I feel simultaneously old, proud, and broke.

My son wants an electric guitar for his 15th birthday.

Maybe I’ll dig up my old Led Zeppelin chord charts for him, while I’m at it. Ah, youth. Ah, memories. Ah, wasted lessons! Anybody got a cheap guitar for sale, let me know.

Houston, I love you, but you’re stupid.

How hard is it to drive without touching your car on the other cars around you? It’s too hard for people who take my freeway home, apparently. Especially the people entering/exiting on a certain exit. Every time the DJ says, “And there’s a wreck on [Gwen’s freeway],” I say, “Was it on [the exit where 90% of the wrecks occur]?” and the DJ says, “Yes, Gwen. Yes, it was.”

So then, today, it was raining. It’s raining a little because Tropical Depression Ernie (or whatever they named it) is edging its way into town. It might be followed by Hurrican Dean, and it might not. But that’s beside the point. The point is, it started to rain, and therefore several people in Houston automatically lost the few driving skills they had. There was a multi-car pile-up on my freeway this morning. There always is, every effing time it rains. Not when it storms, and not when it hurricanes… all it has to do is rain, and people are wrecking all over the place.

People. Put down your cell phones. Put down your eyelash curlers. Stop texting on your Blackberries. For the love of God, stop working your Sudoku puzzles. (I swear to God on the Bible, I saw a woman doing that on the freeway the other day. While driving! Granted, traffic was stop and go. But still!)

If you know in your heart that you aren’t a very good driver, or that you’re easily distracted, or that you’re really bad at judging distances and brake times… Please, please, please put down all your other stuff and keep your eyes on the road. Damn it. Seriously, people. Get it together. What would you do if you had to live in a city where it snowed? You’d be dead by now, wouldn’t you?

Also: If you know your car’s a piece of crap and it’s likely to stall on the freeway, take the effing feeder road, instead. Or, at the very least, ride in the freeway’s rightmost lane, so you can get to the shoulder if anything happens. Leave the middle and left lanes for people who can afford tune-ups and gasoline, okay?

I know no one who needs to is reading this. I know there’ll be some jacked-up, time-consuming accident on the way home this very afternoon, in fact. Screw it. I’m doing happy hour after work. I’m not driving home til dark.

Food Patterns and Vanity

Do you ever get into a certain food flow? Like, a craving that lasts a long time?

Right now I’m really into eating eggs and toast for breakfast. Every day. I think I’ve had eggs and toast for about 18 days straight now. My body, it needs the protein. It wants the bread and butter for comfort, too. I’m thinking about buying a toaster, actually, so I don’t have to outsource the toast production all the time. But I know the minute I get one, I’ll stop wanting eggs and toast. I’ll go back to Special K Protein, or Generic Version of Special K With Strawberries, instead.

My other food flow, lately, is plums. Plums are pretty awesome, don’t you think? They don’t get mushy as fast as peaches, and they don’t get mealy like nectarines. And their skins hold everything in, and they’re a compact, almost cute size, and they only have, like, 40 calories each. And you can eat almost the whole thing, apart from the pit and the stem. They’re like cherries, but bigger and cheaper, and less susceptible to mold. So I’m really into plums right now. (You’re like, “Uh, thanks for that info,” right?)

Today, in other calorie-related news, I finally lost enough weight to wear this shirt that I’ve been holding onto, without its buttons popping off my chest and putting out somebody’s eye.

Which isn’t too crow-worthy, in the grand scheme of things, because that just means I’ve fought back down to the same weight I was at a year ago. And I still have quite a ways to go to meet my goal, which is “the weight I was at 2 years ago.”

And the seasons, they go ’round and ’round, and the yo-yo diet goes up and down. I’m singin’ ’bout a carousel of fat…
(Sorry, Joni Mitchell. Sorry!)

I mean, none of this really matters, in the grand scheme of things. But, at the same time, I’m happy to be wearing this shirt again.

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Posted in Houston, parenting, vanity, venting on 08/16/2007 04:57 pm
 
 

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