Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries newest entry

8:25 p.m. - November 25, 2001
the return
I was thinking, just as I was about to write this, how young I still am, since I just went on this admittedly really boring and noneventful trip, with my family no less, and am back with twenty million stories, none of which are particularly interesting, but some of which are sort of funny. Like I thought it was just a rumor that in Texas, people wear cowboy hats and spurs and heavy gold chains with crosses on the ends and are actually proud of it. It isn't. Or, well, this observation isn't exactly fair, since the samplng of people taken was at a country concert (Jerry Jeff Walker... you know.. Billy Bob, Sally Sue, Jerry Jeff.. all right, I'm done..) and it ws a real good ol' boy kind of thing, I thought I'd gone to hell by accident instead of just Houston. That isn't fair either. I tried not to begrudge the Southerners their excitement, though I really, really wanted to get a picture of one with his big old leopard print cowboy hat on (LEOPARD PRINT! HAHAHA!) My God, I'm going to get hate mail.
All right. We're not all drunks, as some may consider us, what with the feeding vodka to children and uncles making us takeshots of tequila at.. what was it.. twelve? ten? My 'niece' is only seven now, but she made her a lemon drop anyway. The term is 'loose'. None of us will ever die in want of an alcoholic drink. The funny thing is, I don't even like alcohol that much. At all, really. Oh, but they do. Ohhh... but they do.
I did get to like Ars Morendi after I listened to it in a tipsy state few times. It helped that I 'understood' the Latin. 'Understood' meaning not.
My uncles are like the three bears, with their identical twinkly eyes and sly slow grins. Uncle 'M' and Uncle 'G' were arguing over whether Uncle 'G' knew I was smart since I was little or not. 'G' said I was smart. Uncle 'M' said, 'how do you know?' and Uncle 'G' said, well I could tell from her early responses before SOMEBODY scared her' looking pointedly at uncle 'M', who got insulted and spent the rest of the breakfast arguing about calculus. Uncle 'G' said calculus was the cream cheese, or some such, and that's when I stopped listening. Uncle 'W' is silent through this exchange.
Sometime later, or before, my chronology is not excellent, the entire dinner table (20+ people, an amalgym of cousins and aunts and grandparents and uncles and nieces and in-laws) got into a heated, and I mean heated, argument about whether a tomato was a fruit or a vegetable. Most of them took fruit, and they were tossing scientific anecdotes about leaves and roots and trees across the table, because they all want to seem smarter than everyone else, like they need to with their PhD's and Ivy League college degrees and such, but I got sick of listening to them show off and I said, "Tomatoes are vegetables because I hate the way they taste and vegetables always taste worse and anyway you put them in salad with lettuce and cucumbers and all the other vegetables with dressing, and you wouldn't do that with a fruit, so it's a vegetable, so it is.' And the whole table fell silent, everyone wondering whose gene pool I cae from, because it certainly wasn't theirs, and one cousin piped up, 'Cucumbers are fruit' to either try and make me feel better or to mock me, I'm not sure which, but nobody dignified it.
Later, still on the discussion, which had opened to include about every other fruit or vegetable in the world, I said, 'It is a bush that they grow on, and I know this because I want some raspberries, I'll say to my dad 'I'm gonna go steal some raspberries from te neighbor's BUSH' and fruits grow on bushes, so raspberries are fruits.' By then, I was almost painfully obviously making fun of them, but the table just went silent again, except for my mom, saying 'Hannah's mind makes things happen', my Grandma going, "what? what" and the cat, going 'MEOW'.
We sat next to a woman on the plane who was making a Powerpoint on the September 11th attack thingies. She showed it to us. In the air. We're flying around over.. like.. the Mississippi or something, and she's showing us these pictures of the planes crashing into these buildings, and my mother and I are a little disconcerted about the terrible timing of this woman (plane? hello?) but we can't say anything so we look. And as always, the only pictures that bother me are the ones that show people actually jumping out of the building. There's on picture this lady has on her presentation with this woman, jumping out of the World Trade Center, in perfect falling form, hands behind her head, legs together and straight out, perfectly vertical to the ground. She looks calm. I think about how desperate someone must be to jump out of a window. Then I remember I'm on a plane. The same kind of transportation thing that crashed. And I can't look anymore, and her computeris playing 'God Bless America', really loudly, and the other passengers are looking round to see where it's coming from, and we're trying to make her stop the presentation, but she won't do it until it's over, ending with this picture of the Statue of Liberty. God Bless America. It's a cliched phrase, now. It used to make me angry. Now I just can't be bothered.
Also, they made me drink my Snapple at the security checkpoint to make sure it wasn't poison, or, as the Powerpoint lady said, kerosene.

 

previous - next

about me - read my profile! read other Diar
yLand diaries! recommend my diary to a friend! Get
 your own fun + free diary at DiaryLand.com!