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A Hodgepodge Collection of Thoughts
The only thing worse than a Monday morning is a Monday morning full of sidewalks that double as skating rinks and the threat of such a ginormous winter storm that all of the schools in the area have been called off. This bugs me not only because I still had to haul my ass out of bed at 6 a.m. this morning while schoolchildren everywhere lay snuggled in their warm beds dreaming of sledding adventures and snow angels, but also because when I was in school - the snow had to, at the VERY least - have already fallen before school would be cancelled. I remember one of the 3 times I ever took the bus to school, the streets were glare ice and snow was flying all over like crazy and I was fairly certain that we were destined to perish by plowing into the government center, a mere block from the sanctuary of our little school. I remember driving home from school in white out, blizzard conditions. I remember waking up to 16 feet of freshly falling snow, thinking "SURELY they will call school off TODAY! I can't even see my car!" Alas, in my more than 12 years of education in this arctic wonderland, school was cancelled maybe 20 times. And never - EVER - was it cancelled because of the threat of snow. Seriously - this is a very North Carolinian antic. It stopped surprising me that the schools would close the night before if the forecast even mentioned snow. It didn't matter if the forecast called for a "light dusting" of snow, or a "natural disaster" sized portion of snow - the mere utterance of the "S" word would close down schools and businesses state-wide, and send people racing to the store to stock up on bread and milk. People behave like maniacs when faced with the threat of flurries in those southern states, and after a while, I got used to it. It still annoyed me to no end, and when they'd cancel work (as in CLOSE THE ENTIRE INSTITUTION) and then make me take vacation time for it? I hated it all the more (and believe me, I wrote several unsent letters to the powers that be from the University to national level. "They're called SNOW PLOWS fuckers. It costs you more money to close the entire damn town down for days [and sometimes weeks] at a time than it does to buy 3 or 4 spare snow plows. Morons.) But that is part of the reason I moved away from the south and honestly, I just expected more from the frigid tundra upon which I grew up. Kids are such sissybabies these days. Jeez. ************************************** Conversation snippets with my grandmother: "DOHWWWWWWW" (with a German "ech" at the end. This was in response to my asking her to sign Saturday's newspaper for me. She appeared on the front page, shoveling. My family is now officially famous.) "What? You'd rather go out and get drunk and get laid?" (in response to my statement that Valentine's Day playing board games in a church basement is maybe not the way I want to spend my VDay.) "Oh, I wear those. I like them." (In reponse to my mother holding up a teeny tiny thong from my sister's laundry and asking how anyone would wear something so gross. My gram later retracted her statement saying that she thought we were discussing something else.) I'm thinking that Gram was maybe just particularly randy this weekend. And, ew. ************************************** All in all, it was kind of a fun weekend. My friend Sarah dragged me out of the house on Saturday night after we'd spent most of Saturday afternoon on the phone trying to figure out if we were feeling young and therefore would hit the town, or if we were feeling old and would therefore curl up in our jammies and watch movies and eat things that are bad for us. Finally she ordered me into the shower at 6:30 p.m. with the plan that we would at least go out and get something to eat and then, if we were feeling too old, we would hit the video store and spend the rest of the night in. This was a very good plan, I thought. And, as luck would have it, we wound up at Buffalo Wild Wings, and someone put one of those trivia things in my hand and...well...that was it for me for the night. I ALMOST won too! The last round I played I was beating MFDVER, CMLTOE AND ARSE! They got me on the last two questions though with some obscure references to 1930's east indian dining etiquette or some stupid shite. Seriously though? Good times. Sarah has created a monster. Now, every weekend I'm going to be all "LET'S GO DO THE TRIVIA THING! WHOOO!" Sarah also talked me into going to church with her on Sunday. She even called me Sunday morning and tolerated my sleepy "do I have to go to church?" with grace and ease. My whole family was so proud, and Sarah is officially their new favorite. ************************************** I find that I am particularly sensitive to...well, everything really, post 9/11. I know that I've always been a very empathetic person, but post 9/11 has me crying at the drop of the hat over the smallest of tragedies. There's a very raw place inside of me where the innocence was ripped away from me that day and the days afterward. I don't talk about September 11 very much anymore, but a little piece of it is always there inside of me. So when I flipped on the TV Saturday afternoon and slowly comprehended what the Hell was going on with all the TV stations and why everyone was showing the NEWS at 1 p.m. on Saturday afternoon and then I sat down and watched the footage of the glittering ball of fire and light come sailing from the sky as the remains of Columbia scattered about Texas - and I just cried and cried. While it's not September 11 in the magnitude of the tragedy, and it's a different kind of sad than the Challenger tragedy was, as a country we've just been hurting so much in the last couple of years, and this was just another blow to our already bruised hearts. God Bless those who died on the Columbia, and God especially bless the families that they have left behind. ************************************** Reading:FINALLY moved on from Sylvia Plath (and in the end, I have to say that she most definitely grew on me). I started reading A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons. Another slow starter (for me, anyway) - but I'm plugging away at it. Recently Saw:High School Reunion last night - and what a sad episode THAT was. I feel so bad for the bitchy girls who can't tell tacky from socially appropriate behavior, and who also have apparently not aged, socially, from the time they were 16 years old. Sad sad sad. Also saw "Sorority Boys" this weekend, and cannot believe I just admitted that in public. |
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