Melancholy Music Listener Today

Remember when, back in, like, 1992, the video for Jeremy came on the tv, and you stopped and watched it, completely fascinated, and then horrified and totally freaked out?  Remember?

You know how it was totally astonishing, totally shocking, and fixating, and scary?

(I was sort of like in-training to be a teacher right then, so... yeah.)

Did you know it was sort of a true story?  Based on a story that Vedder read in a paper about a boy who really was named Jeremy in Texas, who killed himself in front of his teacher and other students? 

Bull crap.

Anyway, so I'm just jamming to the radio lately, and I'm all, "All the other kids in their pumped up kicks... better run, better run, faster than my bullet."

WHAAAA?

Catchy tune. 

Damn, kids be bugging.

Don't shoot each other, kids.  I like you all way too much.  Don't shoot yourself either, okay?

Potty-mouthed Buddy

Look.  I'm all about "togetherness" and being "nice" and other such nonsense.  Honest to God, I'm a really sweet person.

Aherm.

I mean to say, I try to do right most of the time.

But I am still awfully, awfully fond of the "eff" word.

Eff you, you effing eff is possibly my favorite thing to say, although for some reason, I'm actually having a tough time typing that out for real right now.

The eff word hurts NOBODY.  NOBODY.  NOBODY, I SAY.

Anyway, so I went on an outing with my coworker team yesterday, and it was fun, and it culminated in a whole bunch of people all lounging around on a boat.  Which is very, very booyah.

And so, so, so many cuss words were bandied about, and it was glorious.

GLORIOUS.

EFFING GLORIOUS.

Additionally, I got an email from my favorite recent-college-graduate (one of two, actually), that was post-scripted with "Sent from my iPad."

I responded with a message, blah blah blah, and then ended with this:

"I like 'sent from my iPad.'  It's like saying, 'BTW, I am the shit.' at the end of every email."

She liked that.  I like HER.  I am also very validated by the approval I am getting from this member of the Next Generation, a Generation that studied in Athens, GA, I mean, come ON.

I'm hipster-friendly.

EFFING hipster-friendly.

Hot Rod

Something is really, really wrong with me.

Yesterday, after church?  I was conflicted.  You see, there were two things I wanted to nap in front of watch on television:  Saints v. Bears, AND the Nascar Sprint cup race in Chicago.

Let me let that sink in for a minute.

WHO AM I???

Ahem.

Anyway, so I determined to flip back and forth, between channels 8 and 34 until I fell asleep or was sucked into one or the other.  I was already past the 1st quarter of the football game, and we appeared to have a solid hold on the Bears, so I was able to flip back to the race channel, wherein the race was under "rain delay."

Rain delay.  In football, there is No Such Thing.  Because football is a Real Sport. 

Ahem.

BUT THEN, the stupid speed or nascar channel or whatever ESPN 7 or whatall channel was on, it started to show clip shows from Nascar.

Now, as an aside, let me let you know how I feel about clip shows.

J'ADORE.

Pretty much start anything with "Top Five...." and I'm totally in.  "Top Five World's Dumbest Criminals?"  Mmm hmmm.  "Top Five Scariest Roller Coasters?" YOU BET.  "Top Five Cruise Ships?"  YES, PLEASE.  "Top Five Stinkiest Cheeses?"  In an M-F'ing heartbeat.

So when you put before me "Top Ten [could have been Twenty] Best Quotes in Nascar," I couldn't turn it. 

And you know what, It was AWESOME.

Lookie:

Oh My God "Carpet Eater" hahahahahaha.

I love Nascar.

Poison Ivy

Me and my guys are going to go camping tonight.  Just for one night.  We are tent-camping, the real deal, with tents.  And tents and stuff.

Tents.

We are camping in a campsite, the kind of place with bathroom facilities and showers (nah.) and stuff like that.  We will have electricity and water at our campsite.

Where we will be sleeping in tents.

Is it lame that I am planning to bring along my air matress which auto-inflates for in the grown-up tent?  I'm old.  My back.  You know.

I'm also planning to bring along my running shoes because, last time I went to this park it was for a race, and I saw a deer and it was AWESOME.

(aside:  last night while I was running, I either saw an armadillo or an opossum.  Or an obnoxious cat.  Tough to tell, I wasn't close to it.)

Anyway, so yeah... tent camping.  Me and three dudes, all of whom can just pee wherever.

Yay, tents!

Yay, camping!

Wish me luck...

Bleeding Heart Liberal Hippy (as per usual)

Look, I'm not definitively either FOR or AGAINST the death penalty.  In fact, I have not yet made up my mind how I feel about it.

Except to say that, the fact is, there are NO do-overs, you know, if the party in question is dead.  And so, if he/she is found innocent, too late.  Too bad, so sad.  No do-overs.  DNA has exonerated 17 people so far, according to The Innocence Project.  I know, that's certainly NOT a staggering number, BUT... I bet to their moms, each one of those people is a staggering person.  Just saying.

This got under my skin.  More than reasonable doubt, is all.

But then, this on Facebook this morning:

GD, y'all, REALLY???

On what planet is it okay for us - you know, people - to celebrate another human being's death???

I do not care if it is Osama Bin Lauden or Hitler or whomever, they done some bad stuff, it's true.

So have I.  Not that bad, I think, but I don't know that God cares what level of bad.  It's all bad.

I don't have any right to throw that stone, thanks.

Ugh.

I hope the family of the slain police man gets peace.

I hope that the family of Troy Davis continues to believe his innocence.

I hope that Troy Davis is sitting in Heaven, just shaking his head because we-all are so dang stupid.

Space Oddity

SHUT UP.

This article - and many others - imply that there will be a hurtling crash of over 100 pieces of space debris hitting the Earth on September 24.

Which is three days from now.

You want to tell me why I'm only just hearing about this now?  As if I am worried about it, which I'm not.  Oddly, and inexplicably, I'm amused.

One source said that there was a 1/3100 (ish) chance of being hit by it. Those odds are not actually that bad. Probably similar to my chance of being in a car wreck on my way to work.

What the eff, y'all? How is this even possible?

Here's what the big mess looks like BEFORE it breaks into pieces on impact with the Earth's atmosphere:

Dude, I don't want to die from it but I SO BAD TOTALLY want a piece to fall in my back yard, so I can talk about it with my friends and be famous.  You know, for a minute.  I'm such a media whore.

Wouldn't it have been much cooler if this was Major Tom?

Theoretical Teenage Prankster

In theory...

The first true-tell sign of fall happened last night.  Our trees blossomed in white.  Not our trees, actually, as we have no trees, and even our bushes did not bloom, but the trees all over our part of town.  (For the record, we got WW'd last year and it is definitely a mark of honor here, so that's nice for Beanie.)

Here's a quick picture I took on the way to work:

Isn't that nice?

This happens every fall where I live, on the Wednesday prior to Homecoming.  It's a tradition, one that the kids (and the grown-ups, actually) call "White Wednesday."  The baby does actually believe that the trees sprout toilet paper once a year.

So let me give you a theoretical situation.

Say that, theoretically, you were out for a quick run at 9:30 p.m. last night.  Say that you pass about a dozen or so White Wednesday revelers, mostly giggly, cheerleader-type teenage girls.  Say that you approach one group just getting started.

Say that, theoretically, you stop to admire their work in process, and then you just can't stand to be left out.  Say that you say, "hey, let me throw one."

Say that the kids give you a roll, and you hurl it up towards a tree limb, of which the paper falls short, embarrassingly.

Say that you mumble, "thank you, I suck," and continue to run.

Of course I am not saying any of these things happened, you know, because White Wednesdaying people is illegal.

But say that it did... theoretically...

Would this not make you the coolest 35 year old runner/mom/girl ever?

I think so.

Ex-terminator

Let's play pretend.

Pretend that you are sleeping in my bedroom, also that you are me.  Pretend you awake to hear like a rustling sound.  You open one eye, and you see your fat, cancerous, old cat, whom you love, scuffling around in a paper bag in which you have gathered some clothes for giving away.

So your first thought is, that damn cat is going to pee in those clothes.  So you fuss her.

The cat goes "brack!  Bicaback! pkkack!"  and continues to pat the bag.

A second later, she crouches down, shakes her ass, and then pounces an inch or so to the side of the bag.

Brack!  Pkkack!

She is clearly smiling.

You are still in your bed, now wondering what kind of critter she has found.

You can hear it walk across the bag now, crinkle, crinkle crinkle.

A mouse.  There is a mouse in your bedroom.  This is NOT THE TIME FOR PANIC OMG OMG OMG.

Bicaback!  Prrack!  Wacka-wacka!

And now, said rodent is walking across your floor, almost into the bathroom door.

Only - get this!  IT IS NOT A MOUSE.  

Walking across your room is the mother of all cockroaches, the biggest Wood Roach/Palmetto Bug/Outside Roach/Satan's Minion you have EVER SEEN, easily 3 inches across.

Eventually, your cat chases it up a wall in your bathroom, and you run out to fetch the can of Bengal Roach Spray from the other bathroom (if you don't own this, go buy it.  they didn't ask me to say that, I say that because that crap kills the big roaches.)  You spray the monster, it falls from the ceiling into your bathroom, and eventually dies.

1) You make sure that your cat gets extra lovin'.

2) You make your teenage son remove the carcass.

3) You never feel comfortable sleeping in your bedroom again.

Those things can fly, you know.

Happy pretending!

Singing September

I have mentioned before that I enjoy the singing.  Of me.  The singing of me.  I am a fabulous singer.  That's a big fat lie, I am an acceptable singer, better than several but not certainly worse than many.

All this is preamble to talk about a great big concert at which I am singing (in which?) on Sunday, a 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina Memorial.  Me, little Sarah-bean, getting all makey-uppy and standing in the smack-middle front of the stage (gulp) to sing like 20 songs in the company of some other Very Good musicians, and possibly somewhere between 100 and 500 community people hangin', waiting for cake-o'clock.

People will probably cry.

I will probably cry.

I miss what it felt like to not suffer from PTSD in early September.  Maybe this will help me get back to that safe feeling, the one that a hot bubble of panic robs me of each year. 

Alternatively, this might be the worst year of all.

At any rate, I will not have any voice left at the end of the night. 

I've been working hard.

I get to sing Peter Gabriel (I believe I mentioned that before.)

I sound good.

I'm nervous.

WHAT TO WEAR.

I wish you were going to be there.

Sister

My sister is on her way to visit.  So that's nice.  She's my little sister, and I wasn't born with her or anything, I married into her. 

I plan to keep her though.

My sister has golden red hair.  It's not straight-up red, it's like strawberry blonde, it's awesome.  I wish I had that hair.  I do not, though.

Her hair is sunshine colored. 

My hair is brown streaked with gray.  It's lovely.  It's not really lovely, but I don't care.

You know what my hair is, though?  Perfectly curly. 

Anyway, but my sister is coming and will be here today, and I am excited because I love her.  She's a good sister.

SO that's all.

And my hair IS pretty, you know.  I mean, don't get me wrong...

Rain Delay

It's raining.  Poor ol' Louisiana has gone so long since its last "real" storm that everybody is all a-buzz because, you know... it's raining.

Technically, there is a Tropical Storm hanging on top of us right now, and technically, it could develop into a Hurricane.  A little, teensy, tinsy baby hurricane.  But right now... it's raining.

All this being said, I was supposed to run a four mile race, largely over this bridge, on Sunday, and I was very relieved that they postponed the race:

Do you know me?  Do you know that I am effing PETRIFIED of bridges, that I don't know what in the Sam Hill I was thinking because I can barely drive over bridges, and so I was planning to run over one, because... why?

Because I am a dumbhead.

So instead, I'm going to watch movies and hang out with my babies, cook lots of food that makes my house smell yummy, and do laundry.  I suspect that I will NOT run at all.  Because, you know... it's a tropical storm.

On another note, Beanie got his learner's permit this week, and I've let him drive pretty much everywhere, but I am certainly not going to let him drive in a Tropical Storm.  So that's a completely other "win."  Tee hee.

Happy weekend, everybody.  Thanks, Tropical Storm/Rainstorm Lee!

Eventually, they will reschedule this race, but I'll (HAHAHA) cross that bridge when I come to it.