I am somewhat out of sorts today. I had odd dreams all night (did you know Ellen and Portia are coming to my hometown for their honeymoon, and that Ellen is wearing a light pink chiffon dress in their wedding?) and the phone startled me awake, and I was up until two in the morning finishing a book. Oh, you might be thinking, two in the morning. That’s obviously your problem. Really, though, it’s the book that’s causing me to stop typing every few minutes and stare with a furrowed brow at the two Rose of Sharon trees in my yard until I realize I am staring and continue typing.

I just re-read The Time Traveler’s Wife because a friend was reading it for the first time and I thought it would be cool to discuss it in real time, sort of like a mini book club. And also, because it’s an amazing feat of genius, and if you have read it you know why I am out of sorts. And if you haven’t you will either go buy it, or you will be the first to tell me in the comments and I will send you this copy. Anyway. I re-read this book, and it is brilliant, and brilliant novels often lead me to conduct marathon finishes because I just can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. When the rising action of a story is crafted just right it has that effect on me, and putting the book down would mean breaking this frantic uphill climb, this frenzied momentum. I have to keep reading.

Reading in this fast and furious fashion leaves me mentally and emotionally spent, to say nothing of physically, since most of my read-a-thons now occur after Mia’s Very Late Bedtime. But it’s the emptying out and filling up of my brain that wipes me. I just want to sit and stare, to be with the characters a little longer and absorb the things they did, the things that happened to them. This is one of the reasons I like re-reading books: if I loved the characters, and I miss them when the last page is turned, it’s so easy to visit them again, because they are inside there living their lives and all I have to do is turn to page one and it’s like a little reunion. I don’t re-read many books, mind you, only a select few, and this was only my second round with The Time Traveler’s Wife. It probably won’t be my last.

Like I said, any good work of literary genius leaves me wistfully staring into space the morning after. It’s almost like I am still IN the book, and there are no other books in the universe but the one I just read, and to attempt to use my brain for any other task (like writing or, God forbid, starting another book!) would be a mere waste of my mental energy. But this book is different. The effect is deeper, more profound, and yet here I sit at the keyboard trying to explain it to you, which probably won’t happen, because every time I stop to ponder a word or work out a phrase my mind immediately fills with vignettes and characters and scenes from The Time Traveler’s Wife. It has left me (again, only more so) awed and dumbfounded, overwhelmingly bereft and more than a little confused. I also feel a great sense of amazement and possibility. And now I’m starting to feel a little vague, because what I really want to do is talk about what actually happens in this book, but I can’t–I wouldn’t dare give away any of the details you will want to savor at two in the morning when you read it yourself. 

What have you read recently (or ever, I’m not picky) that affected you profoundly?

Let me start by saying that this getting up an hour before the kid has been working out pretty well for me, but not so much for my writing habit, which is why I started doing it in the first place. I won’t bore you with reasons why I haven’t been writing, but they are completely legit and have actually provided me with writing material. But for another day, because right now I have some other things to toss around, and I’m falling back on my friend the bullet to help me remember everything.

• My laptop died at the ripe old age of 1 year, 7 months. I know someone in real life who could have fixed it gratis, but his father passed away a few days ago and he has enough on his plate, so I took it to the Ge3k Squad, and here is what happened: I stopped counting charges at $350, and this was before we even discussed the actual cost of repair. So I left and found a guy in the phone book who is going to back up my hard drive (which I had been investigating doing myself for the past few weeks prior to the crash!) for $95, and the manufacturer is going to fix it for nothing, even though it is technically no longer under warranty.
• I am borrowing the laptop I have used at school for the past two years, the exact same one, which I complained about endlessly and called awful names, but which is still working perfectly. Huh.
• Unfortunately, the laptop I am borrowing only connects to the internet via a wireless router, which I do not have, so I either have to use it in a WiFi zone or hold it up above my head on the screened porch and hope it picks up one of my neighbors’ wireless signals. And yes, that is what I’ve been doing.
• I realized in the mountains last week how attached at the hip I am to technology. I can check and send email with my phone, and I can even access the internet, and so both nights I was there I would wait until Mia went to sleep and then I would sit on a trunk by the window in our room and read email and catch up on blogs. Isn’t that ridiculous? I mean, we complain as as society about being too connected too much of the time, but I think deep down inside we are all addicted to the connection. I need to think further about this. I’ll get back to you.
• My daughter has a love/hate relationship with our vacuum cleaner. When I get it out she will come sit as close to it as she can get, sometimes ON it, and lightly touch the hoses and compartments while softly mumbling something I can’t make out; but as soon as I fire it up she takes off in the direction that affords her as much distance from the machine as possible. And when she is running away she looks exactly like Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow when he is running away from the natives in the second pirate movie. I would try to capture this on video for the sake of comparison, but every time it happens I fall down laughing.
• I might have a new job. Shhhhh. I don’t want to say it too loudly. I believe I have the power to screw it up by feeling TOO optimistic about it. I cannot tell you how nervous the whole thing makes me. I have been working in the same school for 12 years. TWELVE. I have never resigned a position, nor have I had to start fresh in a new one in a long, long time. It’s damn scary. And also exciting–don’t get me wrong. But mostly scary right now.
• I yelled at some pre-pubescent boys in the lazy river at water park yesterday, where Mia and I go almost every afternoon. What IS it with me and lazy rivers? Or maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the real question is this: Do lazy rivers simply attract obnoxious people? Because these boys were having a bumper car rally with their floats, and they were banging into babies. One of them was mine, but it was over the other baby that I lost it. He was much younger than Mia, and his mother seemed unconcerned that these little cretins kept splashing him right in the face. I couldn’t help myself. For all I know they were her kids–she didn’t say a word to me after the incident–but I didn’t care, I morphed into Classroom Manager Mommy before I could stop myself.
• ANd finally–Happy Independence Day, whatever that means to you.

Well, not really. Leaving in my car is more like it, but I’m going to the Land of No Internet, otherwise known as a house way up in the NC mountains, and I’ll be away for a few days. You won’t even notice. It will be like–well, it will be like the last several months, except this time I will actually have an excuse.

Meanwhile, to curb your missing-me grief, I just uploaded 9 billion pictures to Flickr, and I think you should look at them. Every single stinkin’ one.

I kid.

If you are feeling the comment love and you’d like to lend a girl a hand, please have a look at the following dilemmas and tell me what to do. If I take your advice I’ll bow every time I see you (or read your blog) and call you Master.

Again, kidding. I am just full of laughs today. I should get up at 7:30 more often (and if you know me at all, you know THAT is also a joke).

1. If you have children, please feel their glands, particularly those in the neck area, and tell me how big they are. If you’ve had gland obsession like I am currently having, please give me your experiences, as I think Mia’s glands are large and it freaks me out a bit. Okay, a lot. Also, she doesn’t want me to touch her neck at all, which could mean that her glands hurt, or that she doesn’t want me to mess with her neck in general (the latter is a definite possibility because sometimes she doesn’t want me to touch her anywhere, or even LOOK at her).
2. If you are a SIGG owner, and if your bottle is of the painted variety, and if the paint on your bottle has started to chip, are you continuing to use it? Why or why not?
3. I am in need of good (read: EASY BUT TASTY) summer recipes. Mind sharing a favorite?

Before you close this page and vow never to darken the doors of my Small Corner again, rest assured that my prejudices are not related to race, gender, sexuality, or religion. Well, I’m not really fond of the Baptists, but that’s a generalization I’m working through. No, my prejudices have nothing to do with skin color or lifestyle–unless you are, say, a gay Asian Catholic who happens to be OBNOXIOUS. Yep, that’s right, I don’t like obnoxious people. There, I said it. Do you still love me? Can we hug?

Seriously. I suppose I have always known this about myself, but in my insular little world, where I get to choose (for the most part) the people I encounter, I don’t often have to deal with it. I shop at the same grocery store every week, eat at the same handful of restaurants, buy coffee from the same Starbucks. Sure, there are obnoxious people at those places, but I have learned their patterns, because they, like me, are creatures of habit. That woman in the white Lexus SUV is always going to cut into the Starbucks drive-through line without going around like everyone else, and that surly teenage girl at the supermarket is never going to be happy when she sees me coming through the U-Scan line with all of my reusable shopping bags. There are even obnoxious people at work, and I know how to minimize my face time with them. I should note that kids don’t count because they are pre-programmed to be obnoxious, particularly teenagers, and while it’s annoying, I try not to hold it against them. It’s the Obnoxiuos Adult that bothers me, the individual who ought to know better, and probably does, but still chooses to wave his (or her) Ass Flag high and proud. And there’s no place like a touristy vacation spot to see those flags waving. Consider the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: The Restaurant

Last Wednesday while at the beach we had dinner at That Restaurant Owned by the Cool Dude Who Sings the Anthem to a Particular Tequila-based Beverage. We were on the patio where there was great live music and a nice breeze coming in off the fake lake surrounding the place. It was a great. Everyone was having fun–the waitstaff, the people standing in line to get in, even Mia, who was flirting with the waiter and shaking her little booty to the music. She even loved that every 30 minutes the lights would dim, and Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel would appear on the big screen TVs to announce a ”Hurricane Party Warning.” Inside the restaurant (which we could see through a huge picture window) an enourmous fake hurricane funnel would start spinning, complete with lightning and thunder, and a giant bottle of tequila would emerge from the center of it and appear to pour tequila into a giant shot glass. Then Cool Dude Restaurant Owner would sing his tequila drink anthem on the big screens and the entire place would clap and sing along. The first few times it was a blast. Then the Obnoxious People came.

Apparently, unbeknowst to the rest of the restaurant’s patrons, there was a So You Think You Can Whistle contest going on at the Obnoxious People’s table. At completely random intervals and for no apparent reason, one of the Obnoxious People would whistle. By whistle I mean he would insert his index fingers into his mouth and let out an ear-piercing scream of a sound that made people jump, and that is saying a lot considering how loud this place was. And just when everyone had recovered from the last whistle, he, or one of his Obnoxious Friends, would do it again. And every time one of them whistled, Mia would have a total meltdown–a pitiful, startled, shaking, fingers-gripping-my-shirt meltdown. I would have her calm and ready to go back into her high chair when the next whistle was dispatched, and with each whistle she calmed less and less, so that by the time my food came she was a wreck and I had to put my meal in a styrofoam box and go sit with her on a bench outside the restaurant.

Scenario 2: The Pool

You know in cartoons when they play ominous dramatic music to indicate that something bad is about to happen, and then you see what appears to be an enormous menacing figure in shadow wielding what looks like the world’s longest Samurai sword, but then the angle changes and it’s just a cricket in front of a light with a blade of grass in its mouth? Last Wednedsay afternoon at the pool the scene was the exact opposite of that. There was cool music playing on the pool sound system, and I was floating dreamily along in the lazy river with Mia stretched out in front of me. The sun wasn’t too hot, and the breeze wasn’t too cool. And then some people came into the pool area–three or four kids and three grown women who had obviously come in off the beach and were looking to settle at the pool for a while. Groovy, I thought. And then three things happened: they settled right next to the lazy river, they started talking, and they got IN the lazy river. I watched in horror as the cute little cricket morphed into a murderer of peace.

For starters, they took up the entire pool deck area next to the lazy river, part of which was intended to be a walkway, and if someone needed to get by, well tough shit. They weren’t moving. Not even if you said excuse me, or if you were carrying a squirmy toddler. Once they got settled in they started talking–some of them to each other, and some of them to remote parties via cell phone, and some of them to both at the same time. I don’t tend to be one of those people who gets all irate when someone is having a cell phone conversation in public, but there are cell phone conversations, and then there are CELL PHONE CONVERSATIONS. In this particular scenario it was the latter, and there was lots of crowing and hooting and screeching involved, as well as lots of stopping in the middle to repeat to someone at the pool what the person on the line had just said. But all of that was nothing compared to the lazy river.

At first it was just the kids, and as I said before, kids this age (12-15 or so) are often pre-programmed to be obnoxious. Unless their parents are watching them, and then all pardons are off, because HELLO, if your kid is actually knocking people off of their lazy river floats, you should do something about it. But it was soon clear that this was acceptable behavior, because when the adults got in the lazy river a few minutes later, they acted exactly the same way. Yes, people, I watched grown women knock little children into the wall and into the water of the lazy river. I had gotten out by this time, so I had a prime view of the action: the women made a dramatic point of walking into the lazy river with no floats, then decided to get on the floats in the deeper water where there are no helpful steps to aid in the process. There was a LOT of screaming and splashing, and they completely stopped the flow of traffic, and then, oh good lord in heaven, one of them fell off and GOT HER HAIR WET. I am surprised that no hotel personnel or beach lifeguards came running, because her shouts of, “Oh God, my HAIR! MY HAIR!” were so loud and desperate that she might have been saying, “Oh God, my HEART! MY HEART!” Thankfully, the trauma of WET HAIR IN A SWIMMING POOL was enough to drive them back to their rooms for the remainder of the afternoon.

Scenario 3: The Wrong Room

Their rooms, which were on the same floor as our room. Which is how it came to be that the next morning at 7:45 there was a loud insistent pounding on our door. Guess who! It was one of the ADULT WOMEN, and when the door opened revealing total strangers she said, “Sorry, wrong room,” and then turned around and yelled, without leaving the vicinity of our door, “IT’S NOT THIS ONE! TRY 317!!” So yeah, they were just knocking on doors. At 7:45 in the morning. Hoping to find…I have no idea.

And yes, in case you were wondering, my daughter, who slept through a 45 minute alarm and evacuation, woke up when she heard the pounding on the door.

So maybe I am being unreasonable (and I know I can count on you to tell me if that is the case), but there seems to be a definite lack of consideration for others on our planet, especially among the vacationing (is this because people throw their manners out the window on vacation?). I can admit that encountering bad behavior makes me prickle and fantasize about payback, but I’m not really a vengeful person, and I’m definitely not interested in putting more obnoxious juju out there in the universe. Mostly I want to teach my offspring how to be kind and compassionate, even when she is faced with a singular lack of kindness and compassion, and I don’t think hearing her mother say, “Yeah, bitch, WRONG ROOM” is an appropriate lesson for that objective. So what’s a girl to do? How do you deal? And if you have kids (or are planning to), how do you teach them to wave their peace flag high, even as the wind from the waving of those other flags blows sand in their eyes?

So I have this giant bald place, and it was completely and totally a result of the resort emergency alarm, which apparently was “falsely activated.” Do you know what that means, people? Do you? It means that some punk kid (or obnoxiously immature adult, which I’ll get to another time) pulled the fire alarm lever and ran away. I know this because I work in a high school, and it happens there all the time. Kids think its hee-freakin-larious to interrupt the normal daily activities of several hundred people, which is why I rolled my eyes two years ago when the fire alarm went off during the lunch period while I was teaching a 9th grade English class. Schools don’t have fire drills during lunch, so it had to be a prank. I told my kids we’d be back in within minutes, and we all left our stuff behind without a second thought. Except it was real, and within 24 hours the building was a shell, and all that “stuff” we left inside was either crispy or completely waterlogged from the fire hoses. So you can imagine my panic last Tuesday evening when the alarm sounded. Shaking, I held my frightened daughter and whispered in her ear (”That’s a fire truck,” “Look at the clouds,” “Can you hear the ocean?”) while I nervously watched emergency vehicles surround our hotel.

And then I read this little sign in the elevator the next day: “Please help us. If you see anyone tampering with the fire alarm pulls, please alert the front desk immediately.” Since the little sign didn’t read, “We apologize for the inconvenience, but our alarm system was being tested,” or “We are sorry for the alarm scare–the system malfunctioned but has been repaired,” or even, “Your safety is our biggest concern. A _____ (gas leak, grease fire, terrorist, swarm of killer bees) was reported and evacuation was necessary,” I can only assume resort personnel had nothing to do with the alarm and were simply looking for some unknown culprit to arrest (did you know pulling a fire alarm in jest is a federal offense?). This made me furious–12 year classroom veteran sick of immature little teenage brats furious. I wanted to find the little jerk and go all teacher on his ass.

And then the alarm went off again on Thursday morning.

MORNING.

At 5:45.

In the morning.

While my daughter was sleeping.

While I was sleeping.

No longer was I feeling the anger of a sick-and-tired teacher. Now I was pissed in the way only a mother can be pissed, and as I scooped my sleeping baby up onto my shoulder and covered her head with a blanket and joined the sleepy masses stumbling down the stairs, I glared at anyone who dared make a noise near me or who came remotely close to bumping into my sleeping kid. You see, Mia is a late-to-bed, late-to-wake sleeper, and it doesn’t matter how early I get her up, she is still late-to-bed. The difference is that if she has to wake up early, she wakes a totally different child–a child with a serious anger-management problem and a penchant for hurling objects and screaming. I didn’t want to spend the day with that child. And so I lay down on a dew-covered lawn chair and held her and muttered curses at whoever thought it would be cute to see hundreds of resort patrons milling around in their jammies at 5:45.

I’d love to tell you there is a satisfying ending to this tale–that the resort security guys found the alarm puller and held him/her screaming for mercy over a ravenous shark just beyond the breakers. Or, you know, something equally appropriate. But if anyone was apprehended they never told the rest of us, and that’s probably a good thing, because I can only imagine what I might have done had I come across the little brat. And believe me, I can definitely imagine…

No, the real ending is this (and some of you will roll your eyes and think, “Why did I bother, that’s not a real ending,” and to you I say, “Hey, no one forced you to read this post!”): MY KID SLEPT THROUGH THE ENTIRE THING. Through the screaming kids running around, and the old man who took a piss in the bushes just a few feet away from us, and the alarm sounding continually, and the fire truck sirens, and the sunrise. She never even opened her eyes, and when we went back up to our room and I put her back in bed she curled up and sighed contentedly like she’d been sleeping there the whole time. So now when she wakes up after a 37 minute nap because the cat meowed at the other end of the house, I want to look at her and say, “WTF, kid? You slept through a 45-minute EMERGENCY EVACUATION! GO BACK TO SLEEP!”

A little over a month ago I purchased a bathing suit for the first time in years–a real, whole bathing suit, not just a tankini top here and a tankini top there from random department store sales that I would wear with shorts because I refused to let anyone see my ass. This was an actual suit, a two-piece tankini set with an attached sarong on the bottom half and a wild summer flower print in funky colors. I was excited, but also a little nervous. For one thing, although the sarong provided a nice visual block, for all intents and purposes people were going to have the opportunity to see my butt in a bathing suit. I had mostly talked myself out of caring about this, because in spite of that little round post-baby tummy that will probably never go away, and in spite of the long list of body issues I’ve been carrying around with me for years (tiny boobs, enormous feet, round bottom), I really don’t have room to complain about my body. Even better, I am finally in a semi-happy place about my body. I wear single digit sizes, I am comfortable in my pre-pregnancy clothes, and I fully believe that when I am ready when I have the time some sweet day I will start exercising regularly again and rediscover my rockin’ muscles. So yeah, putting on an actual bathing suit bottom made me spend a few extra minutes in front of the mirror scrutinizing my parts. But I was far more nervous about another issue.

We (assuming there are no men reading this, and if you are a man–Hi Mike!–you might just want to stop now and walk away, and if you choose not to walk away, don’t say I didn’t warn you) are all familiar with the required grooming that accompanies bathing suit season. Do we shave? Do we wax? Or do we wear shorts over our suit bottoms and forget the whole grooming process altogether? Alas, that’s what I’ve been doing for years, but my bathing suit investment (and I’m using that word literally–have you purchased a bathing suit lately?!) was going to require a change in procedure.

The week before I was planning to debut The Suit at my family reunion on Memorial Day weekend at Lake Hartwell in South Carolina, I decided I’d spring for a wax job. When was a senior in college I worked the front desk of a salon, and I very quickly became the willing salon experiment. If things were slow, one stylist or another, or sometimes a group of them, would suggest that I have something cut, colored, or waxed. It was free and fun, and it taught me three things: 1) hair always grows back; 2) having a different hair color every month is a blast; and 3) although I cannot tolerate wax on my face, my legs and other bodily regions don’t even register the tug. So on the Wednesday before Memorial Day, I left my salon with a pristine bikini line. Great, except that by the weekend I was already touching things up with the tweezers. I’m sorry, but if I’m going to spend that much money to have someone rip my pubes out of my skin, I want them to stay gone longer than three days.

A few weeks later I bought a membership at a local water park so I could take my daughter to the super-cool kiddie pools, and before our first visit I was faced with the grooming problem again. I resorted to shaving, and that is fine in the moment, but we all know the agony of the day after. And that is why I decided to try some nifty bikini line hair remover cream for my four days at the beach.

We arrived at the beach on Tuesday evening, and after the car was unloaded and everything was in its place, I took my little tube of cream and locked myself in the bathroom. I read the directions carefully, noting the bold print (DO NOT LEAVE THIS CREAM ON FOR LONGER THAN 10 MINUTES!), and got to work. I was well into the process, with one side completely finished and the other side still on the clock with about four minutes remaining, when the fire alarm at the resort started screaming and a voice came into our room from a speaker over the door: “An emergency has been reported. Please exit your room through the nearest stairwell and leave the building. Do not use the elevator. Repeat….” Having experienced an actual devastating fire at my place of employment, I wasted no time in hastily removing the remaining cream, pulling on my shorts, gathering up the crew, and jetting down the stairs. Forty-five minutes later we received the green light to re-enter the building.

And 45 minutes later I went back to my hair removal experiment, only to discover with horror and, I must confess, mild fascination, I had not gotten rid of all of the cream in my haste to get out of the building. And apparently while I was milling around outside, the remaining cream sort of…spread. And that is why, when I swiped my bikini line with a wet washcloth, I was left with a bald spot the size of my fist in an area where there should be no bald spots.

And in case you are thinking of trying something similar for your summer grooming needs, you should know that although the hair removal cream worked REALLY, REALLY WELL–TOO well, you might say–I have already had to tweeze and shave just to maintain the effect. Which is why I’m just going to have to suffer the razor for the rest of the summer, or next thing you know I’ll be telling you another story like this one, and I’d prefer to never mention my bikini area on the internet again.

That doesn’t really sound exciting does it? I know, I know. I am pretty much always at home, unless I am at work, and that’s not particularly exciting either. Not nearly as exciting as, “Greetings from the sunny South Carolina coast!” See, now there’s something new and different. Except that I am no longer on the sunny South Carolina coast. I am…at home. You see, I had planned to write at least three of the five mornings I was at the beach, but our “suite” that online appears to have a separate dining room was actually one large room and a bathroom, and the only thing that made the dining room separate was that neither of the beds converted to a table. And since I was sharing a bed with my daughter, who likes to sleep with her face pressed into a corner, and since the bed was not against the wall, thus making me one wall of her corner, I was left with no choice but to lie in bed inhaling my baby’s sweet sleep smells and think about what brilliant things I would write later. Sadly I have forgotten most of them.

So now I am back to my original plan of writing every morning before the kid wakes up—which, according to history, will be in approximately 10 minutes. So there’s no time today for the story of my adventures with bikini line hair remover, or the two total resort evacuations that occurred during our beach stay, or the list of things I learned while on vacation. At least tomorrow I’ll know right where to begin.

I believe it was comedian Bill Engvall who covered the topic of warning labels in one of his stand-up routines a few years back. I’m sure he’s not the only one. This is, after all, a subject of great interest and import. Think about it: have you ever wondered why the makers of frozen food feel the need to include the warning, “COOK BEFORE EATING” on their packaging? Or why food establishments who sell coffee insist on telling you “THE BEVERAGE YOU ARE ABOUT TO ENJOY IS VERY HOT!”? Have you ever been tempted to eat those little packages of silica gel inside your shoe boxes or new electronic equipment? Of course not. But apparently someone has–and that someone has probably also attempted to eat frozen pizza and wash it down with boiling hot coffee. And that’s why we have warning labels, right? Because some people are too stupid to be walking around loose on the streets just can’t be bothered to make sense of the world in which they live.

Or at least that’s what I used to think. And then I knocked an entire bottle of Zyr.tec into my open toilet. No, there was nothing but water in the toilet at the time, and yes, I got as many out as I could salvage, and yes, I do realize how disgustingly gross that is. Please understand: flushing an entire bottle of Zyr.tec would have been a devastating loss for me, because this was before said allergy medication had gone OTC, and I was still paying a large sum for my prescription, and also because without it I cannot breathe. Or eat cantaloupe. Or wear eyeliner and mascara. So yeah, motivated by allergic misery, I fished it out and I took it. That’s right. I took toilet-water soaked allergy medication. And you know what, it didn’t work anymore. The whole next day I had itchy, watery eyes and I sneezed 3 billion times. I ate toilet water and it wasn’t even worth it. I had to buy a whole new bottle.

So if, in the future, a warning label appears on the Zyr.tec packaging that says something like, “This product is not effective once it has been in your toilet,” you’ll know where that one started.

What potential warning labels have you inspired in your own life?

This was about to be one of those sorry introductions about how I haven’t blogged in weeks because this is such a busy time for people in the education field, and how even though I’m not in the classroom anymore I am just not in the mindset to sit down and actually put words on a page. To support this drivel I was going to give you some statistics from previous Mays to prove that I am indeed too emotionally and mentally overwhelmed to blog. But apparently last May I posted 20 times. TWENTY. That’s an average of five posts a week. Sure, in May of 2006 there were only 7 posts, and in May of 2005 only 2 (which doesn’t actually count, since I only started blogging in April of 2005), so I could feasibly argue my original point. But I won’t. Because I don’t really have an excuse, unless you want to go along with my personal belief that upon walking across the University stage on May 17, thus marking the completion of my Master’s degree, the remaining functional brain cells rolling around in my skull went on an indefinite strike and have not been heard from since. But that is not really true, not to mention physically impossible.

So let’s just skip the boring introduction (and for those of you who inevitably read it because who the hell starts with the second paragraph, sorry about that) and move on to what will undeniably be only slightly LESS boring: A Bulleted Rundown of the Last Two Weeks.

• As mentioned, I graduated. Woo-freakin’-hoo. I am so over it that I don’t even have anything else to say about it. I do have some commentary about the photos taken that day, and after reading this, you probably will as well. First, it should be obvious to you after looking at these pictures that I have not been exaggerating all those times I’ve said Little got all the boobs in our family; and in case there was any doubt that I got next to none of the allotment in that department, my University graciously marked the size and location of my own non-boobs on the outside of my robe. Secondly, I tried [unsuccessfully] to avoid uploading any of the photos that showed my feet, because apparently, that is where the Universe chose to give me a surplus. Seriously, my feet look like CLOWN FEET in every single picture. My mom keeps trying to comfort me by assuring me it was just the shoes I was wearing, but I keep insisting, and rightfully so, that the shoes are only as big as my actual feet! It’s not the shoes’ fault my feet are enormous! And finally, do I have a cute kid or WHAT?
• Having completed a Master of Library and Information Science, and having worked for an entire school year as a school media specialist, I regret to announce that I won’t actually be working as a school media specialist next year. Thanks to the ubiquitous Public School Budget Cuts, my position no longer exists. Before you school librarians start hurling curses and shaking your fists at the education gods, I was media specialist number two at my school–the entire program wasn’t cut, just the second position. I was offered two options: a) returning to the classroom as a 9th grade English teacher, or b) a position called “Curriculum Facilitator,” or CF for short. I chose B. Given what longtime readers know about my last few years’ worth of frustration in the classroom, I would have taken a position called “Chief Sidewalk Crack Filler” over potential incarceration, because going back to the classroom would have incited violent behavior on my part, and I don’t think they let girls take their babies to prison. And anyway, don’t you think it’s hilarious that I’m going to be a CF? Am I the only person who thinks that’s a total scream? Someone should invent an education job whose acronym is SNAFU. We could have adjoining offices and take the blame for everything wrong in our school.
• So two weeks ago I had this excruciating pain in my calf. I would have assumed it was a muscular injury of some sort, except I didn’t remember injuring my calf, so I consulted the school athletic trainer, and after some poking he said, “Well, I guess it could be a blood clot.” You know what came next, right? Oh, Dr. Google, I hate you. Because by the end of that day I was a nervous wreck, so nervous that I actually went to the doctor. The short version of this story (because in the long version I would have to type the phrase, “and after a multi-hour wait…” several times, and I think just seeing it that once is enough to give you a picture of the next 48 hours) is that I did not have a blood clot. There was no actual diagnosis, only instructions to take Al.eve twice a day, and so I can only assume I had–wait for it–a muscular injury. Apparently I have reached a whole new level of clumsiness, one that involves painful injury with no memory. Go figure.
• I was flipping through a magazine a few weeks ago and saw this, and I immediately decided my daughter had to have one. My deepest hope is that these lovely little doors will satisfy her door-opening and closing needs. A girl can dream, right? So I used some graduation money from my dad to purchase one from some website I’ve never heard of, because it was the cheapest one I could find. Nearly two weeks later, I still have not received my order, and after several unanswered emails and dead end phone calls, I actually did some fishing around and discovered a review of the site indicating that it is out of business. So far my credit card hasn’t been charged, so I feel pretty fortunate in that department, but mostly I feel annoyed because I really just want the kitchen, and because if you have a retail site but are no longer selling retail, WHY NOT JUST TAKE YOUR SITE DOWN? Gah.
• Mia and I spent Memorial Day Weekend at my aunt’s lake house. Pictures coming soon, but the entire weekend can pretty much be summed up in two words, spoken as questions, over and over and over again: “Butt? Wawa?” (For those of you who need a translation: Boat? Water?) My baby, she loves the water, and if I thought it would improve her napping as much as riding around in my uncle’s pontoon did, I would dig a pond in our yard and put her bed in a canoe.
• I am almost as behind on reading other blogs as I am on writing this one. There are high fives and kudos and good luck wishes and virtual hugs in order, and although I’m not managing to put them into comments they are out there in the Universe, hopefully finding their way to you.
• And finally, just for old times’ sake, there are EIGHT DAYS left of school.