2001-06-18 - 12:49 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: Theme from "Friends"

*bonk*

That's my head hitting the desk.

I'm very tired today, and I have a headache. A client called my boss at 6pm on Friday (?!) wanting an update for some number on their desk Monday morning. What kind of stupid idjit calls at 6pm on a Friday and wants a number on their desk first thing Monday morning? An idjit who doesn't have a life, I guess, and expects no one else to have one.

Even more aggravating, the client doesn't know where the number came from, AND, based on our research, the number doesn't mean what they think it means. So I was up until 1am IMing with a coworker in San Diego trying to figure it out.

When I got into bed at 1am, Poindexter was half asleep but he reached over and grabbed me to pull me close to him.

This sort of thing gives me a big rush of goopy feelings for him. So much so it almost brings tears to my eyes. I don't know what it is about this. It makes me feel cherished, I guess.

I love my husband a lot.

Whenever I am feeling particularly mushy about people, I start getting panicky that something is going to happen to them. I hate that. It's a form of waiting for the other shoe to drop, I guess.

Poindexter says that life is not perfectly balanced like that -- you don't get an equal amount of goodness and badness. I know this. But I still feel like, "What did I ever do to deserve all this goodness?"

After stuffing myself with bread and homemade garlicky hummus, I went for a very slow walk in the park last night. I smiled at all the babies and old Muslim ladies and the baby ducks, which are nearly teenager ducks at this point. I was probably in NJ when they were really tiny, which is a shame because I had been looking forward to seeing the babies.

Along the way, I noticed for the umpteenth time that there is a cement box by the side of the lake. About 10 feet square. Water falls into it. I thought to myself, "If you were 12, you would have explored this by now. Get on it."

So I took a closer look, and there are two large drain pipe entrances in the box. Big ones, too, at least five feet in diameter.

Now, when I was kid, I used to play in drain pipes sometimes. They were for water, not sewage, and the water was never more than a couple inches deep. We (we being me, my brother, and Alicia's brother Aaron) would put on rubber wading boots and just crouch down and and walk into the pipes. They never went very far.

I seem to remember a set of two pipes. A small one, maybe four feet in diameter, went under the road, and then there was a little "room" we could stand up in where the grating was, and then a bigger pipe that led to somebody's backyard. I remember being freaked out by the noise of cars passing overhead when we were in the smaller pipe. It echoed a lot. It was just cool. We were exploring.

So last night, I'm looking at those five-foot pipes. I know that they go to a drainage channel that runs alongside the railroad tracks. It's not too far. Maybe 50 yards, tops. And the pipes are so big and roomy.

I'm thinking about it. ;)

I forgot to mention this:

When the Great Flood happened, our neighbor Frances caught Poindexter hauling rugs outside at 6am. She stopped in and said, "I take it you're not going to work today. What happened." He told her the story, and she said, "When you get home today, you come on over to my house and I'll give you some dinner. I know you won't feel much like cooking.

What an astoundingly kind thing to do. She is just the sweetest person ever. Poindexter was dead on his feet by the time dinner rolled around, so it was wonderful to have a bunch of delicious food ready and waiting. I'm going to pick up some flowers today to say thanks.

I think I mentioned a long time ago that my grandfather had a journal. He typed it out using his ancient Underwood typewriter that dates back to the 1940s, if not earlier. When my mom was cleaning out his apartment at the assisted living place, she asked if there was anything I wanted. I immediately said, "his journal". She found it in a shoebox in the closet.

It's great. Each entry is very short, usually only 5-7 sentences. It's very dry and impersonal -- every day he records the weather, whom he visited or telephoned, technical details about home maintenance, what sort of yard work he did that day, and sometimes what shopping trip he made, what he bought, and how much he spent. It would be boring except that it's so him. Those are the things he tended to focus on.

The cool thing is that the journal goes back to 1974, which is when he retired, I think. My brother was born in 1975, so I got to see his entry for the day my brother was born. "We learned shortly after 11pm that [my mom] has given birth to a boy, [my brother] -- 9 pounds." It says later that my grandmother stayed with my mom for a few days to help out.

Or my engagement: "Evelynne called to tell us that she and Poindexter are now engaged!" (That one merited a rare exclamation point.)

The funniest thing is that the big focus of the journal is the weather. It's the first thing he mentions in every entry. He discusses how it changes through the day. Snow rates an exclamation point.

I've noticed when writing a journal that my first tendency is to write about things like that. The weather, what I did today. Things that I do pay attention to, that are the focus of my life. But if the purpose of my journal is to give people a sense of who I am -- all the strangers out there, the ones who have become friends, and future generations of my family -- that kind of writing isn't going to cut it.

Now, the weather is something I pay a lot of attention to, and nice days make me extremely happy. The air dried out yesterday and even though it was hot, it was pleasant, and the sky was sharp and clear blue. But the weather itself is far less interesting than how I reacted to it, isn't it? It's slightly more interesting and revealing about me to know that I drove the VW with the top down to run my errands, and that when the lady at the deli counter asked the standard "How are you today?", I told her that I was so happy that the mugginess was gone.

It's hard to pull out those details that make a journal worth reading by other people, or even by a future me. Requires a little effort. Let's see, this weekend I:

Got a perm
Ate dinner with my brother
Had dinner with Rob and Rianna on Saturday
Went clothes and Barbie shopping

Tomorrow I'll see if I can make those things interesting.

previous index next