I wanted to let you guys know that Ginny has become bored enough to begin writing online again. I won’t promise daily updates or anything, but if you want to hear about what it’s like to recover from a major car accident from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, there’s the place to go.

My parents have seriously overbooked themselves this weekend. Tomorrow night they’re supposed to go volunteer at bingo for one of the booster clubs they’re in (my sisters play three JV or varsity sports), which is from like 5 until 11 or so, and they’ve also volunteered to work at the after-prom party, which is actually kind of funny since no one in my family is actually GOING to prom this year. They volunteered last year too, and again – no one in my family went to prom. Sam is a junior this year so she could go, but she’s not down with dances and dressing up and stuff so she decided to skip it. And yeah, my parents are kind of Those Parents. But in a mostly good way, I think. They’re pretty popular with the kids.

So yeah, bingo and the after-prom party. In addition to that, Jamie has a softball double header and has been invited to a birthday party, and I think Sam has to work, and someone has to be with Ginny at all times. Sammi’s car has been fixed, so she should be okay getting herself where she needs to be, but we’re going to have to be a little creative to get everyone else set.

I don’t know how we did it when I was in high school. Between my junior and senior years, here’s what was going on in my family:

• Marching band – Ginny and I both did that. (3 afternoons a week, plus every other Friday night and some Saturdays in the fall)

• Volleyball – me, and Ginny did it one of those years too. (every afternoon, plus games on most Tuesdays and Thursdays in the winter)

• Soccer – me. (every afternoon plus games, all spring)

• Tee ball/Softball – Sammi and Jamie, and I think Ginny did it one year. (a few nights a week in the spring, plus games on weekends – and they were on two teams)

• Basketball – Sammi and Jamie. (same as above, except in the winter)

• Forensics/speech team – me. (weekends in the spring)

• Symphonic band/chorus – me and Ginny. (concerts a few times a year)

Oh, and I had a job, too. And I don’t even think I’ve remembered all the stuff we were doing then. My parents had at least one kid in the elementary, middle, and high schools. The middle and high schools were fifteen minutes east of our house, and my mom worked 45 minutes in the opposite direction. The activity bus didn’t run every day of the week, and I didn’t have a car until partway through my senior year.

They had these crazy orchestrations of rides and drop-off times and pick-up times and spending a certain number of innings at one game before driving a half-hour to another one, or meeting so-and-so halfway to trade kids or bring equipment or whatever. And for the most part, we always ended up where we needed to be.

Lesson: Don’t have four kids. Or, if you insist on having four kids, don’t let them do any extracurricular activities. Well-rounded kids are hell!

Actually, my parents are incredible.

Things had settled down somewhat with Ginny and I “grown-up,” even though we’ve both been living at home. Between Ginny, Mom, Dad, and me, we could always work out rides and stuff whenever needed.

It’s been a little crazier lately, though, with Ginny out of commission and Sam without her car for a few months. When Sam didn’t have the car, we really only had two drivers at any given time, and that’s just not enough in my family. Now that she has her car fixed she can shuttle herself around town a little better, but it can still get complicated sometimes – especially this weekend.

But we’ll get it all worked out. We always do.

I hope your weekends are wonderful, and less busy than ours will be!

Today’s newspaper had a kind of wrap-up story on the accident, summarizing the results of the state police investigation, which was released yesterday.

Fatal wreck blamed on driver inattention and excessive speed

I’m really sad to learn that the driver of the other car was going too fast, because I know it will cause people to think she was irresponsible and that’s going to hurt her family. She was a good kid, though, and did something that lots of people do. People speed a lot on that stretch of road – it’s a downhill straightaway that sweeps into a curve, and it’s easy to pick up speed.

Today I stayed home with a nasty case of the queasies, so I guess the coughing yesterday may not have been steak-in-lungs related after all. I’m really bummed that I couldn’t make it in, because I was supposed to go to a work thing tonight involving miniature golf and go-carts, neither of which I’ve dabbled in since I was roughly ten years old. I’m sure I would suck at both but I wanted to play! I’d really been looking forward to this.

Here’s something else I’m looking forward to from my childhood, though – Netflix is shipping The Brave Little Toaster for this weekend. It’s one of our favorite movies from when we were little, and my sisters and I are all really excited about it getting here. Sam’s been singing songs from the movie all week.

I just hope it doesn’t turn out like Animaniacs, though. We thought that was the funniest thing on TV when we were younger, and kept clicking around the old cartoon channels looking for it. Finally, it showed up on NickToons, and we got all excited and TiVoed a bunch of them. I don’t know if they don’t stand up to the test of time, or if they’ve been edited, or if the network is only showing weaker episodes, but they weren’t nearly as funny the second time around.

I think The Brave Little Toaster will be okay, though. Sure, it’s Disney, but it’s by the same director as Toy Story, and the voice cast was awesome, and we just completely loved this movie. It was right up there with The Chipmunk Adventure.

Yeah, I’m really showing my age today.

So that’s what’s going on. Oh, and by the way, daytime television is really sucky.

Last night, we’re all sitting eating dinner in front of American Idol. Yes, we are that family. Shut up. Anyway, so we’re watching and eating and all of a sudden something happens that causes me to suck in a sudden gasp of air, and the sharp intake of breath causes the piece of meat I’ve just put in my mouth to lodge directly in my throat.

This has never happened to me before, as far as I can remember. Sure, there have been plenty of times when a little bit of something or another went down the wrong pipe, but this piece of meat is completely blocking my airway.

I can’t speak. I can’t breathe. My family is glued to American Idol. And in that brief, brief moment of absolutely blind panic, here’s what I think:

Oh my god I can’t breathe holy fucking shit this is no good and no one is looking at me and I’m going to choke to death and die on a piece of friggin’ steak and my family’s going to notice after I’m dead on the floor and be like “Oh, no biggie, we can just do CPR and bring her back but first let’s see how Diana Degarmo does” and also I think Nanie’s chihuahua died from choking on a piece of meat so I’m going to die just like a yappy little dog and oh crap oh crap oh crap oh crap….

And then, seconds later, the killer meat became dislodged. I think it fell into my lung. And I sucked in the biggest, hugest, most grateful breath I’ve ever taken and proceeded to begin coughing my face off. Which really sucked, and hurt. I seriously coughed so long and so hard that I nearly vomited, and my throat was so trashed that I spent the rest of the evening barely able to speak.

I’m still coughing today, which I think is mostly pollen-related, but I think the killer steak is also involved somehow. That was pretty scary.

And I’m walking around with a piece of steak in my lung today.

TMI? Yeah, maybe. But up until this point my greatest memory of oxygen deprivation involves getting cocky on an innertube in a California hotel pool, falling in the deep end, and swallowing about three gallons of pool water. And I was something like 6 at the time. So I felt like sharing.

In retrospect, of course we’re all laughing and joking about it, because that’s what my family does.

The last week of the month is always my least favorite. One serious drawback of working in education: monthly paychecks. So the last week of the month is when we start to run out of shampoo and toothpaste and stuff and when I’m scraping money together to gas up the car and calculating when I can start floating checks so that they don’t beat my deposit to the bank.

Yes, if I were a fabulous money manager, none of these things would be issues. I’m getting better at it – the last week of the month is no longer sponsored by Visa – but making positive changes in your life takes time.

I am tired. Exhausted. I keep yawning these uncontrollable yawns that threaten to swallow my head. The yawn thing has been going on for a couple of days now. I don’t know what that’s about.

Last night we watched The Swan, again. I’m so ashamed that my mom and dad and I keep watching it – it’s like a train wreck fascination or something. It has stimulated some really interesting dialogue, though – not to mention some really spirited ripping on the terrible production values of the show itself. The over-the-top melodrama, the Serious Music that I’m sure was recycled from Joe Millionaire, the horribly boring clips and in-episode recaps – it’s all so FOX of them. Seriously, they must think their average viewer has the attention span of a newborn kitten. I don’t know – maybe the average viewer does have such an attention span. But anyway, a few things came up that I found interesting enough to share.

When they begin detailing the “necessary” changes to the women, it tends to bring forth opinions from my household that fall into one of two areas. Sometimes, it’s the sharing of “wish lists” – “I’d have my chin done, and my boobs, and my toe joints.” I don’t really have a wish list. Sure, there are things about my body I don’t like, but you know what I would really worry about? I’d worry that the “experts” would find flaws with parts of my body that I don’t find objectionable at all, or worse – parts of my body I cherish.

Can you imagine? You go in there thinking, “I hate my nose, it’s always felt out of place, I’ve always been teased for it, I just want them to fix my nose,” and the next thing you know, they’re telling you that they have to fix your chin, your brows, and your cheekbones too. Your squarish chin that looks just like your grandfather’s, that makes you feel a connection to him when you see pictures, even though you never had the pleasure of knowing him. Your brows – yeah, maybe they’re a little heavy, but you like them. They make you look smart, thoughtful – not like you’re in a constant state of alarm. And your cheekbones – what the hell is wrong with them?

I think most of these women look perfectly fine “before.” For example, I loved the shape of Tawnya’s face – she had this lovely elegance to her bone structure. In her “before” clips, she didn’t look like an ugly duckling to me – she looked like a woman who had been absolutely crushed by circumstance one too many times. She looked sad, and tired. I wanted to cheer when she told them not to change several things about her face that they’d planned to “fix.” She said something along the lines of “this nose has been with me through all this, both of my daughters have it, I want to keep it to remind me of who I am.”

Those surgeons were SO disappointed, and actually went so far as to admonish her a bit in interviews – “She seemed like she really wanted to work on herself, to go through with this transformation – I’m disappointed that she cancelled the surgery.” And meanwhile, I’m sitting there like YOU GO GIRL!

We’ve found that we can choose, without fail, the woman who will be picked to go on to the bullshit pageant each week. Why? Because it’s always the one who looks the most like the women chosen on previous weeks. The woman who stands out a little, who didn’t lose as much weight, who didn’t conform, is sent home.

My dad made an excellent point last night when I was complaining that they all looked the same, with their makeup and their hair extensions and their lookalike gowns (of course, this is standard in mainstream beauty pageants as well). Dad said, “I feel like I’m looking at several portraits painted by the same artist – they’re all a little different, but they’re similar enough that you can tell they were done by the same person.”

I keep planning not to watch, and then I wander through the living room and get sucked in. For me, it’s turned into this weird thing – she looks perfectly normal, so what will they find wrong with her? What part of herself will she shed as part of her “transformation?”

It’s not entertaining, really – it’s the feeling I get when I watch a movie like Requiem for a Dream. It hurts to watch, but I feel like I have to. I feel like I have to hear what it is exactly that makes these women so sad that they’ll go through all this willingly. I feel like maybe if I keep listening to the same bullshit recycled clips, I’ll begin to understand.

This phenomenon has certainly been written about more thoroughly and eloquently elsewhere, with more references to actual facts and theories about it. I haven’t studied nearly enough feminist theory to ground my feelings in some facts, and I wouldn’t begin to try. For me, this is about witnessing something that makes me simultaneously uncomfortable and fascinated, and making an attempt to reconcile what I’ve seen with what I understand about my world, and about myself.

Okay. So. Someone I work with recently updated a chart we use in the office which explains some of the codes we use.

It’s in Comic Sans.

Once it’s revised, I’m assuming that it’s going to be photocopied and distributed around the office so we can put it on our bulletin boards for reference.

Problem is, there’s no way in bloody hell that I’m displaying anything typed in Comic Sans anywhere in my office. My brain will be eaten by crazybugs if I have to look at it every day.

I wish there were a diplomatic way to say that I don’t want anything in Comic Sans, ever, but I can’t come up with anything that doesn’t make me sound like an anal-retentive psycho bitch.

Which is basically what I am, and that’s why I’ll probably end up retyping the entire document myself in an appropriate typeface, or sticking with the old, outdated one (because I’m familiar enough with the system that I use this reference chart infrequently). Because I am exactly that anal.

Sam and I had fun with the digital camera on Saturday. Check it out here.