newyear schmewyear

You know when you're really hungry, and you eat something that you didn't really enjoy, so you want to just keep eating because, gosh darn it, even though you're full, you're not really satisfied? This mint chocolate chip ice cream is not really that good...therefore I have to eat the entire carton in order to make up for what a small bowl of really good mint chocolate chip ice cream would've done for me. Right?

That's how I feel about winter.

I'm having a hard time not listening to Christmas music.

I put away my Christmas decorations (they're not very far - there's not really an "away" part of my little apartment) & have strategically placed my Christmas presents in their proper places (which mostly means "my stomach").

I'm watching the Falcons & the Giants, neither of whom I care about, but if I close my eyes and just listen to the crowds, whistles, and audibles, I can pretend it's a few seasons ago when the Colts were actually a team and I used to watch them and they used to win.

It is not cold outside.

It just doesn't feel like winter.


I would like for it to snow. Not the "Oh it's snowing! And now it's 60 degrees" type snow. I want it to snow.

I mean, I'm not saying it has to look like this:

But it wouldn't hurt.

I don't even know what Kentucky would do with that kind of snow.

The sun is great and all, but clouds are also God's creation. And who are we to praise Him for one type of creation over another? I feel gypped.

I mean, I can't even wear my wool socks because my feet are already sweaty most of the time.

GYPPED.

Boo. >:(

unbridled spirit

My car is an official Kentuckian. I was going to join him in this identity transfer, but then the car inspector wrote down my Wisconsin driver's license number and talked about how Wisconsin and Florida have the longest license numbers, and then I felt bad going and changing my driver's license after all the work he just put into write down its number. So I'm still a Wisconsin resident for a little bit longer. This makes me feel a little more legitimized when I get excited to watch a Packers game, because, hey, I'm legally a Cheesehead.

And guess what: The Packers are throwing a celebratory game in my honor on Thursday, September 8th, to kick off football season and my 24th year of birth. Just watch and see if Aaron Rodgers doesn't throw a touchdown and then throw his arms up in the air and shout, "HAPPY BIRTHDAY HEATHER!" Because it's all about me.

As I waited in line at the county clerk's office to register Dule (my car - he's named after Dule Hill, which I don't know if the real Dule Hill would appreciate), I stood sandwiched between a guy who kept turning around and smiling at me, and a girl who looked like she'd share her entire life story with me if I merely made eye-contact with her.

Finally I said, "Great way to spend an afternoon, isn't it?"
The guy started speaking rapidly in a thick Spanish accent, and I, not understanding any of it, smiled and chuckled and then said, "Yeah."

This is always my default position when I don't understand what people are saying. This is going to bite me one day in a very scarring way, I'm sure. Like the time I was at a Mexican restaurant with a friend and, after my friend, let's call him Fred, went to the bathroom, our waiter pounced on me like a hungry leopard.
"Is he your boyfriend or your brother?" He asked.
Oh. Um...."Well, neither."
The waiter, let's call him Manuel, smiled. "He looks like he could be your brother." Translation: You shouldn't consider dating him. DATE ME!
I chuckled. "He does sort of look like my brother."
Here's where the indistinguishable part of our conversation came in, and, not understanding what he just said, I just smiled with closed lips and shook my head.

WHAT POSSESSES ME TO DO THIS? Why do I feel it's okay to answer people when I haven't even heard their question?

Manuel, taking my shaking head to mean that I actually heard his question and was honestly answering him, looked me in the eye and said, "Too bad." Then he walked away.

What do you think he could've asked? Whatever it was, I think I unintentionally led him to believe I was off the market. Which is a blessing, because I didn't particularly feel like going out with my waiter from the Mexican restaurant. But this time I was spared; what if next time I accidentally agree to something?

"Mumble mumble mumble mumble."
"Heh, heh, yeah."
"Really? Okay, pick you up at 8!"
"Wait, what?"
"Bring your castanets!"

Back at the county clerk's office: The clerk who helped me with my paperwork was friendly enough, but she never really made eye contact with me.
She asked, "Which license plate do you want?"
I looked at the two license plates pictured on the window, one that said "Unbridled Spirit" under the picture of the Kentucky horse, and one that said, "In God We Trust." I chose the unbridled spirit one, because, though I trust in God, I think it's a little presumptuous to assume that all of Kentucky does.
I tried to say "Unbridled Spirit" as inspiringly passionate as I could, like William Wallace maybe, but the woman simply smiled accommodatingly and went about her business.
Well, of course I accepted this as a challenge to make her day brighter. I waited in silence for an opportune moment, watching her float from left to right as she grabbed papers, stapled them, ripped others, tossed some, filed those, stamped here, all in one fluid motion. I looked at her in captivated awe.
"Wow," I said. "It's like a dance."
Her face relaxed and she smiled a genuine smile and chuckled.
I'm in! "You've got this down."
"Oh yeah," she said.
When she handed me my papers, she looked me in the eye and smiled. I smiled back. Day brighter.

Then I noticed she put my "Fayette County" sticker on my license plate completely crooked.

After all we'd been through.

operation: fly north

Spring keeps knocking on my door.

"Listen, Spring," I tell it, "I have nothing against you. You have a lot of things going for you. But I just don't love you...like that. Please stop coming."

But it doesn't listen.

It's already gotten inside the minds of the community. Boys playing basketball in their driveways. Girls riding their bikes down the street. Mothers yelling out their doors for their children to find their shoes and come inside for dinner.

They have no resistance!

And I don't know how much longer I can hold out.

Kroger is selling lilies and hyacinths and lilacs and, I would still be okay, but then I saw them.

The daffodils.

Spring is so sneaky! Blast its yellow-petaled tactics, like drops of sweet, syruppy sunlight, smiling, laughing, bobbing their heads under a bright blue sky...so happy....

There's only one option for me: I have to flee.

I tell people it's because I can't find a job (which I can't), or because I'm hoping to go to grad school this fall anyway (which I am), but the real reason I am packing up all of my things and moving back to Wisconsin is because, well,

Winter is still there.

Winter and I have had a very long love affair that goes through months of turmoil every year. People often shake their fists at the wintry sky and ask, "Why must you snow?" But, you see, Winter and I, we understand one another. I understand why it must snow. And, in the same way, it understands why I want it to snow. But we can't explain it to you. You wouldn't understand.

I wonder if it knows how much I'm struggling right now.

And I have to hurry, because now tulips are beginning to grow right outside my front door.

Spring.

Curse you and your cheerfulness.

do not tell me what I can and cannot do when I rock

Three days ago I sat at a traffic light in Lexington, blasting Lifehouse's "Everything" from my speakers, because a.) I love that song, and b.) my windows were down and I wanted to drown out the city sounds. Suddenly out of my peripheral ear I heard a guy's voice, and I looked up to see said guy leaning out of his truck window next to me. I thought it might be a repeat of the time I met my future husband, but it wasn't. This guy was shouting at me, "You have a flat tire."
"I have a flat tire?" I questioned, as if some strange man would lean out his window and shout at me, "Hey, that lady three cars down has a flat tire."
He answered affirmatively, and I thanked him without a good attitude, then drove over to a neighborhood street and called my dad.

Since the tire obviously wasn't completely flat (seeing as how I didn't even notice it was lacking air), Dad told me to take it to a gas station and fill it with air, then drive to a Wal-Mart or some other mechanical place and ask them to fix it. So I pulled up to a Shell gas station and saw a big sign that said, "Air, 75 cents." George Harrison was not kidding when he wrote "Taxman." It's air. It's all around us. We breathe it every day; sometimes more than once. I should've just placed my mouth over the nozzle on the tire and exhaled really hard. (You can tell I know very little about cars, and it's about to get a great deal more obvious.)

As I lifted the gun (because it had a trigger), I saw a sign warning, "Injury may occur. If overfilled, tire may explode." I stared at the sign with the weapon in my hand, my eyes wide, watching a slideshow in my mind of the possible ways I could be decapitated or permanently blinded by my exploding tire.

Did you know they make gauges to determine how much air needs to be in a tire? I didn't.

I kept one hand in front of my face, as if that would protect me from the rubbery shrapnel, and squeezed air into the tire, occasionally stepping back to measure its rotundness against the other healthy tires. "Eyeballing" is a very accurate method that will soon make it into all the indexes of university science textbooks.

Wal-Mart's tire service was closed, but the greasy people there told me to try Chevron.
"I don't know where that is," I replied.
"Across from KFC."
"We have a KFC?"

On my way down the street Dad called, and I told him I filled the tire with air and was on my way to Chevron.
"Did you use the gauge to see how much air you put in?" Dad asked.
Suddenly I remembered that long proby thing with numbers up and down it that I used to use in the car when I was bored and pretending to be a doctor. But I very slowly answered, "No." He could've told me that that was for checking air BEFORE I checked the air.

I found the Chevron (and the KFC), whose sign was almost unreadable behind the grime. I pulled up to the garage and stepped out of my car as a tattooed man with a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth and a gut that made his pants sag walked up to me. I should learn to at least pretend like I know what I'm doing in situations like this, but instead I said something like, "I don't know what I'm doing." I probably mentioned that my dad told me to come here, too, and anytime a girl mentions that her dad told her to do something, the potential to be hit on or treated like a child increases by a baker's dozen.

Cigarette Man (shortened to Cig) felt my tire, measured the tire pressure with a gauge (glad somebody told him), and said, "You got a leak, baby girl." Baby girl? Yeah, I definitely shouldn't have mentioned my dad. He took off my tire, chatting amiably in an equally grimy southern accent (I found out he hates Wisconsin and that he was in "the service," though which service I'm not really sure). Then he sprayed soapy water on the tire to find out where the leak was, and I was fascinated by the spewing bubbles coming from the hole. Finally he stuffed a large metal probe into the hole to make it bigger (seems counter-productive, doesn't it?), before twisting a long soggy cloth that looked like a pre-chewed Slim Jim around some plyers and shoving it into the hole. Problem solved.

Cig put my tire back on and told me, "I'll give this to you for ten instead of fifteen," he said.
"Oh, okay," I said, taken off'guard. "Thanks!" Yeah, definitely a good idea to mention my dad.

But when I went to pay for the tire, the lady at the front desk heard what I'd gotten done and said, "Ten dollars, sweetie." Really. Ten instead of fifteen, huh, Cig? I'm sure.

somebody loves me, I wonder who?

I woke up at 6 this morning, and now that it's 7:30 I'm thinking about taking a nap. Mom put lavender-colored sheets on my bed, and for some reason they are more appealing to sleep in than those of a different color. Pretty soon it'll be time to put on my flannel sheets with little penguins on them, drinking hot chocolate and going ice fishing, and for this I cannot wait. My teddy bear, Gilbert, also cannot wait. This year marks our eighth anniversary of sharing a bed. Dad took him out of the car upon my arrival home on Monday and said, "He's getting flat." Yes, well, he's lived an adventurous life. Adventures tend to flatten us out over time.

Speaking of adventures, the other day Courtney and I were driving down Broadway, coming out of Lexington on our way back from church. We had our windows down and my arm was casually strewn out the passenger-side window, riding the wind like a seal with wings. I turned my head just in time to see a middle-aged man with a gotee lift his own hand in a friendly wave as his car passed ours. I waved back and said, "Hello." Then I turned to Courtney and asked, "Why did that man just wave at us?"
"I don't know," Courtney answered.
"Do you think it's because I have my hand out the window, and he has his hand out the window?"
"Yeah, it was probably like a mutual 'we both have our hands out the window' type wave."

You know, like when motorcyclists wave as they pass each other, because somehow just because you're both on motorcycles, you have a bond. From now on I'm going to wave at people I walk past, because, Hey! I have legs, and you have legs, and we're both walking on them! What are the odds.

Sometimes Courtney and I are willingly naive.

Well, I picked up Courtney's cell phone to change the background to say something that she'd remember me by, and as I did so, I heard a male voice shout, "859-2415!" I looked up to see Mid-Life Crisis Guy's car beside ours. It was a security vehicle. He was shouting his number out his window. I laughed somewhat shocked, nervous, and delighted all at the same time. He called it out again, and this time I called back, "Are you rich?" He veered right for the turning lane as he called back, "I could be!"

Well. See? All those people who tell you that you don't have to find your mate in college were right. They could be driving down the street in a security vehicle right now, just waiting to desperately shout their phone number into your car. I'm keeping my windows down at all times from now on.