bloodyrosemccoy | May. 9th, 2006

No Socks Day
Anniversary - V-E Day
World Red Cross Day
Birthday - President Harry S. Truman (33rd President)
Liberation Day (Slovakia)
Victory Day (France)

I love the way so many parents taking their kids on an Outing to, say, a water park regard everyone over the age of about 14 and under about 30 as some sort of evil influence. They gave the six of us these suspicious glances, as though expecting us to suddenly whip out drugs and alcohol, remove our tops, and, I don’t know, have a wild lesbian orgy in the wading pool. After we’d swum around for a while and went back to shower and change, a troop of middle-school-age girls came into the same locker space and regarded us with terror. I don’t know why the girls found us so fascinating—all of them trying to gawk at us without looking like it—but a few of the mothers took in the couple of tattoos, the piercings, the swim trunks, and in some cases the hair,* and arrived at a swift and apparently unfavorable solution. (“We look like a fleet of lesbians,” said Emily, which prompted me to start wondering what sort of group name you would give a bunch of lesbians. You know that you’ve been in college a while when for a moment you can’t think why anyone would find the idea of a fleet of lesbians to be alarming.)

Oowee, le soreness. I think drowning in the wave pool was the most exercise I’ve gotten all term, unless you count walking, which doesn’t involve much upper arm work. And now I’m all chlorinated, but I don’t mind because I’m actually glad they pump enough poison into the water to kill anything smaller than your standard Yorkshire terrier. My OCD is compromised by noxious green chemicals!

We were sitting around on the bus on the way home and swearing in ASL and Japanese at the stupid little twerps on the back and then discussing one of those intensely stupid things you talk about on a bus,** and the girl two seats ahad of me whirled around and said, “Amelia!”

And behold! ’Twas my arch-cousin, my California counterpart, who colleges here in Eugene too and who I’d been thinking about just the week previously. I quickly introduced her to all my friends, and then we summarily invited her back to the Fortress of Terror for pizza and a movie. (Lots of bloody pizza. So much pizza …)

With the cousin’s arrival, I smoothly and unworriedly changed into Family Gossip mode. How many siblings did your mom have? Because when there’s 62 cousins or so to a generation, you have a boatload of gossip. It was a sudden, irreversible transfer from swearing in other languages to who’s pregnant, who’s engaged, who’s dead, who’s not dead against all odds, who’s got new tattoos, who’s tranferring schools, who’s going to Japan, who’s on crack, who says they’re not on crack but everybody knows they’re lying, who’s got a new job, who’s moving, who’s crazy as a bedbug, who’s in love. An hour later we had made it through some of that, as well as having a brief argument over the merits of Titanic. (Woulda been a great movie if there weren’t all those damn protagonists blundering around like a bunch of idiots.) Then she left, and we all took Titanic apart, and then everybody collapsed into bed, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow there was a bloody Japanese test that we hadn’t studied for.

Ah, repose.

I need more of it. Off to bed!

*Brittany has a sort of reverse mullet—long braids in the front and boy-short in the back. And it’s bright blue. And my hair looks progressively more and more butch the wetter it gets.

**Today’s lucky winner: What constitutes an orgy in Tennessee? Somebody said that that state's definition was a group of eight or more people in a closed room with their shoes off. “So you mean that eight people could be butt-naked and having wild sex, but as long as the door was open and they were wearing shoes it wouldn’t be an orgy?”