frustrating friday

i have had a series of near accidents and some actual accidents and i am certain that it is because of the de-fense on monday. i have been vertiginous lately -- not really pathologically, but still dizzy and light-headed and woozy.

i barely made the flight last night. and then sat buckled into my nwa.com seat for an hour on the tarmac.

i couldn't sleep through most of the night and then got up at 4 to let my parents' dog out. while waiting for him to return from his romp, i watched the trippiest installment on an episode of sesame street ever. i recounted it to my parents tonight at dinner, and my mutha insisted that i was making it up. it was a vignette about counting to two with two girls playing in a doll house, with racially matched figures. that is, the white girl had a white doll and the asian girl had a racially ambiguous non-white/non-black doll. they set the table with two plates and two spoons. the asian child corrected the white child's placement of the spoon, much to my relief. (doesn't everyone know that the spoon sits to the right -- they don't match and mirror.) the two girls put their two dolls to bed and two cats lumbered through the window and tore up the doll house, upsetting the crockery, the flatware and the furniture. the two girls remained unperturbed. they giggled and the segment ended. it was old footage -- like from the 70s. or tarantino and rodriguez made it look like a dollhouse double feature.

i trundled to the nara today to snap some images of letters of application that i know mary will ask after at the de-fense. (i want to have them at the ready for the next round of revisions). i made it to the archives late, the archivist i had to interact with was the dreaded tab lewis, a man who reduced me to frustrated tears years ago because he is so cranky. i did not cry during this encounter which may be evidence of how far i have come? at any rate, they pulled the wrong boxes and there were more obstacles, but i made it work.

[just a moment here about the devastating news i learned while in college park: j.s.s. will understand how upsetting this is. nara II is only open until 5 pm m-f and not at all on saturdays now. one week a month, they have "late night + saturday service" but no more friday nights at the archives. this is a cost-cutting measure. there are many reasons to rue this adminstration. this is the icing and the jimmies and the rosettes on the cake.]

and then i sat in traffic for a very very very long time on 95 and cursed commutes. the piece de crankiness today was my inability to use father's E-Z pass in the tunnel. i blame my mother for this because we cruelly mock how seriously my father takes the responsibility of paying tolls with electronic devices. (and every single time i pass through one of those booths, i thanks the virgin mary that jbw is no longer dating cbh.) so i tried to channel you julia, and thought to myself, "sometimes i will make mistakes" as the highway administration's camera snapped an image of the license plate and the man behind me fulminated.

anyway. i just had crab cakes with my parents and a hot bath. always a clarifying combination.

tomorrow, extended family comes for the easter egg hunt and our new family tradition: steamed crabs for the risen christ.

i hope that i am getting all this foolishness out of the way before the big day.