Smiley’s Brilliant Idea

I went to lunch with Smiley, which was good, because, obviously, I had a burr up my butt and needed to touch base with someone who could cheer me up.

If you can’t get happy around a guy called Smiley, you need to get you to a therapist, I think.

Anyway, Smiley had an idea so brilliant that I’m tempted to take Friday off and implement it.

Ready?

Riding around town all day on the bus.  Various busses, but just seeing where all they go and how easily they get there.

Come on!  That’s good fun.  And I think it counts as investigative citizen journalism.

Another Open Letter to the Law Students

Dear Law Students,

I realize that you are just the hard-working beneficiaries of a totally fair, totally unrigged market system based solely on a grand meritocracy that rewards those who deserve it and punishes those who can’t get with the program.

 My inability to park near my building was clearly my own fault, for had I been better able to capitalize on the opportunities presented to me, I too could have had a daddy fund my whole god damn life.

But I suck, so go ahead, park in my spot.

 Love,

Aunt B. 

An Open Letter to the Law Students

If you are driving a Mercedes and attending law school at a prestigious university, you have already won the lottery called Life. 

Don’t park in my lot.  Just do me the common courtesy of that.  I know you’ve got the whole motherfucking world on a chain.  Life is so great.  You walk down the street and folks drop to their knees to give you head you’re so fucking cool.

But the rest of us would prefer not to have your over-privileged out-of-all proportion to your actual abilities daddy’s money spending luck rubbed in our faces. 

Not very charitably yours,

Aunt B. 

—–

This Year, I am Not Going to Get Freaked Out about Renewing the Lease

I try to take small steps on the road to non-fucked-up-ness.  Possibly, this means that I will never actually achieve non-fucked-up-ness.  This is fine.  I’m merely attempting to reach, “Easy for me to live with.”

I think the biggest step I took on this path was going to the bank this time last year and consolidating all of my credit card debt into one big pile of debt and one tiny pile of debt.  The tiny pile of debt will be paid off this month, which mean that next month I can take the money that was going to the tiny pile of debt and put it towards the big pile of debt on top of the money that is already earmarked for it.

This feels like such a grown-up thing to do that I fear I’ve overlooked something important and it’s really going to turn out that I also owe $2500 to the Russian mob, which they’re going to make me pay off by scooping horse shit on some farm down in Williamson County.

Anyway, so I have my “fear of never getting out from under mound of crippling high-interest rate debt” managed.  I am going to get out from under it, if I stick to my plan.

Another paralyzing fear I have is that our landlord will not want to renew our lease and we will be forced to move.  Writing it out like that makes it seem like a stupid fear.  We pay our rent on time and without complaint every month.  We take care of our own issues, so we don’t trouble him with stuff to do.  And, though the place is messy, it’s not filled with bugs or rats or other vermin.  Why would he not renew our lease?

And, if he doesn’t, I’ve been putting money in savings every month so that we have money to move on, and I’m cruelly not letting the Butcher make any birthday travel plans until I know if we’re going to need that money, too.

The moving thing is just a hang-up I have.  It’s hugely traumatic for me and I just can’t stand it.  I want to live in this place until I can afford to buy a place and then I want to live in that house for the next million years.  I don’t want to move from Nashville.  I don’t even want to move from this neighborhood.  I want to put down roots.  I want to make friends and know that we will be friends until we just naturally drift apart.  I want to know the people in my neighborhood and know that they know me.  I want to be recognized at the grocery store because I go in there so often, not because folks have been gossiping about me.

I want to have a hometown.

I want this to be it.

If the landlord wants us to move, it doesn’t actually affect all that other stuff, but in my mind, they are so closely linked that moving one causes the whole rest of the mess to shift.

But this year, I’m not going to get freaked out about it.  I will allow myself to be unreasonably nervous, but I’m not going to be paralyzed with fear.

That’s my goal.

I Spend the Afternoon Thinking of W.

Today I watched this awesome show about the crazy engineers who are trying to design a bridge over the straights of Gibraltar.

It was awesome on its own, just in terms of coolness. But I have to say that knowing someone who designs bridges that go over water made watching it even more thrilling. I did sit and wonder what W. thinks when he watches shows like that. Does he someday want to be the kind of bridge builder who dreams of making bridges that can span continents? Does he go out to the bridges he’s designed to watch them being built? Is it scary or thrilling or has it become mundane?

Update on Monday, August 21, 2006 at 07:03AM

I don’t think I could drive across the Gibraltar bridge.  The more I think about it… No.  To be out there in the middle of the bridge with only water beneath you and around you, high enough in the air that ocean-going vessels can pass underneath you…

It kind of makes me sick to my stomach just to think about it.

When I was out in Colorado visiting JR and Elias, they took me way up into the tundra of the Rockies, and I thought I would have to barf or just live up at the rest area, perhaps tied to it by a series of sturdy ropes that would prevent me from falling off the face of the earth.  And JR asked me what I would have done if I had been married to a man who wanted to cross the mountains to move west, and I said, and it’s true, “He would have had to do it without me, then.”