Running Thoughts (2)

I was just finishing up this week's paper for my writing class and was really struck (for the twentieth time) by a description of someone as "bristly."

God bless, but that's beautiful.

Your assignment for the week is to use the word "bristly" in conversation. Go forth.

Have you seen this article? This article about sleeping positions and personality?

www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/09/16/sleep.personality.reut/

Okay, let me say something right now--I sleep, at various times, in three of the positions mentioned in this article, and that makes me--at various times in the middle of the night, I suppose--shy and sensitive, quiet and reserved, and brash and gregarious.

Huh?

While I have no doubt this sleep expert conducted his study with all possible rigor, I find it hard to believe that I am the only person who moves around into different positions at night. I usually start on my back, roll over to my side--where I fall asleep--and wake up on my tummy. So I go to bed quiet and reserved, fall asleep shy and sensitive, and wake up brash and gregarious.

If you saw me in the morning when the alarm goes off, brash and gregarious are probably not words you'd use to describe me. Sullen and morose, maybe. Grouchy and pissed off, perhaps.

Nothing to brighten up your day quite like a chance meeting with someone you love.

Ran into Brian after a somewhat tedious meeting I didn't need to be at. On our anniversary, no less! Put a big smile on my face and restored my spirits for the long afternoon. A Good Thing, Martha might say.

I think the whole concept of a "last hurrah" before you get married is a little silly.

Point: the bachelorette party I attended this weekend was made up of three married women, three engaged women (one being the actual bachelorette) and two singles.

So if the marrieds are out of town on a weekend, partying their asses off, and the engageds are there, too, without any serious repercussions, then how is this a "last hurrah?"

Obviously, the answer is that it isn't. It's just an excuse to take girls' night out to another city, get a hotel room, and act like morons in funny t-shirts and tiaras. And there's nothing wrong with that...I just wish people wouldn't react to the whole phenomena as if it were the end of something.

I also wish that people, upon seeing the bachelorette party, would not recommend divorce lawyers, or suggest that there's still time to "change her mind."

Admittedly, the prospect of marriage is a little daunting--even to those of us on the wedding track--but don't you think it's tacky when a divorce lawyer hands a bride his card the night before the wedding? (This actually happened at my friend's rehearsal dinner. Jackass.)

Two men died today, John Ritter and Johnny Cash.

Ritter died suddenly and unexpectedly, in the prime of a career revival and Cash died after a long history of illness and poor health.

The news outlets I read all have a large story, with picture, about the life and career of Johnny Cash, legend. He was, indeed, a monumental figure. His music was and is amazing, not so much for its musicality as for its lyrics. Man, Johnny Cash CDs are made for road trips and cloudy days and bad moods. I love the gravel in his throat, the warble, the way he sometimes just said his words in rhythm to his guitar.

But I loved John Ritter, too. I grew up with Jack Tripper and his slapstick, antic humor. I loved watching him fall over the back of that couch. I can still see his trademark facial contortion--you know, the one where someone slapped/kicked/punched him in one room, but he couldn't scream because someone in the other room would hear? So he'd twist his cheeks and lips and curl into a standing fetal position. It still makes me smile and giggle. So I guess that's why I'm sad to see that John Ritter's death isn't being met with a little more shock, a little more utter bewilderment, a few more why's.

I mean, I have to say that when I heard on NPR this morning that Johnny Cash had died, I thought, how sad. But then I thought, well, he was old, and ill, so I guess it's not that surprising. Still sad, though.

But when Noah Adams followed it with the news of John Ritter's death, I gasped. Literally. Out loud, I gasped and put my hand over my mouth. How tragic! Oh my God, what a loss! I thought to myself.

Maybe it's just that the death of someone young, or at least vibrant, is so much harder for me to take. Old people die--it happens. Ill people die--and you are always somehow prepared for that. But men in the primes of their lives don't usually pass so suddenly from the world. Jack Tripper. Man, I loved that show.

I don't have a quote today, just musing thoughts on death. And I know Johnny Cash was probably a much more important person than John Ritter in the overall picture. But we all expected The Man in Black to pass on someday soon. John Ritter's seems to be the more upsetting death.

Back again. ::::sigh::::

I really thought I might have escaped the overwhelming need to unburden myself on an unsuspecting world.

I was clearly wrong.

Sometimes I just need an excuse to babble. Today, my babble is going to start with this terrific quote I just read on Salon.com:

"Drinking works only short-term; the booze will take your wallet in the middle of the night just like a bad hooker." - Cary Tennis

That's just exquisite. It helps to have the background that Tennis is a recovering alcoholic--but it's not really necessary to know that. The words stand quite well alone. What a terrific image--I see this skanky chick with fried hair (blonde, of course) and a spandex mini, shoes in hand, slinking out the door with a leather billfold in hand. And she smells like Jack Daniels. The air is dark grey, cigarette smoke hanging over everything, and the lump in the bed barely breathing.

It's kind of funky. In the sense of "gross," not "cool."

Practice your own scintillating turns of phrase, please.