Today is wimpy and gross outside. What is more, I had to use LIGHTS this morning when I was getting ready. LIGHTS!!! Wasn’t that the point of Daylight Saving (note: no S, per Eloi)? To have more light?
The thing about that cruddy spring DST jump is that I don’t just lose that hour once. I lose it like five times. Instead of my day being 24 hours, it feels like I just get up and it’s time to go to bed. Esteban says that I sleep better on the DST schedule, but I tend to think that it has more to do with the general amount of daylight itself rather than the clock schedule. I do know one thing, I detest walking up in the dark. It makes me feel like a mushroom. No. A mole. Or possibly Thumbelina, married to Mr. Mole.
It did give me a different perspective on things, though. This morning, driving to work during my normal time, which was actually an hour earlier than normal, it’s a different look at the world. There was a delicious morning mist, half obscuring the not-yet budding trees. When I take the freeway, there is a little river I cross, a river with bends and turns and egrets and cranes, trees bending their slender arms over the water, and I can rarely resist taking my eyes off the road to view this little patch of wild. It was breathtaking today. Morning is sometimes obscured by these masks of clocks and schedules and I feel very fortunate when I get a glimpse of a lovely sight like that. Even if it is through half-lidded bleary eyes and grumbling curses.
But it all means that spring is upon us, which is lovely even if it presages cruddy drippy weather. The proof is in the follicular changes of my husband’s face. Esteban made the leap from ‘winter beard’ to ‘summer beard’. But before he can do a complete summer beard, he shaves it fully. And looks like he’s twelve. He goes from being masculine and virile to having the face of a paperboy. I half expect his voice to crack. I’m one of those rare women who actually prefer facial hair on a man if it works better with their face. Some men have beard faces. And some have goatee faces. Tom Selleck has a perfect mustache face. I’m not crazy about mustaches, but on Tom, it works. So be it. So now I’m dealing with my husband, Skippy, and his baby face complete with rarely seen chin. But I like rubbing my face on his cleanly shaven face and not getting Do-It-Yourself Dermabrasion. Luckily for him, I think he’s cute no matter what. And I adore his butt.
And how’s this for a non-segue…
The previous mole comment, combined with the Night Monkey clips on Jackass last night, reminds me of a play I was in when I was a senior in high school. It was a college play and I was quite honored to be included in the cast as a high school student. I had auditioned for the part of Mr. Toad, but that went to a senior drama major whose name I’ve since forgotten.
I was a Weasel. I had no actual lines, but rather improvised furious snarls, tweets and other weasel-like noises. My costume was head to toe brown shag fur and I had an enormous weasel head with red battery-operated glowing eyes, made from Christmas lights, ping pong balls painted black and two AA batteries which I had to connect before and after every performance, lest they run out before the end of the run. Not only did it introduce me to the world of artsy-fartsy liberal arts thingies, but it also scored me an entire excused week out of school, as we had thrice-daily performances for the various grade schools in town.
Also, during the course of that play, I was involved in three other plays and it gave me my first taste of being a Type A personality. I’d write my own production during the day in classes, then do my high school play rehearsals after school (I played Sweet Pea Meadowbrook in a rather disgusting play called “Death By Chocolate”, picked to take advantage of the drama production’s curvy round sex goddess in training, but I’m not going there in this entry). I was also a primary in a community children’s theatre production, thus I had those practices on Saturday afternoons. And practice for Wind in the Willows at night. Oh lord. It was glorious. I was never home. I was sorely depressed when January came around and all of the lovely performances were complete. That’s when I turned to recreational pharmaceuticals and started wearing lots of dark blue eye shadow and a black jersey dress, knotted at the thigh, over white lace bottomed leggings and blue All Stars. My Ny-Quil habit was sacrosanct and I was seriously baselining Mountain Dew during the day, not to mention Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. Hey. I was a pretty good kid, even though I was Goth before it was cool, or at least before anyone in Green Bay had ever heard the term Goth.
That wasn’t necessarily a funny story. It just was what it was. They’re not all funny. Perhaps I just think every teenager should get the chance to be a weasel. Or maybe that I shouldn’t have had my weaselness taken from me. I don’t know. Blame it on the GD DST.
I had another Frosty lunch. Bleary drizzly weather deserves Frostys. Seriously. I read that in a fortune cookie or something.
Does anyone else keep fortune cookie slips? I will not eat a fortune cookie because my drunken mother worked at the town’s only Chinese restaurant (at the time) and used to bring home shopping bags full of fortune cookies for our cookie jar. This was a rather slight benefit. I was 18 before I realized that Chinese food was not meant to be eaten cold out of white containers directly from the refrigerator in the morning. Thus, I will only rarely eat a fortune cookie, because I’ve had too many white trash meals consisting of fortune cookies and Banquet beef pot pies. Or sometimes just fortune cookies.
If I’m at a business lunch, I’ll sometimes take a cookie under pressure of my dining companion and crack it open to see the fortune, leaving the remains of the cookie there, defeated like a crushed beetle carapace. I have one such fortune on the top of my monitor, sort of ironic for one who hates them so very much.
top will be granted
You’ve just got to love a fortune cookie like that.
Of course, in my head I like to add the words ‘in bed’ to the end of it. And that just makes me giggle.
Because sometimes it’s good to be eight years old.
