A Cricket Near Penn Square

I came to Barnes and Noble to work and kill some time this afternoon – it’s interesting to see what people are up to in the middle of the day. It’s been a weird week for working – on Wednesday I bailed altogether and went to Delaware with my cousins. But this is one of the perks of working remotely; I’ve got to get my social interaction SOMEHOW.

There’s a girl sitting near me who looks like she’s about twelve, although she might be older or younger. I can only WISH we’d had a Barnes and Noble when I was 12—I would’ve been there every weekend for a sugary drink and BOOKS! As it is now, I come to the big chain bookstores now to read the books I don’t want to wait for at the library—usually 3 or 4 hours and I’m all finished and happy. But I think of all the times I spent waiting to either buy or borrow books back when I was 14, and it makes me sad. I could’ve had such good afternoons at B&N!

My house is overrun by crickets. I’ve killed one in the kitchen and one in my bedroom. I’ve seen one in the basement that I didn’t bother to kill. And then last night, when the lights were off and the computer was on, a freaking cricket hopped across my laptop. Hopped slowly, not jumped, which is good. Had it come flying out of nowhere onto my laptop, I probably would’ve screamed. And then I couldn’t find it to kill it. I don’t love killing bugs, but I draw the line when they show up in my bed.

As far as bug infestations go, crickets aren’t the worst. (Although there is one currently in my kitchen tweeting away that needs to die. Talk about annoying.) But the thing is, I really hate the hopping things. They’re just so unpredictable – they could be in your hair or your mouth or up your pant leg at any moment! – and that’s what makes me crazy. Mice, too, because they can run so fast. Give me roaches and stink bugs and snakes and even spiders any day. While they can run and slither, they don’t seem so uncontrollable.

This is the first year I’ve ever seen crickets in my house, though, and it’s very strange. Where are they coming from—and why?

Okay, back to work. I need to go research baby boomer marketing strategies.

Yoga wedding birthdays

I take yoga a few times a week, and I like it, even though one of my teachers bugs me just a little bit. She reads “inspirational” quotes that are cheesy and a bit clichéd and her voice has weird inflections, like she doesn’t quite understand what she’s saying.

Anyway, if you’ve ever done yoga you know that there is usually eastern-ish new age music playing in the background as you breathe and move through your poses. But last night my teacher threw on the old school stuff – and I really do mean old school. We were doing our poses to Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and Pachebel’s Canon in D, which do nothing but make me feel that I’m at a wedding, watching bridesmaids come slowly down the aisle. (And a very specific wedding – it’s outdoors, and there’s a string quartet or harp playing – a movie kind of wedding.) Even if you don’t recognize the names of these songs, if you listen to them, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll think “wedding!”*

So I wonder what Bach or Pachebel would thing if they saw us doing these ancient Eastern poses to their very Western Civ. type music. I kind of like the juxtaposition, but somehow it doesn’t feel quite right.

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And even though summer is only officially over as of 9/21, things have definitely changed around here. There’s always something that happens at the end of August that makes everything feel different. 8 PM suddenly feels like the middle of the night instead of the end of the evening. You can almost feel things roll over.

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This is probably my last post until my birthday! The last post while I’m 30. It’s been a good year, a relaxing year in a lot of ways. I’ve stopped thinking about how old I am, and about expectations. There are no expectations for 30-somethings, really. Everyone just figures out their own life as they go along.

Last year the economy collapsed right before my birthday—the week OF my birthday, as a matter of fact. This year things are much quieter - and that's good. Worldwide economic destruction is NOT the kind of birthday excitement I'm looking for. This year I'm going to a wedding on my birthday, which is much more palatable: drinks and dancing, whoo-hoo!

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*And even though they’re so overused, I can’t help but love them anyway. I think I’d use them in my own wedding—they're just really beautiful pieces of music. My musicians would probably want to kill themselves though. Canon in D? Seriously. Talk about hacky clichés.

Where were you

So tomorrow is September 11.

I don’t think I’ve ever done a “where were you when?” kind of post, so here’s mine.

It was an amazing September day – perfect blue sky, sunshine, low humidity. I had just started (a week previously) a job – my first professional post-college job – as a secretary at a high school in town. I was in charge of attendance, and we had those ScanTron pencil-bubble sheets that the teachers marked.

I had carried the ScanTron sheets back to the scanner (it was temperamental) and was working on that when one of the women in the office came around to tell us that a plane had hit the world trade center. We all exclaimed and commented and thought it was weird. I finished my scanning and went back to my desk.

I don’t actually remember the order of events after that. I do know that we found out pretty quickly that a second building had been hit, and then we knew it wasn’t just an accident. The kids were doing a special reading test all morning and were locked in their classrooms, so there was no great outpouring from the student body – but as they finished their testing word started to spread and the teachers turned on their classroom TVs.

I was still very new at my job and learning the ropes, plus I wasn’t sure how much time I should spend not working, so I sat obediently at my desk and put info into the computer. The administrators in the office had the TV on, and at one point one of them came out and asked if I’d seen any news and told me I should come watch. And I did for awhile.

The thing I remember most is the feeling, though. Because we didn’t really know what was going on . . . for awhile it seemed that every half-hour another target had been hit. Planes were missing. The president was somewhere. Dick Cheney was hiding. We had no idea when it would end and a kind of panicked nervousness overhung all my work that day.

By 11 AM or so, some panicky parents were coming to get their kids. By 12:45, we’d let the kids out early. I think I stayed for the rest of the afternoon, but I’m not sure what I was working on.

You’d think the days after the event would stick out to me, too, but really everyone just went about their daily lives (except for those in NYC, of course). We all went back to work and school and did everything we’d done before. I guess there was news. The internet was still pretty new and relatively small at that point, so no one spent tons of time on it. The other week when Mike was down here we were imagining 9/11 Facebooking and Twittering, and how absolutely insane that would’ve been.

And it’s strange to think about the fact that my life hasn’t changed that much in 8 years, other than my job and the fact I now couldn’t be torn off the internet if something happened. But there are kids who were fourteen then who are 22 now, and they are very different. 9/11 happened in their childhood, before they grew up. Their lives now are completely different. The kids who were doing that reading test are now working, married adults – I think I work in the same building as at least one of them.

So that’s my 9/11 story. I was about to turn 23. My life situation may not have changed much, but I think I have – even much more than I realize.

Scraps of happy

I use my blog mainly for ranting these days, and believe me, there is no end to the stuff I could go on and on about that drives me insane.

BUT!

I am not going to do that today. Good stuff is everywhere.

My cousin had a baby on Saturday (honorary nephew!) and his name is Jack and he is chunky and cute and healthy, so that’s awesome. Mad Men season 3 is underway and I’m enjoying it immensely. I DID get a new camera, so I can take pictures of the new baby. I’m in the process of painting and doing some general home improvement stuff that’s making me happy. Plus, youtube has videos on how to caulk a bathtub – score! (Honestly, what did we do before the internet?)

Mike came down to work in my office today, so I have a co-worker (very temporarily) and it’s a little bit like the olden days. Good times. Also the weather is perfect and we walked to Wawa for lunch.

I’m reading Fred Clark’s Slacktivist takedown of the Left Behind series, which is full of complete and utter WIN. He’s systematically destroying the books page by page with some pretty heavy and awesome snark AND Jesus-based theology (my favorite combo!). This is taking a long time to read, because he writes 3,000 words for every 2 pages of book (so after 6 years, he’s only on book 2 of the series.) But I’m still loving it.

And I have a Labor Day pool party to go to, and a wedding in a few weeks, and the new Gabaldon book comes out on September 22. There hasn’t been a new one of those since before I started this blog. So it’s about time.

Normally I despise the month of August, but this year it was actually pretty great. And September should be, too, I think. The rest of this year is looking stellar, as a matter of fact—at least until the question of What to Do for Christmas must be faced. It’s an odd-numbered year, which means married sibs and cousins are with the in-laws and it may just be me and my parents sitting around and staring at each other, which is depressing. So let’s push that thought off for another day.

Hooray for late summer!