« Laugh-Out-Loud Time Waster for Wednesday, December 15th | Main | guilt »

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

hypochondriac, airline tickets, and a runaway freight train

C has a cough. This doesn't bother her a bit; I think she actually enjoys it. She is always kind of hoping she's just a little bit sick -- not sick enough to be really miserable, but enough to get some attention. To illustrate my point: she just coughed, and then said to her brother, "I sure have some big coughs, don't I? Poor me!" Those words exactly! I worry about her future; she has potential pill-fiending tendencies (oh, Mommy, please can I have some red medicine? I think I might have a sniffly nose...)


I have just done a very exciting thing. Last night, for the first time in my life, I actually purchased airline tickets. Yes, I, who have never been in an airplane, never been further east than Kansas, never seen the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, am GOING TO FLORIDA IN AN AIRPLANE in about a month and a half, along with T and both kids, to visit my best friend. She and I met in a Christian chat room at WBS Chat. Does anyone else remember WBS chat? Chat-room chatting is kind of an Internet-newbie staple, and it's the kind of thing we all look back at with embarrassment (I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning doing what?), but by the grace of God, in January 1997, I "met" a kindred spirit there, in among all the sig lines and little icon pictures and server-push text scrolling up and up and up. Yay for WBS. ;-). And I finally get to go see her, after mentally planning this trip scores of times (she's been here once, in the spring of 1999).


Can everyone please join with me in a minor panic? Christmas is a week and two days away! It's not that I don't love Christmas, because I do, and it's not that I'm not ready for it, because I am (well, pretty much. THe house needs a little tidying before we can achieve the Norman Rockwell Christmas-morning scene), it's just that it came running up so fast! What happened to November and December? For that matter, what happened to 2003? It makes reasonable sense that the years keep seeming faster and faster -- after all, when I was ten, the time between Christmases was one-tenth of my life; at 30 it's only one-thirtieth of my life -- but still, if it keeps up like this, by the time I'm fifty I'll go to sleep on Christmas night and wake up on the next Christmas morning, another year older. This is insane, and more than a little frightening. There's got to be a happy medium between that desolate childhood December 26th feeling of looking across the unending desert of the year to come at the tiny little Christmas oasis that is so depressingly far away on the other side, and this runaway freight train where the years fly by so fast we can hardly see them. Maybe I passed that happy medium when I was 19.3 years old, or something. sigh.

--------