Junior High - Oh My!

A friend from junior high e-mailed me something I wrote when I was 11 or 12. Too dang funny. It included something about Tom Cruise?! Don't worry Katie, he's all yours.

Gosh, I can't believe she still had it after all these years. Makes me wish I had something similar to share in kind, but I don't. Until recently I wasn't ever the sentimental type.

FOUR Minutes!

I finally got around to making my dreaded doctor's appointment. It was scheduled for 4:00 pm. I arrived on time, filled out the necessary paperwork and then waited, and waited, and waited. At 4:45 the nurse called my name. I was weighed, my blood pressure was taken, and I answered a few questions. Back to the waiting room to wait. 5:17 pm I was called again and left alone in a small room with the examining table facing the doorway. Who designs these rooms?! Anyway, the small little curtain hanging from the ceiling really doesn't provide me with a great sense of privacy, but hey, I'm not here for a lesson in dignity. Anyway, I continue to wait for the doctor, this time basically naked except for a sheet and a thin little half rob that exposes more than I care to show. Finally at 5:30 pm the doctor sees me. At 5:33 she's finished, by 5:34 she leaves the room. Four minutes! The whole freaking thing took less than 4 minutes! I waited an hour and a half so she could spend less than 4 minutes addressing my needs and concerns. Ugh. I left disgusted and frustrated. Can hardly wait to go through all that again next year.

Paper #2

"Robert Hass in Sun Under Wood often uses simple, everyday scenes, yet his poems are artistically complex and rich with allusion and connection. Find two poems about mothers / motherhood written in English in the past 100 years and write an essay explaining why they fit especially well with the themes in Hass's book. Include the poems with the essay."

This is my next assignment. Seems pretty basic. Hopefully I can find a couple of poems that I understand. I'm sure I'll select something that I think is perfect, only to learn AFTER I've turned in my paper, that the poems weren't about mothers / motherhood or connected in any way to the themes in Hass's book, but instead about about alien space invaders that eat tiny tuna sandwiches with the crusts cut off and find them so terribly distasteful that they blow up the planet and whew, now I don't have to worry about my paper because I'll be space dust.

Is it really any wonder that I can't write a paper? Jeez with the attention span of a gnat I'm lucky I can even dress myself! Oh wait, I haven't, I'm still in my pj's and robe and red framed glasses.

Foggy first paper

I earned the highest grade in class for the first paper: B-. Better than a C, but not by much. Ugh, who am I kidding?! Gotta kick it into high gear if I'm going to do well in this course. Unfortunately I'm as dense as a holiday fruit cake when it come to this stuff. I read a poem and think, "Oh, that's lovely." Then, when we dissect the piece in class I think, "WTF?! Syphilis, that was about syphilis? What the hell did I just read? How, I, ... um... but, wait, ... really? Oh, yes, I see it now. Hmm, syphilis. Well, um, that was the day. Those early years must have been a bitch. Yeah for modern medicine." See, dense like London fog. Oh, that's just my subtle reference to the poem:


London

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

William Blake, 1794


Sooooooo painfully obvious AFTER the fact. When, oh when, will this stuff make sense to me. I worry that it never will. Sure, sometimes a rose is just a rose, but what about ALL the other times when it's not. How will I know the difference? How many times will I have to read the same piece over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over before finally, finally a little light peeks through and the spiders retreat and I see it for what it is. Oh, that's lovely. London fog.

Red Frames

I went a little wild and selected red frames. I usually go for the quite librarian type in tortoise shell specs, but no, no, not on this occasion. Keep in mind the hubby likes the librarian tortoise shells, but claims to really like the red, so why not? They're only glasses. I like em', they're fun. In fact I've been wearing them more often than usual. I've found I'm quite lazy when it comes to my morning and evening routines. I like not having to mess with contacts: cleaning them, popping em' into my eyeballs, peeling them off at night... yeah for glasses!

Photo Op: That's Paula on the right. She's my partner in crime at work. Paula totally rocks. We're a great team and she makes work fun! Fun! When Monday morning whacks me upside the head it doesn't even hurt thanks to Paula's cheerful disposition, wonderful sense of humor and fun-loving spirit.

The "Holiday Gifts" sign in the background is for a work event held in October. Don't ask. It's a "sales" thing, those crazy sales people. The photo was taken on 10/15/08. And what's up with my bangs? Wish I knew! But hey, aren't the frames fantastic? They really help detract from bad-hair days - or at least that's my hope.

Glasses

My left eyeball has buggin' something fierce! As a result I've been wearing my glasses. I usually don't wear my spectacles because my eyes are very sensitive to light and the "transitions' eyeglasses tinting doesn't ever get dark enough to do me any good. These past few days it was cloudy and overcast which seems to have helped. Today though, we have an eye appointment, so hopefully they can figure out what's causing my eyeball pain. The contacts were brand-spanking new out of the package, so I dismissed that as the problem. Perhaps I misdiagnosed it. Guess I'll find out soon enough.