Cereal Thumb

A couple of weeks ago, my sister was in a play at her high school, and it was very funny. She was spectacular in it, as she always is. She has real stage presence, and she throws herself into her characters.

After the play, I rode in the car while my dad took my aunt home. Then, we came back to the school to pick up my sister, and one the way we ate single-serve cereal boxes, dry, which someone had thrown onto our driveway in some sort of marketing scheme. That isn’t shady at all. Anyway, since my aunt lives less than five minutes from the school, this took about ten minutes, so my sister was still puttering around and getting ready to go. That part doesn’t matter, though, because of what happened next.

I climbed out of the passenger’s seat, and shut the door casually behind myself with one hand, closing my thumb in the door as I did so.

I yelled non-words and dropped into a crouch, ready to fend off the lion or whatever, and began to spin around my thumb, as though it were glued to an immobile stake in the ground, hopping as I went.

I could hear my dad pause on his side of the car, and knew that he was waiting to see if this was a real injury or just one of those I-bumped-my-wrist-a-tiny-bit-too-hard things. As I began to rise in pitch as I yelled (mostly an assortment of nonsense with “Oooh no, ohh no,” thrown in) he came around the truck.

When he saw me spinning, he crouched down too, and did that I’m-not-touching-you thing people do over an injury with their hands (to fend off the carrion birds, I guess) and asked to see my thumb.

I opened my hand, which was clenched around the injury, and squealed, because it hurt, and there was blood. My dad hissed at me, and unlocked the car door to get some (clean?) napkins from the center consol thing. I wrapped them around my thumb, and managed to get up to follow him into the auditorium, in search of ice.

He strode up the aisle with purpose, and I followed behind him, hunched over my injury, making that high-pitched sound through the nose, like a dog, unaware that there were other people in the room. We made it to the lobby, where one of my sister’s friends was talking loudly on his cell-phone.

My dad had to ask him twice for ice, which is understandable, because that’s a weird request, but then he saw me, and scurried off to grab an adult (the drama director). She went behind a door and came back with a huge plastic shopping bag (the kind for like, microwaves or computer monitors) with about a cup of ice in it.

I wrapped this around my thumb and sat in a metal folding chair behind the card table where they sold concessions during the play, and made that sound. Another friend of my sister’s, who I assume saw me come in earlier, while I was in my pain haze, came up into the lobby and said,
“Apricot, are you oka-- you need to stop smiling like that. It’s creepy.” And then he shuttered. Of course, he didn’t call me Apricot, he used my name.

“I can’t,” I said, grinning. “It hurts too much.”

“Well it’s terrifying,” he told me, and went back into the theater.

My dad came over to the chair and said, “Let me see your thumb.”

I opened up the plastic and wet paper napkins to reveal a very ugly thumb, still making those irritating stuck-pig sounds.

“Whelp. You’re going to lose that nail,” my dad said.

And that’s when I burst into tears. My head fell back, and I started sobbing.

My dad sighed to himself, shook his head, and started down the aisle to get my sister.

Who thought I was carrying a dead bird in a bag, crying over the corpse.

It’s been a couple weeks since this happened, and the cuticle died completely, all the way down to the base of the nail. It does indeed look like I’ll be losing the nail, but it no longer looks quite as bad as it did, y’know, when it happened.

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On an unrelated note, the boyfriend has started a new blog about his jewelry making, and I highly recommend it.

http://rolandgridley.wordpress.com/

Rabbits on the Moon

When I was very small, probably four or so, maybe even younger, I would, on occasion, spend the night at my grandparent’s house. They lived in a retirement type community, with a metal screen door and a chair on the porch. This was before they moved to San Diego, for my grandmother’s health. When they moved, I remember getting to ride the empty dolly from the truck back to the house. Before they moved though, I would sometimes spend the night there, and I vividly remember being very small and having my grandpa show me the rabbit on the moon. It took me a while to see it, and I remember first lying and saying that I could, and then, a few seconds later, I actually could. My grandpa was also the person who taught me that I have to let go to the peanuts if I want to get my hand out of the jar. At four, I guess I wasn’t much smarter than a raccoon.

Actually, I don’t know how honestly true that is. In Where the Red Fern Grows, they talk about how a raccoon won’t let go of something, so you could capture them by getting their hands stuck. I’ve never even had the desire to hunt raccoons, so I’ve never taken the opportunity to find out for myself if you really can catch them that way, or if it is simply a clever literary device.

There was a coyote in our backyard this morning, and it was beautiful. It had a little white tuft at the end of it’s tail, with a skinny black ring separating the white fur from the sandy brown. They’re so lanky, coyotes, and they have such lovely long faces. Our dogs didn’t think the coyote was gorgeous, they though it was an intruder. Fortunately, there was a fence between them.

Fur texture on dogs is a funny thing. We had a beautiful sheltie, named Charlie, and she had soft, fluty fur that was long, but the individual strands were thin and wavy. Our short-coated shepherd, Patriot, has stiff outer hairs that are a few inches long, and our long-coated shepherd, Sheila, has long hairs that are in between Patriot and Charlie’s fur in terms of stiffness. My boyfriend’s dog, Zobby though has fur that when you pet him feels slick (if not soft) but when taken individually is downright bristly.

The main thing that I dislike about winter is how itchy my skin gets. Last night as I tried to go to sleep it felt like there were a billion little pins poking through my pajamas, and it sucked. I also dreamt that I missed my first class this morning. When I woke up this morning, and got in my car, I left on time, but due to extraordinary traffic, I ended up being a little late anyway. While trying to exit the freeway, a person (very rudely) zipped around me and used the shoulder to get off the freeway. Then they ran a stop sign. I found it interesting, when I caught up with them, that they had a little tiny Jesus fish up in the corner. It reminded me of the time I was cut off hard-core by a large SUV and got to watch the driver toss a lit cigarette out the window into the leaf-strewn gutter during fire season, and they had a prominent W, a Jesus fish, and an anti-choice bumper sticker.

I’ve been meaning to repaint my toenails for months, and it still hasn’t happened, and while this shouldn’t come as a surprise to me, it still made me sad when I stepped into the shower this morning.

Dreams of a Badass

Sometime Saturday evening, I was walking up the slope where we have our citrus grove while cutting an orange with a knife. Unfortunately, I was paying a little too much attention to the ground and not enough attention to my fingers, and so I now have a flesh wound on my pinky. I haven’t cut myself with a knife for a while, other than this incident, and so it came as a bit of a shock to me. What scared me was that it really didn’t hurt, despite the orange juice which was all over my hands. Although it did sting when I rinsed it out, it never really hurt, and honestly it isn’t that bad the first day or so. I will admit that while I was in class on Monday I did slice right through the same spot with a piece of cardboard on accident, and that pretty much sent me through the roof.

I had such an odd dream Wednesday morning. At six I woke up and did my sit-ups with my mom. Then I went back up and laid down, thinking I’d sleep for twenty minutes and get up with my alarm. Unfortunately, when it went off, I turned it off and fell back asleep. The dream I had was vivid, intense, and strange. My family and I were all at Knott’s Berry Farm, and we were standing under the Ghost Rider, where it goes out over the lane to the parking lot. The sign outside said something that I remember as very odd, although I’m not sure what it was, and my dad and I remarked on it. We went in, and we were told the story of the Spear of Longinus, and how a gladiator who looked like that actor from The Mummy took it and murdered a couple in a small town in Pennsylvania. Then the scene changed and the German (I think) actor from that Sandra whoever movie, 28 Days (not the one about zombie-like crazy people-- the one about drug addicts) was there with his wife (girlfriend?) and he was suicidal. I didn’t see it happen, but he ended up killing himself by throwing himself onto a bed of toothpicks, which were all pointing straight up. It was all very creepy. I think part of the creepiness came from the faux-old-English everyone was using, plus the Old West (in Pennsylvania?) setting.

In case anyone cares, I ended up getting out of the house exactly 10 minutes after I normally do, despite waking up exactly 10 minutes before I normally leave, which means it took me 20 minutes to shower, get dressed, gather all of my crap and start my car. Not bad, considering that it often takes an hour and a half.

Today when I went to use the restroom I noticed that my knuckle was bleeding. Briefly, this excited me because I thought that maybe I looked badass. Then I realized that it just looked like the cat had scratched me, and that no one would believe I laid into anyone anyway. Then I washed my hands and went to class.

Rattle My Hair

I spent a week and a half with most of my hair pulled up in a ponytail, and in that time my hair grew out what seems like a lot. It is very cool to suddenly notice how much longer your hair is. It’s one of those things like foot size. There’s not really a noticeable difference between one day and the next, but suddenly! BAM! There it is. Richard Dawkins used a similar analogy to explain evolution, and I thought it was very apt. Why I have stolen it to talk about my hair, I honestly don’t know.

If I were loading a steel box onto a truck without a tailgate or handrails, I would make sure I wasn’t loading it on to flat ice. I would also probably tie the box down with bungee cords. I understand that it makes sense to word physics problems as “real world” scenarios, but honestly, who would load a steel box onto an ice covered truck and not attempt to secure it in any way? That’s just stupid. Although I have on several occasions set my backpack (complete with laptop) on my passenger’s seat while driving, and once it fell off while I was on the freeway and knocked me into neutral. If I leave the story at that it sounds very scary, but I was only going twenty miles an hour, downhill, at the time, so it wasn’t really a very big deal. Perhaps I’m not much more intelligent than someone loading the steel box into the truck after all.

I’m reading The Princess Bride (the abridged version, by William Goldman) and it is thus far almost exactly like the movie. I am surprised because that is almost never the case, ever. Most of the time, the book is butchered on it’s way to the silver screen. The Golden Compass was an extreme example of this. An extreme, heart wrenching, frustrating example of the phenomenon. I have not heard what Phillip Pullman thinks about the damage done to his story, but I can’t imagine that he was happy with the results. I will admit that the movie was visually stunning and that there were some wonderful parts. Overall, though, I think it comes down to the extreme difficulty of condensing one of those densely populous fantasy worlds down from a thousand plus page trilogy into a two and a half hour film. They weren’t written to be experienced that way, and often, it doesn’t work. There are a lot of exceptions, of course, and even though the odds are against me, I still go out of my way to see the film adaptations of my favorite novels. And my second favorite novels. And so on. (By the way, anyone who has ever read Michael Crichton needs to see the movie version of Congo. Pure B-movie camp, all the way through.)

People on campus smoke. Not all people, obviously, but enough for it to be noticeable. It doesn’t really bother me (unless they’re being rude about it, and no, spitting and flicking your ashes onto my backpack does NOT make you look feminine and mysterious, it makes you look like a pig), especially when the people smoking are far away. On my way out of math class today, I realized that I kind of like it because from a distance, the smell reminds me of campfires, and I loved camping when I was little. There is something about eating macaroni and cheese out of a metal bowl with a plastic spoon that just appeals to me. It’s also quite hot today, and the smell of hot pine trees is also a smell that makes me want to walk up creek beds bare foot, looking for little critters and new plants. This summer, I’m so there.

When I was younger, before his ankles got so bad, my dad really liked to go gold panning. I loved to go with him, but not because I really like swirling dirt around in pan (although finding gold and garnets is really a lot of fun). No, I liked it because of the swimming and snakes. I know that sounds funny, but we would swim in this little fork of this river with the dogs while my dad would pan, and we must have seen about a bajillion snakes, lizards and fish in the process. Once, I was off on my own a little farther than was really safe, and of course I was barefoot, and I hopped up on a wide, flat rock atop another wider flatter rock. I simultaneously put my eyes and foot down towards the second rock, and came within a couple seconds of hopping on the most beautiful baby rattlesnake. I probably would have heard the little guy, but the river was only about a foot to my left, his right, and that drowned out any sound he could have hopped to make. His little rattles looked like miniature pearls. Fortunately, my mom showed up and startled him away, but it was literally breathtaking.