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Thursday, February 27, 2003 Calgon, take me... oh, forget it. One of my kids is playing a Lord of the Rings game on the Playstation 2 that I bought them with tax refund money. The game came on and I heard the sad music, Cate Blanchett's voice talking about sad things that went down, and I thought, "Man, I would like to escape into that escapism for a while." I didn't say this earlier because I didn't feel like whining, for once, but dammit my car is causing me a world of trouble. And tickets. And fees. And apPARently a piece of mail went out to my ex-spouse's house almost a year ago explaining to the recipient that if I didn't get an SR 22 (car insurance thingie) within 21 days, my license would be suspended. I never saw that piece of mail. I almost got arrested the other day. Everything's going to be okay. My faithful cousin Helen will drive me to get my license reinstated tomorrow. Then, when we get back, I can use all the rest of the tax refund money -- no, NOT to put a down payment on a car that ISN'T falling apart, like I'd planned, but -- to pay for my tickets and fees and the mythical parts, as yet unfound, that will make my car whole or at least legal to drive. Before I get any more tickets, hopefully. (And, yes, I realize that I have it better than a LOT of people. But this site is about me and not them, so I will continue to whine and moan in the snow.) So the temptation is to morph into Frodo or Eowyn or somebody and get away for a while. Go off into the hills of New Zealand and fight EVIL. What's that you say? Did I actually read the books? Yes, I did. Yes, I know that all they ever really did was trudge through swamps or snow, moaning and whining. Or else they fought monsters for a bit and got painful wounds. None of that sounds like fun, I know. But at least they were doing it for something. And they knew what they were doing it for. My favorite thing about the story is that they could wake up every day and say, "Oh, goddammit, here we go again with the snow and the trolls and I'm tired and my wound is aching and I just want to go back to bed but, dammit, if me and my friends don't fight evil today, who the hell will?" Lately I wake up and know that, goddammit, here I go with the searching for car parts and paying for fees and just trying to get everybody to school and to work without the aching dread filling me with bile every time a cop car goes by. And I say, "I'm not fighting evil. I'm not doing anything constructive at all. I'm barely making it through the fucking week here. Evil must be running rampant." I'm just glad I got my kids a PS2 before the bureaucracy could squeeze the rest of its Lower Middle Class Existence Tax out of my worn out Hello Kitty wallet. Evil's running rampant. I'm running out from under its feet. Hear the siren? That's the Ringwraith coming to ticket me again. or maybe it's Welsh, like my great-grandma Did I ever tell y'all that my crazy hippie parents made one of my middle names Galadriel? We pronounce it "guh-LAY-dree-el", though. My other two middle names are Spanish, to go with our surname, I guess. When I tell people my whole name, their minds are dazzled by its length and they don't question it too deeply. I save the Lord of the Rings pronounciation debate for another day. But now I've outed myself to y'all, so we never have to mention it again. I feel cleansed. Don't you? I don't know... I think Galadriel could maybe pass for a Chilean. Her nickname could be Gala. If she moved to Houston in the 1970s, her pachuca name could be La Loca Oreja. Arwen could be the quiet girl whose super Catholic parents never let her leave the house. Hence she sneaks out at night to meet Aragorn, who is secretly about to inherit a super bad-ass mechanic franchise. Okay, that's dumb. I'll quit. |