So I’m sitting up in bed, roughly around midnight, typing on this lovely but God-forsaken netbook I’m using these days. I’ve been stricken with a summer cold, for lack of a better term, and it’s KICKING MY ASS. I had this whole 5 day holiday thing worked out, including pool time, beach time, movie time, eat something not on Weight Watchers time and BAM! This cold has made me its bitch.

I have a lot of half-posts I’ve written lately. I was going to do all these fun, intelligent things about design and how our minds see images without predisposed opinions. (On second thought, that doesn’t make sense.) Then I was going to write a list about what the Internet and Its People have taught me over the last couple of months. (Surprisingly, quite a bit.) And then I have this really cool post coming about a memory I have of being 8 or 9 in July. Because, you know, it’s July.

But instead of topping off those half-done projects, I’m going to start another one. Warning up front: Brian doesn’t know I’m about to talk about these things. Like every other plan we’ve ever had, this one will sink like a cinder block. TRUST ME. It’s still fun to talk about, though.

Have you ever thought about picking your shit up and just moving away? I don’t mean the next water district over, or into that 10,000 square foot foreclosure by the country club. I mean AWAY. Away, away, away. Like, House Hunters International Checks out Amsterdam! away. Actually, my first preference would be the Loire Valley of France, or perhaps Brittany, right on the English Channel, but my adventure partner, who doesn’t yet know about his adventure, wouldn’t be up for it.

Instead, I have decided that this is the very last summer I can put up with this heat without doing something about it. We – both of us – are FUCKING MISERABLE. Granted, I don’t live in Texas or the Death Valley or whatever, so yes, some of you are hotter. But I can’t take the two seasons per year thing. We have scorching brutally humid hot, and sometimes okay, rainy, coolish cold. That’s it. We can’t enjoy outside stuff in the summer because of mosquitoes and the drought (and it’s too hot) and we don’t live close enough to either the beach or the mountains to take advantage of other weathery thingies.

So yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and look for jobs for one or the both of us. I’m going to look at houses up in the mountains of (some) state. I want a screen porch that allows me to enjoy myself without needing a baby pool to catch my sweat. I want to plant some plants that won’t automatically die once they’ve figured out where they are. I want to see the seasons change. You know, like CHANGE. I don’t want to have to keep my flip flops and cropped pants out just in case this Thanksgiving is like all the other ones before it. I’d like to wear a pretty sweater more than once during the winter.

Again, I haven’t officially brought this up with Brian. What’s the point right now? It’s a pipe dream.

A cool, rainy, screen porch, Wellies, good grocery stores and schools, fun cultural activity kind of dream.

This was taken about a quarter mile from the farm. We kept saying that we don’t understand how a tornado behaves, not that anyone does. Why does it tear a path and suddenly stop? Why does it miss large structures and take small ones?

I love that we live in a county that is bordered by a large city on one end and lots of farmland on the other. In 30 minutes we can enjoy restaurants, concerts, museums and all the fun city stuff fun city people enjoy. But then we can take a short drive and be out. Out of the noise, out of the traffic, out of everything. It’s peaceful, like this.

Newcomers to our area come for the weather, ironically. We have warm, mild winters and hot, humid summers. In between there’s not much of either – instead there’s rain, sleet, snow, hail, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods. A famous saying around here is that if you don’t like the North Carolina weather, just wait five minutes. These people didn’t have five minutes.

Everywhere we went today there were old people and young people, all suited up with work gloves, rakes, ropes and chainsaws. We saw a man carry a big blue cooler, wider than he was, across railroad tracks. There were cars on the side of the road for half a mile, with neighbors and family members helping load up what was left of belongings.

We finished our drive around the county and were about a half mile from home, just across the railroad tracks and behind the grocery store. This was a mobile home owned by a man I know, although he thankfully wasn’t living there.

In Raleigh and Sanford, there was damage on a larger scale, if only because the structures were larger and the concentration of people exposed to the storms was wider. There were deaths all over the place and some of those included children. Tomorrow there will probably be more people found. North Carolina hasn’t seen this type of tornado damage in over 25 years.

Anyway, this weekend I was all I’m gonna organize! I’m gonna get shit done! I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m gonna! and now it’s Sunday night and I haven’t even finished that one load of laundry. HOWEVER. I’ve yet to find a person out there who hasn’t read Stieg Larsson’s Millienium trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.) and I’ve been anxious to watch the movie. A quick search of the on-demand movie channel revealed that the first two books are now movies in Swedish with English subtitles. Let this not deter you, Internet! These movies are OUTSTANDING.

If you’ve read them, you know how graphic they are and the movies do the nasty parts some serious justice. They are entertaining and stick with the story pretty closely, but by far the most fun for me was learning Swedish words. For instance, did you know that “okay” in English and “okay” in Swedish are the same? ME EITHER. And “holy shit” and “what the fuck” sound exactly the same, except with extra syllables. I always thought Spanish was fun, but Swedish? Well. I haven’t asked anyone about this officially, but I’m pretty sure Swedish is a combo of German, French and English, and maybe some other languages, and they use all those fun letters with the dots and slashes through them, like the No Smoking signs. SO FUN, RIGHT?!

Now this is interesting: I just looked on Wikipedia and it turns out that Swedish is the official language of Finland, too. Which totally confuses me, because I would think that Finnish would be Finland’s language, but does that mean that Finnish isn’t a language? Or do people in Finland not like their own language? Or is it like Canada, where people speak English but probably don’t want to, and feel like Americans just shoved English down their throats and so they rebel by saying “oot the door” and other weird stuff?

These are the questions that keep me up…in the afternoon. I didn’t even nap today thinking about this stuff. I blame Stieg Larsson.

In other news, everyone in these movies drives a Volvo. Or, if they’re executives at their jobs, they drive Audis or Mercedes. Can you imagine living somewhere where there isn’t a tacky 12 year-old domestic death trap parked on every street corner? Me either. And all the houses in Stockholm looked really quaint but modern and Ikea-y and the rural towns have names like Uppsala and Hedestad. I said on Facebook today that I wanted to plan a trip to Sweden soon and one of my friends sent me the current weather in Stockholm, which was 22 degrees, and I said that I didn’t mind because hello? It’s colder than that in Pittsburgh today. (I only know that because I’m watching the Steelers play the Jets, and that’s only because my friend Kristen showed me Heinz Field when I was there a few months ago and now I feel beholden to Pennsylvania.)

Tomorrow I’m going to see the lu-lu doctor, which is not the vagina doctor. Apparently this is confusing to some people. I’m going to ask her what I’m supposed to do about taking my crazy meds when I’m sick with a stomach virus, and also about Ambien amnesia, which is happening more and more. Maybe I’ll come out of there with some new prescriptions, and if that’s the case, I’ll be sure to let you know what’s good and new on the crazytrain market.

Until then…

Var är toaletten? (I’m asking you where the toilet is, please, when I’m in Sweden. Or Finland.)

A few thoughts and observations, in no particular order, about no particular or singularly fascinating thing:

My friend called me tonight to tell me that he ran into the woman he THOUGHT he was dating, except she was having dinner with another man – her steady boyfriend. The “other man” was wearing a blue wife-beater, a camouflage hat and a gold rope chain. My friend wears tweed sport coats and those leather driving moccasins with the buckles. The irony was not lost on us.

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I went to the beach this week and it was absolutely beautiful. Fall is my favorite season anyway, and anywhere, but the beach this time of year is perfect. The crowds are gone, the air is crisp and salty and the seafood is extra fresh and comes quickly. Days are warm, nights are cool, and any time of day you can watch huge white yachts cruise by on their way to warmer climates. You really can’t beat it with a stick. True story: some giant rusty barge slammed into the side of a really shiny yacht from the British Virgin Islands while we were having lunch on a dock. It was kind of awesome. (I’m not evil; no one got hurt, except the side of the shiny expensive gigantically huge rich people’s yacht.)

I went to the beach this week because we’re on fall break and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I always lust for vacations from work because, let’s face it, I don’t like to work. I don’t like to do much of anything, really. But what always happens has happened again: I got home from my trip, have had a few days to myself and I’ve wound up couch-potato-ing the days away because I am out of my routine. I’m like a three year-old who missed a nap. When I’m out of my routine, I don’t take my crazy meds on time, I sleep too late, I take too many naps and I have chronically dirty hair. Not to mention the fact that the pantry mysteriously gets emptier and emptier. Remind me of all this two weeks from now when I’m counting the days until Thanksgiving.

What I need to do is grade papers, calculate percentage points, pay my business taxes before I get sent to jail and finish up invitation orders already. Someone tell me how YOU get motivated when there’s all this free time ahead of you, because frankly I’m stumped.

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In other news, the famed Power-Tool Pumpkin Carving Party is next weekend and as usual, we don’t have a pumpkin yet. Also as usual, I’m worried about what to wear around the 20-somethings. If I wear clogs, they’re in boots. If I wear jeans, they’re in cords. If I wear a sweater, they wear t-shirts and those infinity scarf things. If I didn’t actually care whether or not a 20-something looked my way, I’d drink more pumpkin ale.

Also in other, scarier, news…there is an arsonist loose in our neighborhood. I’m not even remotely kidding and I get terrified every time I leave the house that I’ll come back to fire trucks. Two houses that were recently vacated have burned in the last 6 weeks, and that’s just on the next street over from us. There have been other fires nearby and the police have resorted to fliers asking for leads in exchange for reward money. This is quite unsettling, and yes, we’ve checked the smoke alarm batteries.

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The Seven Year Itch. Yeah, Internet, we’re gonna talk about it. Not right now, of course, because that’s a whole other casserole in the oven. But it’s there. IT’S THERE. I’m referring of course to relationships and not a condition that requires vagina cream, if you were wondering.

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Finally, I miss – like, in my bones and my heart and my soul – my co-workers, specifically my shiny light, C. This new job is fantastic, wears me out, makes me feel challenged and yadda yadda but I don’t see her every day anymore. I actually don’t see her at all and our phone conversations are short and somewhat stilted. I love her more than life and I miss her deeply. Don’t let people fool you: your co-workers are closer to your heart than you think, whether you love them or hate them. When you leave them or vice versa, you will miss them. Mark my words.

I’m going to bed, y’all. I’m going to sleep well because the windows are open and it’s 40 something degrees out – YES, BITCHES, THE HEAT IS GONE! I AM NOT SWEATING! HALLEFLAPPINGLUJAH! – but I will dream about this blog and wonder if you’re still out there reading.

I sincerely hope you are.

I saw a face in PEOPLE magazine last week that also told a story. This face is one I know well, and belongs to a woman who has been my friend for almost 15 years. She is a mother, a wife and a lawyer. Before Katrina she had no real ties to New Orleans. After Katrina, she committed her life’s work to representing the underrepresented and in doing so she met her husband, adopted the Crescent City as her home and married there under the lights of the French Quarter. I was there to see her and her fair city three years after the hurricane. I visited Lakefront, a community flooded by the breached levees. I took photographs of water lines above overpasses and houses that probably still haven’t been rebuilt. My friend had her daughter in Louisiana and, with her family, lives near a military base there.

I saw a face sitting next to me in a taxi last week, and this face told a story I’d never heard. As he drove me up Canal Street, from the French Quarter and around to Jackson Square, I listened to his Louisiana accent and saw the lines on his face. I never learned his name, but this man – in his late 60s – was born and raised in New Orleans. He remembered Hurricane Betsy and so he evacuated the day before the storm, per the orders given by the city and state. He left with his family and returned not long after Katrina, coming home only to a little wind damage, but luckily no flood waters. He couldn’t understand why so many people stayed, and further, he couldn’t fathom the “lack of self control” his fellow New Orleans residents exhibited in the days after. This man was ashamed of the fighting, the looting, the reaction of his people, but he never said a word about the action – or lack thereof – of the government. He was proud to be back in his city driving tourists around to see the sights that are still standing, that seemed never to be touched.

When I was in New Orleans last week, I watched the local news in the morning and again at night. There were stories after stories after stories featured on each channel about rebuilding. There were families with new Habitat homes. There were children preparing for a new school year in new schools. There were local politicians cutting ribbons on new businesses in different neighborhoods. There were very few pictures of flood waters, and even fewer pictures of the Superdome and the Convention Center.

My friends and I did the usual touristy stuff. We walked to the French Quarter and ate dinner. We rode the street car up St. Charles, saw Loyola and Tulane, and pointed out The Real World house. We lost money at Harrah’s, took pictures of the Mississippi from the Riverwalk and ate beignets under the shade at Café du Monde. We bought pralines and jewelry, took pictures of the mimes and the jazz musicians and brought home t-shirts to children. I met a friend for drinks in an up-and-coming section of town, and marveled at her historic Garden District home. All of us spent money. We met natives and transplants, asking them questions along the way. Some of them were tired of the questions – the same ones – about Katrina and whether or not they stayed. Had their houses suffered damage? Did they live in the Ninth Ward? Did they know anyone who did? Or who had died? Some of them wanted to talk, and some of them just wanted to show off their town.

I have watched the documentaries, listened to the stories, seen my dear friend fight for the rights of the underprivileged and I am still shocked that a natural disaster could tear our country apart and expose it for what it really is. Five years later, 25 years later, doesn’t matter. I live in a small Southern town, I know what goes on here. You know it, too. As a really ignorant woman once said to me, there are the haves and the have-nots. She was a have, she told me. But she did pity those poor other people. Most of them.

It’s hard to say why, in the last ten years, these horrific things keep happening to us. Yes, to us, I believe. In the South, there are evangelical Christians who are recruiting young people in droves to their mega-churches with coffee shops and rock bands. It gives them comfort to know that their religion and faith in their God will carry them through whatever else is coming. Some people my age, myself included, find themselves past the quarter-life crisis and in the middle of their anxiety-fueled 30s, ever upwardly mobile. We compare ourselves to each other, watching as our neighbors’ houses get bigger, our friends’ cars get more expensive and our own credit card debt gets higher.

Somewhere along the way we have continued to miss the big picture. It isn’t necessarily about the power of religious belief. It definitely isn’t about our own small corners of our own small worlds. It’s about the faces we see every day, that could tell us a story if we listened. How very many of us have forgotten about Katrina victims until we were reminded on television? How many of us take our girls’ weekends to the beach and whine to our friends that our kitchen counters need replacing and that our waists just aren’t as small as they used to be?

I do it and you do it. We forget to look at the lines on the faces of our fellow human beings and think about how those lines got there. From laughing? From crying? From worrying? From mourning? From rejoicing? We don’t stop to think that there is a bigger world outside of our own, and that bigger world has a much bigger story to tell.

My own story is small and forgettable, because I am only one of millions who have traveled to Louisiana in the last five years. I am one of an unfortunately large group of people who didn’t travel to New Orleans to help. I went on business, spent some money and patted myself on the shoulder for shopping because I thought it would help the economy. Perhaps it did. But probably it didn’t, because probably my money would have been much better spent buying a hammer and some nails and helping someone rebuild…something. Anything.

No one likes to be preached to, least of all me. But I found myself in the middle of one of the most open wounds in our country, in the middle of the anniversary of its injury, and I couldn’t come home and blog about the wonderful restaurants I tried or the funny stories of the shit that happened while I was there. It’s not funny and it’s not relevant unless we’re talking about HELPING PEOPLE.

I haven’t done that in a while. It’s time I did.

We returned from our week-long family beach trip yesterday and we are happy, slightly tan and rested but exhausted, if that makes sense. We’re exhausted from visiting, from finding things to talk about with people who can’t count conversation as their strong suit, and from filling our bellies with shrimp, crab and fish. (And maybe some cheese dip and margaritas and cookies and lemon meringue pie and tomato sandwiches with real mayonnaise and ice cream…)

We are rested though, because we basically did nothing. The most exercise we got was from hauling our crap down to the beach and back up to the house, and really BB did that. We swam – a lot – and we lolled about in the sand until we got rashy and bumpy, which is an okay trade off. We played shark and pulled our nieces around in innertubes. We people-watched and criticized bathing suits and tattoos (we already know we’re hypocrites, don’t worry). We read books, had deep discussions and tried to avoid olive appetizers and bourbon slushies. (Eww and eww.)

In short, we had a really good time.

Now, though, the real world faces us, as it does everyone who returns from vacation, and for me, school will begin in a week. I will be teaching a class of 75 students (in an auditorium!) once a week, after my regular job. We will register new students, encourage the old ones and smile the smile of this-summer-wasn’t-nearly-long-enough.

I’m kind of with the kindergarten mothers: I’m not ready to let go, even though it’s time this weather cooled the hell off already. I’m also ready for football and for daylight to go away before bedtime. When you live here though, the seasons don’t change quickly, or on time.

Some days I’m really surprised that I’m not in charge of the world. I really am.

Interneeeeet! What up? You’d think that while I was chillaxin’ with my homies snowed in for the last four days that I would have churned out post after intelligent post. You’d be wrong. I’m going to make a list now that will enlighten you about what I’ve been doing since Friday night’s crippling dusting of snow major winter storm.

1. I watched the news for school closings, only to discover that our website updates quicker. Go us, because usually our website announces closings about 10 minutes before the work day is scheduled to begin. Fuck ups.

2. I watched most of the stuff on my DVR. I’m down to 42% full. Trust me, this is like empty in my house. I caught up on Big Love – oh! – and I totally should mention this, because if you watch Big Love on HBO, you totally have to read this book. Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (do you love how I just correctly titled this book without quotation marks or italics? English majors RULE!) by Jon Krakauer. It’s about this woman and her child who are murdered by two Mormon fundamentalists and it gives this big long history of Mormons. I will mention here that I grew up with a slew of Mormons and those in the regular garden variety LDS church are super nice people. But it’s those Big Love Juniper Creek creepies that this book talks about. Anyway, if you’re interested in that kind of stuff it’s a good read.

3. I started watching The Tudors. Shut UP that shit is good. First of all there’s some hot sex in it, which kept BB interested of course, and then there’s Henry VIII who is eight different kinds of beautiful and then there’s Sam Neill who does a decent British accent and then there are all the jewels and fabulous fabric in the costumes and do you get Showtime? Catch up. RIGHT NOW. They’re showing seasons 1-3 and you should catch it while the catching’s good.

4. I slept. I slept in in the morning, I took naps, I permanently squished the cushion down in my Archie Bunker chair in the den, so now it looks like a butt pancake. I laid around on the couch. I stretched out with the ottoman and listened to BB hand wash dishes because our dishwasher melted. I waited for him to cook dinner. I showered occasionally. I was a ROCK STAR.

5. Our dishwasher melted. So now BB we have to hand wash our dishes and dry them and hope we rinsed the soap off good because I can tell you from experience that soapy Cheerios are not so tasty. Yesterday we ventured out into the scary world of icy parking lots and bought a shiny new Whirlpool stainless dishwasher. It’s so pretty. And supposedly you can put dishes in there WITHOUT SCRUBBING THEM FIRST! That would be a miracle. And BB bought it with his own money that I didn’t have to contribute to. It was a great moment in my life.

6. I made whole wheat bagels. Those fuckers are N-A-S-T-Y. They are hard as rocks, dense as rocks and taste like rocks. I asked my good Interweb friend Ashley Gross to come up with a recipe to replace these things. She’s working on it.

7. I played 1,764 games of some kind of Solitaire variation on my iTouch. Maybe not that many games, but it seemed like it. Once I found myself in the kitchen looking for Diet Sunkist and I couldn’t see the fridge because my eyes were blurry from looking at the screen too long. I need an intervention.

8. I started The Lovely Bones last night and almost finished it. I had to stay up until almost 1am though and by the time I got good and asleep, the alarm went off. Good grief. I have to say though, after all those days of slugging it around the house, it was a little bit nice to get back into a routine this morning.

9. In case you haven’t gathered by now, North Carolina shuts down completely when it snows and sleets. COMPLETELY. Schools closed, businesses on delays, snow plows doing their best but not enough. It’s enough to make an outsider nuts, but it’s what we’re used to. They’re calling for more Friday. I might shoot myself.

10. BB tried to tell me what to do. I shut him down. We’re headed to the beach for an early Valentine’s vacation Friday, and if his ‘tude doesn’t change, I’m shutting him down again. On vacation. In a fancy hotel. You know what this means, people. SHUTTING IT DOWN.

On the Internet, there were good recaps of the Grammys (holy shit Pink!) and there were friends that joined Twitter and Tom and Lorenzo of Project Rungay did some super funny posts about Kelly Cutrone (Kell on Earth) and RuPaul.

OK. That’s the shit that happened while I was snowed in.

And it was for Daddy and his sister:

And it was for Cathy and Burt and Frank and Mack and Marie and Michael and all the Mollies and all the Cindys. (There are more than you might think.)

And even though the crowd was smaller, and even though the food wasn’t as homemade as last year (we’re all too old and exhausted to cook anymore), and even though not all my favorites showed up, I did not have to suppress the urge to tell an old wrinkled person to fuck off, NOT ONE TIME. Incidentally, I noticed at the park this afternoon that the leaves are starting to turn. I also noticed last night that it’s dark at 7:30 now.

You know what this means? This means that the universe has given me reprieve! This means that the air is changing! The heat – DEAR GOD THE HEAT THAT TRIES TO KILL ME EVERY SINGLE DAY – is dissipating! I would marry the fall season if I could. I would even buy it a ring and plan a big fussy wedding with a ball gown and a 30-piece orchestra. And I am so not exaggerating.

9:15 am, Me: Yes, I know he set up his tuition through the payment plan but apparently THE PAYMENT PLAN DIDN’T PAY. So do we owe back tuition or not? Oh. No m’am, we’ll pay it right away. It’s not necessary to report us to THE STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL for collections. Honestly. I have to go now, there’s a murder that needs committing right fast.

10:27 am, Drew: Hey, so I almost ran over a kitten on the bypass this morning. I went back and picked him up but he was right on the white line in between the two lanes and these two tractor trailers came by at the same time and they seriously missed him on both sides. Like for real. Can you and Mom take him to the vet at 12:40?

11:08 am, BB: You’re gonna run errands? Is it because you’re mad at me? I know you’re mad at me. I can’t help it. I didn’t KNOW I didn’t pay my tuition! I swear!

12:30 pm, Mom: Don’t let that cat get pink eye on you. And make sure it doesn’t shit on my backseat.

1:05 pm, Vet Tech: Well, he’s negative for FIV and feline leukemia. And we’re calling him Big Rig back there, because of how he was saved.

2:12 pm, Me: BB, why is it so hot in here? WTF…WHY IS THE THERMOSTAT ON 78?

2:53 pm, Me: Mr. Fred, please call us back ASAP. This thing is still under warranty and IT SHOULD BE FUCKING COOL OFF THIS FUCKING HOT HOUSE. Sorry about that…it’s been kind of a long day. And it’s not even three o’clock.

We roasted oysters and marshmallows and made s’mores and listened to some good music and promised to do it again sometime soon. Sunday afternoon I got a nice little visit from a smart little girl, who at almost two years old, knows a crescent moon and how to pose for a camera.

Today at work, I keep checking weather.com and wishing that the weekend would just hurry up and get here already. I haven’t seen Gena in months and I’ve really been doing good, if you ask me, but that pesky anxiety is starting to creep up on me again. I can’t decide whether I just need a vacation, or whether there are bigger things at work, but my plan in the next week is to get a lot of rest and see where that leaves me.

I finished a book last night written by Jen Lancaster and I have to say that there’s hope for me, yet. She’s 40 (ish?) now and after a giant layoff saga, she took to the blogosphere and consequently wrote some books. Do I reek of desperation yet? No? Take a bigger whiff. It’s there.