Tonight I saw the future...

No, really.

At 10:25, Joe turned on ESPN. The quarterfinals of the Australian Open were on, showing Jankovic vs. S. Williams. To me, not particularly interesting.

Except for the fact that I was watching this event at 10:25pm on Monday, January 21, when in fact the event was occurring at 2:22pm on Tuesday, January 22.

Tomorrow looks sunny.

Resolutions

I spent some time at work today thinking about resolutions. Not that I've made one. Just about the fact that somehow our society decided that a good way to start each and every year, without fail, is to pick on ourselves.

Find (at least) one thing about ourselves that we do not like and obsess over fixing it. It's like January first rolls around and instead of congratulating ourselves on any of the past year's accomplishments, all we can think to say to ourselves is damn, you really sucked at this one thing and now, as punishment, you must dwell on this thing until at least February when you will give up and have your first real failure of the year.

Way to fucking go.

Whose stupid idea was this, anyway?

I have decided that January is not the only time of year that I can have goals and be resolute about keeping them. So I am devoting myself to trying new things and going new places. I will seize the day. Or the night. Or whatever strikes me as worth seizing.

And I will NOT start each new year berating myself over how I managed to screw up the last one.

!%$#%$@# Grout

So.

Our grout FINALLY got delivered, and we finally had a night to grout the floor.

We read the directions meticulously, added the exact amount of water, stirred in the grout as directed, waited the allotted time before remixing as called for...

and ended up with some variety of grout soup. An utterly useless slurry.

*&%^&*^%!

The bag had called for 5 pints of water. So we went to the manufacturer's website for an faq section on grout soup, and THERE the directions called for 4 pints of water, with the allowance of an additional pint only if necessary.

ONLY IF NECESSARY.

We now know the fifth pint was reeeeeally not necessary.

So we had to go back to Home Depot (who, may I remind you, does not stock this particular color of grout) to re-special order more grout.

Only no one was there to help.

We will try again today.

And maybe by the year 2525 we will have our kitchen floor finished.

I make no guarantees.

Friendship

Do you remember when you were little and friendship was effortless? There was nothing more important than being with your friends, and there was never a time when you were apart. Whether it was one friend or a group, hanging out and talking was just so easy and felt so right that you thought it would surely last forever.

And then you grew up. And they grew up. And everybody moved away from each other and got new friends in their new towns. And they say absence makes the heart grow fonder. But distance just separates people. Not because we care less about each other, but because we simply are not involved with the minutia of each other's daily lives. We are certainly not going to call our friend over a stupid little thing that happened to us that day, even though when we look back at every single inside joke between us and our friends it is over that same type of stupid little thing.

And everyone is so busy. Busy with work, or their house, or their new friends in their new town, or the big one-their husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend. And if said husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend does not like you, or you do not like them, your friendship suffers.

And your friends change. Or else, you change and they stay the same. And there is nothing either of you can do about this because change is inevitable. It, though, is not always good.

And so we fill the voids of our old friends with new friends, and we try to create new bonds, as strong as the old ones. But we know they never are. They can't be. Because when we were little, our friends were our first priority. There wasn't ever any job, or house, or anything else to distract us from what was truly important. That's what made it so easy.

But as we grew up we managed to unwittingly fill our lives with these other things, these higher priorities, and our friends fell further and further down the list of things with which we chose to fill our time.

So again I ask, do you remember when you were little and friendship was effortless?

I really miss that.

4400

So there's a really cool show called The 4400 and it's basically about people who discover they have abilities after being returned from an alien abduction of sorts. Trust me, it's way better than I'm making it sound. Anyway, on their website you can take a quiz to find out what your own 4400 ability would be.

The quiz told me that I am a Mind Control Master.

Finally. Somebody gets me. :)