oh jeez

I love being sick. Not because it’s particularly nice to have snot dribbling out of your nose like it’s some kind of leaky faucet, and not because it’s pleasant feeling like your body aged 60 years overnight….but because sometimes it’s nice having an excuse to lie in bed all day.

Sure, I’m living on my own so I can pretty much lie in bed as long as I want even when I’m in perfect health…theoretically. Unfortunately, years of living in my mother’s house has conditioned me to be really bad at sleeping in. That is, my natural desire is to want to sleep all day, but every few minutes after 8 am I keep waking up expecting my mother to barge in and start scolding me for being lazy. Of course, my mother is now 8000 miles away and is probably not going to be barging in every few minutes in the morning yelling at me to wake up, but old habits die hard. I feel guilty when I sleep in.

I think this was my mother’s way of trying to prevent me from becoming her. My mother, like every normal human being I suppose, LOVES sleeping in. And the woman is a Master of The Nap. At about 2 pm she might crawl into bed, telling anyone who will listen, “I’m just going to rest my eyes for a for minutes, I swear, just for a couple minutes.” And for us kids, we know that this means that we’ll be eating Chinese food or pizza for dinner tonight, because at 9 pm or so she’ll wake up and groggily ask what time it is and…”Oh G-d! Is it really??? Oh jeez….well what should we do about dinner?”

The best though was when my mom would come barging in to wake me up, and I’d weakly say, “I don’t feel good.” And boom. Immediately my mom’s voice would change from a scolding yell to a soothing whisper. From that point on I would be allowed to lie in bed for as long as I wanted, whether it was till noon or until next Wednesday. Periodically my mom would come in to wake me, but this time offering orange juice (or Sprite if I were suffering from some kind of stomach ailment).

So this weekend I’ve been sick. Meaning I’ve been lying in bed all day and not feeling in the slightest bit guilty or lazy. All I need now is someone to bring me some OJ…

Last night I saw “Twilight” for the first time….oh man….I’m so embarrassed to admit that I liked it. Am I turning back into a preteen girl? What a horrible thought. Christ…. Luckily I was the youngest girl in the room watching the movie, so I guess it was slightly less lame for me to be enjoying the movie. Only slightly. All I know is that from the amount of squealing and swooning and gushing going on in the room, I felt like I was at some 7th grade slumber party. But in the awesomest sense possible.

Girl One: “OH MY GAAAD, HE’S IN HER ROOM!!!”
Girl Two: “I’m going to start leaving my window open at night and hope that a hot vampire guy comes in while I’m sleeping.”
Girl Three: “Well it couldn’t hurt. …Unless he eats you.”



So, completely unrelated, there’s this girl in my class who clearly doesn’t like paying attention to the teacher. She’s constantly bored and uninterested and fidgety. Which I can totally relate to, because I am also bored during class. It’s difficult to sit through grammar class for several hours every day, and to top it off the teacher is strange and boring. But when it comes down to it, class is optional, a gift from the government. But this girl…she squirms like someone is holding her down, forcing her to be in class. It’s like she’s struggling desperately to get out of her chair, unbearably bored yet unable to just get up off her ass and leave the classroom. She constantly lets out exasperated sighs, and says, “This is so boring,” or “I can’t stand this,” or “No, I can’t sit here any longer.” Which I don’t really understand. That’s not to say that class is always a joy for me, but at least I just shut up about it. Okay, I’m bored, so I’ll doodle in the margins of my notes. Or I’ll keep a tally of how many times the teacher says “Okayyyyyyyyyyy,” or I’ll daydream. I don’t really understand the need for constantly announcing how horrible the class is. Just leave or shut up. It’s driving me crazy. Once she tried to take a nap during class—using my shoulder as a pillow—and I nearly lost it. I wanted to smack her and yell, “GROW THE FUCK UP ALREADY!” but instead I just sort of shrugged my shoulders until she took the hint that I wasn’t a pillow. What’s really frustrating is that this girl—or woman actually—is a college graduate, and not just a worker but a “professional.” She’s several years older than me. And I’m a college drop-out, the youngest in the class by several years. And yet…who knows how to behave herself?