Up Yours, Hypothalamus!

The last few weeks have been a series of annoyances and mistakes, somewhere along the spectrum of the banal.

Which is why I thank God that tea and Roy Orbison's music are both readily available. Roy Orbison reminds me that things could be worse, and tea makes me believe that things are just about to get better. I've finally righted all of the knitting wrongs I made, and am caught up with e-mails, bills, and all the rest of my many annoyances.

Speaking of e-mails: for a few months, I was convinced that those nonsense Spam e-mails were really secret codes some mysterious (but wealthy!) figure was sending to me. Really, I had just read The Westing Game and other kids caper books too much as a kid, and was desperate for adventure. Which... would be a good excuse if I had been twelve. But I was eighteen. Finally, a computer geek I had a passing acquaintance with loudly and publicly informed me that they were just Spam after I had printed them all out and spent months trying to decode what Karamazov had to do with stock tips.

And further embarrassments: For many years, I had a long-standing, and secret, crush on a certain boy in high school.

Well, I thought it was a secret, until I found out that a middle-aged woman I worked with at work knew who he was. Which means either my mom told her, which is bad enough, or worse- the crush's mom knows! Which means he knows! Forgive me for being unbearably high school about the whole thing, but he was much better-looking, more popular, and more athletic than I was. And taller. Oh, how very much taller. Even though I'm way past it now, it would still be embarrassing to the pimply teen aged girl that lives in us all, in my case, in the monstrous zit right between my eyebrows.

So, I was hanging out with some high school friends last Thursday, when we ran into a raving bitch working the late shift at the local all-night grocer's. This led to a conversation about how you never seem to run into the people you want to see again, and I said that I wanted to run into the ex-crush, to see if he was worth all the hormones I wasted on him. Well, the next day, I was walking with my Dad downtown. When, out of his native habitat sprung the Exus-Crushinus, in a family herd of mother and brother. I didn't say hi. I didn't wave. I didn't even make eye contact. Instead, I abruptly turned to my Dad, and launched into a rapid twelve point discussion of my hatred for Mondays. I narrowly avoided whiplash and a collision with a pole. I finally went into the bank to withdraw some money, and as I stabbed my PIN into the keypad, I wondered if maturity would ever catch up with puberty.

Tomorrow, I promise to talk about the spinning and the tank top graveyard. I can even make the girl guide hand thing, and there will be sockpal news! Yay.