It's Champagne Thursday!

But today is Friday!
Well, Thursday came twice this week.
(from Failure to Launch)

A long time ago, we all did that poem-meme, "Where I'm from." I dug this one out of my archives. I was looking for a different one, but this will do.

I'm from that Simon and Garfunkel song, "If I never loved, I never would have cried." I'm from lemon meringue pie from a box and icing flowers on my sixth birthday cake. I'm from a scratched record that sings, "A Patient Man am I, A Patient Man am I." I'm from the Mary Poppins soundtrack in my Easter basket, second grade. I'm from that box of records that sit in Falls Church. I'm that 17 year old, crying in a phone booth, every time the operator said "All circuits are busy, please try your call again," dialing your number and the country code and the AT&T card number sometimes 17 times before I got through. I'm from Old Blue and Granny's brown Chevelle. I'm from Columbia Women's Hospital, a building that is no longer there. I'm from the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences and the School of Hard Knocks. I'm from games and games of Free Cell. I'm from movies and movies and movies. Choose the city: New York always wins.

***********

Some things I don't get:

• people who have children and feel guilty for reading books, knowing books relax them. (I was reading magazines over lunch, about "perfect mothers") (Bravo to Babelbabe, who reads voraciously, with 3 boys aged 5 and under.)

• people who complain about visiting their parents. As a gal who has worked retail for over half her working life, you just didn't have the option to pick up and visit them. So you visited them on the off-season. It meant that I actually got to experience hospitality outside my own familial unit. And as a girl who has lived most of her adult life at least 4 hours away from the 'rents, sometimes as far away as 6 time zones, a visit home is never drudge. I know I'm an odd bird, talking to my parents sometimes twice a day, and at least 4 times a week...I hope going home is never a drudge--if it's a duty, it's a love ticket I'm paying.

• people that let go of friendships. I don't mean irreconcilable differences--I mean, just not answering letters or phone calls or emails. My friends are my extended family. It hurts me that there are people that I knew intimately that no longer answer emails I send. There are at least two babies I've never met because their moms don't think keeping in touch is important. I am grateful for the friends who have decided to try again, and again, and again. (I smile as I think of you, survivors. You know who you are. )
• Tapioca. I mean, what makes it look like pearls in pudding? (But it tastes good...)

Driving to Women's Bible Study this morning, I thought about him, Mr. Sixteen-Years-Ago. (I did the math wrong in the last post.) How when we were together (if you could call it that) I thought, he'll change, and in twenty years, we'll settle down and get married. How my chasing after cowboys has been trying to be the fulfillment of that seventeen year old's wish. How I don't want to chase after the end of the rainbow anymore, looking for the elusive pot of gold. I want to dig into the gold right in front of me. I want to live my life, unafraid.

So this, this is another one of those Kevin McAllister moments, when he goes down to the laundry room and yells, "I'm not afraid! I'm not afraid anymore!" It's like peeling away the layers of a smelly onion, which makes you cry.

Layers? A parfait has layers! (From Shrek.)

I got to talk to my mom tonight. I wanted to cry, to tell her how horrible work was, how I totally screwed up this particular thing, that I'm trying so hard to do everything right and how humbling life is, but my mom is not *that* kind of mom. So I told her that I got a pretty Easter Dress. I told her it was green, and Liz Claiborne. I actually drove while on the phone with her, (she would have hated knowing that) but I just wanted to talk to someone who loved me irrationally. Someone who didn't hire me, or someone who shares an office with me, or someone who thinks I'm a little looney. No, I wanted to go home, to that place where "when you have to go there, they have to take you in" (Robert Frost). I didn't care what we talked about, I just wanted to hear her voice.

Well, it's past midnight--maybe I stored up those extra hours of sleep this morning so that I could spend them here, blogging.