And I like you more

I was going through my old journals yesterday and I came across an entry that startled me in my Zimbabwe journal.  I count my Peace Corps days as among the gossipy-est ones of my life.  No matter how much a person tried to stay out of that scene, PeaceCorps volunteers were so far up one anothers’ asses [...]

Open letter to a long lost friend

Yesterday, my colleague Angie and I rushed to the bathroom after returning from lunch.  We were headed into a 2 hour meeting at an unfamiliar site and had just returned from a spicy thai lunch with lots and lots of water followed by a trip to Starbucks.  Something had to give and it had to give fast.
As [...]

Choice?

My younger brother once reported that he had taken a political stance quiz and he had scored a perfect ultra-conservative. He was still in middle school. He would sneak P.J. O’Rourke books up to his room and read them for hours, occasionally laughing out-loud. My parents have voted for a Bush every time one of them [...]

Can I get some change from that bribe?

I can’t remember who it was who once advised me to always keep an emergency $20 bill stashed someplace in my wallet where I would forget about it until I absolutely needed it.  It might have been my husband, my mom, the creepy night manager of the restaurant where I waited tables during high school [...]

Snow Days

Yes, I am an 11 year old stuck in a thirty-something body.  I love snow days, and I check the ten day forecast obsessively for the possibility of snow from Thanksgiving until mid-March. 
Until today, there has been nothing in my area.  This morning, when I logged on to Weather.com and my zipcode popped up, not [...]

Bullies, part one

Now that Trainwrecks is completely derailed, I’m guessing that violentacres will become my next guilty pleasure.
Her most recent post about bullies struck a chord with me.  After moving during the 6th grade, I was bullied several times.  Perhaps more ostracised than bullied, but either way, it was no fun.  Looking back, I can think of [...]

Dear Trainwrecks.net

I come back from a three day weekend to find a Dear John letter where your loveable wreckiness was once found.  I googled madly to try to figure out what was going on, but all I found was some dry blog posts and Yahoo answers.  I’ll try to turn my perverse sadness at losing this guilty [...]

Sea Donkey

I’m relatively certain that “The Sea Donkey” (referenced here as well)  is my best friend’s step-sister. 
If she also force feeds her kid to keep him quiet, complains loudly at the myriad ways every public place she enters is ignoring the needs of people with BAYBEES,  plays the “until you’re a parent, you can never understand” card [...]

Bailie

In sixth grade, my school got a new music teacher, Mrs. Bailie.  Mrs. Bailie had really thick, wavy brown hair cut above the shoulder with bangs.  The resulting look was striking.  It took no more than two days for the student body of our 100 student school to dub her “Snoopy” behind her back.  Her [...]

Running

I started running as punishment, penance for a five month, exercise free, food and wine bender.  I was recently married, and that, I was told, was a certain trigger for weight gain.  I initially blamed the abrupt halt in my good exercise habits and the addition of half a liter of wine to my weekly [...]