I say "no worries" far too often. I'm not sure where I picked up this decidedly Antipodean affectation, but I can't stop saying it. Actually, I do know where I picked it up; I picked it up from Sean, a guy who's so laidback, it takes him two hours to watch 60 Minutes. (I wish I could claim that joke as my own, but I'm quoting the great Bob Dylan.)
Well, I guess I'm going to have to start a brand new life list now, considering I just crossed off the number one item on my current one.
The first indication that our trip to Knoxville might not have been the most well thought out plan was when I accidentally booked my friend Alison on the wrong flight.
"See you at the airport at 9:30 tonight!" I typed blithely in an IM on Friday.
"I'll probably be there more like 10:30pm," she replied.
"What?" I typed back immediately. "The flight is at 10:40pm!" (I did it just like that, except with seventeen hundred more exclamation points. While frothing at the mouth.)
Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, I kept a collection of notebooks in which I wrote down inspirational quotes, song lyrics that seemed impossibly meaningful at the time, and the sort of pensive, doleful observations that prompt in me now a full-body cringe when I remember them. Basically, I had a Tumblr account way before my time.
I had a whole different post lined up and written in my head—what, they don't count when you write them in your head?—but I have managed to spend the entire evening embroiled in one enormous, never-ending, multi-player game of Draw Something instead, and so that one's going to have to wait.
I have been feeling unfailingly nostalgic recently. You might argue that I am always unfailingly nostalgic—and it's an argument you'd win; it does seem to be my default state—but I am feeling, I guess, particularly nostalgic as of late. I don't know why. Perhaps it's the wisteria, suddenly out in full force around the buildings at work, and how the scent of it takes me back, like a punch in the gut, to the wisteria that burst into life every spring at school, a riot of purple blooms climbing up the brick between the staff room and the ladies' toilets.
1. Earplugs
One of the things I'm trying to work on getting over is my fear of changing in front of other people. Changing clothes, I should clarify. I mean, I'm sure you knew that's what I meant anyway, but now I'm getting a small kick out of the fact that one or two of you perhaps imagined, for a split second, that I was anxious about changing, say, my menu order or my hair color with others present, which sounds like a very severe and specific medical disorder that I most certainly do not have.
I think this may be the most suburban thing I've ever said in my life, but here goes anyway: we're having a bit of trouble with gophers on our front lawn. I said that to a friend last week in a bar, and I swear I could see his eyes glaze over before I even got to the second syllable in "gophers." Hey, young people: whatever you think you're going to become when you're twelve or eighteen or twenty-three, chances are it's not a person who laments things like gopher holes on your front lawn.
I'm just getting over a weird 24-hour bug, which began in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning, when I awoke to find that someone was stabbing me repeatedly in the upper abdomen. A swift and panicked glance about my darkened bedroom revealed that nobody was, in fact, stabbing me repeatedly in the upper abdomen, and so I lay there deep-breathing for a little bit, then finally managed to fall asleep only to have the whole thing happen again an hour later, like a bad rerun of Real Housewives when you'd been hoping for a new episode.
