Entries

Not Even a Week

Last night I was full of energy and anticipation, so to stop myself from just pacing around the house for hours and hours before Todd got home I sat down and redesigned the navigation for Coffee Shakes, adding new graphics and listening to Sunday in the Park With George for hours, singing while I did it (I have all the words to every song memorized).

He’d said he’d be home at seven, so at seven I started to watch for him. By eight I was a complete nervous wreck, sitting in front of the computer inserting the new graphics in every journal entry. By ten to nine I was absolutely frantic — luckily he came home then (his plane was late — he’d called from the airport but I hadn’t gotten the phone mail message) and when he walked in we stood there holding each other. Around eleven p.m. our feet were starting to hurt so we went to bed.

*grin* Okay, we didn’t really stand there holding each other for two hours, but it was an awfully long time. Todd kept saying, “Next time, you’re coming with me. I don’t care. I don’t care if we have to sell the car for the ticket money, you are coming with me.” For the rest of the night we followed each other around the house, around ten my cramps were terrible and Todd ran a hot bath for me and then sat next to the tub and held my hand and we both talked a mile a minute and I cannot believe how long five days felt and how miserable we both were. Last night we kept saying things like, “Oh, well I’m sure that it’s changed by now — after all those weeks –” and then realizing that it wasn’t weeks at all, it wasn’t even a week.

Todd read all of my journal entries and saw the new Auntie Lois answer, then I sat and read the journal he kept — I loved reading it, but felt left out too and crabby that we weren’t able to experience any of the trip together. I ordered a pizza that was supposed to be half tomato and half cheese, but I guess the pizza guy thought I meant half tomato sauce and half cheese, ’cause that’s what we got. Yuck. My favorite part of the journal was this paragraph:

Attendant was calling around looking for the pilot who was running late. Just as he hangs up the pilot shows up. His bags had a sticker on them that said: “God is my pilot — I’m just the co-pilot.”
I’m scared : ).

You have GOT to be kidding. I was just drinking my Dr. Pepper (went to the nearby deli today and got a sandwich) and looked at the label and it actually says: “WARNING contents under pressure. Cap may blow off causing eye or other serious injury. Point away from people, especially while opening.” Only in America.

We both slept beautifully last night and woke up feeling wonderful. I spent the majority of the day spell-checking and adding in new graphics to every journal entry, which *grin* those of you who have sat through my misspellings for months will be happy to know. I cleaned up the links as well, so they should all work just fine now. And what did I learn from this experience? It’s stupefied, not stupified. I must have misspelled it 47 times, how humiliating. It was quite a bizarre experience to read back through the last five months — I didn’t read the entries all the way through, but caught snatches from every one. And found myself thinking, surprisingly, that I liked reading the entries. Liked myself.

Broke the deli-owner’s heart, poor thing. I walked in and he asked what I was doing for christmas and I said that I didn’t celebrate it — he asked why not and instead of getting into a whole philosophical discussion about my opinion of holidays I simply said that I’d had some really terrible christmases growing up and didn’t celebrate it for that reason and boy, he was just crushed. Kept saying how sorry and sad he was that I didn’t celebrate it.

While it isn’t the entire reason that I don’t celebrate holidays, past experiences are certainly a part of it — holidays meant I had to be in the same room with family, who could barely be in the same house for an hour without having a screaming fight, not to mention the charming times that I had when we lived with Spring and Patricia. But in a wider sense I just feel like holidays are silly. The idea of setting aside a day when gifts are given, when people “come together as a family” is completely foreign to the way that I live my life — I give gifts when I want to, I get in touch with my family when I want to, and for me that means that the feelings behind the acts are genuine and truthful and not dependent on what the rest of the country happens to be doing on a certain day.

Hm…I was just sitting here thinking about Martie and what she’ll think of what I just wrote — my family is very big on christmas — and I was thinking about the traditions that have been passed on from my grandparents to my father and then to me. Things like being allowed to look at stockings but no presents until the parents are awake, reading the bible (I think this one may have been my father’s and not my grandparents’ — considering that I’ve been absolutely and completely non-religious from age eleven on it was a strange addition) and reading The Night Before Christmas on christmas eve. So I was sitting here thinking about all of that and then started to smile because I realized how funny it is that I can’t stand holidays and yet holidays are the most routine-oriented concept that this world has.

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