apropos of anything

In the spring, there are daffodils, and the daffodils look lovely today.

They begin popping up in February, sometimes as early as late January, courtesy of a Georgia winter that, by northern standards, is usually more tepid than cold. Some are bright yellow, some are pale yellow, some are a combination, and they are all so lovely.

Daffodils are for my freshman and sophomore years of college, when Sarah and I would indulge in a little flower-snippery (or, if you insist, flower thievery) during our walks home from Technique staff meetings, back when we both still loved the paper and were both so incessantly cheerful it’s unlikely anyone would have stopped our covert poaching had we ever been seen. And also for that guy, the one on the production staff whose name I can’t remember, the one who immediately took a strong liking to Sarah and insisted on following us home, no matter how many times she tried to get him to leave, or I mentioned she had a boyfriend, the one who really thought we were both slightly insane for picking daffodils on campus but didn’t want to say so because he liked Sarah THAT MUCH. (But he wouldn’t take a hint, and he wouldn’t take an outright refusal, so that made him creepy and we avoided him in the future.)

The daffodil days would overlap with pansy season. We would pick those too, pressing them in between the pages of phone books (what else would we use them for?) and old Blueprints. I would later drop them into snail mail to Mandi and Damaris because they were pretty and just a touch old-fashioned. Azaleas don’t press well — they come out looking like amorphous blobs — and dried daffodils fall apart at the touch, or in a slight breeze, but pansies are made of sterner stuff.

Daffodils are for the chemistry labs we sat up all night doing, calculating and typing and recalculating and sometimes “tweaking” the numbers to make the graphs look pretty because it was four in the morning and dear God, the graphs needed to look pretty by the time we turned the blasted things in at nine. There is a soundtrack to each year of college, and the one for freshman year is defined by the chemistry labs and the chemistry study sessions, the ones where we listened to the same set of discs over and over again until we knew them better than the formulas we were supposed to be memorizing. Er, deriving.

Last year, Rob’s daffodils bloomed early, so he gave a bunch to every woman in the office. Today I again saw daffodils in a plastic cup on a desk, even though Rob no longer works with us, and I thought of chemistry labs and Sarah.

Today is somebody’s birthday. Not somebody in the grand scheme of the world, because, duh, but somebody I know personally. The problem is, I can’t remember who it is. Also, I think it may be several somebodies, at least one of whom I may no longer be in touch with because she is my old childhood friend from when I lived in Houston. And was nine.

If it’s your birthday, I’m very sorry I can’t remember who you are, but could you please send me an e-mail so this doesn’t happen again next year?

Dear Parking Attendants of the World,

When I pull up to your booth and hand you my ticket, I expect you to tell me how much I owe you, take my money, and maybe, possibly, make a few tiny moments of small talk about, say, the weather. I do NOT expect you to flirt with me. In fact, I actually expect the opposite: no flirting, no asking me my name, or how old I am, or where I come from. THAT’S CREEPY. And it’s even creepier if you are a parking attendant I see on a regular basis because every time I drive away, I wonder if I have to read up on the fastest way to obtain a restraining order.

So, please. Next time I come to do business, let’s just do business. I hate having to drive all the way around to the other exit just because you give me the heebie-jeebies.

Thanks,
Huda

P.S. If I’m giving you the death stare of Get the Hell Away From Me, TAKE A HINT.

I feel like I’ve been traveling for months. I think that would be because I HAVE been traveling for months. It’s been a long time (read: Thanksgiving) since I’ve had my regular work-home-Augusta schedule, and let me tell you, the nastiness that is my house is simply awful to behold. I’d post pictures, except then I’d have documented evidence that would forever haunt me.

Tonight when I unpack my suitcase and put it away, I’m going to do so with the expectation that it will stay away for the next couple of weeks. At the most, I’m planning to go to Augusta, and I have enough clothes already there that I rarely bother to pack a bag.

I’m looking forward to living in my house and my city full-time again… but I’m very much going to miss the regular trips to Chicago. It’s been good to see family so frequently, to strengthen existing bonds and to form new ones (with baby Amal, for example), and when I say that I had begun to consider the guest bedroom in Naperville to be my room, I am not entirely kidding.

As much as the Chicago visits upended my routine, so also did they provide stability for me. They became a different, albeit hectic, sort of normal themselves. In Chicago, if you remember, we are competitive, we are sarcastic, and we laugh a lot. There is a space for me in Chicago, whether or not somebody else is in my room, and the amount of comfort I take in that knowledge is indescribable. Plus, there are very few people in Atlanta who will play Scrabble with me.

Atlanta’s home. The place where I keep my shoes. However, it’s heartwarming to know that if I ever need it, my shoes and I have another place that’ll take us.

And then there’s work. I don’t think I’ve worked two consecutive five-days-in-the-office work weeks since Thanksgiving either. I took some time in the middle of December for the aforementioned traveling (and also, I suppose, to finish out the rest of my vacation time), and then we had the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, and then I was gone for hajj, and since coming back from Saudi, I’ve spent at least two days a week in Chicago, sometimes working a whole lot, sometimes… not. I’m amazingly productive out of the office, but for some things (like stalking people — have I mentioned I’m a champion stalker?), it’s easier to be at work when you’re working.

Seeing my friends again will be great. Cleaning up my house so it’s not a federal disaster area will be great, and cooking again will be great. Not worrying about whether I need to wear a coat will be super-great. It will be normal. After so many weeks of “abnormal,” though, I’m not entirely sure what “normal” is going to feel like now.

This morning when the boxes of Dunkin Donuts arrived, we opened one and found a dozen heart-shaped donuts. Heart-shaped. All they needed was little pink hearts to make send us all into sugar overload, in more ways than one.

It’s good, then, that immediately afterward, we engaged in an artery-clogging second breakfast at Wheaton’s own Egglectic Cafe to balance out all that sweetness. (Can’t decide between omelets and pancakes? It’s okay, have them both!) This meal was courtesy of the Steal Dave’s Shoes Fund and limited to the “younger generation.” We didn’t use all the money, so somewhere, sometime, there’s another breakfast in it for all of us.

That is, unless I pull a Miss Doxie and blow it all at Zappos.

There was an interesting story on CNN.com’s Science and Space section earlier this week about an outcast star that fled the Milky Way at the same time that its companion star got sucked into a black hole. Thinking on terms that large is always, shall we say, broadening — this was no 60 mph star that just went hurtling out into the universe. And black holes have always been fascinating. To me, anyway, but then I grew up with Johnson Space Center in my backyard and wanted to be an astronaut until I discovered that would conflict mightily with my massive fear of heights and high speeds.

In any case, the point is that black holes have long been reputed to be vacuums that suck in all the matter nearby, condense it down, and hold on to it forever and ever. (That theory, btw, is no longer wholly accurate.) I think there’s something similar going on in my head, a vacuum, or some kind of funny transformation machine that takes in normal sensory data and translates it into “Chicago” or “Daytona 500.” Neither of which, btw, are things I particularly want to blog about.

So that’s why the dearth in blogging: nothing to write about except things I don’t want on a public site. Also, I don’t expect the majority of y’all really care about Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s expectations for the 2005 season, or whether Kyle Busch thinks he’ll make the Chase this year. I certainly don’t, and yet those questions KEEP PLAGUING ME, night and day.

I hope to soon convince my brain of the new Hawking idea, that even black holes release some information (mass), so it needs to get back into gear, IINS (a la Kate). In the meantime, y’all stay warm, and blissfully unaware of Rusty Wallace’s upcoming retirement plans.

With the “YOU” being Leta, and the “here” being gate L9 at O’Hare International Airport. The odds aren’t as high as they might be, considering Leta lives in Chicago, but it’s still highly coincidental that we’d both be on a plane to Atlanta. Especially since that wasn’t my original flight; I had myself bumped to an earlier flight because I got dropped off at the airport an hour early.

Also because I hadn’t really had time to try to get in touch with Leta while I was in Chicago, and she confessed she wouldn’t really have had time to get in touch with me while she was in Atlanta. Odd how things work out, huh?

Happy Chinese New Year, everyone!

Can somebody, anybody, PLEASE tell me what’s going on with Debra Messing’s hair in the promos for The Wedding Date? It’s so sharp and frizzy at the bottoms, and it looks like it’s been plastered to her head. Also dyed badly, although I thought she was a natural redhead. I can’t watch even ten seconds of that commerical because my eyes are forcibly drawn to that hideous, horrible hair.

Also, has it occurred to Dermot Mulroney that perhaps he might want to try something other than the wedding comedy?

Fool me once, says the President, shame on you. Fool me twice… well, W. says you just don’t fool him twice.

I, on the other hand, am apparently a different story. (Let me stop for a moment to say how insanely terrifying it is to have to consider yourself dumber than a man who can barely walk and chew gum at the same time, a man who made the news for choking on a pretzel, a man who says “noo-kyoo-lar,” a man who… okay, I have to stop now, or I may end up depressing myself permanently.)

I’m still recovering from the exhaustion and viral (possibly bacterial? at this point, I don’t know what it is — you could say whooping cough and I’d likely believe you) infection I picked up while in Saudi Arabia, which means I’m a sniffly, coughy, achy mess. Last night, I woke up with a coughing spasm so bad I threw up the dinner I’d eaten several hours earlier.

I did not, however, throw it up in the toilet. When I’m close to vomiting, the idea of staring into the toilet grosses me out so much that the possible vomit becomes definite vomit, so instead I chose to cough over the sink… and vomited. And vomited. And vomited, and vomited, and vomited.

Then my sink went on strike. Apparently sinks don’t like that much vomit at one time and will suddenly decide to stop draining at any given moment. So I decided, “Let me pour some Drano into this mess. It’ll clear everything right up!”

It was late. I was dehydrated and coughing. I couldn’t be expected to think as well!

I added Drano to the clogged mess in my sink and waited. Nothing happened. No movement. Nothing except an increase in the chemicalized smell that tells you there’s unpackaged Drano in the room. I started to panic that the Drano was eating at my beautiful Corian sink (which it wasn’t) or that I was going to have vomit in my sink forever and for always. I needed a solution to the problem at hand, and I found one: methodically transfer all the vomit in the sink to the toilet, where it should have gone in the first place.

Transfer, transfer. Flush, flush. Fresh paranoia: What if the Drano eats my toilet and and I have liquid toilet mess all over my bathroom and I have to get everything completely replaced?!?!?

It was laaaaaaaate. Did I mention I’m sick?

More flushing. Frantic Googling. (Side note: As much as I’m trying to give A9 a chance, how can that search engine possibly become a verb? A9-ing doesn’t have the same musical panache. Or the convenient browser toolbar, for that matter.) The Internet, in all its wisdom, informed me that my toilet was quite safe from the ravenous effects of Drano. Apparently, the only reason they tell you not to use it in a toilet is because it won’t actually do you any good. I felt kind of silly, then, especially as I’d had a little bit of time (and adrenaline) to wake up some.

On the positive side: This time, I didn’t stick my hand in the Drano-water.