not enough handbells.

I'm looking for a church, both because I want to meet new people and because I feel guilty when I don't go. And while I know this isn't really why God wants you to go to church, I think He'll agree that'll it'll do until you come up with a better reason.

It's hard to choose a church, because you're mostly judging on things that ultimately aren't important. You may choose this church because it has a good handbell program, but if it turns out handbells don't equal spiritual growth in this church, then you may have made a poor choice. Then again, I tend to think you could feasibly get the same spiritual nourishment out of your experience at any church; you just may have to work harder at places without handbell choirs. In any church experience, you only get out what you put in.

So I have to figure out what's important to me in a church. I tend toward United Methodist churches, because I grew up in one. I joined the UMC when I was twelve, and by the time I was eighteen, I had begun to pay attention what denominations actually meant. Luckily, it turned out that I still liked the Methodists. That could've been because of the mass brain-washing they did to me over eighteen years, but if so, they at least had the courtesy to brain-wash me into being happy about it.

I like interesting, thought-provoking sermons that aren't just retelling the same Bible stories over and over. I want to hear something I haven't heard in 20 years of sermons. I would like for there to be other people my age and marital status. I like pot lucks with lots of deviled eggs. I like for there to be programs going on, even if they're not ones I'm necessarily interested in; I want the church to be active. I like smaller churches. I like it when everybody seems to know everybody. I liked anonymity in my college classes, but not in my church. I honestly feel like a sense of a tightly-knit, yet open to new people church family is the most important thing to me. I want a church family that is warm and friendly. I can sacrifice on all the other things if I go in there every Sunday and someone is just thrilled to see me.

So I've been church-hopping. It's a hard thing to do, to just show up somewhere where you don't know anyone. Then you have to try to figure out the order of service, the songs they sing, and Lord help you if they sing the Doxology to a different tune. And you're supposed to fill in the attendance pad. I always do, but I never tell them my address or phone number. I'll pick a church without the assistance of a marketing team, thank you very much. I do mark down that I'm a visitor and that I'm new to the area, just so they know if they don't see my name again, they need to work on something. Chances are, they just didn't have enough handbells.

but with less issues.

Hi there, I'm Brian. Don't worry, I'm not here to harass you, I'm just looking for non-violent people. Are you a violent person?

Um, no. Is he a violent person? Why is he on my porch?

Well, good. They're just sending us all out here to make us work on our people skills, make sure we keep eye contact and don't spit all over people. Have I soaked you yet?

Um, no. Why is he here? Why is he here? Why is he here?

Then I'm doing a good job. You know, there are six hundred of us all over the state of North Carolina running around, and right now, I've got the most points. I'm trying to win so I can open up a Cajun restaurant. I'm from New Orleans.

Wow, that's mighty ambitious of you. I hate Cajun food. Why is he here?

Yes it is, and I'm going to need your help. Plus, if I win, they're going to send me to Cancun. Ever been to Cancun?

No.

Oh, well, I'm going to need a dancing partner...

...

...unless you have a husband or a boyfriend already.

I do have a boyfriend. He's six-nine, and he plays for the Redskins, except now he's on probation because he killed a man with his bare hands.

Ah, that's too bad, but I don't wanna get in trouble now.

(uncomfortable laughter) Go away. Why is he here?

See, the more magazines I sell...

Ah.

...the more points I get. Here's a list of my magazines. Now I'm not asking you to buy twenty subscriptions, just ten!

(forced laughter) You obviously don't know me very well, then.

Nah, that's just a little joke there. But seriously, all you gotta do is pick these out and sign a form for me, and the magazines come right to your door. It's cheap and easy, like my ex-girlfriend, but with less issues.

That's not very nice. Not to mention really creepy and weird.

Ah, well, it was just a rough situation there, you know? She had this baby and it died, and then two weeks later she broke up with me because she didn't want a committment. After two years together! Can you believe that?

...

Then, well, I just decided I had to get out of there, so I started travelling around the country, just get away from there. And now I'm here!

Yes, you are. Oh, good.

So, here are the magazines. Now, I'm not points-greedy, I'm just points-needy. And you know what? You can even send these magazines as a gift to a charity. I had a guy in the next building over send a subscription of Maxim out to our troops. And you know what the best part about that is?

What? That you'll leave?

It's tax deductible.

That is good. That is the first sensible thing you have said to me.

Now, what do you do for a living?

I write software. Where is he going with this?

Wow! Good for you!

Thanks. Funny how those college degrees keep you from selling magazines door-to-door.

How much do you make?

That's really none of your business. You've got to be kidding me.

Ah, well, I like to ask. I really like to ask cops, because I make more than they do. Cops are so full of themselves, and it's funny that I make more than they do.

Plus you don't get shot at. Although, if I had a gun right now...

Well, there was this one time that I did get shot.

That's no good. This is ridiculous.

Ah, well, it happens. So what can I put you down for?

I really don't need any magazines, thank you. Go away, go away, go away.

No one needs magazines.

Okay, I don't want any magazines. Why did I tell him that I have a good-paying job?

No one wants magazines...

What the heck kind of pitch is this?

...but you can still do your part and send some as a gift, you know.

I'm sorry. I'd like to send a subscription of Playboy to the local children's home and a subscription of Cat Fancy to our troops, please.

Do you mind me asking why?

I'm sorry, I'm just not interested. Because you're creepy. Because your magazines are overpriced. Because you're bothering me. Because no one needs or wants magazines.

Well, bye then.

(locks door)

look at me.

So, Alexandra Zuck died a few weeks ago.

Depending on how old or how up on trivia you are, you may not know who Alexandra Zuck is. I know who she is, because my name is Sandra, and for all the years of my life, people have been calling me by Alexandra Zuck's pseudonym.

Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee...

If your name is Sandra, you already knew all about Sandra Dee. If your first name is Sandra and your last name starts with a D, then I'm very, very sorry. I feel your pain. It's not even Sandra Dee's fault for branding all future Sandras. It is the fault of Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, who wrote "Grease," and the fault of Stockard Channing, who sang "Look at Me, I'm Sandra Dee" in the movie. I even blame Olivia Newton-John a little bit. Thanks to them, I'm forever associated with being "lousy with virginity."

People began calling me "Sandra Dee" in middle school, probably coinciding with my classmates realizing what "virginity" meant. Since then, I've heard all sorts of variations. Sometimes it's "Sandra Dee," sometimes "Sandra G." (my last initial), and I even had a guy who called me "Miss Dee" for a while, and I could never figure out why he was calling me "Misty."

The trouble with this nickname is that people independently come up with it themselves. It's not like you know a specific group of people who call you "Boo-Squawky" or that you're known as "Buggy" around the office. People who have never before heard me called "Sandra Dee" by others call me that. It flows, they like it, and they are impressed with their own ingenuity.

Okay, I'm done griping. I really don't mind, and to be honest, I kinda like it. Having a nickname, even a really awful one, which Sandra Dee is not, is generally a sign of affection of others for you (unless it's "Dummy" or something like that). And there are worse things to be associated with than wholesomeness. So I don't really blame Alexandra Zuck for anything. There are worse things to be called than Sandra Dee.

Like Alexandra Zuck.

it's fun to be good.

Thing 1: Zach played golf on his lunch break.
Zach, the guy in the office diagonally from me, plays a lot of dang golf. He plays every day there is no precipitation and the temperature is above 40 degrees. When he doesn't play outside, he practices his swing technique in his apartment with the aid of a pair of giant mirrors he bought at Lowe's expressly for that purpose. Whatever Zach does, he is passionate about it, and he is always trying to improve himself. He says he plays to be good. I asked him if he ever played anything because it was fun. He said that being good was fun. Part of me wishes that I were like this; the rest of me thinks it would be awfully inconvenient.

Thing 2: The ACC men's basketball tournament started today.
Sure wish I could get the games with my TV and rabbit ears setup. Setting the score page on ESPN.com to automatic refresh every 30 seconds is just not the same. Tomorrow we are having an office lunch, the time of which is magically coinciding with the tipoff of the Carolina game. You probably think it is coincidental, since the game starts at noon. Not so. Every office lunch I've been to in the past two months has always started at 11:30. We are true North Carolinians.

Thing 3: I had deviled eggs with my lunch today.
I made them myself last night without any adult supervision. The rest of my lunch was also homemade, and none of it involved the letters P, B, and J. Every day, I become a little bit more marriage material.

ten-cent limes.

Chris happened to have a Winn-Dixie sales paper on his desk. I honestly don't hang out with Chris all that much, except for the fact that he is Rob's officemate, and I try to talk to Chris so it's not like I'm just coming to see Rob all the time. But anyway, Winn-Dixie was having this phenomenal produce sale. Ten cent limes! Ten cent kiwis! Ten cent baking potatoes! Plus, ten cent Granny Smith apples and bananas, as well as a big selection of twenty cent apples. Chris, Rob, and I fantasied about the possibilities of such a veritable menagerie of produce-tastic enjoyment. Actually, I fantasied about it, and Chris and Rob laughed at me.

Here's the thing: there is only one Winn-Dixie in the Winston-Salem area, and it's about fifteen miles from my house, down Highway 52 in the suburb of Midway. Driving that far to get ten cent limes would probably offset what I would be saving off the cost of my ten cent limes (regularly 33 cents apiece). Plus, there was the fact that I don't ever use limes. Kiwis, potatoes, apples, and bananas, maybe.

Rob tried to talk me into going and picking up some limes for him. He wanted me to go, not because he needed limes, but because he would be amused at the thought of me driving 13.82 miles (according to MapQuest) for some ten cent limes. Really, the idea was ridiculous.

Of course, I went.

There's not much in Midway. Besides boasting the area's only Winn-Dixie, there was a Dollar General, a local pizza place ("Presto Pizza"), a nail salon ("Art Nails"), and a gas station or two. That's it, nothing else to justify a trip to get ten cent limes. I bought a dollar's worth of limes for Rob and didn't accept reimbursement, making them especially cheap for him. Plus, I got some other fruits and veggies for me, though nothing I couldn't have gotten at the Food Lion close to my house for more than ten cents apiece. Still, I'm glad I went, because it's silly and ridiculous, and because I am a grown-up, I can do all the silly and ridiculous things that I want to do.

Actually, I am just that hard-up for something to write about these days.

blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch.

I always stop to check my mailbox when I get home from work. My mailbox is one in a pair of clusters in a tiny building attached to the apartment building next to mine. From my mailbox, I can see my front door. And so one day last week, I could see the little red and white pieces of paper as they stuck in my screen door from my mailbox. How exciting!

Not really. The red piece of paper was from my rental office, saying I needed to come see them ASAP regarding March's rent check. Eh, whatever. The white piece of paper was a piece of wide-ruled notebook paper folded in half twice. At the top of the page it said, "Blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch." And that was it.

No, it wasn't a very odd sexual predator. It wasn't even your run-of-the-mill sexual predator. The sentence fragment in question is a song lyric that I know well, from They Might Be Giants' "Birdhouse in Your Soul." You would probably say the fact that a person who knows such a bizarre little snippet says something about the person who left the note. You would probably also say the fact that I recognized it immediately says something about me.

The best thing about the mystery of the weird note was that there were multiple suspects. If it says something about me that I know someone who would leave a note saying "Blue canary in the outlet by the lightswitch" in my door, what does it say that I know multiple someones who would do it? What if I had, in fact, two suspects in mind, and that I called the wrong one first because of geographical evidence?

Josh very nicely said it wasn't he who left the note, very nicely humored me and said it did sound like something he would do, then probably hung up the phone laughing at me. First suspect eliminated, I called the second, my brother, Sid. He laughed at me, too, because I called the wrong guy first. Then we talked a minute, and hung up. Then I laughed at me, because it was all very ridiculous.

BFFAABYMBFOC*

Amy and I were best friends in high school. She was slightly on the weird side of normal, and maybe I was on the normal side of weird. (I say maybe because I don't really like to declare myself as "weird." I don't like to declare myself as anything. I'm Sandra, and if you don't know what that means, then you're not paying attention. But this is another issue.)

My relationship with Amy was peppered with lots of in-jokes, as all my best relationships are. Sometimes I get my in-jokes mixed up and I make them with the wrong friend. I made a tea kettle roar at my friend Josh this weekend and received a blank stare. I said, "If you were Amy, you would have thought that was hilarious." With Amy and I, even having in-jokes was an in-joke, along with "John's Bluff," cookin' beans, and making tea kettles roar.

But the real focus of this aside-riddled entry is BFFAA, one of our most oft-used in-jokes which stands for "Best Friends Forever And Always." It's something that elementary school girls sign at the bottoms of letters to their bosom companions. But Amy and I didn't sign "BFFAA." We signed things like "BFFAABYLWIMATKR"** or "BFFAAETYWTTLWIMATKR"***. We made up new ones every time, and put a little star at the end which matched up to the footnote where we would explain what all those letters meant. The challenge was to guess what the letters stood for. Mostly, the statements were so ridiculous that we could never get the whole thing. But sometimes, we could. Whether that's a testament to how close we were, how similar we were, or just how sad we were, I don't know.

Amy and I still talk quite a bit, mostly on the internet. When I lived in Boone, we'd go weeks without seeing each other until we happened to both be bored on the same night, and then we'd get together. We say we are "friends of convenience" now, and though it may seem kinda sad, it works for us. But we'll send cards sometimes, and we always sign off with our version of BFFAA. And it still makes us laugh to do it, even though it's been years since we came up with it, just like all our little in-jokes, like "John's bluff," cookin' beans, and making tea kettles roar.


*Best Friends Forever And Always Because You're My Best Friend Of Convenience

**Best Friends Forever And Always Because You Laugh When I Make A Tea Kettle Roar

***Best Friends Forever And Always Even Though You Weren't There To Laugh When I Made A Tea Kettle Roar

best in the world.

Thing 1: This morning, traffic was rotten.
Usually there's a bottleneck where Business 40 begins from the merging of 421 and the cars coming off of I-40. Today, the traffic was backed up a whole exit away from that, which I took as a bad sign. However, it was because of a wreck. None of the lanes were blocked, but there was a rubber-necking delay, as there was a jeep, a sedan, and a cop car in the median. I didn't slow down enough to really assess the situation, but I did see that the license plate of the jeep read "FECK!" I can only assume this is a euphemism for some other word that the DMV won't let you put on your license plate, and I thought it oddly appropriate for this jeep sitting in the median of the highway after being in a wreck. FECK! indeed.

Thing 2: Josh said he could never marry a North Carolina girl.
This is Josh that I work with, not to be confused with any other Josh in my life. Josh is from California, and frankly, I'm not sure what's wrong with him. NC girls are, like, the best, even when they do pepper their sentences with "like." We're so nice, and we talk purty. He seems to think we're unenlightened as a group. Most of the NC girls he knows are from his studies at Wake Forest. He seems to think there is something wrong in general with a group of people who feel no desire to move to another state. I feel this is a recommendation for that state. Anyway, the conversation left me feeling offended and bummed that even someone who has lived here a couple years still thinks we're all backwoods hicks. I'd like to throw some sweet tea at
him.

Thing 3: I discovered findyourspot.com
It's a survey. You take it, and it tells you where to live. It doesn't include every city in the country, but it does include some pretty obscure ones (Boone, for instance). I think they have to achieve some sort of standard to be a recommended city. Winston-Salem does not achieve this standard, as it's not on the list. Anyway, I took the quiz, and my top recommendation was Hickory, NC (about half an hour from where I grew up). I also got recommendations for places like Chattanooga and Tulsa, and a couple of places in South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. Most of my cities were NC cities, clearly because they are the best ever, no matter what those silly boys in California think.

everything i need to know, i learned somewhere other than college.

One of the things that frustrated me as I was looking for a job for after college was the fact that I was about to receive two degrees, and I still didn't seem to know enough. Most of the job listings I found, I didn't meet the qualifications. Though I had a sheet of paper that said I spent four years learning, I apparently didn't learn the right things. There's a reason there aren't any posters that say "Everything I need to learn, I learned in college." (Actually, there probably are those posters, but they all have statements about kegs or going out in public in your pajamas.)

I shouldn't have been upset, as I had been warned. When I was in the eighth grade, my algebra teacher told me that college is only about getting a degree that proves to companies that you can have the ability to learn. He told me you didn't learn anything in college that actually prepares you for a job, that your employer will train you when you get there. I did not believe him. What a ridiculous story! Not learn anything in four whole years? That's craziness.

Okay, so I believe him now.

This isn't such a terrible thing as long as you can find a place that's willing to hire someone straight from school and train them. It's accepted practice. Apparently, it wasn't just me that didn't learn the right things, it was everyone. So that's why I have a job now, and that's why I'm learning a lot of things that were never even mentioned in all those computer science classes I took. My first couple of weeks, the guy who was training me would ask, "So, have you ever worked with this? Yeah, I hadn't either before I came here." That always made me feel better, because he had a Master's Degree, so he went through six years of school not learning anything.

It's not that I thought learning would be over as soon as I finished my last class. I believed in continued learning, but I believed it in that learn-something-new-everyday, cliche kind of way. No, I'm learning whole new languages and programs and processes. And don't even get me started on all the office politics I'm learning about.

It gets worse - I actually have to take tests. My company wants its programmers to be certified in a language I had no exposure to before I came here. I spend my free time reading textbooks and taking notes for the test I have to take. It's like school all over again, except for the minor detail that I get a certificate and a Microsoft pin if I actually pass the test. That never happened in college.

But it's not so bad. I do like computer science, so learning about it is not torture. And the new language is very similar to one that I already know, because I learned it...in college.

the advent of the three things.

I've been struggling to write lately. You've probably noticed. If not, call my mother, and she'll tell you about it. I'm not too worried about it because I'm a strong believer in ebb and flow, so if the writing isn't coming as easily as it once was, someday it'll be easy again. But until then, I must power through, because it is important to me that I keep writing, whether it's easy or not.

And so I announce the advent of Three Things. A guy at work plays this game at the dinner table with his family. Everyone gets three turns to tell something that happened that day. So that's my new game. All I have to do is tell you three things that happened, and I am free to elaborate as much or as little as I want. I may elaborate so much that one of the Things becomes an entry by itself. Or I may not feel like going into detail and a Thing may be just one sentence long. I haven't yet decided if I'm going to limit myself to just Things that happened that specific day, mostly because I write at different times of the day, and if I'm writing in the morning (not at work!), then much may not have happened yet.

I like this idea very much. Not only because it take some pressure off of me to produce a lot of writing, but also because there are often things that I would write about, except I don't really have enough for a whole entry. Now I don't have to. I can tell you about the funny incident, even if it does only take up two sentences.

And since this entry would suck if it stopped here, here are the first Three Things.

Thing 1: I bought Girl Scout cookies from my coworkers.
There were two cookie order forms in the break room last month, and so I ordered a box of cookies from each of the two daughters of two coworkers. This morning, there was a box of Iced Berry Pinatas (with real strawberries) on my desk. I'm expecting a box of Thin Mints (with no strawberries, real or otherwise) as well. I'm very excited about my cookies, despite the fact that I'm a little bitter that I never had parents who would take my various sales to work and peddle for me. But in any case, I ordered cookies partly because buying cookies from a coworker's daughter seemed like an adult thing to do. I am a grown-up, and I have coworkers old enough to have children. Plus, I like cookies.

Thing 2: The guy who sells newspapers at the corner of Stratford Road and the off-ramp of Silas Creek Parkway South wore an umbrella hat this morning.
You know, those little head attachments with mini multi-colored umbrellas on top? Like this. I've seen him wear it before, when it was raining or rain was in the forecast. It wasn't raining this morning, but it had been and the clouds remained dark. Anyway, the umbrella hat makes me like this guy even more and on the mornings when I'm feeling frisky, I wave at him. A couple mornings last week, he wasn't there, and I was getting worried that he might be sick or that he had been fired. But he's back now, and all is right with the world.

Thing 3: I used expensive conditioner this morning.
I bought it last night, because it was on sale. Also because I always wanted to know whether expensive hair products really worked better. Usually I get the dollar or two-dollar brand (which smells nicer than the one-dollar brand). This stuff is the four-dollar brand, very pricey. My hair is awfully soft and nice-smelling this morning, but I don't know about twice as soft and twice as nice-smelling as it usually is. The true test is volume, because I have limp noodle hair (the professionals call it ultra-fine, which, as I was disappointed to find out, is not really a compliment). By the end of the day, I'm sure it will be just as flat as usual, and I'll be able to go back to buying cheap products, confident that the expensive brands are no better.

See? That was easy.

what would bruce do?

We all hate her. Despite the fact that many of us grew up with parents who told us it was not nice to hate, we all hate her without remorse.

Usually computer projects are not referred to with a gender-specific pronoun, except maybe in those languages that assign gender to everything. But we speak English at my company. We call the project a her because the project name is actually a girl's name. So if you happen into our doors to hear us talking disparagingly about Sheila, don't feel bad for the poor girl. If you worked with her, you'd say all those words, too.

Sheila is the name of the company that we are building the project for. Some man probably named it for his wife in a misguided tribute. If it were me, I wouldn't want a company that makes truck parts named after me. Maybe a company that makes really great tea, or vintage tee-shirts, or unique clocks. Truck parts? I'll pass.

In any case, we hate her. We are releasing a new version of Sheila tomorrow, or we are supposed to. The program doesn't work. The install doesn't work. It is all Sheila's fault. So the half a dozen of us who are assigned to her sit at our workstations and plug away and making the stupid hussy work stopping only to call someone else on the team and complain about what a dumb broad Sheila really is. We call her all sorts of names reserved for females, just as if she were some very lazy and uncooperative girl that we all happen to know.

I feel that it is also the fault of the guy who named his company that makes truck parts after his wife. If he had named it after himself or maybe a best friend, we would not be having these problems. These things would never happen to a Bruce. Would a Bruce make everyone beat their heads against their desks? Would Bruce mess up all the other projects when he was installed? No, of course not. Not Bruce. He'd never do something like that.

detail-oriented.

Mike is training me. He's not in charge of training me, and he doesn't even do the same work that I'm being trained to do. Mike is a tester, and I'm the new Build Master (we considered calling me the Build Mistress, but that sounds like I'm just sleeping with the Build behind the Build's wife's back). I do work with Mike, because when I make a build, it has to be tested, and sometimes Mike is the one that tests it.

So he isn't training me to make builds. He's training me to make builds his way. Mike likes his builds to be burned to a CD. Yesterday, I finished a build for Mike that fixed a couple problems the previous one had. I told him that I finished it, and I put it up on the public company hard drive where he would be able to get it. This morning, Mike came in and asked if I had fixed the problem. I was confused, because I thought I had told him I fixed it. Then he said, "Well, I didn't know if you did, since I didn't get a disc." Ah. Point taken.

Technically, that was my fault. I knew he likes to have a disc. He likes to have them labelled. He likes to follow SOP (standard operating procedures). The first disc I ever made for Mike was sometime last week, and I didn't label it. The guy who is actually training me, the previous Build Master, didn't tell me to. So Mike trotted back to my office and asked me to label it. Mike could have easily labelled the thing himself. He knew what it would say. But I needed to be trained to do it. It's SOP. So I labelled it, and I've labelled the two discs I've given to Mike since then. I even went to the office manager and specifically asked for a Sharpie so that I could label Mike's discs. It's green.

Two days ago, I revised a build for Mike. Builds are supposed to restart the computer when they fiddle with the registry, more as a precaution than anything else. The previous versions of this build did not restart, though they did change the registry. I fixed it so it did restart, because that's SOP. Mike came to my office and asked why this build restarted when the others did not. I told him it was because the build changed the registry, and the others should have done that. Mike said, "Oh, good, so we're going to follow SOP?" It was really hard not to laugh.

I could be irritated. I'm not. I'm the new guy here, and since all this stuff is new to me, I don't mind learning it this way if it's what keeps people happy. Besides, being anal-retentive (or "detail-oriented," as we call it) is what makes a lot of computer scientists good at what they do, even if it sometimes makes them a little obnoxious in social situations. So I'll burn the disc, and I'll label it with my green Sharpie. And I'll follow SOP, but not for Mike. That just makes good sense.

the site of somebody's family dinners.

My kitchen table is old. It's old and dirty and grimy. It wobbles when it stands up at all, which hasn't been very often lately, considering two of the four legs haven't been attached. Somehow when I was living in downtown Boone, one of the legs decided not to hang on to the table anymore. I blame Krystal, mostly because she was the only one who knew it was even broken for months. The leg was just wedged under the table, and somehow it stayed up.

But all that aside, I love that table. It's over 50 years old, one of those kitschy dinette sets everyone used to have. I bought it at a yard sale with six matching chairs for $15. The guy who used to own it said it had been in his grandmother's kitchen since the 50s. And yeah, it showed its age, but, man, that table was cool.

For the entire month that I've lived in Lewisville, my table has been lying on its side against the kitchen wall, as much out of the way as possible. My family tried to get me to throw it out when we were moving it. It's true that it's given me at least $15 worth of service and that it's barely functional. During the move, another leg came loose. But I couldn't bear to let this table go. This table has a history! Family dinners were held there. Not my family, but somebody's family!

I decided to fix it. This was kind of a problem. I couldn't just screw the legs back on because the table top is made of that old table material that you only find anymore in places called Mel's or The Silver Dollar Diner or Eats. The underside was very old corkboard, reduced with age until it looked more like cardboard. The old screwholes were wide and eaten and unusable. What a dilemma.

But I fixed my table last night. I bought some boards at Lowes (actually just one board that the nice man at Lowes cut for me into eight little boards), and then attached the legs to the boards. Then I attached the boards to the table. This engineering idea came from my brother, whose other engineering idea was to throw the stupid thing out. And my table stands again. It wobbles, and it's a lot higher than it used to be, but it stands and it works. In this course of this project, I got some splinters in my fingers, broke a 3/32 drill bit, and almost spoiled a gallon of milk (I forgot to put it away before I left to go buy screws). But I fixed my poor $15 table. And now it's my $20 table when I add the $4 for the boards and the $1 for the screws.

See? The value of this table has gone up already. And you were going to let me throw it out.

i'm here to win.

I was in the math building at 8:30 am on a Saturday to take a math test. Oh, and it was a voluntary math test. I wasn't even getting extra credit in any of my classes like some of the other kids who showed up. Before we started the test, we went around introducing ourselves and telling why we were here. Most were there for the extra credit. A couple, like me, were there more out of curiosity than anything else. Then there was this skinny sophomore kid, who shrugged his shoulders and said, "I'm here to win." The other kids looked aghast, and I laughed out loud at his audacity and arrogance, but thought, hey, if he's going to be full of himself, he might as well be honest about it.

The Putnam Math Exam is a Big Deal. Undergraduate students all over the country take it, and basically, if you make a positive score, that's considered really good. You're given a dozen problems and about six hours to work on them. You're not meant to finish them all. The hope is that you'll get far enough along on at least one of them to get partial credit. That's how you get a positive score. Whoever has the highest score is the winner. I don't know what the winner gets, maybe a scholarship to grad school or something like that. I wasn't there to win, so I don't know.

There were maybe a dozen kids there. For the test, they put each of us in a different classroom, and we were allowed to draw all over the chalk boards if that helped us think. I don't like using chalk boards. Give me a good sheet of scratch paper and I'm set. Plus, I ended up having to share a classroom anyway. The other guy in my classroom used the board a little for the morning session. He drew triangles. There was a triangle question on the test, so I assume he was working on that rather than just killing time with three-sided figures.

I was the only senior there. I knew only a couple of the other kids. During the half-hour lunch break, I mostly just listened to the others talk. I could tell that some of them were pretty smart and others not so much. I talked to Adam because he was the only guy I knew well. I like Adam. He has math tattoos. Plus, I think he was the only one besides me there who was of age.

After the morning session, we were all looking a little discouraged. The test is apparently designed to make you feel stupid. Most of us questioned how long we would even stay for the afternoon session - what was the point? Most of us weren't there to win. Adam joked that we should blow off the afternoon session and just walk to Murphy's and have some post-Putnam beers.

The afternoon session was a joke. No one cared anymore about this stupid impossible test. I made myself at least make an attempt on the afternoon questions. There was one that looked doable, at least more doable than the others. The other guy in my classroom gave up after about fifteen minutes. I thought I was getting somewhere on my problem, but then realized a kink. There were always kinks in these questions. I had spent the whole morning session feeling like I was getting somewhere and then finding a tiny kink that made the problem exponentially harder. Once I found the kink in the afternoon problem, I gave up. I didn't care. I wasn't there to win.

Security was much more lax in the afternoon. I peeked in the other classrooms to try to find Adam to see if that post-Putnam beer offer was still good. I found one of the other kids in his room, and they were discussing the problem I had just given up on. This was definitely not allowed, but I joined in since I had already given up. Adam wanted to finish the problem - he thought it looked doable, too. He and the other kid talked about it for a while while I watched. Adam started getting excited. Then I pointed out the kink. I had to explain it twice. Then Adam saw it, too, looked at me, and said, "Let's go to Murphy's." We didn't care. We weren't there to win.

talking about hypercards and the yellow beetle.

Driving back from Mario's, an old yellow Beetle pulled out in front of Rob's black Civic. We all cursed him mildly before returning to talking about hypercards. Actually, Rob talked about hypercards. Dave and I listened because we didn't know what they were. I'm still not sure. As it happened, we ended up behind the yellow Beetle at the next stoplight.

We were still talking about hypercards when we interrupted ourselves to talk about the guy in the yellow Beetle again. He was dancing, and he was doing it like no one was watching. His head was bouncing back and forth and all over the driver seat of that yellow Beetle. Whenever we happened to catch a shot of his profile, we saw him singing, his mouth wide open.

Amused, I started imitating him. I bounced back and forth and all over the passenger seat of that black Civic. I think our dancer saw me in his rearview mirror, because he became even more animated. Apparently he dances even when someone is watching. He began to point back and forth a la Saturday Night Fever. Then he somehow managed to jump while in the car, causing that old yellow Beetle to shake dangerously when he landed. It was awesome. We were fascinated. I wanted to know what he was listening to. Dave wanted to know what he was on. Rob wanted to just follow him around town.

The light changed, and when the yellow Beetle made a right turn, the black Civic kept straight. I wish we had followed him to see where he went and just watch him groove; instead, we went back to talking about hypercards.

well-informed beggers.

I don't know whether to be scared or amused by the people who sell newspapers on the medians of busy intersections. I say people out of a habit of political correctness; the only ones I've ever seen are men. The first couple of times I saw them, I thought they were beggers. Then I noticed that instead of displaying a poorly-spelled plea for help, they displayed the days headlines instead. Maybe they're just well-informed beggers.

The one I see most often is the black guy who works the intersection of the off-ramp from Silas Creek Parkway South and Stratford Road. He keeps a stool and extra papers sitting near the intersection, but he wanders farther back to peddle to the line of stopped cars. He carries a cane, and his right foot bends inward at an unnatural angle that I don't like to look at too closely. I can't hear what he yells, but he holds up his left index finger. I assume he means that newspapers are a dollar, rather than other possible interpretations of the gesture, like "Wake Forest is #1," "Turn to the Lord," or "Look up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane!"

I've never bought a paper from him, or any other of the vendors like him. If I wanted to read the Winston-Salem Journal, I would have bought a subscription when they called my house. But people do buy their papers this way. Seems like every morning I take that off-ramp, someone is holding a buck out the window. It's a good corner to work - my route is the same as a lot of business-types who live in the suburbs. Plus, the light is long, giving him a lot of time to hobble along our right sides, pointing upwards.

I assume these people are hired by the newspaper, rather than them just being independent entrepreneurs who buy a stack of papers to sell for an increased fee. I'm not even sure if they work on commission, because though my guy works his corner pretty hard, others stand still at the front of the intersection, not really giving anyone behind the first few cars a chance to make a purchase. Bad business.

And that makes me like the fella who works the off-ramp. He's got a bum foot, but if he's gonna sell papers, well then he's gonna sell papers. Maybe the newspaper even assigns the corners. Maybe he got such a good corner because he earned it by being so enthusiastic about such a crappy job.

In any case, I will likely never buy a paper from him. But I'm glad he's on my route to work. Even though I'm currently on the bottom of the pecking order and only doing grunt work right now, if he can be happy selling copies of the Winston-Salem Journal on the corner of the off-ramp of Silas Creek Parkway South and Stratford Road, then I can be happy building program installs.

peruvian cotton polo shirts from lands' end

I don't do much here yet. I'm training to do a specific thing, and that thing doesn't have to be done all the time, so the training is slow without examples. So I have a lot of down-time to basically spend reading. It's not as exciting as it sounds - my choice of reading materials consists of the InstallShield Manual and C# For Experienced Programmers. Sometimes I play with code, making up programs when I get tired of reading about them.

I'm the Install Girl, the Build Master. I don't write programs yet. I build the programs that install the programs that other people write. Just today, something I built was burned to a disc and mailed to a customer. I felt proud. I don't even know what the program was. Something to do with forklifts.

I like the company. They let me in and gave me my own office, a company polo shirt, and a coffee mug, which I use for my afternoon tea. I had to bring my own half and half (not fat-free) for my afternoon tea, but they let me keep it in the company fridge, and no one uses it but me. And my company polo shirt is from Lands' End, made from Peruvian cotton, and has the company logo embroidered on it. I think company polo shirts from Lands' End is the mark of a good place to work. They've also ordered me some business cards and a nameplate for my office door so that I can take down the one that says "COAT CLOSET." Just kidding - a company that gives its employees Peruvian cotton polo shirts from Lands' End would never do that.

waking up is hard to do.

As slack as I have been lately, I wasn't even going to write tonight. But then I came up with that title, and I took it as a sign.

I've always been a frequent user of the snooze button. And I've discovered that grown-ups have to get up so early. True, my office allows me to come in as late as 10 am, but I've been told that I should make a good impression by coming in early the first couple of months. Then, once it's established that I'm a good worker, I can be not a good worker.

The goal is to be there at 8 am. It hasn't happened yet. And I usually go to bed before 11 at night. I just have a hard time getting up in the morning. I don't think clearly that early, and I make some great excuses while my hand is traveling to the snooze button. I don't have to be in early. I won't shower. I'll wear the same thing I wore yesterday. Depending on what kind of dream I was having at the moment my alarm went off, sometimes the excuses don't even make sense. Sometimes I have no idea if I'm delaying the next alarm or, say, the next shuttle launch at Cape Canaveral. In any case, soon it's 7:27, and I really have to get up.

I could set my clothes out the night before. It wouldn't help. I could shower in the evenings, but then my hair would look ridiculous. I could go to bed earlier. Wouldn't help. I could set my clock fast - that will help. And I could prep the coffee machine.

This evening, I went ahead and got the coffee maker ready for tomorrow morning. I put 4 cups of water and a clean filter filled with freshly-ground coffee in. I figure that'll save me a good five minutes when I only have to push a button to start the coffee.

I just hope that I don't remember that I prepped the coffee tomorrow morning. I'll just use it as another excuse to sleep in.

such a lonely word.

I am a big fan of honesty. No, not the Billy Joel song, thought it's not bad. I mean the concept of not being a big liar. I know some big liars, and their lack of honesty is my least favorite thing about them. And I know some very honest people, and their honesty is one of my favorite things about them. My philosophy is to give me the truth, because I can handle it. And if it turns out that I can't, well, then it's my own fault for asking for it.

Casey is a very honest person. When he tells me something, I believe him unconditionally. If I want to know something, I ask him, he tells me, I trust him, and that's that. I love that I can do that with him.

All this leads up to going shopping with my beloved the other day. I found a pair of pants, lovely blue ones on sale for ten bucks. I went into the dressing room to try them on, and I found them to be questionable. They didn't fit so well or so badly that I immediately knew whether or not to buy them. So I poked my head outside to ask Casey's opinion on them. He said, "They're not very flattering."

Did I say I was a fan of honesty? I didn't mean it.

It's true, I asked for his opinion, and I would have wanted him to give me his true opinion. And if someone had asked me what I didn't like about the pants, I would have said, "Well, they're maybe not as flattering as I would like." I would have used the exact word that he used. So why is this any different? Why did my eyes widen in an expression of extreme injury when he gave his verdict on the pants?

I dunno, it's just different. In the world of relationships, there is an understanding that all pants are flattering, girlfriends are not fat, and size does not matter. And it wasn't that I disagreed with his assessment of the pants and the way they looked on me, I was just shocked to hear him say it. Apparently, love isn't so blind after all. Not only can it see, love thinks I look fat in those pants.

It's okay, really. I'm ready to joke about it, which he will say means that I'm not over it at all (That's not an unfair assumption; jokes mean many different things in my world). I asked for the truth, and it turns out I can handle it. Maybe next time I should ask for tact, too.

Needless to say, I did not get the pants. I never would have been able to put them on without thinking about how unflattering they were. And maybe next time, I'll just go shopping with my big fat liar friends.

the only fashionable computer scientist.

Tuesday, I start my life as a working woman. So by Tuesday, I need to come up with some working woman wear. Just what does a computer scientist wear once she's exhausted her supply of Linux t-shirts?

The majority of my clothing would not constitute as business casual. Until now, I've had very few occasions to wear work clothes. Basically, the only time I had to wear business clothes was when I went to interviews so that I could earn the right to wear them every day. Now I have that right, and now I have to find some clothes, because I think even computer scientists would notice if I wore the same suit every day.

I've actually been on the lookout for work clothes for months now. By that, I mean that I've been browsing thrift store racks with the idea of work clothes in mind. I haven't come up with much. As much as I love thrift shopping, when you need something, it's not very helpful.

I'm trying to get a lot of basic pieces to create a good mix-and-match situation for myself. Computer scientists won't notice that I'm wearing the same black pants three times a week if I wear three different shirts with them. All I need is a versatile pair of khakis and two more shirts and I've got a workweek covered.

I've also recently discovered tights. Maybe I should say that I re-discovered, since I'm pretty sure I discovered them initially a good fifteen years ago. I hated them then. Now, they are the best thing ever. Take a casual skirt, add some tights, and suddenly that skirt is business casual. Plus, they squeeze in excess flesh, and you don't have to shave your legs! That's legwear that I can get on board with.

I probably have enough to last me a couple of weeks. Then I can just wash the whole batch (I've been buying only machine washable fabrics, of course) and then start all over again. I even bought a special mesh bag so I can wash the five pairs of tights I bought today (JCPenney's, 70% off). Of course, I really don't know why I bother. It's not like these computer scientists are even going to notice what I wear.

my father's daughter.

My sister Carla tells the story of going to some soda store (The Pop Shop? The Pop Stop?) with my dad when she was a little girl. She wanted to try something different, so she went for a Diet Pepsi. Daddy took it away, telling her it was gross and she didn't want it. So she got something else. Daddy paid for the drinks, including one for himself, and they went out to the truck to enjoy their cool frosty beverages. Daddy took a great big sip of his and then spit it out all over the place. He had forgotten to put back the Diet Pepsi he took from her and ended up getting it for himself.

This is classic Daddy. He's the kind of fella who sees the big words on a product and then ignores all the little qualifiers. Let me tell you, those qualifiers are important. The only time we ever had any sort of fat-free or diet or low sugar version of a regular product was if Daddy bought it and just didn't pay attention to what he was getting. If for some reason you hated things that taste good and wanted the low-fat crap, he could not be relied upon to bring that home either. Basically, it was whatever he saw first.

Daddy is a very intelligent man; he's just not one of those attention-to-detail kind of guys. And that's no big deal. We can all just suck it up and eat the low-fat yoghurt. Or, we can avoid eating it until it goes bad and then next time not let Daddy do the grocery shopping. To be fair, usually the thing he gets is something only he eats anyway, and in true Daddy style, he doesn't seem to notice the difference.

Then, last week, I bought a quart of fat-free half and half. Man, it sucked.

I realized my mistake as I was putting the offensive stuff away, but I wasn't about to drive ten minutes back into town to exchange it. As important as fat levels in dairy products are to me, making an extra trip for the sake of full-fat cream was silly.

So I used the stupid fat-free stuff. I drink a lot of coffee and hot tea, so I use a lot of half and half. And apparently, the fat is the good stuff. I had to use much more cream per cup of beverage to get it to taste/look right. Which turned out to be not such a bad thing, since it meant I got rid of the fat-free cream quicker. This morning, I used the last of it, and I'm now enjoying a nice cup of Earl Grey with all the fat. And it's good.

So now I'll pay more attention to the words on the containers I buy before I put myself on a diet without realizing it. Of course, now I live a mile from the grocery store, and I'll go back and exchange that sucker before I suffer through another week of defattened cream.

dance like no one's watching.

I can deal with solitude. True, I need my regular dose of social contact, but it does not take much for me to overdose. Then just leave me alone. I have no problem with my own company even if public opinion seems to say that it sucks.

That being said, I do get lonely from time to time. It doesn't happen much, and usually I can just give somebody a call and ask if they want to hang out. I am fortunate to be blessed with many people who are just fine being my friends of convenience. They don't take it too personally.

But now I've gone and ruined all that by moving to a city where I don't know anyone. Suddenly, being a friend of convenience to someone an hour and a half away isn't so convenient anymore. So I turn to my other friends: books.

I read a lot when I'm lonely. And by a lot, I mean Oh-Dear-Lord-How-Does-A-Body-Intake-That-Much-Literature. When I consume words, they really consume me. Most books to me are the kind that I can't put down. Luckily, I read fast, so I only lose like six hours of my life with every book. Today, I read a book. And the day before yesterday, I read a book. Now, I need to unpack some more so I can find a book to read tomorrow.

As far as I can tell, I started doing this the summer before my senior year of high school. I went to Governor's School that summer, and I didn't know anybody then either. And though I was perfectly happy reading, I didn't want to do that the whole summer. So I made sure and positioned my reading spots in places where people would hang out. I also tried to read interesting books, so that these same people would think that I was interesting. I read three books that first week, checked out from the Old Salem library (which is not very extensive), and I read them out by the fish pond. By the beginning of the second week, I had become a part of the fish pond crowd, and I didn't read another book the whole summer.

Last night, I stopped at the Lewisville branch of the Forsyth County Public Library and applied for a library card. I'm very excited. The Lewisville branch is smaller than my apartment, but I can order anything from any of the eight other branches via the website and have it sent to the tiny one a block from my house for convenient pick-up. The only possible way that idea could be improved is if they were to actually bring it to my door with a complimentary cup of Earl Grey.

I even thought about joining the book club that meets at the Lewisville library, but I'm afraid I'd walk into a room of middle-aged housewives for an hour long discourse on a Nicholas Sparks novel. Here there is no fish pond for me to go read by, though there is a park where old men go to power-walk. Somehow, that's not quite the same.

The point here is not that I am lonely; I've only been here five days. The point is that I wish I read more. I enjoy reading when I do it, and even if I feel like the book wasn't that great as a whole, I can usually glean something from everything I read. So now I add one to that old phrase: Work like you don't need money, love like you've never been hurt, dance like no one's watching, and read like you've just moved to a new town where you don't know anybody.

read my lips.

When I was in elementary school, my classmates and I were submitted to all the usual extra-curricular type classes required by the state or the county or just general unwritten public school rules. We had music and spanish and drama. In music we learned about composers and in spanish we learned about the confusing idea of objects having genders. I am at a complete loss as to what we learned in drama. Most of the time we had a male teacher who later got into trouble for something or other and was not allowed to teach little children anymore.

But during my first grade year, we had Ms. Reis. She did teach some sort of acting, as I distinctly remember being a puppy learning to walk. But she also taught ventriloquism. She had a dummy named Dr. Pepper. This was back in the day when I was insanely popular and all the little first grade boys had crushes on me. And so somehow, maybe from the suggestion of all the little first grade boys, Dr. Pepper developed a crush on me. First grade merriment ensued.

Through Dr. Pepper, Ms. Reis taught us how to talk without moving our lips. She taught us the troublesome letters, like B and V, which you couldn't really say without the use of your lips. There were only about six of these letters, and I figured that was a pretty low percentage. I was amazed at all the things you could say without looking like you said it.

And I loved ventriloquism. We were encouraged to bring in our own puppets. I brought a sock that I swiped from Daddy's drawer because I was not one of those rich kids that had a lot of impressive puppets lying around. For the other poor kids, the ones without the imagination to bring a sock, Ms. Reis supplied giant sesame seed hamburger buns to use for practice.

I wouldn't dare say that I am any good at ventriloquism. It's not something that I would attempt for a living. But it's useful. Ms. Reis shared her lovely craft, and gave me a fabulous way to talk in class and never, ever get in trouble. Between minimizing lip movement and perfecting the art of saying something just loud enough to be heard by neighbors but not by teachers, I talked pretty much nonstop all the way through college. The only times I got in trouble were the times that whoever I was talking to had not mastered those arts. Sometimes my teachers suspected me, since people around me would be hiding snickers and I'd be sitting there with the most innocent of looks on my face. But they didn't hear me, and they didn't see my lips move. What could they do?

But here's the best part, particularly if you're a big fan of irony like I am. Ms. Reis was only our drama teacher that one year. I didn't see her again until sixth grade, when she suddenly became my chorus teacher. Apparently she was a woman of many talents. I sat in the middle of the third row of her class, and again, I amused myself during class by making constant comments under my breath. One day, Ms. Reis was griping about a couple of girls who were talking during her class. She asked why they couldn't be quiet all the time, just like Sandra. My neighbors, the only witnesses to my crimes of conversation, were amazed. The moment was probably the only time in the class that I was silent, but only because I was trying so hard not to laugh. It's harder to do that without moving your lips.

forced hiatus.

For the next few days, I will be taking a brief hiatus of the no-internet-access variety. It will last about as long as all the other brief breaks I've been taking lately. Those breaks have been more of the no-inspiration or no-motivation or just-plain-lazy variety. According to Time Warner, my no-internet-access hiatus will end sometime on Tuesday between the hours of 10 am and noon. After that, just assume I'm being lazy.

So yes, I'm moving. I've been packing off and on for over a week now, and I'm now down to the objects that either I will need up until the very last minute or just things that are shaped weirdly and don't fit anywhere.

I'm very excited. Not about the actual moving; that part sucks. But I'm excited about living in a new place and taking all my stuff and arranging it in a new way. And I think moving is a good thing for me in that it forces me to get rid of crap, of which I have a lot. Granted, I got it at a good price, but crap is crap. I've taken tons of clothes and little odds and ends to the mobile Goodwill donation center. This morning, I took a desk chair, a TV stand, and a large mirror. I rewarded myself by buying a new coffee table. That seems like a fair trade, right?

But enough. I have to get back to packing all the crap I decided to keep. When I'm not doing that, I'll be busy worrying about rain and breakage and tornadoes and any other unlikely possibilities that I manage to come up with. It should be a good time.

a farewell to boone: the perfect reuben.

It took me a couple of years of living in Boone to find The Perfect Reuben. First I had to discover that despite the fact that pretty much every ingredient in a reuben is gross, nothing beats them when they are combined properly. I realized that fact when working at Vintner's, which served Very Good reubens, though maybe not perfect.

For the uninformed, a reuben is a sandwich consisting of corned beef, sauerkraut, swiss cheese, and some sauce closely related to Thousand Island dressing all served together on toasted rye bread. And I hate sauerkraut and rye bread. I never eat corned beef or Thousand Island when it is not on a reuben. Swiss cheese I enjoy every once in a while when I can't get provolone.

That being said, it is no wonder that it took me so long to try a reuben. And had I tried the wrong reuben, then I never would have discovered how very good they can be. But the secret is the ratio, that is the amount of corned beef to the amount of sauerkraut to the amount of sauce to the amount of cheese. The amount of rye bread is pretty much a constant two slices, unless you are dealing with one of those avant-garde open faced reubens, which I just made up. When the ratio is done right, you never taste any individual ingredient of the reuben, only the conglomeration. The reuben is the sandwich illustration of "United we stand, divided we fall," except it's more like "United we taste yummy, divided we are crap." It's the most patriotic sandwich I know.

After discovering that reubens were good, I went through a stage where that's pretty much all I ever ordered everywhere I went. I immediately discovered that some reubens are bad, and some are Very Bad. Macado's, for instance, makes a terrible reuben. Way too much corned beef - the ratio is all wrong. Murphy's reuben is bad, too. The reuben at Pepper's is okay. The ratio is close, but not quite right. Carribean Cafe used to have a pretty good reuben, if a little greasy, but then they closed down.

No, The Perfect Reuben can be made to order at Our Daily Bread in downtown Boone. The ratio is perfect, the ingredients are fresh, and the meat is well-sliced. I am passed the stage where I eat reubens all the time, but I get the craving every once in a while, and Our Daily Bread is always where I go to satisfy the reuben urge. It's consisently perfect, and then there is happiness in my mouth.

But now, I am moving, and an hour and a half is a little far to go just for The Perfect Reuben. I knew that I would have to find a new hairdresser, a new doctor, a new dentist, but finding a new reuben place just only occurred to me today. So I drove into downtown Boone this evening to have my symbolic last reuben as a resident of Watauga County. I would have been sad, if not for the distracting idea that I was about to have a reuben from Our Daily Bread.

And it was Perfect.

keep stomping.

My downstairs neighbor, Zoe, has been AWOL the past couple of weeks. Well, she's probably not really lost, but since I don't know where she is and I haven't asked, that gives me the right to make up interesting explanations for where she is. Maybe she's joined the circus, or maybe she's on a secret spy mission. Maybe she is on tour with a Journey revival band.

Whatever.

Anyway, while she's been gone, her boyfriend has been house-sitting. I didn't realize he was even there until I came in one night last week to find my kitchen appliances vibrating. Stupid rap music with its ridiculous bass beats. A less uptight person might have made the best of the situation and pulled out my turntables and played along. Not me. I stomped downstairs to bang on the door. Of course he didn't hear me. The music was too loud. I love a good slap of irony in the face.

It was ludicrous. I don't care if the guy listens to loud music, but it should not make the house shake. I'm not even sure how he can stand it (and I'm refering solely to the volume issue; how he stands the music is a whole other question).

I went back upstairs and stomped around the kitchen, hoping he would get the hint. After a few minutes, he cut the music off and left, slamming the door as he went. Not that the story is over.

Today he was back, and the music either wasn't quite as loud, or the bass just wasn't as prominent. It started out with a soulful female solo, and I looked up from my computer, startled. It sounded like it was actually coming from my kitchen, and I half expected to see the angel of the Lord standing there. The music was better today, but still much too loud. So I stomped around the kitchen and thought mean thoughts about both the guy downstairs and his taste in music until he finally went away again.

I in no way imagine that this is over. But it's close enough for me to not do anything. I'm moving within the next couple of weeks, and my passive aggressive personality does not need much excuse to avoid confrontation. So all I can do is keep stomping. That, and hope he at least starts listening to better music.

apartment 1.

My mother loves wind chimes. When in doubt around her birthday, spring for wind chimes. I like them okay, maybe because they remind me of her.

I do own one set. They hang above my couch in the living room, which despite its proximity to the ceiling fan, is not a very windy spot. But the awful irony of wind chimes is that when you actually put them out in the wind, they tend to tear up and get battered and broken. Perhaps this is a marketing trick the wind chime companies came up with. My mom had one on the front porch with little porcelain doves. The noise it made was very pretty, but I tried not to look at all those headless and tailless birds very often.

My set is made of bamboo stalks, and they make a lovely noise as well, though I have to physically reach out and touch them to create that lovely noise. I bought them not long after I moved into this place as an audio reminder, not of my mother, but of 216 Howard Street, Apartment 1.

Apartment 1 was, appropriately enough, my first apartment. I lived there with two other girls, and then later with two girls and a husband, not mine. And in the kitchen of Apartment 1, which was painted yellow by me, there hung a bamboo wind chime from one of the pipes that came out of the ceiling. And even though the kitchen was not a very drafty place, I heard those chimes all the time.

The chimes hung down next to the light switch. Pavlov's dog drooled when he heard a bell, but me, I turn on the light when I hear a bamboo wind chime.

You heard it in the mornings when Ashley went in to make coffee. You heard it in the afternoons when I came in from class to make lunch. And you heard it at night when Krystal came in from going out to party. No matter when you heard it, you almays always heard the same tune, the same sequence of hollow notes, because we always hit them in the same way as our hands made for the lights.

I think we meant to move them. We just hung them there when we moved into Apartment 1 to get them out of the way. And then we didn't move them until two years later we we all left Apartment 1. We even had another set of metal chimes shaped like elephants that hung outside from the porch. And I don't remember what they sound like at all, not even the tone of notes that those elephants made in the wind. But I do remember the exact bong-da-long bong-bong of those bamboo chimes in the kitchen of Apartment 1 announcing that someone was home and the lights were on.

When I hit my own bamboo chimes hanging above the couch, they don't play the same bong-da-long bong-bong song the ones in Apartment 1 did. But I hear it in my head just the same. And I turn on the light.

stupidstupidstupid.

Okay. So I know that I haven't worked at The Bistro in over three weeks, but I was still invited to the Christmas Party, mostly because I still did work there when we drew names for Secret Santa. And I had every intention of going, even as I put in my notice, even as I worked my last day, even as the party drew closer and closer and I wanted less and less to go. I was determined to go to the stupid party, if nothing else than just to prove everyone wrong. They clearly thought I was not coming, all because of the Pig-Pickin' incident.

There was another employee holiday party at Halloween. I was expected to attend. I said I would attend, and I was signed up to bring brownies. The thing is, Halloween is the day after my birthday. When I said I would be at the pig-pickin', I obviously intended to drink more water and less alcohol the night before than I actually did. So on Halloween, I was very very sick. Hungover sick that I did to myself, but sick enough that I couldn't go to any stupid pig-pickin' where vomiting would not be encouraged. I called and told them I was sick. I even admitted the reason, thinking that since I worked with a bunch of partiers, they would understand. Not only did they not understand, they didn't even believe my excuse. (Apparently, when you drink frequently, you handle hangovers better or something. I have no idea.)

So it was clear that there was some doubt as to whether I would make it to the Christmas party, which was last night. But I was going to go. I had cookies and I had my Secret Santa gift. I was going to go to this stupid party. I only became even more determined when I received a message on my answering machine reminding me of the party this past weekend.

I spent the day down the mountain with my sister-in-law baking cookies for this party yesterday. Around the time that I needed to leave, the weather started getting iffy. I left for the party anyway, because that's just how stubborn I am. But I called my apartment to check my messages, just to see if the party had been changed because of the weather. Sure enough, I had a message from my old boss, saying the party had been moved to "tomorrow at five-thirty". Since I was hearing the message on Sunday, I assumed that meant the party was now on Monday. You can see where I am going here.

I get back to my apartment a few minutes ago and there is a new message. It is from one of my former coworkers, basically telling me off for not showing up, not calling, and not dropping off my Secret Santa gift. As the result of my inconsiderate actions, someone didn't have a gift under the tree. (Apparently, this sort of inconsiderate action ran rampant last night, as I also did not have a gift under the tree.) The message I heard Sunday night was left on Saturday night. Now I have a batch of cookies and a present for someone else and a restaurant full of people mad at me.

I'm going to go in tonight and apologize. I'm going to give the present I bought and I'm going to share the cookies I helped make. I'm going to tell them what happened. I will not expect to be believed. I will expect to be talked about in disparaging tones once I leave. That is what I am going to do.

What I am going to try to do is not let this bug me. There was a misunderstanding, and I'm going to do the most I can do to make it right. But if I am not forgiven, I will say "Screw it" and get on with my life.

Then I will eat all of the rest of the cookies all by myself in one sitting.

numberOfPeopleYouKnowWithJobsInTheComputerIndustry++;

Forgive the computer science joke in the title. It's okay if you don't get it. Laugh, it's funny.

After months of feeling dejected and rejected, worrying about my future, and sending out my resume to companies all over the South, I have a job. Don't worry, it's official. I signed a paper that said that I accept the offer of employment and that I will not work for any other trucking-related software companies.

I'm going to have a job with benefits. I'm going to have medical and dental coverage, paid vacation and a 401k. Nevermind that I had to look up exactly what a 401k is on the Fidelity Financial site. Now that I know, I am very excited about planning for my retirement in 40 years. I will not have to work on Thanksgiving or the day after. In fact, I will be paid to not work on either of those days, plus another seven holidays every year.

I'm going to have a salary. I'm not going to live off the generosity and tipping know-how of strangers. I don't have to ask anyone how they want their filet cooked, and I won't care if someone's coffee cup is full or not.

I'm going to work somewhere where I will not be the biggest dork. I will make computer jokes, and people will understand them. Moreover, they will laugh, because I will be the only female employee under the age of 35.

I'm going to live in the (comparatively) big city. I'm going to live in a town where they have a Best Buy, a Total Wine & More, and a mall that does not sell furniture. I will live close enough to a Sam's Club to merit getting a membership. I'm going to be able to give directions based on the interstate.

I'm going to live somewhere where there are about 185,776 other people living (based on 2000 census reports), and I will know two of them. I will live two hours from family and an hour and a half from where I've lived for the past nearly four years.

I'm not going to be a student anymore. I'm going to be something other than what I've been for seventeen years now. I'm going to start a brand new career in a brand new place, and I may hate every bit of it.

I'm terrified. I'm excited. I'm ready.

i (heart) math.

Alright, okay, I admit it. It was bound to come out eventually anyway, so I might as well tell the world before the world finds out from someone else. I am not ashamed of it. I am proud of it.

I like math, and I am good at it.

Let me define good at it. I do not mean that I can do crazy Rain Man arithmetic in my head. I can do a little arithmetic in my head and get pretty close to the answer. But I'm slow, and there's a good chance I'll be wrong. I hate to break it to you, but in college math classes, they don't spend a lot of time teaching you extended multiplication tables. We use calculators for that.

A professor told me a story about when she was going to take her Comprehensive, which is a great big math test that graduate students take that makes the SAT math section look like a pop quiz. At the time, she was explaining to a non-math person that she had spent days upon days studying for this test. The person replied in all seriousness, "Wow, there must be some really tough fractions on that thing." Yeah, fractions. Not multi-dimensional calculus or abstract algebra or statistics, but just a bunch of really tough fractions.

Like I said, I can do some math in my head, mostly stuff I've picked up from waitressing and not my math classes. Trust me, I got really good at calculating 10%, 15%, and 20% of a check total pretty quick. I've waited tables for two years now. That's a lot of percentages.

Math is not embraced at The Bistro. They see it as just another of my weird quirks, along with the novelty earrings, the bowling shoes, and the sarcasm. If possible, they disdain math and math nerds there. I was reading a biography of Paul Erdos (who is second only to Euler in the number of math papers he published), and a fellow server said, "Please tell me you're not reading that for pleasure." When I said I was, everyone else joined in the eye-rolling and laughing, except for one of the kitchen guys, who leaned in and whispered, "Can I borrow it when you're done?" He's a math major. My coworkers were not impressed with my pi earrings, either. Seems like there was some eye-rolling the first day I wore those, too.

They can scorn all they want. I scorn the fact that a group of seasoned servers can't tell the difference between a good tip and a bad tip. One girl was griping about a tip before I looked at it and told her it was nearly 20% of the check total. Most of them will go back behind the bar and pull out a calculator so they can decide whether or not to be pissed off about a tip. Did I mention that most of these people are about to graduate from college and that they all have at least two years experience waiting tables?

Once I was working the bar and was cashing out a check. The customer gave me $48.18 for a $40.18 check, and the change was the tip. I brought up the check and just hit cash rather than enter 48.18 and then cash to see the change. I knew the change. The owner came over and actually fussed at me. Then she asked, "Do you do that all the time?" I answered, "Only when the change is easy to figure out." Again the eye-rolling. I could understand if I had been doing something like $53.72 - $38.91 in my head, she would be justifiably concerned that my internal calculator would be unreliable. Subtraction isn't even my forte, particularly when borrowing and canceling are involved. But $48.18 - $40.18? Please.

The people I worked with were the ones who asked "When are we ever going to use this?" when they learned multiplication. You know what? You use it. I've been in classes where that question was asked and the teacher said, "Probably never." I know perfectly well that I will never ever use Laplace Transforms (differential equations), eigenvalues (linear algebra), and Jacobian matrices (calc 3) again. I can do them all, and I happen to think that Laplace Transforms are pretty neat, but I know I'll never use it. But I sure as heck use multiplication. Everyone does. I don't expect everyone to be good at it. But I expect some things. I expect people not to need machines to do the same calculations their job requires every day. I expect waitresses with three to four years experience to be able to tell that on a $70 check, a $14 tip is great and $9 is crap. I don't expect to be treated like a freak because I can subtract nice round numbers.

But whatever. Depending on your stance on math, you're either nodding emphatically or still working out $48.18 - $40.18. Maybe you're still rolling your eyes over the fact that I own pi earrings, which, by the way, are really cool. But even my math-hating coworkers can tell that my new salary is a lot higher than theirs. Roll your eyes at that.

the bus windows are not tinted.

Yesterday, I was on the bus. Waiting, sitting, observing. Outside, a couple was walking toward the bus. She was cute and bubbly-looking, talking animatedly and walking with a little skip to her step. She clung to his arm as they walked. He, however, was striking in his solemn confidence. His posture was upright, his step was strong, his jaw was set. I couldn't imagine why these two were together. I figured he was humoring her for some reason. Why else would they be together, he in his stolid silence with his gliding gait, she with her breathless enthusiasm?

And then, all of sudden, he did this ridiculous hop-skip for several steps, his hands thrown up in the air, his mouth open and smiling. I couldn't help but smile broadly as I watched this transformation.

It was then that both the girl and I realized simultaneously that the bus windows were not tinted. I saw her laugh and point straight at me, clearly telling him that I was laughing at him. He smiled broadly and waved at me; they both laughed. I smiled back. The bus pulled away from the stop, the couple kept walking, and it was all over only a few seconds after it had all began.

the daddy essays: not catholic, just crazy.

“Oh, are your parents Catholic?”

That is usually the question I am asked by people newly acquainted with the idea that I am the youngest in a family of six children. And like any question that I am asked repeatedly, I have a stock answer.

“Nah, my parents just really like each other.” Sometimes I think the other person thinks I’m just being sarcastic, which honestly is a fair assumption on their part. But no, I’m being serious. My parents like each other. Also, they’re careless. But who’s complaining? Not Number Six.

My parents do like each other. It’s not just that they are still married. Most of my childhood friends came from two-parent homes. But most of my friends grew up with the knowledge that they were the reason their parents were still married. One of my friends told me once how she thought it was great that Mama always looked so happy to see Daddy when he came home; her parents were barely on speaking terms. Mama and Daddy were not staying together for the kids’ sake. They were staying together because they still liked each other, and well, the kids came out of that. So it’s not just that they are still husband and wife.

It’s that given the choice, Daddy would still use that line about being in the FBI on that brunette back in August of 1960. It’s that Mama would still opt to quit school and move across the country to marry a man she’d known only a few months.

And really, couldn’t Mama have done a lot worse with that kind of decision? She could have easily ended up with an abuser or an alcoholic or a used car salesman. But Mama got lucky (and Daddy did, too, but this is his book). She didn’t get an abusive, alcoholic, used car-selling husband. Sandra Jo could have done a lot worse and not much better than Sidney Louis. And they still like each other, still together, still in love, still crazy after all these years.

the daddy essays: my dad is cooler than your dad.

My parents were never the super-involved type. They came to PTO Open House and ballgames and things like that, but I never had the kind of parent who came to the school on my birthday and brought the whole class cupcakes and soft drinks. Classmates knew those parents by name and by sight, and the kids who had those parents automatically became well-liked, no matter how bad at Red Rover the kid was.

Kids like it when their parents come to their school. They like to show their school and their parents off to each other. And it’s important that the parent be met with approval. You didn’t want to be the kid with the fat mom or the dad who wore white shoes after Labor Day. Your dad could be wearing a white pantsuit in the dead of winter, but if he brought cupcakes for the whole class while he wore it, he came out looking like a hero.

My parents never did the cupcake thing. And I maybe I resented it a little. Maybe I envied the kids with parents like that as I ate those store-bought cupcakes with the waxy icing, especially with my birthday being so close to Halloween, when I figured the themed cupcake decoration possibilities were unlimited.

But one day, in the fall of my third grade year, Daddy came to school. He did not bring cupcakes. He did not bring two liter soft drinks. He brought an apple press and a bushel of apples.

My whole class spent the afternoon outside working the press and avoiding the bees. We stood in line to throw apples in and watch them get crushed and juiced. Then we drank the cider we made and all agreed that it tasted great, even though it had those weird apple pieces floating around in it.

And the Lenoir NewsTopic even came out and there was a picture in the paper of my daddy and my classmates pressing apples. The caption read something about Louis bringing his apple press to his daughter Sandra’s third grade class. That never happened for those silly cupcake kids, no matter how many cupcakes with themed decorations their moms brought.

Kids in my third grade class remembered that day years later, though I bet they’d be hard pressed to remember a single cupcake party unless it was their own birthday. And though my third grade popularity didn’t necessarily carry over all those years, everyone at least thought my dad was cool.

an introduction to the daddy essays.

My dad turned 70 last month. Months before the occasion, us kids started up a flurry of emailing, trying to figure out how best to celebrate the birthday of our patriarch. Actually, the spouses of us kids started it, because while we're all kind of laid-back, some of us had the sense to marry go-getters (And I only say "some of us" because I'm not married yet).

So we decided to celebrate the momentous occasion at Thanksgiving by putting together a great big scrapbook full of pictures and memories. My assignment was simple: just write something. Fine, I can do that.

So I reproduce for you here The Daddy Essays, so named because they were written for Daddy's scrapbook. Happy Birthday, Daddy.

My Hero

It was sometime before lunch on a day midway through my senior year of high school when I found out that I had a flat tire. A friend of mine had gone to an orthodontist appointment and happened to notice that a quarter of my car was sitting a little lower than the other three quarters on his way in from the parking lot. I should’ve noticed the flat tire earlier myself. I had noticed the way the car pulled when I drove it to school, but it never occurred to me that there might be a problem. Yeah, I’m clueless.

So I had a flat tire and no idea how to fix it, though I was pretty sure I had a spare and a jack in the trunk somewhere. So I do what I always do the car has a problem. I called my daddy.

Daddy has always been our resident Fix-It man, both for our home and our cars. All those basic auto maintenance and repairs were taken care of by a different Mr. G than Mr. Goodwrench. He did it quick, he did it right, and he left oil smudges all over the steering wheel, but he did it for free. So I wasn’t too worried about the tire, because I knew a good mechanic.

But my good mechanic wasn’t home, or at least he wasn’t answering the phone. I left a detailed cry for help, telling him that my car was in space 169 (second row from the end) and that there was an issue. But I wasn’t hopeful. There was no guarantee he’d be home before school was out, and he didn’t always check the messages when he came in.

So then what? I spent my last classes of the day in despair. True, I didn’t have anywhere I needed to go after school, but there were places I wanted to go, like home. Who would help poor little me, a delicate flower of a girl with less than the average knowledge of auto mechanics?

Big, strong men, of course, or at least high school boys who worked out. All I had to do was woefully mention my predicament, and I had a sea of volunteers to save me from my troubles. I had forgotten that females held the power of the damsel in distress, though I had learned it years ago in a sixth grade frisbee-in-a-tree incident.

I walked out to the parking lot at the end of the day with two or three high school boys that worked out trotting along with me. Actually, they were strutting, and I was just trying hard not to laugh. We arrived at parking space 169 (second row from the end) to find my Corolla standing evenly on four tires full of air. My daddy, my mechanic, had come and fixed it while I sat worrying inside, leaving no note or indications that he had even been there other than the newly-repaired condition of the car.

The high school boys who worked out, who had previously been arguing over who was to change my tire and how best to do it, now were silent, lost and without purpose. They did not get to rescue the damsel in the tower because the dragon had already been killed by a mysterious knight, though the damsel did say “Thanks anyway!” before driving off. They had been beaten to the punch by a big, strong man.

My hero.

pippy, the one-eyed cat.

At the Watauga County Humane Society Thrift Store, they have a resident cat. It's a very sweet cat, one who will nuzzle up to shoppers as they peruse the selection of other people's trash for their own new treasures. The first time I met the cat, I bent down to pet it a little, and it looked up at me, yellow eye shining up at me in adoration. Yeah, that's right. Yellow EYE. Just one. Where the right yellow eye should have been was a slightly concave, matted, black eyelid sewed shut. I stood up quickly and gave a little gasp. It really freaked me out, so much that I stayed away from the cat for the rest of that day. I don't think it would have bothered me had the eyelid not been curved in, making it painfully obvious that there was just some hollow space where the eye should have been.

After the initial shock wore off, I pet the cat on subsequent visits to the store, though I tried not to look at it very closely. Apparently, this cat is rather popular at the store, perhaps with customers less skittish than I. Frequent shoppers have even been known to get upset if they don't get a chance to pet the cat. I think maybe those kind of shoppers don't have a lot going for them.

And so, inspired by the cat's popularity, the store had shirts made. They read "Official Member of the Pippy Fan Club" and had a cartoon drawing of the cat, one eye and all. The shop was selling them for $10.

I would not say that I am a fan of the one-eyed cat, who is evidently named Pippy. Like I said, she kinda creeps me out. But I am definitely a fan of t-shirts with one-eyed cats on them, though I didn't even know it until I saw a whole display of them and decided I needed one.

The woman working was very excited to sell me the shirt, convinced that I must be a cat-lover to the core, and a Pippy-lover to the extreme. I did nothing to make her think otherwise, as I'm beginning to suspect that not everyone has the same view as I do about unusual t-shirts. I'm sure that it is a very nice cat, but I would be much more excited if they had a resident llama or something, particularly if they had the wit to name it Lloyd.

Then I'd buy a Lloyd t-shirt, too.

you can't do that with doorknobs.

My mother collects magnets. It's a simple, cheap hobby, and it makes getting her souvenirs from places simple and cheap too. I have a friend whose mother collects doorknobs. This is not a simple and cheap hobby, and so I am glad that my mother is generally satisfied with just the doorknobs on the doors in the house.

I don't know why she started this collection. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that she has six children. Since the refrigerator is traditionally the gallery of the artwork and good grades and Optimist League basketball schedules of children, my mother just wanted to make sure she had what she needed to hang everything we wanted displayed.

Now I don't have any children. But I do have magnets. They help me display recipes, shopping lists, coupons, and winery pamphlets. But I don't buy a lot of magnets for myself. I'm too busy not buying a lot of coffee mugs for myself. Mama doesn't have much to hang for us anymore, so she uses the magnets to hang stuff from her grandchildren, letters for her children that still come to her address, and articles she clips from the newspaper about the health benefits of chocolate, coffee, and wine.

When I go somewhere, I try to buy Mama a magnet. Like I said, it's easy. Most souvenir shops have magnets, specifically for the people like my mother. She always jokes that I'm going to buy her one of those t-shirts that says her daughter went to such-and-such and all she got was this stupid shirt. Finally I bought her a magnet in Pigeon Forge that was in the shape of a t-shirt that read "My friend went to the Great Smoky Mountains and all I got was this stupid t-shirt." Sometimes the perfect magnet just calls out to you.

And because it's so easy to get a magnet someplace, I feel bad when I don't get one for her. I try to be picky. A lot of souvenir magnets are pretty stupid-looking or at least just not very interesting. Often that means I have to get her the mose expensive magnet, because it's the best, but since magnet prices generally top out at $5 or so, I don't complain too much.

I did buy her a very expensive one once. For the longest time, we had been looking for Snoopy magnets. This was before Charles Schultz had died, when Snoopy items were still a little hard to find. My sister had just moved into her first apartment, and we were trying to find one for her, since she was the original Snoopy fan, and Mama and I just kinda jumped onto the Snoopy bandwagon she started. I went on a youth group trip down to the beach, where we stopped at an outlet center. There was a tiny shop there with gray metal walls where all they sold was magnets. And there I found a Snoopy magnet, a very, very nice magnet as far as magnets go. It was about an inch thick and maybe five inches tall. It was $8, which is absolutely ridiculous, but it was exactly what we wanted, so I got it.

When I got home from the trip, I brought out that beautiful Snoopy magnet that I had bought for my sister's first refrigerator in her first place of her own to show to Mama. She was very excited, as she should have been, because this truly was a fine specimen of a magnet. And then she put it right front and center on her fridge, hugging me and thanking me all the way for her new magnet. I said she was welcome. (We did eventually buy my sister a Snoopy magnet, but it was not as nice as Mama's. She never knew the difference. Well, not until now, anyway.)

By now, my mother's fridge reads like a travel log of all the places she and her children have been. There are more magnets than things hanging from them. Whenever she gets back from a big trip, she brings out all her newly-acquired magnets, shows them off, and tells us about the place where she got them. You can't do that with doorknobs.

do you still listen to good music?

I keep having this dream. Well, no, not the same dream, but the dreams are the same in that they revolve around this one person who I know, or used to know, in real life. I haven't seen this girl in a good seven or eight years, and I keep having dreams about her, usually at least once a month.

Charity and I were two-thirds of a trio in my nightmarish sixth grade class. The other third was a tomboy named Macie, and we were kind of the misfits. Misfits in that we were the most normal people in this class. I got some interesting education in that class, learning of things and acts that I did not know could ever exist, and I'm still not convinced that some of them do.

But I really didn't know anyone in that class. I had gone to elementary school with some of them but knew them only minimally. All my friends had been put in the same class two doors down. And so I guess I always thought of Charity and Macie as secondary friends, as unfair as that was. We were more buddies than friends. We didn't really share like adolescent girls usually do, we just goofed off. We got in trouble a lot, and we would have gotten detention if my teacher had had the heart to send a good girl like me. Me! In detention! The shame would have killed me.

Anyway, Charity and I were in the same seventh grade class as well, and then we had eighth grade Algebra together. We always sat together and made comments to each other under our breaths the whole class period through. But it was a low maintenance friendship. I don't think we ever called each other, and I didn't even know where she lived. We were only friends during certain class periods, and then we were just two people. And then Charity went to a different high school than I did, and we were just two people all the time. I saw her at a couple of football games my freshman year, but then I never saw her again.

I don't think I appreciated Charity as much as I should have. Looking back, I think she was a lot cooler and more fun than I really gave her credit for. We were the only eighth graders who listened to They Might Be Giants, and I should have recognized that as a sign that she was good people.

But I didn't think about all of that until the dreams started happening. In the first one, she killed herself. The second one was similar. In another, she borrows money from me to go to beauty school or buy drugs. And each time I have another dream, it brings Charity to the front of my mind, which of course makes me have more dreams about her. Thankfully, the dreams aren't so depressing anymore. Usually, I'm just looking for her, and then I find her and tell her about the dreams and how I was sorry that we drifted apart and that I wasn't a better friend. Every time I have a dream, I think about calling her, though I don't know what I'd say or how I'd even find her. There really is no good way to say, "Hey, we haven't spoken since we were 14, but I keep having these weird dreams about you and I was wondering what you're up to. Do you still listen to good music?"

Or maybe there is a good way to say it. And maybe someday, the dreams will drive me just crazy enough to find a way to say it, whether there's a good way or not.

unsympathetic.

I was in Virginia this past weekend. Specifically, I was lost in Virginia this past weekend. So we stopped for directions at a giant discount tobacco store called The Red Barn or something like that. They specialized in lottery tickets, and, well, discount tobacco.

I waited in line to ask for directions, with flannel-wearing men carrying tobacco products in front of me and flannel-wearing men carrying tobacco products behind me. The guy in front of me (whose flannel was green and moustache was gray), bought two lottery tickets and a soft pack of Broncos. His total was $5.86. He had $11 all ready and waiting for the clerk, and had had it ready the whole time he'd been standing in line.

And it made me very very sad, that this old man had been here enough to buy his lottery tickets and his Broncos in a soft pack to know how much it would cost. I've never even heard of Bronco cigarettes, and I live in North Carolina, where tobacco is considered a vegetable.

I could easily use this story as an anti-lottery and anti-cigarettes vehicle. But I'm not. Because as I thought about that guy in front of me, I concluded that I am not against the lottery. As far as I've heard, the main argument against the lottery is that people gamble themselves into bankruptcy. And while, yeah, that sucks, but that's really their own fault. Can't afford to pay your rent? Don't buy a lottery ticket.

So anything beyond moderation in terms of the lottery maybe isn't such a great idea. We let people drink and smoke, and I've heard rumors that those things in excess aren't so good for you either. At some point, you have to let people take care of themselves. People have the right to ignore both the Surgeon General's warning and the eviction notice.

I'm unsympathetic, I know. And I'm certainly not speaking from any sort of expert standpoint. I'm just a completely uninformed bystander with an opinion, but that is my right. North Carolina doesn't even have a lottery (just a Cherokee reservation that has casinos, but where you can't even buy beer at the grocery store). I'm okay with not having a lottery. And I'd be okay if we had one. I hear they give the money to the schools. Maybe then we can afford to start a new curriculum for our kids where we teach them not to spend all their money on stupid stuff.

spyware.

I hate having to ride the bus to and from my car. But that said, I love riding the bus, mostly because I get to spy on people. I especially love it when I catch the Blue Route on the way down from the parking lot, because that means I get to ride it on its entire 15 minute route, openly staring at people outside from behind tinted windows.

I study their faces, I study the way they stand, the way they walk, the way they talk to their friends if they have any. I wonder why that guy keeps looking around. I wonder if that girl's parents bought her that Mercedes. I think that guy needs a haircut. I try to figure out if that guy saw me staring at him and his bizarre facial hair, and if that's why he's staring at me now.

I've gotten to know some of the people. Not that I've ever actually spoken to any of them, because that's just not my style. Why bother finding out their actual personalities when the ones I make up for them are so much more interesting? But I know them. I know the aloof guy who listens to good music on his CD player. I know it's good music because I peeked when he was rifling through his CDs, and because I can hear it when I sit near him. One time I heard a band that is so obscure and good that I felt an extreme urge to say something so that he would know that I was cool, too. I know the girl with the plain face and the plain haircut that gets into the champagne Chevrolet Impala with the heart-shaped "I love my Marine!" sticker on the back window. I know the guy who wears his pants really high and who always takes a run and go up the steps. I know the girl who is taller and prettier than I am, and I don't like her very much. I know the Asian girl with the bad haircut, and I think she shouldn't wear such unflattering clothes. I know the skinny guy with long black hair who wears his socks pulled halfway up his stick-thin shins.

And I don't just watch. Oh, I'm listening, too. Does it look like I'm staring off into space, thinking about something amusing that brings a grin to my face? Don't be silly. I'm listening to the people behind me, and they are having the most ridiculous conversation. Later, if I remember it, I will write it down. But for now, I'll just sit here and listen. And watch. And wish that my car was not so far away.