the phone rang at 4am. i opened the door around 4.30. i made it to work by 9. what a pleasant surprise.

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in a few minutes, im off to bed. for 4 and a half hours. then im up.

then im on a plane across the country for the weekend. i wont see most of the people who swore to me that they would see me, so im less excited than i was a week ago.

if you are around and know my cell, by all means call. 48 hours isnt enough time at all, but ill do the best i can. help me – find me if youre there.

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I don’t care if I’m getting sick, because I love the changing of the seasons. This is a recent development. For the last three or four weeks I have been waking up exhausted, even though I was going to bed at a (semi) reasonable time. I just hated waking up to darkness and driving home with the sun directly in my ears for nearly an hour.

What a difference the time change makes. Not only did I completely enjoy the extra hour of sleep, but now I wake up with the sun in its full glory. No more tired mornings for me. And driving home at 5pm in the dark is fantastic. Being more of a night person than a day person, it just starts the festivities sooner. It’s almost like you brain doesn’t realize you’re on your third drink and it’s only 7PM.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Spring and Summer, but there’s something more appealing about Fall and Winter. For one thing, the holidays are better. But there’s also something nice about having to put on a light jacket that is refreshing to me.

The only downside is that I’ll have to put up with Christina’s whining about the temperature for five months. What’s wrong with the kids in Southern California? 65 – 75 degrees is the absolute best temperature one can be in. It’s god’s weather. And it’ll help the firefighters put out these insane fires.

Speaking of which, last night I dreamed that Jason Voorhees was the arsonist behind all these fires. I woke up thinking, ‘Damn, my brain is so fucking rad.’

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I’m definetely full-blown sick now. My body kind of feels like it did right after my car accident.

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i meant to post about this on tuesday. it was amazing outside. i was walking to cmc from the dorm. there were strange waves of heat rolling at me. the sun was bright red. i couldn’t help but look at it. that night i was walking to class and the moon was a bright red sliver. definitely weird. living in a state that is on fire is pretty bad but the sky was breathtaking.

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did anyone else get oliver’s email invitation to come stay with him at the mansion he’s satying at in middleburg? it is quite possibly one of the most funny e-mails i have ever read. i am going to contact him for permission to post it here.

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>1.15pm: i’m sitting ina classroom mostly full of high school administrators – ie, old white guys with nose and ear hair. i’m not sure if i want to be a principal one day anoymore or not. i always want to be at the top of my field, be it at the radio station, school, whatever. but the day-to-day minutiae of the job look really depressing. and i feel like i wouldn’t have my own kids each year, and i love that. but i get so frustrated with the way so many things work at NK, and i am such an outspoken believer not bitching about something you know you could personally make better…

what is the dumb trend all about with caling school libraries “media centers’? lame.

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things are finally falling place for my nyc trip this weekend. i compromised on wanting to be anonymous and seeing my friends, so i’m staying with marcus & jenny on saturday night and at a hotel on sunday night. i got a sweet-ass-sweet deal at the marriott new york east side- thank you, priceline!

things are also shaping up nicely for halloween on friday. my rigid travelling schedule won’t allow for real partying, so all my festive holiday energy is being siphoned off into the school day itself. since kim and i ended up being dorothy and the scarecrow last week for character day, i am arranging an en masse flinstones costume extravaganza. i think so far we have everyone except barney. and that creepy martian guy who i do not at all endorse. and that green hopping animal (a prehistoric kangaroo? was his name hoppy?). i am going all out, including orange sprayed hair with a huge plastic bone accessory. aw yeah.

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“Dumber, sir.”

Apparently, Fox nearly sued itself because of the Simpsons’ parody of the Fox News crawl at the bottom of the screen.

As we’ve already seen with the Al Franken debacle, Fox has a hard time with the concept of satire. I guess when your content borders so close to self-parody, actual parody would seem like a threat.

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today i got a voicemail from my mother. i am sick today and i was not at work and i was not at work yesterday, either. i got a voicemail from my mother telling me to drink oj and eat chicken soup and get lots of sleep. at the end of the voicemail, my mother said, “love you, darling.” she says this at the end of almost every voicemail ive ever received from her.

my mother is a wonderful, wonderful mother. her death is my worst fear. i am very close with her and i try to be a good daughter to her and i try to help her when i can.

losing my mother is sort of always in the back of my mind. i try to always tell her i love her and i try to not let too many days pass without talking with her. i wish we lived in the same city and could have lunch on saturday afternoons at sidewalk cafes. i wish we could sew together on friday nights or go look at jewelry on sundays. and lately ive been watching ‘youve got mail’ over and over and over again (turrible, i know)…and in this movie, meg ryan does not have a mother. her mother passed away years before the movie begins and this has a big impact upon her life. she struggles with having no one to ask for advice. and seeing this in a mainstream movie makes me feel a little better. not because i have lost my mother, but because i never met my mom’s mom and i feel sad that my mother had to raise me without having someone for advice. i feel like most movies show complete families — or glaze over lost parents unless they are central to the plot — and i feel like most people assume everyone has full sets of parents and grandparents.

i find it interesting when i meet people who have lost parents or grandparents at a young age. the loss of my dad’s dad at age 5 had a big impact upon tripp and me and i know this is not comparable to the effect of losing an immediate family member.

and i know that i am writing on a site where linda is dealing with similar questions of what happens when a parent passes along. and i know that i have similar questions, even though they are not as immediate… and i would like to tell this story which makes me feel better when i wonder about losing my mother, and which i hope might make linda feel a little better when she wonders the same thing:

my grandmother lived with my family for eleven years. this was my dad’s mom. she was a wonderful woman. and her house was cleaned out and packed into boxes and sat in our basement when her property was sold. after the move, we could not locate an important piece of jewelry — a ring, or a pocketwatch, or something. and my mother looked and looked and looked through boxes trying to find it for my grandmother. and my mother could not find it. and my grandmother passed away. and a couple years after my grandmother passed, my mother found the piece of jewelry. and my mother was sad because she could not tell my grandmother that she had found it, and it was safe and sound.

my mother relayed this story to her older sister, who had become the mother-hen of her family after my mother’s parents had both died. aunt laura (her sister), told mom that she should go sit on my grandmother’s bed, and tell her that she had recovered the piece of jewelry, and that everything was in its place. and this is what my mother did.

just writing this story makes me weepy. i actually dont really believe in afterlives and i am fuzzy on religion…but i do believe in some sense of consciousness for people after bodies are gone and after life changes. and i believe that there was a sense of reconciliation between my grandmother and my mother that day. perhaps my grandmother had known all along that the jewelry would turn up. perhaps it was only my mother who needed to reconcile. but i believe, that when my mother is gone, i will be able to sit on a bed somewhere and tell her about my day and tell her about my life…and i believe she will hear me. maybe not in so many words, but i believe she will know. and this is what i think of when i think of losing my mother.

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