Category Archive

So today is my birthday. I was all excited that it fell on a Friday this year, but thus far it’s been uneventful, and parts of it have downright sucked. Consider the following:

• My skin is breaking out. Yes, with zits. I have not had a breakout since I got pregnant and now, today, on my birthday, I have two zits on my chin. What the hell? I have always said if you are old enough to have gray hair, age spots on your hands (yes, I do, thanks; they’re hereditary), and crow’s feet, you should not have to suffer acne. Am I right ladies?
• Gayle’s mom is sick. She’s 87. Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Some other stuff. Hospitalized, maybe dying. Probably. Gayle was keeping Mia today; she called me 15 minutes before the final bell of the school day and told me to come home ASAP because it wasn’t looking good for her mom. Send good thoughts her way. It’s been a long week.
• Just before I received that phone call our assistant principal announced over the intercom that our county was under a tornado warning. Warning means a tornado has been spotted, which means we have to take the kids into the hallways and have them sit against the walls. Have I mentioned to you people that my school is a collection of “pods”? Pods are really big trailers. Our school is an academic trailer park, if you will. My first thought is safety, and you’d think that would also be the first thought of children who lived through a school fire, but no, they are far more concerned that their clothes might get dirty. Have I mentioned to you people that they are building the new school just feet from our “pod village” and it has not rained in so long that on Monday we actually had a dust storm? We are dirty ALL. THE. DAMN. TIME. There is dust in our books and on our computers. There is dust on our refrigerator and coffee maker, which are in a room with no windows. We are like a big school of Joads, and today I almost shoved my grapes of wrath up a kid’s ass. Here’s what happened:

There are two classrooms in the library building; a hallway connects them to us, and it was in that hallway that the students in our building were supposed to be sitting, ON THE FLOOR, after the tornado announcment was made. Several students refused, most of them jackasses I had to deal with in classes last year (see: every single post under Work is Hell), and I wanted the pleasure of making them sit on their Sean Johns and shut the hell up. So while I’m explaining that “this is not a drill” for the 7 millionth time to a kid who said he would sit down if all the teachers sat down, the girl behind me says, loudly, “Why she got her ass all up in my face?” I turned around so fast I suspect I might have resembled that guy who played Professor Quirrell in the first Harry Potter movie when he removed his turban. Or something like that, because she looked kind of shocked. I don’t think I was supposed to hear her. She recovered quickly, though, and did that little teenage girl head shake-eye roll-lip snarl and said, “Why you looking at me?” It’s a good thing for her that my phone rang.

• The weather is freaky. Tornadoes scare me to death. If I didn’t have Mia I would go sit in my closet with the light on and read. I am so not kidding. But she doesn’t deal well with confinement, so I am listening to the weather and pretending everything is cool, but I can’t ignore the fact that the expired tornado warning has been reinstated. It’s dark outside (at 4:46) and the rain is deafening. I wanted rain for my birthday; now I see I should have been more specific: NO TORNADOS.
• I miss my grandma. I will write about her death in time, but unfortunately, thanks to the scum-sucking ass-munch bastard son-of-a-bitch she was married to (NOT my grandfather, who died 18 years ago), we can’t just mourn her and try to move on. As you can imagine, it’s a long, long story. And no, I don’t really want to talk about it right now.
• I am out of beer. Really, what kind of solo birthday celebration can I have with no beer? So far the score is 33: 1, me: 0.

~~~

Ah, but I can’t ignore the big picture. I am healthy, I have a wonderful family and really great friends. I have a house and food and clothes. I have a beautiful daughter, also healthy. She has lots of clothes, too, which reminds me….

Did one of you fabulous blog people send my baby a package? Because she is now the proud owner of two really awesome t-shirts, both from The Onion’s online store, and they arrived with no sender information. Either someone who knows me pretty well sent them, or Mia knows how to order things from the internet.

Anyway, life really is good, and I will celebrate my birthday week starting today, and come to think of if, I DO have some vodka. Who needs beer? 33 can kiss my butt.

My friend Steph is compiling a list of great things about being 30 for her sister-in-law, who is apparently freaking out about her upcoming thirtieth birthday. Since most of my readership is in the 30s range, I thought I’d enlist all of you to contribute to the list. Leave your “what’s great about being 30″ contribution in the comments, and feel free to include more than one if you are so inclined. I’ll start:

1. I no longer worry so much about looking or feeling stupid in front of others, because who really gives a crap as long as I am content with how I look or feel?

2. I no longer obsess about that weekly pumpkin cream cheese muffin or that extra handful of Peanut M&Ms, because I’ve developed a close enough relationship with my body to understand that moderation is acceptable.

3. I leased a car at 21, and after the lease was up I financed the car; I never managed to pay off the loan for that car. The car I bought less than three years ago will be paid off in 18 months.

4. I have grown up furniture now.

5. I am much more interested in what a person stands for than in what a person is wearing (or what size a person is wearing), and I find it to be a much healthier interest.

Your turn.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006: The One With No Subject-Verb Agreement

So I’m in an all-day workshop to–ahem–learn how to teach a class I didn’t want to teach in the first place, and the instructor, who is getting paid BY THE HOUR to fill our minds with knowledge, keeps saying things like, “The students needs structure,” and “We has to be aware of the student we teach.” No, those are not typos. Yes, I nearly had a stroke. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. This might be a good time to point out that the class I’m supposed to be learning to teach is reading. Yes, friends, a person who is instructing teachers in how to teach reading CANNOT USE SPEECH WHERE SUBJECTS AND VERBS AGREE.

Thursday, September 14, 2006: The One Where I Turn 32

Remember yesterday’s episode? Today started out as a sequel–it was a two-day workshop. Not the best backdrop in the world for a birthday celebration. The second day of the workshop was worse, as I had already decided that I was not going to learn anything of use and kept trying to tune the instructor out, only to have her force us to get up and walk to the front of the room and write things on a flip chart. Good times. Both days of the workshop I had to rush home, grab my other bag, and run to class. My back ached, my eyes were crossed, and I got only one birthday card in the mail. Bah! Imagine how thrilling it was to sit for three more hours listening to talk of collection management and reference! Yep, I was a little surly.

Friday, September 15, 2006: The One With the Fancy Dinner

So by Friday I was tired, irritable, and ready for some attention (how old am I?). Gayle was planning to take me to eat somewhere to celebrate, and I had originally wanted to have lunch at a cool little bistro-cafe-market place I used to really love, but I was so surly on Friday evening that she suggested we go somewhere nice for Friday dinner. After some debate we decided on a really nice seafood restaurant in town, one I’d never been to but had often talked about trying. We didn’t have the “recommended reservations” but there was space on the patio, and the air was just perfect for outdoor dining–coolish but with a warm breeze, and most important, no humidity. Maybe I was just starving. Maybe I was just starving for intelligent conversation and some birthday attention. Maybe the food was just that good. Whatever the case, dinner…was…delicious. Except for when I accidentally flung a shrimp over my shoulder and into the container garden between me and the table behind us, it was the perfect ending to a not so perfect series of days.

Fun!

Friends!

Beer!

Pub!

Laughter!

French fries!

Happy.

You might have inferred from the end of yesterday’s post that today would not be much of a celebratory day given my three hour grad class at the end of an already long work day, and never was a truer inference rendered. I’ll be brief:

Class is supposed to end at 8:20. We finally dismissed at 8:40 (although one ballsy girl packed up and left at the normal dismissal time!). I almost bitch slapped another of my classmates, a woman in my online project group who seems to think she is the only person in graduate school who also holds down a full-time job. The extra 20 minutes of class time added an hour to my parking deck fee, so it cost me four bucks to escape. I had three dollar bills and a ten. Now I have seven one dollar coins. Great. And until this moment I have not eaten since noon, unless you count that handful of craisins and nuts I shoved into my trap as I circled campus three times in search of a free space before I finally gave up and parked in the aforementioned deck. I’m now speed-eating the most disgusting Lean Cuisine meal ever packaged, and my cat is practically climbing my leg like a tree because apparently he’s hungry as well. Finally, I had to stop at the grocery store on my way home because otherwise I wouldn’t be eating lunch or breakfast tomorrow, and as I was thrashing my way into the house with an armful of groceries, books and dog, a friend called to see how my evening was. When I told her she had the nerve to laugh jovially at me, and now she must suffer. (You know who you are. Beware.)

In celebration of day two of my birthweek I think I’ll spend the next 30 minutes on my yoga mat. Well, maybe 31. Because tomorrow that’s how old I’ll be.

My sister Charity has been making me laugh at inappropriate times and at inappropriate things since she was five months old. I will never forget sitting in church on a Sunday night with her on my lap. I was 12, and drawing attention of any kind to myself was, at that time in my life, emotional suicide. But right in the middle of a very long Southern Baptist prayer, Charity started blowing raspberries at me, and then giggling at herself. I giggled back. She was encouraged, so she did it again, and this time I stifled a laugh. She continued the game, and I slowly inched my way to hysteria, the kind that only gets worse when you try to control it. I had tears streaming down my face, and I was doing that silent shaking laughter that is actually painful. All of this was encouragement to Charity, who was by now causing people to turn around and smile that “oh, isn’t she cute” smile that only babies can score for interrupting a church service. My mom was an innocent bystander, but she, too, got sucked in, and eventually the three of us–my mother and I with Charity in tow–had to get up and retreat to the empty church nursery where we sat in the middle of the floor and laughed like the insane.

This evening at dinner Charity and I had already started eating before we realized that everyone else at the table was staring at us expectantly. Perhaps they thought us barbaric. Perhaps they were waiting for us to choke or keel over from eating unblessed food. We sheepishly withdrew our forks and joined hands like everyone else at the table, and just as Big Dave began the prayer, my mother’s cell phone, which Charity had programmed on the way to dinner, began ringing loudly, proudly belting out the theme song to “Sex and the City.” I tried to control my laughter, but I was holding Charity’s hand, so I could tell she was laughing, too. I thought I was going to have to crawl under the table.

Before the evening was over, my Uncle Mike almost fell out of his chair (I swear he wasn’t drunk), and Big Dave had a gigantic marinara stain down the front of his shirt. It could have been embarrassing, but I was happy–I got to laugh with my sister.

Megan, we missed you.

My birthday is Wednesday, but for the past several years I’ve started celebrating several days in advance. Birthday, birthweek, birthmonth. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just an excuse to celebrate life more fully.

I had dinner with my mom and my sister Charity, my grandmother and her husband, whom we all call Big Dave (behind his back, of course), and my aunt and uncle. We went to an Italian restaurant (my favorite). I had a Crown and Diet Coke (must take advantage of my last 2 weeks of conception vacation). Someone ordered a giant piece of chocolate cake on the sly (it was so rich I could literally only swallow two bites of it!).

I left the restaurant and went directly to Rack Room with my birthday spoils. I should add to my “A little more about me” list: I am a shoe whore. Shoe stores are like crack houses for me: I get lured in by some attractive ploy in the window, and then I can’t seem to break away. I just keep touching them. Trying them on. Smelling them. New clothes smell like burnt plastic, but new shoes…ahhhh. (Incidentally, new books have the same effect on me, but that’s a story for another day.)

The shoe store was having a “Buy 1 Get the Second Pair for 50% off,” so of course I had to buy two pairs. I was there for over an hour, and I almost bought five different pairs of shoes before I found THE SHOES near the counter. I tried to get the girl to give me 50% off of pair number three, but she just laughed. I think she thought I was joking. So I put one pair back and left with my top two selections.

By all counts Day 1 was a GREAT success. Stay tuned for Day 2: Adventures of an Almost 31 Year-Old Library School Student. (I know, shoe shopping is WAY more exciting.)