Quotes Worth Repeating

"I's tryin' to be good and didn't get me a cookie."
-Woman leaving Sidamo coffee house. She was a little overweight and may or may not have been wearing a hair net. You may have had to be there for this one, but it was kinda hilarious. 


"That's the third time in a row that mo fo's gone and locked itself on me!"
-Man referring to his car in the alley outside my house. I feel like this is a time when reading your owner's manual definitely comes in handy.


"When me and you gonna go see a movie?"
-Davino, one of the hoodies that hangs outside my house
"Umm, probably never."
-My response, not the least of which was due to the fact that he'd just finished telling me about his boil ("BAWL. I had a bawl, you know what dat is?"), how he'd gone to the hospital to have it operated on, how it had then gotten all infected and started oozing nasty stuff, but not to worry, it was better.
"Oh it's like dat huh?" -Davino
"It is like that." - Me 

ROOTS

For those of you expecting a treatise on Kunta Kinte, I am sorry to disappoint. Contrary to starting on dusty African soil, my roots took hold in a small country town in lower North Carolina. My great grandmother Lucy Hipps had twelve children: she popped out six, took a five year break, then popped out six more. If I never knew anything else about the woman, that fact alone would be enough for me to give her mad props. Of these, there were ten boys and two girls, and at least until I reached high school, all of them were still living. They, of course, all went on to get married and have their own kids, which, if one does the math, is already an insanely large dose of relatives. My Grampa's one of the original boys and therein lies my tie to this family circus.

The Hipps have a website, and the other day, I made the mistake of asking my mother for her log-in info so I could visit it. It appears the Hipps have taken it upon themselves to singlehandedly repopulate the Western Hemisphere. Every five minutes, there was a newsflash that someone else was having a baby, and while I know the original twelve, their children, and can even name half of the great-grandkids (of which I am one), we are now reaching epic proportions. Names are being flung around the family site like confetti, and only about 25% of them still have Hipps somewhere in the mix. People are marrying Joneses, Grahams, even Yoshinos, and our numbers passed into the hundreds some time ago. Needless to say, I am not yet contributing to this melee, although my brother has already treacherously jumped on the bandwagon by producing what I'm convinced is the world's cutest fat baby (ah BOO BOO), but if we're not careful (and we won't be), the annual Hipps Family Reunion is going to turn into the Hipps Family Conference, with 65% of the participants being under the age of 16. Going to restaurants is comical: Hipps, party of 2,000. Even outside of your standard childbirth, people are divorcing, re-marrying, absorbing pre-fabricated other families, adopting, what have you, and our family tree has rapidly become a family shrub. Add to that the twelve strains of quirky that we've inherited from the original gangstas, get us all together, and it really is a travelling circus, the biggest you've ever seen. We've already started doing in-house variety shows, we put on our own golf tournament (complete with trophies and award ceremony), one of my great uncles is infamous for conducting illegal tours of private property (it's for the children!), and at least two of the brothers have been professional clowns, my Grampa included. EGAD. Taking a stroll through my bloodlines gets weirder every day.

applicable quote of the day

"You get tired of thinking about yourself all the time when you're a writer... It gets wearisome, all the bellyaching and feeling and thinking about the world and how you interact with it." - Donald Miller

Amen to that.

A Healthy Dose of Discontent

I was just walking down the street today, mindin' my own, talkin' to the Moms, when in the middle of our conversation, she makes the very mom-like comment, "well, you're not getting any younger." Wow. Even though I kept rapidly putting one foot in front of the other, because I was late to work again, my world came to a screeching halt. Seriously. I could almost hear the squealing of brakes and tires as my somewhat comfortable little existence braked so fast my chest hurt from the seatbelt. Here I am cruising along, thinking I'm clever at having manufactured my life in such a way that I only work part-time, sleep till noon, and often have more free time than I know what to do with (oh wait, I think I'll just sleep some more), and then she has to go and say something like that, pouring salt in the ever growing wound who's scab I began picking at a couple of weeks ago. It's all I've been able to think about these days, especially since my birthday is creeping up with all the leisure of a speed locomotive.

I used to love my birthday. I still declare March 1 as the day when I absolutely refuse to do anything I don't want to do. Yet now, it brings with it all these dismal thoughts of the massive amounts of time that have already passed, the scarce minutes remaining in what people term my "youth," and an immense dissatisfaction with my current path of choice. Why am I not riding a gondola in Italy right now? Why does my life feel like anything but an adventure and why are people giving me books to read whose sole intent and purpose is to make us question the completely uninteresting aspects of our lives? I can't handle much more of this. It's overwhelming me to the point of not being able to do much about it save finding some series/movie to watch online that completely numbs my mind to the havoc being wreaked upon it by this debilitating discontent. I could use my own dose of radical vision, instead of hearing church vision talked about so much with all this excitement about things that I couldn't feel more removed from. I. Just. Don't. Feel. It. My apathy seems unable to be more inopportune. Can I just stop thinking for once in my life about being a person who chose differently?