10:00 a.m. - 2007-03-13
summer time and the livin's easy
I don't feel like going to work just yet. i should be getting ready, but I am enjoying my morning of emailing and coffee that I think I will just go in a little later than usual. I'm the boss so I'm allowed.
There are exciting things afoot, dear readers. A baby in mrs. Cooke's belly. A wedding for Brooke and Gabe. New relationships. Friends moving close from far away.
I signed up for my first pension plan yesterday. Wowie. I never realized how stupid it is to not have one. The amount of money you can have for retirement if you start saving now is incredible.
I never told you about my trip to Harrisburg. it was amazingly fun. our big night out ended with my friend Leah challenging this guy she met to a dance off so we ran down the streets of harrisburg at 1:30am to find a dance club and they, in fact, did have a dance off in a club where NO ONE else was dancing. I would say she won, but it was close.
Harrisburg is a nice city, but they do not want you to leave apparently. We followed our directions out of the city on our way home. The streets downtown are almost all one way and we simply could not get onto the main road to leave town. After at least a half hour of illegal u-turns, yelling out the window to ask strangers how to get to the highway, and missing the street we needed, we finally found the right way out. The first thing you do to travel west is to cross this long bridge, over the river. We crossed that, drove for a while, glad to be out of the city and on our way home. We merged onto a few other roads, following the directions...we got on now less than four other highways...and about 20 minutes later, somehow, we were traveling in the opposite direction over the same damned bridge back into town. and of course, once again, we could not find our freaking way back to that bridge. It is amazing that i am back in Pittsburgh at all.
We went to a dance club on saturday night for a friend's 25th birthday. My friend Kel's cousin, nicole was turning 25 and she decided that she should have three nightsout in a row because she plans to be pregnant by her next birthday. So she went out thursday and friday and we joined the creew on Saturday. Both Nicole and her husband looked a little green around the gills from two nights of shots and irish car bombs. Nicole is 2 inches shy of 5 feet and boy can that girl put em down. Rum and cokes were on special and she ordered two at a time. There was some dacing on the bar and such. kevin and I mostly laid low and observed...although when "Pour some Sugar on Me" came on, I just had to head to the dance floor. At one point, this drunk girl leaned over and yelled in my ear "No! you have to dance like a stripper to this song!" And she proceeded to demonstrate. I gave her a big thumbs up and continued with my conservative-I'm-not-drunk-I'm-married-please-don't-come-up-and-freak-me-from-behind dance.
The funny thing is that nicole was completely wasted, but she had excellent motor and verbal skills nonetheless, and at about 1am she came back over to the bar and said to her husband calmly "Ok. i am very drunk. Please take me home."
We watched this frightening move called Jesus Camp this weekend. It is about a charismatic church that has this summer camp for christian kids. There was a lot of crying and speaking in tongues and the leader walking around with a microphone yelling about how evil Harry Potter is. Sigh. Look, lady, Harry Potter rocks my world and is pretty much the first thing i am going to read to my children. I just do not get why the christian right gets all up in arms about certain things. It's just total stupidity. The documentary is disturbing and worth watching. Exercise extreme caution in sending your children to church camp, folks. I went to two different ones as a child...strange, because we weren't really a religious family back then. And I had some very odd experiences. The kids were all really nice but I spent a lot of time being very confused. No one told me what a quiet time was, so I spent that part of the day sitting quietly on my bed. I got yelled at frequently for saying things like "Oh gawd." and "Jeez." apparently these were no-nos. Once i got annoyed at all of that and so one night, in our pitch black cabin while our counselors were at some meeting, we were all awake, talking. I waited until everything got quiet and I pulled out this heavy stick I had brought into bed with me and i threw it across the room in the darkness, so it hit the metal lockers and made this horrible, loud, sudden crashing sound. Hahahahahahaha. I giggled so hard while they were all screaming "What was that?!?!?!?" I know, totally mean. Totally passive aggressive. the other camp i went to when I was older was just nuts. It was called Teen Quest. They had a lot of great activities during hte day, like tubing behind a speedboat and horsebackriding. But at night we'd have these weird speakers and then the staff would guilt us into writing an amount of money on a piece of paper out of our fund that our parents had given us for candy and field trips. It was horrible. They would go on and on about how these people came out for free and they didn't get any money and how our "love offerings' would help them keep doing their ministry. I ended up giving them all of my money (and people wonder why I'm cynical) and my mom was so mad when i told her about it. She probably called them and gave them a piece of her mind they would not soon forget. There was also a lot of pressure to find a date to this dance at the end of the 2-week camp. I had only been to all girls camps before, so this was new to me and my 13 year old self. I managed to get a date and felt really excited except that i hadn't brought nice clothes and had to attend in my jean shorts. Among not giving any instructions about quiet times, there was no mention of formal wear either. One other thing i remember was how much PDASs were discouraged. I certainly had no idea what that was and I only found out because these two skanky looking weirdos kept getting in trouble for sneaking off and making out...to the sounds of michael w. smith that was always being pumped out over the loud speaker. I was nowhere near ready for making out...I barely had a training bra...I know, hard to imagine. Believe it or not i was a late bloomer in that department.
I was so out of my element and confused about the issues...during one workshop we were being told how wrong homosexuality was and I decided to pipe up and ask if it was wrong to date black people. I am sure the token black child in the group really appreciated that one. I am shuddering, recalling my ignorance. I don't remember the answer to that one but I know it was uncomfortable. What I didn't realize then was that I was experiencing people being judgemental and i simply connected it to another issue i had heard people be judgemental about.
Ah, summer camp memories.
