formerly a fearless temp

Guys, it is summer, which means I'm not teaching, which means I have all sorts of time to Accomplish Things, yet all it seems I've been accomplishing so far is:

-developing an addiction to Junior Mints,
-reactivating my ABC Daytime addiction,
-reading piles of books I left around during the school year,
-watching tons of movies (both of the cinematic and awful LMN variety), and
-that's about it.

My room is only half-cleaned and my half of the office hasn't even been touched. I haven't updated my teaching portfolio, and to be honest, I'm not 100% I know where it is. Oh, I have applied for some jobs. So there's something.

One thing I did last week is visit my grandfather's grave for the first time. It was weird; I've driven past the cemetery where he's buried a huge number of times (in fact, every day on my way home from work - it's on one of the busiest roads in my hometown) and I've never gone. I've never been to the cemetery where my other grandfather has been buried since the day of his funeral, which was five years ago.

I kind of worry that this makes me an awful person, especially since it's not like this is being done as a symptom of a bad relationship I had with either of them. I had great relationships with both of them. I loved them very much - still love them. Still miss them. But the cemetery just doesn't seem like where they are, to me.

And so every day I drove past the cemetery and didn't think too much about it. For me, the physical place I visited to mourn my grandfather this year wasn't the cemetery but his house, which was successfully sold a couple of months ago. That's gone now - I can't exactly pop in on the new owners and ask to walk through the downstairs and stand in random rooms for long stretches of time for no particular reason, the way I did before the papers were signed. Maybe that's why recently I've had this flash when I drive past the cemetery lately, a quick burst of Ishouldgointhere. The first time I listened to it was last week.

My grandfather used to take me to the cemetery with him after my grandmother died. It was an important place to him, which is why I think I've been to his gravesite and not my other grandfather's. He would kneel on the ledge of the headstone in the middle and my brother and I would kneel on either side and we'd say prayers. I did the same thing when I went, and it was weird: familiar, but also strange, since I'm twenty-seven, not eleven, and so the proportions are all different. Also, I was alone. The back of the gravestone is different, too, my grandfather's date of death added in.

After that, I went and looked at some other headstones in the older part of the cemetery, which was down this short but steep hill. I ambled around for a while (is it morbid that I like to imagine the lives of the people whose names I see on the stones?), and then decided to go back. Walked over to the little hill, stepped up and just about face-planted. Flip flops + steep incline + wet grass = disaster. There was some dude about fifty feet away cutting the grass, looking right in my direction, so the whole time I was doing this awkward, wide-legged, arms-windmilling climb, I know he was watching. I felt pretty stupid.

Especially when I realized the solution: taking off the flip flops. Bare feet are perfect for such terrain. I scooted right up, hopped in my car, put on some Johnny Cash.

One thing of note: I didn't really cry while I was there. I got all scrunchy-faced and sniffly, but no real crying. It's strange; I rarely cry when I am sad over something in my own life, probably because if I feel the urge, the first impulse is to stifle it and move on. Wow, that sounds way more messed up than it feels! I cry all the time with sad movies, commercials, documentaries, TV shows, etc., though. Why is that? I suspect I am extremely dysfunctional. Yes, that sounds about right.

And okay, I got tagged to take part in some memes! callmesandy asked me five questions, and kaelie asked me about five songs I'm into!

( two memes! )

The great suzy_queue called me out for the 20 random things meme, and since I really don't want to do schoolwork, I am going to do my LJer duty and reply!

(I will do my other LJer duty, replying to comments, sometime in the next day or so, I promise.)

Twenty Random Things:

1. Today I went to Target and the cashier totally flirted with me, which was fine when I was loading things like Swiffer Wet Jet stuff and pens onto the conveyor belt, but then I got to my "Ultra Control Top" pantyhose and the magic was just kind of gone.

2. I can't sleep with my closet door open.

3. I'm always afraid oven doors are going to snap shut on my arm when I reach inside.

4. I bite my nails when I'm nervous - right now they're so bitten-down that they hurt.

5. I really think I should have played softball as a kid. Or some kind of sport.

6. (5) has less to do with physical fitness (though I need improvement there) than it has to do with my fear of failure - I never, or almost never, try anything that I'm not absolutely positive I'll do well at. I think doing some kind of sport where I'd be forced to regularly deal with not doing well would have helped me become a better person.

7. Oh, I don't know. After typing that out, it kind of sounds like crap. I think I'm just built for worrying and underperformance. I'm like an old American car.

8. When I was in high school, two of my good friends from middle school lost their mothers to cancer. I'd switched to a different school than theirs at that point, and I think I kind of took advantage of the distance that provided and didn't really reach out to them as much as I could have. I always have wished that I had done more for them, said something, done something. Death scared me and I was so afraid of saying something wrong and hurting them more that I didn't say or do much of anything. To this day I feel really guilty.

9. I really have almost no desire to leave the area where I grew up. I want to move out of my parents' house, sure, but I love the comfort of knowing a place inside and out - that the sub place I got my turkey sandwich from today is the same place where I used to get ice cream after school, that I can stand and lean on the same counter I used to look up to when I was eight. I love that I was on the 7th grade academic challenge team with my hairdresser's sister, and that I can open the local newspaper to "this day in 1905" and sometimes read about my great-grandfather (there was an item the other day about how he got his nose broken at a polling location in 1905).

10. I would love to be a truly excellent singer.

11. Holy crap, it's, like, really hard to come up with 20 random facts about me. I feel like I've said everything random about me in this LJ already. Have I mentioned that I play the piano? Okay, something random about that: for years I've lamented the loss of this one arrangement of Pachabel's Canon in D that I could play really well. I memorized the first half, and can still play that part pretty well, but after that it always fades into nothingness. I seriously mourned this loss for years until, last year, I decided to work on my piano some more. I pulled out the old recital books that I never finished (I quit lessons when I graduated high school, before I'd finished going through the last recital book), and lo and behold! In it was an arrangement for Pachabel's Canon in D that I liked as much or possibly more! And now I can play it and it sounds pretty good.

12. I keep trying to teach myself Moonlight Sonata but I always crap out in the middle.

13. The polish chipping off my toenails right now: Wine With Everything, by Revlon.

14. I have no idea how to apply eyeliner. I feel that one day I will learn how, or wake up knowing how, and it will change my life.

15. I've never read Hamlet.

16. I have no clue what I'm going to wear tomorrow. I've taken to laying my clothes out before I go to bed, like my mom used to when I was a kid. I remember when she stopped doing that - how I was excited and at the same time sad, like I knew part of my childhood was ending, even though I was only seven or eight.

17. I have these sharp, vivid memories of things I said that hurt my mother: making fun of her cooking on the phone with my best friend in elementary school (she had a mom who stayed home and used fresh vegetables; my mom worked all day and sometimes gave us frozen dinners), which she overheard. I don't think she ever talked to me about it, or I ever mentioned it to her, but I can remember exactly where I was: sitting on the stairs that led down to the basement, just off of the kitchen, trying to get some privacy for my phone call. I was talking to B., one of the girls whose mother would die less than ten years later. Why does that moment stick with me? It's weird, but it does, to the point that it makes me feel like I want to throw up a little bit now, years later.

18. Can you tell that I obsess over things?

19. I went down to NYC with remainthesame, emluv, and bitchygurl a couple of weeks ago and had a totally awesome time - I never wrote about it here because I got wrapped up in school right after I got back, but it was great.

20. I am going to hate myself tomorrow for not being in bed right now.

And that's 20! I think I was supposed to keep track of how long it took me to do this and tag as many people as minutes it took me to finish this, but since I didn't keep track but know it must have taken at least half an hour, I will just say that I love reading random facts! Please, one, all, share random facts!