Inspired By True Events

Family weekends always seem to be too full of stories to wrap up in an entry of any reasonable length.  I try to make notes to write about later, but my lists end up being far more entertaining than any recount of the actual stories could be.  This is my list from Friday afternoon/evening:

1.  Headphones – tune out unwanted spousal rumination
2. T making Meth
3. Claymation play-dough colors
4. CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
5. Lexicon, phone charger, nostrils
6. Flower sound-effects

What it boils down to is that weekends with my family are more fun than anything else I do, ever, yet they make poor blog entries.  They are completely unintelligible to people who weren't ther, not to mention half the people who were there.  Picture my parents and I laughing so hard we are all but falling out of our chairs, gasping out words that seem to make no sense (CHEEEEEP!  Pork chops!  Weather Channel!), tears streaming down our faces as we gesture wildly with our hands and add in strange sound effects for no apparent purpose; that'll give you a general idea of what my weekend looked like.

Oh, we also had a metric ton of bread on hand, just in case. 

(Not pictured: the TEN BOXES of dairy digestive supplement living on the window shelf by my mom’s carnival glass.  When did my parents start aging?  I call full stop on that, thanks.)

The massive amounts of bread were accompanied by massive amounts of all sorts of food, as this weekend was the (high school) graduation party for one of my cousins.  We’ve moved into the land of family graduations where I start to feel old.  I look at my baby cousins and their friends and baffle at the fact that they somehow turned into teenagers when I wasn’t looking.  I remember how grown up and adult I felt when I graduated high school, and I just want to run over and hug those kids and shield them from the real adulthood that is barreling down on them faster than any of them realize. 

Nearly all of my cousin’s graduating class was there, joking and play volleyball and basketball and generally horsing around.  My dad leaned over and said if I was bored I should go and explain to the lot of them that they were going to spend the next ten years trying very hard to avoid most of the people they were clinging to today; that most of them have nothing in common with each other besides the small town they grew up in.  Likely most of them will look back on 2009 with a mixture of nostalgia and horror, the same way I look back on my days in high school.  But at least they were still enjoying each other this weekend, before they all move onto the next stage in life and try very hard to be more than they are in their yearbooks: “class clown”, “best eyes”, “most likely to save the world”.

And in closing, before I wander off to page through my high school yearbooks and cringe and shudder at the pegged jeans and other dubious fashion choices, I bring you some poor quality pictures of me from high school, just because.

See, pegged jeans.  Paired with high-tops, just to complete the look I was going for.  You thought I was kidding.

 I am particularly fond of the silver high-tops in this picture.  From the background I would suspect that this dance had a theme of “space” or some such thing, but still…silver high-tops.

And to top it off, we have awkward teenager cheerleader Anne.  I can’t even look at this picture without cringing inside at what it felt like to be fifteen.  Man, you couldn’t pay me enough to do that again.

Go Bears!