jeudi– my favorite day of the week (besides sunday when i could literally sleep all day and not miss anything). thursday is the last day of classes for the week, i only have to work six hours in the fluorescent tomb (aka the pharmacy), the boyfriend usually comes home from bezerkley (he’s smarter than me, so he goes to uc berk), it’s payday (well, not anymore–effing cee-vee-ess changing my payday to friday- hurumphh), and my precious tivo records all my favorite tv shows for me so i don’t have to miss a single second of “the office,” “30 rock,” “kath & kim,” or “csi.”
some people get embarrassed or ashamed of watching too much tv, but that’s crazy talk! you can never watch too much tv. it’s not physically possible. you can watch too many commercials, that’s why i would give my tivo chocolates on valentine’s day if i didn’t know my dad would end up eating them. even my mom suffers without tivo when she sojourns to the homeland (that’s north texas) to visit my tootie who hasn’t converted to tivo worship.
oui, there is such a place.
hmm, now tootie may be someone who does watch too much tv. she still gets a frickin tv guide, like the kind made out of paper and resembles a little book you may remember them from your childhood, or from a glass case in the smithsonian. walking into tootie’s climate controlled house (i don’t think it ever gets above 65 degrees in there) is like walking into a time warp– there’s green shag carpeting as far as the eye can see, her toilet seats have cushions on them, she still has an ashtray next to her armchair even though she quit smoking over 25 years ago, and papa’s armchair hasn’t moved a millimeter since his death exactly six years ago today. she may be single handedly responsible for global warming by keeping her air conditioner on full blast 24/7 from april to october. my papa used to say it was like a morgue and would take breaks from the cold by standing outside in the texas summer heat to “warm up.” now i don’t know how many of you have visited north texas in summertime, but it’s not just hot. it’s fucking hot… and fucking humid. it’s what i imagine purgatory to be like, if mormons believed in that sort of thing. so for anyone to want to go out into that palpable, wet wall of heat that hums with cicadas and horseflies and mosquitoes (my sister ash and i once had a contest to see who had the most mosquito bites by the end of our visit to tootie and papa’s house–ash won with i think 27 bites…) blows my mind. it’s the reason i used to want to visit in fall or winter… until papa died in february and i realized that there was no good time to live in texas. my mom is so lucky she got out of there before a tornado took off with her house or she got struck by lightning.
isn’t funny how you can start out rambling on about something as mundane as thursday night “must see tv” and end up talking about the anniversary of your grandfather’s death? his funeral was weird because for some godforsaken reason someone thought it might be fun to videotape this particular moment of my family’s life, so i have a vhs copy of my grandparent’s little baptist church’s chapel with my papa’s flower covered coffin displayed up front and rows of church pews filled with stetsons and big hairdos. most of my family got to sit quietly passing around a box of tissues, but oh no, not caitlin. no, caitlin had to get up and talk to that stupid video camera and read the private letter i had written to papa before he died. since he died before my mom could give him the letter, i guess everybody decided it was public property and they read it. by the time i arrived a couple days later, the letter had not only been read by half my family and dozens of texan baptists, but it had been printed onto the programs for the service. yea. i don’t remember who told me that i going to be reading that letter out loud in front of people (please note aforementioned fear of public speaking). oh, and if i didn’t want to do it myself, the pastor would read it for me. oh double yea. i didn’t want that pepsi-drinking d-bag (we later found out that the man who had been at my papa’s deathbed was a liar and cheated on his wife and basically just was not the guy papa thought he was… plus he drank pepsi in my grandfather’s presence. how rude.) to read the heartfelt words i had meant only for papa to know. even now, six years later, i’m getting all choked up about it. because in the end i did read the letter out loud– caught on video. so, to this day i have a copy of the one of the top 5 most horrible moments of my life on tape! we’re not a tape-every-precious-moment type of family, so it trips me out to even know there’s a videotape of me. but i have gotten really drunk and shown the video to some of my friends. even though i hate that tape, i can’t bring myself to dispose of it. it’s one of those things. i told you i have a lot of things.
i talk too much. is it blog too much? i need to pace myself– this could have been, like, a week’s worth of entries. oh well, c’est ma vie.
bon jeudi…
dans la 408 