Mood Ring

I recently bought a mood ring from the Santa Barbara Mission gift shop. It put me out $2.95, officially the cheapest thing available to purchase in California. I bought it to replace the mood ring that I bought from the same store in 2012. I lost it, or at least I think I lost it. I haven't seen it in years, despite periodically checking my stash of sentimental but rejected jewelry that sit bitterly together in various drawers.

The ring hovered in a reliable state of dark blue, sometimes with hints of pinks and purples.  This in turn meant that I, too, hovered reliably in a state of calm and relaxed, sometimes with hints of love, romance, and ‘very happy’.  So it was shocking, on the morning of our wedding anniversary, to look down and notice that it had turned a putrid, leftover avocado greenish-gray.  It seemed to have taken quite the long journey.  Befuddled, I pulled up the picture I had taken of the all-important mood ring chart.  Green suggests being nervous.  Gray isn’t even on the chart, but its closest neighbor - black - suggests fear.  

“But I’m not feeling any of those things.  Honest!”, I said to the students who had trickled in, early for writing club.  

“Mood rings just go off of your body heat.  They’re not, like, real.”  We all know that fifth graders know, like, everything, so how could this be? 

I decided it was a passing thing and that by lunchtime, my life would be back to blue.  I had driven to school in a rush, I had a lot of to-do’s that particular day, maybe I was just a touch ‘anxious’ about something.

Three days later, it's still a solid putrid greenish-gray.  Hmm.

While commuting, I flipped through radio stations and landed on Don Geronimo’s irritating voice on 100.3.  I know he’s famous in the industry and is probably bringing a lot of listeners back to the station, but I find him very annoying.  He was about to do a contest that I had never heard of called “Honk for Cash”.  Something about the description of the challenge made me stick with it long enough to hear what was about to happen.  If you already know what this is, because you’re a loyal Don fan, you can roll your eyes, try to find the address to the elite rock I’ve been living under, and skip the forthcoming review. 

Here is the Honk for Cash challenge.  (The fact that I am choosing to capitalize it, increasing its official importance, is also frustrating but I’ll accept it in the vein of grammatical respect.  I suspect in reality it is written out Honk4Ca$h but I can not, will not participate in any of that.) 

Take Two.  Here is the Honk for Cash challenge.  The chosen caller is to be actively driving and stay on the phone with Don Geronimo, while on-air.  The driver-caller is to chit-chat as they approach a left-hand turning lane that has a red light at that moment.  This could take up to a few minutes, so it helps if the driver-caller can hang with pointless, acerbic, Don-esque banter.  When the driver-caller thinks the light is about to change to green and they can take the left turn, the driver-caller is to open their driver-caller-side window, hold their phone outside the car, and not drive forward.  During a metro area morning commute, this is going to infuriate the impatient drivers behind them, causing them to honk.  Don is listening to the phone call, counting how many honks the driver-caller racks up, and promises to send $1 for every honk heard.  At the end of the challenge, the driver-caller must honk their own car horn so that Don can verify that the previously heard honks were not of their own making. 

Part of me enjoys this snarky take on the DC area. Who doesn’t enjoy mocking the stressed, self-important?  I was somewhat curious to find out how many honks the driver-caller would invite. 

Here’s the thing.  I could not bring myself to listen to the actual challenge.  When the driver-caller announced that the light was about to turn green, I turned the station, reacting to some short wave panic.  I was now invested in this stupid thing, with a DJ I do not like and a driver-caller I do not know anything about, other than he was about to be completely noise-polluted with angry honks. 

I don’t know about you, but if or when I am honked at - particularly when I’m not about to be in an accident - I see red.  It can completely unhinge my mood.  I take it so…personally.  Who does this honker think they are?  They don’t even KNOW me!  Are we not living in a SOCIETY here?

The actual sound of a car unnecessarily honking might be up there with the most abusive sounds, just behind those people who trip out their Kia Optima with loud aggressive engines and rev them in a school zone.  I’m a music teacher so, like, I get to say what the most abusive sounds in fact are. 

If I am in the car with my husband driving and he is looking at his phone while stopped at a red light, I start to get anxious the closer it gets to the light turning green.  Sometimes he doesn’t notice the exact second it changes and there he is, scrolling to something in cheerful distracted bliss, and all I can think about is how the driver of the car behind us will inevitably get out of the car and murder us all one by one.  I mean, what other consequence is appropriate for such blatant disregard?  

My rule-follower ways simply can not handle it.  I can manage faltering on certain forms of public responsibility, like letting my car inspection go a few weeks past deadline or forgetting the library books - you know, big stuff. But making complete strangers wait behind me in a car for approximately two seconds apparently deserves tar and feathering, if not imminent death.  

So this is where things stood.  I could not stomach hearing the angry honks of angry strangers at another stranger, through the safety of my own car speakers during an otherwise unagitated morning commute.  Nope nope nope.  My putrid greenish-gray ring and I will go about our day and live to see another one, thank you. 

Maybe I could work up to it, in the same way that people who are intensely afraid of spiders can work up to looking at pictures of spiders, then looking at one through a glass case, then eventually holding the thing, through some form of slow, hypnotic therapy.  Honk if you want to help. 

I cycled back to 100.3 after a few minutes.  The driver-caller earned 31 honks, thus a promised $31 from Don. Both of these facts make me shudder.

Another Spoiler: the mood ring was, and still is, simply broken.  The thin plastic outer ring that usually lies flush on top has separated from the color-changing metal part.  The best it can do now is to shine its rotting, nervous freak flag to the world.  I’m thinking about asking California for my $2.95 back.

It’s not me y'all. It’s the ring.  What a relief.