r.i.p. harriet

on my lunch today i was looking through the paper and saw that jean benet ramsey's mom had died after a long struggle with ovarian cancer. i think my exact thought was "whatever." i was too annoyed that the story took up such a big space on the page to actually care. but then i looked on the next page and saw that harriet the 176 year old tortoise had died of heart failure and was so overcome with sadness for this reptile that i teared up.
how embarrassing to be me, the turtle crier.

my first visitor

my marm comes to visit in 11 days and she's bringing my board games. hooray! prepare to have your ass kicked in clue: master detective.

i'm glad/excited that my marm is my first visitor. she'll get to see where i live (since i am the slacker daughter who never quite got around to making a "this is my home" video which i promised many times), and the people i live with (which frightens me a bit due to the 49% of america agrees with 99% of the world bumper sticker on my refrigerator and the multicultural/f you america 4th of july party tom is hosting due to his distaste for patriotism and all that jazz). she will also see that her youngest daughter is doing fine 3,000 miiles away, and that this hippie city hasn't turned me into a total crazy tree-hugging, braless liberal.

goodbye my lover

i read some tragic news tuesday: j.j. reddick, my former future husband, was arrested for drunk driving and performing an illegal u-turn. in my mind we were perfect for each other. he was a history major and i love history. he played basketball for duke and i love duke basketball. he is from virginia and i sometimes claim to be from virginia. you can't get a much better match than that. when i saw the link "duke basketball player arrested for drunk driving" i thought it was going to be greg paulus, he looks stupid enough to pull something like that, but when i saw j.j's name i literally gasped. i was sure that cnn.com was lying, they had recieved bad information and it wasn't really j.j. at all, it was some lacrosse player making trouble again. my future husband would never do anything like that because he is an upstanding citizen and a smart man. i was mistaken. it really was him and in that moment i knew our relationship would never make it; he likes drunk driving and i don't. as my 10th grade history teacher told me to do in sad moments, i held my neighbor's hand and thought of the baby jesus. i was inconsolable for about 10 minutes but then i remembered that my future lover, anderson cooper, would be in town friday and i was okay.