my mother needed some items from Home Depot the other night and really wanted me to go with her so i obliged.  about halfway through her shopping spree i realized that the forklift we were using to carry the items she was purchasing was getting pretty unstable, and that there might be a problem fitting all of that stuff into the subaru outback we had borrowed from dad.  she kept shushing me, telling me that we would make it fit.

even the lady at the register “reminded” us that you could keep things in the store for 24 hours after purchasing in case we needed to get a truck to haul our purchases home.  mother shook her head and promised that we could manage.

forty-five minutes later, after an older man helped us lift some of the things into the trunk and two store employees “reminded” us that we could keep purchased items at the store until we could come back with a truck, mother somehow (albeit stubbornly) fit every single item into the car.  except us.  she wanted me to drive, since supposedly i can see better at night, so she insisted that she could squeeze into the space between the ladder and the vanity in the back seat (the front seat was occupied by two ceiling fans).

so i drove as carefully as i could with two ceiling fans threatening to throw me into nuetral and mother in the back positioned like some type of contortionist.  the situation itself may not have been so bad if at the moment we started to drive she hadn’t been hit by a very potent gas attack.  and we couldn’t open the windows lest something precariously crammed into the car would fall out.

“someday you will be able to laugh about this!” my mother shouted over the vent turned out full blast.

“i have to laugh, otherwise i’d cry.”

“this is NOT bad enough to bring tears to your eyes.”

“no, i’d cry because i have your genes.”

The past two days have been gloriously overcast and stormy.  the air was crisp, cool, and smelled of rain reminding me that i can hold out through the last of the heat, fall is almost here!  unfortunately, tomorrow is one of those hot days i have to live through before fall is officially here.  and then i remind myself that there are places in the US that have weather like this all the time.

yes kit, i’m talking about seattle.  if i could teleport my job, my house, aiden, and his medical school program there i would do it in a heartbeat.  but until then i’m going to have to live through all four seasons and whatnot every freaking year.  blurg.

I’m stubborn, I like the idea that you should “Never, never, never give up.”  But I heard something tonight that made a lot of sense: Keep trying, but when it is over, learn to live with it and move on.  Not as succinct as the previous, I know, but perhaps healthier for the mind.  I realized that this definitely applied to a friendship i’ve been nursing.

every relationship needs time and effort to keep it going, but that isn’t going to do much good for anyone if there isn’t a connection.  you can start with a connection by any means, that something that brought you together, and if that something is strong enough to keep it going you have yourself a friendship.  the problem is that sometimes that connection goes away, and every other connection seems to fall apart.  and the friendship might not be enough to stand it.

i never never never want to give up a friend.  but sometimes there isn’t one thing on your side to keep you together.  it sucks, but it doesn’t have to be the worst thing in the world.  it gets to the point where you realize that your lives are very much different, you no longer have anything in common; maybe you will again, maybe you won’t.  but right now?…

you can’t force friendship.  maybe it is time to move on and stop trying to pretend that we have anything in common anymore.  it makes me feel like a coward, a failure, but in the end I don’t want us to ruin what we had.  i just want to remember what was and move on.  it is over, let’s live with it and move on.

as much as my stubborn self hates the idea.

Aiden bought a wii this past weekend with money he got back from selling old books.  i was pretty excited about this since i’ve never wanted a gaming station bad enough to actually fork over the cash, but I’ve never been one to back down from a game of mariokart… and the wii’s virtual tennis, bowling (makes drunken bowling a little easier), and fighting aren’t so bad either.  but imagine my extreme excitement upon finding out that aiden had bought an extra controller, mariokart, AND an extra wheel.  i thought that i had died and gone to mariokart heaven.

i think half the fun of having mariokart is the trash talking that it evokes from the both of us.  and not just during the game (Princess Peach and I have words).

“is your mom home?  i think you might need her to dry your tears after i beat you.”

“how does it feel to lose this badly to a girl?  is it as emasculating as i think it is?”

“i just feel that it might be criminal the way i’m going to rape you during this game.  try not to hate me for it.”

“do your friends know that you drive like my grandma?”

“what do you want to do when i’m done wiping the floor with your ass?”

“do you always drive like a woman? i haven’t noticed that before.”

and that’s just me.  ah, good times.

the other day i had a hair appointment and since i spend a lot of time sitting around with two different periods of dye setting and pretty much nothing else to do, i like to bring along a good book.  unfortunately, all of my hair salon favorites are packed away in boxes, and so i had to borrow from beth’s collection.  and while her HP collection was in reach my eyes wandered over Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and I decided to give that a go.

in the first section it goes into Chinese Foot Binding and let me tell you, ew.  Seriously.  I cannot believe that people did that.  I mean, I’m not discounting any other fashion senselessness of european or american make but seriously?  ew!  i was sitting there getting my hair done and just about ready to puke from what they described as normal: the toes breaking, the foot DYING, the stench, the pus, and the EW!!!

i am so totally sticking to HP next time.

i’m obsessed with knowing the weather in Seattle and San Francisco.  this is partially to get me excited about the fact that in two years i will most likely be moving to one of those places.  i can’t help but get excited about places that have clouds and rain generally on their forecast.  i love clouds and rain.  i hate extreme heat and extreme snow.  why am i living here again?  oh yeah, i kind of like some people here.

this coming week it is raining in seattle.  so jealous.  because although they have promised clouds in salt lake i know they are lying.  they also promise highs maxing out at 92, this would also be a lie.  92 in the shade?  maybe if your thermometer doesn’t count higher than 92.  ugh.

and in san francisco?  what else?  mid sixties, partly cloudy, and fog in the early morning.  it is only possible for me to imagine heaven in a place like san francisco.  and the fact that they allow gays to marry?  icing on the freaking cake.

this just in: i’m moving to san francisco… right now.

The Hills returns to MTV tonight.  I have to say that I’m a bit torn on the issue; should I start up my addiction to crack again, or should I continue my months of well attended rehab.

I guess the real (albeit run on) question is:  Do I get that excited about the thought of seeing Lo and Audrina face off?  Do I really care whether Lauren and Stephanie remain friends?  Do I need to spend another season staring at Heidi’s face guessing how many procedures she is away from becoming Michael Jackson?  Do I want to watch each episode in the sheer and utter hope that this will be the season that Speidi will suddenly be run over and subsequently killed by a large poop encrusted bus?

The answer?  Yes, Yes I do.

beth and i were walking dumbass late the other night and when we returned home to find that she had been locked out.  while we were trying to find keys to get her in the house we realized that dumbass was missing.  so we quietly tried calling him and scanning the dark bushes to find him when suddenly i noticed extra sloshing from my mother’s koi pond (yet another remodel).

dumbass had somehow gotten himself into the pond, but since the walls are high (or the pond is deep, whatever) he was unable to get himself out.  so he kept swimming around and around until beth and i realized that one of us was going to have to get in the pond and push the 65 lb golden retriever out.  being that beth is a hippie who hardly ever wears shoes, and wears shorts that really epitomize the name “shorts” she was the clear candidate.  i got to move the front end of this genius bus.

we finally got him out, without waking the neighborhood and then had to drag him away from the pond into the yard because he wanted to get back in.  i call him dumbass and yet i’ve dated men dumber than him.  so who is really the dumbass here?  let’s not answer that question.

Kit has an adorable sister, Em, and a hippie older brother, Dwight.  Kit’s family is infinitely cooler than mine so sometimes I pretend that they are my family by stalking hanging out with them as much as possible.  Kit makes this very hard because she doesn’t live in town anymore, but Em makes up for this by hanging out with me when she isn’t busy producing adorably well-behaved genetically superior children.  sit on it, brangelina.

not to make it sound like Em is a baby machine, she has two children.  it’s just that i imagine with the way that they act, look, and smell a lot of work went into producing such adorable children.  kit’s mother calls them “false advertising”.  if i thought that all children would become those two, I would have lots of children.  but i know better.  my children will inevitably be hairless monkey versions of rosemary’s baby.

it seems that my only chance at awesome children would be if Dwight were available, which he isn’t.  so there goes that plan.  It isn’t to say that Aiden doesn’t have awesome genes, they just might not be enough to save our children.  and when the apocalypse comes we all know who to blame… I wasn’t the one who wanted kids.

the other day i was visiting the workplace Starbucks when i saw a priest from my high school.  suddenly i felt very aware of the fact that i was NOT WEARING A PROPER JUDGE MEMORIAL CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL APPROVED UNIFORM!  I was wearing a sweater that was neither navy blue nor itchy wool.  and there might have been GUM IN MY MOUTH! and i was pretty sure that I had nail polish on but not enough time to check.

I was about to shrink against the wall hoping that Father Norman wouldn’t see me when I realized that I GRADUATED 6 YEARS AGO… which means that I can totally wear what I want, bitches.  Ahem.  Please don’t tell Father Norman that I just swore.

And then something even more horrific happened.  I heard myself say, “Good afternoon, Father Norman” loudly enough that he could hear me.  It is like seeing a cop so you slam on your brakes and then realizing that you weren’t speeding in the first place… so you get out of your car, take off your shirt, and wave it at the cops.

I was strangely terrified of adults when I was in high school, almost as much as I was of getting GASP! detention. and I guess some broken part of my brain is trying to fix this by reminding myself that in some circles I am now known as one of those adult-type-persons.  Weird.

So I had a pretty normal/awkward conversation where I learned that Father Norman is now the priest for my hospital.  Meaning that I get to have many more exchanges just like this one, so myabe I will become used to the encounters and not freak out so much.  More likely I might have to start wearing a Judge uniform just to be on the safe side of not peeing my pants at work.