I'm alive!

I'm alive, I'm alive!

Six pounds lighter and with a stomach the size of a walnut, but hey, I'm alive and eating again.

Word of advice folks, if anyone gets the nasty intestinal virus going around, steer clear of them for a month. If you must go near them, wear a surgical mask and carry a can of Lysol at all times. Believe me, when drinking water is enough to make you throw up, you really, really don't want to get it.

But that five pounds I needed to lose is gone. The butt on my pants is now back to loose (and not skin tight). And I found out that sleeping for two days results in a really stiff neck and a massive headache.

On the front where I now have a stomach the size of a walnut, I hold up as proof the fact that my dinner last night was a dinner roll and half of a bowl of baked apples. You know the size bowl. Like we used to get in the cafeteria at school. So it was a puny bowl.

And that filled me up.

Gah. I don't care. I was just so glad to be *eating* again. Because...okay. I had lunch on Wednesday, chips on Wednesday night. No food at all on Thursday (cause the crackers didn't stay on my stomach), half a can of soup on Friday, a biscuit on Saturday (that was a really bad idea) and some crackers, and then miraculous Sunday with the chicken sandwich for lunch and the roll and apples for dinner. But by Sunday it actually *tasted* good, which was the best part.

I so love food and am so glad that I can eat it again.

*happy sigh*

****

Okay, something I don't understand and can't seem to fathom for some reason. I mean, it seriously boggles my mind. There are things I have trouble understanding but get slightly, and then there are things that make no sense whatsoever, and this is one of those things.

I live in the same county I grew up in. Fine. It's sparsely populated, so everyone knows everyone. It's annoying as hell most of the time.

Here's the fun. I graduated from high school in 1995. I went to high school with kids I also went to middle school with (amazing logic at work there, I know). My mom taught at the school I went to middle school at, so most of the kids knew who my mom was. Well, mom now has an educational supply store in town, and every once in a while people I went to high school with go in and buy things from her. No problem. It's to be expected.

Here's where I get confused.

Every once in a while my mom has a message for me from someone saying "hi." No big deal, even if it was from, say Rhonda, the girl I was friends with up until graduation day in which she decided to drop out of a planned beach trip without telling anyone, even though she as the transportation (it was yet another example of how flightly and irritatingly selfish she was and ended the friendship). Rhonda I could understand sending a "hi" because we at least were friends for a while.

But no, I keep getting the "tell her I said hi" message from people that I never, ever socialized with in high school. One girl, Buffy (and no, I'm not kidding), asked after me and told me mom to tell me hi, even though we *never* spoke in high school. At all. We only ever had one class together. I'm still not sure how she knew who I was (face it, the popular crowd was very self-centered - her not excluded - and most didn't know half the names of people in our class).

So Sunday my mother tells me that this girl Renee I went to high school and middle school with said "hi" and that she would love to get together sometime.

WTF?

I mean, the last time we probably spoke was in 8th grade (11 years ago!) and the sum total of what I know about her is that we went to the same high school and middle school, she was sort of nice, short with curly hair, and she was semi-popular. Do I know anything about her personally? No. Does she know anything about me? No. So why suddenly even suggest something like that? When there's really no chance of the getting together even happening? This confuses the hell out of me. Unless for some reason Renee is a Smallville/X-Men/fandom type person who has stumbled across my LiveJournal and is too timid to come out and just let me know that she has, well, I can't see why she even said such a ridiculous thing to my mother.

And here's the funny thing. I don't harbor any ill will toward people I went to high school with. There are several I wouldn't mind saying hi to now, but for the most part, I was ignored by a certain crowd, so the only people I missed were the people who didn't ignore me. There has to be a basis for the missing someone.

Anyone who's done the "hi" thing has been from the popular crowd (with the exception of one person) and didn't socialize with me at all. My theory is that they're stuck in a bumfuck town and looking to recapture the excitement of their youth, even vicariously through people that remember their glory days. It's sad in a way. Because not once has my mom brought up to those people the fact that she's my mom. They know it first and bring it up.

*sigh* I know, too much thinking on a silly, silly matter. But it irked me.

***

And did anyone else make the mistake of watching the Hallmark movie on CBS last night? Jeez. My poor dog got cuddled to death because it depressed me so much. Sad, and Glen Close was amazing, but damn. Those things should come with warning labels.

For your perusal...

Took this quiz, and I'm putting it in here for one reason and one reason only.

I'm an irredeemably eejitous, liberal, not-too-generous, not-too-selfish, relatively well adjusted human being!
See how compatible you are with me!
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

What the hell is eejitous? Not even dictionary.com knows.

Ah hell.

( How the hell am I supposed to resist an MSR quiz? )

Um, and for anyone (which should be most everyone) who didn't know this, as much as I like Smallville, it does not compare to how rabid I was about X-Files. That was my love. I was flat out rabid on that show. *sniff*

Hallmark Town

Apparently there is this mysterious place in America, this magical land of milk and cookies, that I have been missing. A place of perfection in which everyone knows each others' names but still manages to keep their noses out of everyone else's business. Where the diner on the corner is staffed by a warm, grandmotherly type, a friendly single mother or an inoffensively cranky man with a heart of gold, instead of surly teenagers or jaded old crones with hairnets.

I'll call this town Hallmark Town.

In Hallmark Town everything is perfect. The people are all different, but not too different mind you as they must all get along. In fact, they could all be labeled delightfully quirky. Not a single person is irredeemably irritating or inextricably boring. Everyone is interesting in some way, great or small. Even the precocious five-year-old riding her tricycle in front of the market has some wonderful, special quality (besides the fact that she is in fact precocious and five). (In Hallmark Town they apparently don't have accountants.)

The town is a lovely town with no rotten, abandoned buildings or trailer parks. No white trash or "bad" parts of town. Kids still ride bikes and people walk (which is good since there usually is little curbside parking). The grass is green and the dogs have manners and do their business somewhere off camera...um, I mean out of sight.

In Hallmark Town there are fresh vegetables sold by the actual person who grew them, not some big conglomerate in California with massive amounts of pesticides. People can actually make a living working in mom and pop stores for what is most likely less than minimum wage. Not only that, they can afford grand old houses with expansive porches and pet butterflies that land at the perfect time on always flowering shrubs in a climate that never wavers from comfortable.

In Hallmark Town there is always at least one very handy, ruggedly handsome man that has managed to stay single for his 30+ years by some miracle of the gods and at least one single woman who is quirky, lonely and looking for love who manages to find that man. And there is always at least one person of advanced years who is their guide to happiness, imparting years of wisdom on those in need.

In Hallmark Town there is always a lesson to be learned, but only one as the citizens are apparently brighter than most. Of course since that lesson is always that love conquers all, and it seems that each inhabitant must learn that lesson for themselves, maybe they aren't so bright after all. (And somebody tell me, why hasn't the IRS visited that town yet? Because that's a lesson somebody needs to learn - why cheating on their taxes is a Very Bad Thing.)

In Hallmark Town all of the women could kick Martha Stewart's butt and all of the men make Bob Villa want to go home again. Of course there is always one person hopeless in the carpentry/culinary arts, but that is why the others are so adept. They are ready and willing to step in and help that darling soul learn the ways of being a man/woman (instead of harping that the best way to cook green beans is to boil all of the juice out of them and sear them slightly on the bottom of the pan - otherwise known as leaving them on high too long and burning the hell out of them).

All is blessedly wonderful in Hallmark Town, where even the passing of a loved one is beautiful and sad, but not horribly so, because that person was old and had foreseen that their end was near, so they had already made their peace and said their goodbyes.

In Hallmark Town, everything is perfect. Damn perfect.

And that's why I'll never live in Hallmark Town.