Be Ok

When we sit down to eat at the table - which currently involves a coffee table with a tablecloth thrown over... one day I'll have real furniture - I always ask the guys three questions: 

"What did you learn today?"  
"What was your favorite part of the day?" 
and 
"What was your least favorite part of the day?"*

Today the eldest could find nothing wrong with the day.  Eventually he decided his least favorite part was dying in a video game.  "Yes, death by pit scorpion will put a damper on one's day," I said.  

T could only think that Language Arts was too long.  I decided that waiting in line roughly a billion years to pick up my prescription at the Walgreens was kind of annoying.

My project is done ahead of schedule, we had dinner, there's clean laundry, my errands are run, a cabochon was purchased, we turned up that annoying Party Rock song that they love so much and shuffled/club danced all over the living room before bed.**  They're ahead on schoolwork tomorrow.  My house is still a wreck, but you know, project.  I've given up on having a clean house until after grad school.

What I'm saying here is that we all got through Monday with no great disasters or anything.  It was nice.  I like it when there are no disasters.  


* - the last two were shamelessly yoinked from my bb a few years back.  Whenever we would eat with their family, her youngest son's answer was inevitably "WHEN AVERY TOBY COME OVER!!"  Adorable!

** - I imagine that when the kids go to a club for the first time they'll look at the gogo dancers and be like "... she kinda dances like my mom."  Sorry, guys.  

October

Today was the sort of October day that I live for.  The perfect blue sky, the yellow leaves blowing in a nice breeze, temperature just right for long sleeves.  

It occurred to me, while I was standing around on Beth's side of the back yard, that this is what normal is.  I'd just finished carving a pumpkin with the boys, making faces with them as we scooped out the guts with our hands, saving the seeds aside to toast up later.  I was watching the kids bounce on the trampoline while my new neighbor and I gossiped about the neighborhood.  I was thinking about dinner and about how I needed to rake, but fuck it... it could wait until tomorrow.  The raking, not the dinner.

How very ordinary, average American.

(If you scratched the surface of that moment, obviously, you would find a lot of not-exactly-Norman-Rockwell bits.  Let's just ignore that and let me feel special for pulling off a normal fall afternoon, ok?)

---

I took a minute to mark my progress in metals today and feel proud of myself.  In August annealing was terrifying and I could never manage it evenly.  In September I had issues soldering the two ends of a ring together.  Now I'm struggling with butt joints on larger pieces, but when I needed to solder a circle I just spent thirty seconds on it.  Annealing is something I do with one hand while I'm texting with the other.

... not really.  But I really don't pay that much attention to it because it's become second nature.

Today metals lab was full of upper level students making gods know what and rocking out to industrial.  C was there as well, and we were newbie metals buddies, doubling up on torches and freaking out together about how things weren't working right.  Freaking out sounds so much cooler when you're doing it with a French accent, let me tell you.  I should work on getting one of those.

Drunken Lullabies

One day I'm going to learn to say no when Kenny starts in with the shots of whiskey.

This weekend was supposed to be all crazy adventures, all the time, seeing as how it's my last un-spoken-for weekend until January.  Dancing and drinking and being generally merry was to be the name of the game all weekend.  Last night was pretty merry by itself, though, and today I managed to break my metals project so it looks like I'll be in the lab all day.  Maybe that's for the best.

I was going to say "I need some time to think" but that's not true.  I've been doing nothing but thinking, and thinking has gotten me exactly nowhere.  I probably need some time to talk with very specific people about the things that I've been thinking about, but that isn't going to happen any time real soon.  So perhaps I just need some time to create in the interim.

Things I want to remember about last night:

- Sawyer dropping his guitar and hopping down off of the stage to grab me up out of my chair and dance with me when Kenny started singing I Wanna Hold Your Hand.

- Kenny singing, "I like my girls just a little bit older..." at me.  I gave him the eyebrows and blew a kiss.  He started laughing and botched the verse.

- Sara(h?) who went to Italy and loves playing skeeball.  And Jordan, who did not talk.

- Kat is going to cut my hair for me on the cheap, and she promises not to lecture me about my ever-evolving color.

- Jess excitedly messaging me "Mr. Jones is singing!!"  I messaged back "Is playing?  Or someone is singing it?  Or is this actually some dude named Mr. Jones?"  She replied, "Lol, playing.  I might be dink.  drinj.  DRUNK."  I am so excited she'll be here in a few days.

- Introducing Gus to the term "dudebro" because that is exactly what the bar had been invaded by right as I got there.

- "That guy looks familiar.  The one in the flannel shirt."  "GUS.  That is every guy in here.  Except for the waiters, Kenny, and you.  Be more specific!"

- The annoying guy on the train asked, "Do you drink?"  (This is after flailing around to get my attention for thirty seconds, when I finally took out one earbud and said "What?!")  With a straight face I replied, "Never a day in my life."  While he was busy making a shocked, surprised face I followed up with "Too young."  He switched to a side-eye, and I just gave him my best sarcastic jackass face and put my earbud back in, pointedly ignoring him.  He stopped being annoying.

Girl

People on the train were over-friendly tonight.  I don't like it when that happens, makes me nervous.  I know that I'm a friendly sort and all, but people reaching out to untwist the straps of my backpack or prying for information about my love life is just a little too far from random strangers.  What do they think this is, Mississippi?

I waited at the bus stop with an old man who wore a tan overcoat and carried a plastic shopping bag.  He tapped me on the shoulder and I thought, "Jesus, and now this guy."  When I turned around he was holding out a sucker.

"Oh!  Thank you," I said, perhaps a little suspiciously.  I put it in the pocket of my hoodie.  His lady friend/caretaker/family member said, "I've had five of those today.  That's his thing today, passing out candy.  I think maybe because it's Halloween time."

The old man had gone back over to his side of the bus stop, leaving me alone.  Watching him, it was obvious that he was suffering from some form of dementia.  I talked to the lady for a few minutes about flavors of dumdum suckers and when the bus was due.  Eventually, the man came back, tucking another sucker into the pocket of my hoodie when he thought I wasn't looking.  He caught me watching him and said, "I thought you might want another.  Or maybe for a friend?"

"Thank you very much," I said.  "Root beer is my favorite flavor."  I told them goodbye when we got off of the bus.  I noticed he'd left a sucker for the bus driver, too, propped haphazardly on the dollar bill receptacle.

He reminded me of my grandfather, I guess because he treated me like a little girl instead of a woman.  He just wanted to be kind and give me a sucker, because out of all of the people at the bus stop I might need one. 

Later it occurred to me to be a little sad that I can no longer interact with men the way I interacted with my grandfather.  It's impossible to have that sort of completely innocent interaction with a guy, no matter how platonic we are or how gay they are, and has been since I've had boobs.  It's just a thing.  There's guarded distance at the least, like at any second something might happen to send us into inappropriate territory.  

Of course, I regret nothing of the less-than-innocent variety that I've done with the males of the species, so I guess it evens out.

One of the suckers fell out of my pocket on the walk home from the bus.  At least it wasn't the root beer one.

Pets

Tonight the guys and I were talking about food webs (what we used to call food chains back in the day) and were coming up with a bunch.  Like:

sun -> corn -> crows -> hawks
sun -> carrots -> bunnies -> foxes
sun -> algae -> little fish -> big fish -> SHARK

Then the youngest came up with sun -> oak trees -> mice -> cats.

"I don't think anything really eats cats," he said.  

"Except Alf," I replied without thinking.

They stared at me.  

"It was a show that I watched when I was a kid.  The main character ate cats."

They continued staring at me.

"No, see, he was an alien, right?"

They tilted their heads in unison and drew their eyebrows together.  

"Look, it was the 80's, ok?  Don't judge me."