My Secret Identities

A couple of weeks ago we were at Target to buy some things such as puppy treats, trail mix, wintergreen LifeSavers (you know, necessities) and more black socks for me.  I have quite a lot of black socks but then they start to disappear and even though we do laundry with some frequency and regularity, I often find myself in a dearth of black socks.  But that's not the point.  The point is Minecraft, which Alan plays and enjoys, and so my eye was caught by this cool Minecraft t-shirt in the mens' department, which I purchased for Alan.

On the same shelves as the Minecraft shirts were a plethora of DC Comics heroes:  Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Captain Marvel...I wanted one.  I chose Green Lantern, which was less from a particular superhero affinity than because I have red hair so green looks good on me.

Yep: comics geek and fashionista, all in one.

Imagine my surprise when, after only two or three "after work/evening lounge-around-the-house" wearings, my Green Lantern t-shirt that I must have paid at least EIGHT WHOLE DOLLARS for began to leech green dye upon my person and my undergarments.

Here's the weird part: even though the green dye showed no signs of wanting to remain on the cotton of the t-shirt, it won't come off of me!  It's mainly along my sides, on the insides of my arms and (until a vigorous laundering with much OxyClean) all over my favorite bra.  But despite me taking baths with soap and everything many times in the interim, I'm still, well, sort of green.

Alan does not believe that my secret identity is Green Lantern; he thinks I'm turning into The Hulk.  Which makes absolutely no sense because as everyone knows, The Hulk is Marvel, not DC Comics.

If you know me personally, you know I like to make up alternate lyrics to songs, a la Weird Al.  I have songs for the pets, I often sing along to whatever task I'm performing, and this was no exception.  Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, 1980, when The Vapors had a #1 hit with "I Think I'm Turning Japanese".  For a while now, I've been singing to Alan, "I think I'm turning lantern green I think I'm turning lantern green I really THINK SO!"

Then today, I started getting all these emails from Facebook that many people had accepted my friend requests.  The difficulty is that I'm not on Facebook.  (Yes, I'm the one.)  Then Facebook started emailing me trying to confirm my identity because I was, not surprisingly, having trouble with my Facebook notifications since I hadn't actually joined and someone else had put in my email address when he set up his account.  At first I simply thought, "Oh, someone's made an error," and deleted the emails, but then when Facebook started demanding that I send photocopies of a government-issued ID, I started to worry about scams.  I emailed Alan, a Facebook user, to apprise him of the happenings and ask if I should be worried.

By this point I knew the Facebook user's name - first name Helly, but a different last name that was clearly ethnically Indian, as were all of the friends accepting his offer of friendship.  Then Alan looked up the Facebook page and emailed me, "On Facebook it seems that you're a man and you love motorcycles because your profile picture is a motorcycle. It's a BMW bike, so you still have good taste."

I wrote back, "So the truth emerges, after this many years of marriage.  When I'm not out, busy being Green Lantern, I'm a motorcycle-loving Indian dude.  Sorry you had to find out this way."