I'm going to post my actual entry, which I wrote just before I got the phone call that filled me with joy beyond limits, but first, the call. Can you guess from the title of today's entry what it was about?.
.
.
Oh god I am sooooooooo happy.
.
.
.
.
Ding dong. The witch is dead. Better than dead, in fact; retired. The Psycho has put in her retirement papers today and when we get back to school in September she will be already gone. The principal who makes everyone's life a living hell because she is erratic and and a bully and so much more is retiring. I've been waiting for this day for nearly 20 years.
This is good.
Here's a real entry about me.
Not long after I posted yesterday, my OldFriend called, and after we talked for a few minutes she said "So, are you down?" Man, she's good. So I told her pretty much what I had told all you guys, and between the two, I started to feel better. Also, could be that the bad menopause chemicals are settling down a little, which at this point is a physical sensation I'm aware of. I'm going for the record for the world's longest menopause anyway, so by the time I'm 80, I should be really good at getting all the symptoms nailed down.
But then I woke up this morning -- at six -- all ready to walk in the mall and I got there and it was pretty creepy and dark and hot, and I turned around and came home. I got myself all worked up about not going, and I thought I'd go again, but my hair was a mess (and you see people at the mall when there are people there) and I just felt fat and didn't like anything I had to wear and then suddenly before I knew it I got normal and fixed my hair and put on a shirt and went to the mall -- it was about 9:30 -- and walked three laps, so maybe that was 2 and half miles. This made me feel really really good, and then the magic phone call came, so for now, at least, things are looking way up.
Poolagirl was kind enough to mention that she owns not one, but two, tie-dyed shirts! Now, the one I was wearing during the Today show fashion report was not a home-made one, but actually purchased at the school store of the very hippie SUNY school of which R is a graduate. But it did put me in mind of my tie-dying past, which I shall now share with you.
I did not tie-dye in high school in the sixties. I made candles instead. But in the mid-eighties, I got a summer job working at a fairly posh day camp in Rockland County, NY, over the border from NJ maybe 40 minutes from home, so that my kids could go there for free. A friend from school worked there, also to send her kid to the camp, and the Sibs sent the J twins as well, while their father, Satan J, was still willing to pay for their summer camp. But I digress. I got a job as the assistant computer counselor, which was my first real exposure to personal computers, and I learned a great deal from the head computer counselor. Over at the Arts and Crafts shack, meanwhile, the head counselor would hold a massive tie-dying event once a summer for the older kids, and every one of them would go home with a personally tie-dyed t-shirt.
My second summer as computer counselor, I took an hour off one day and watched her do it.
The next spring, when it was my job to come up with a crafts activity for the town Girl Scout camping trip, I said "Hey, let's have them tie-dye t-shirts! I know how to do it!" So I got the dyes and a jillion squirt bottles and everything else I needed, and in the space of about five hours, I rotated every freaking little Girl Scout in town through my station -- a couple of hundred girls, I guess -- and everybody went home with a wet, dyed shirt in a plastic bag.
The next summer, I became the arts and crafts counselor at camp, and I designated one whole week as Tie-Dye week. Everybody from the three-year-olds on up dyed a shirt, maybe it was 400 kids. It was a blast. For that week, I would wear only white clothes, a pair of old white jeans and a white work shirt every day, just to see what they would look like at the end of the week. I wore gloves, but my hands would be purple up to the elbows anyway. The only colors we offered were red, blue, green, and yellow. The second year I may have added pink. The second year, some of the older kids discovered that they could "tie-dye" black or other dark shirts with bleach, and that was very cool.
The little ones, of course, needed a great deal of help, although all they actually had to do was squirt dye over a rubber-banded shirt (which I had soaked in the preparatory solution and a counselor had tied), but even so. Between helping kids, at camp and with the Scouts, and getting new ideas for my own and so wanting to do more, I've probably tie-dyed hundreds of shirts. In fact, now that I think of it, one year the Junior Class picked a tie-dye color theme for Spirit Week, and so I did it with them too, all in school colors.
I don't even have most of those shirts I dyed myself, maybe a few in a box in the basement. They were all cheap men's undershirts, so it's not like they would have held up. Anyway, I'm just saying, if that babe on the Today show doesn't like tie-dyed shirts, screw her. It's part of my heritage, man. It's who I am,
P.S. Don't get me wrong: my father was an anti-social hermit, too. This quality does not make these people less noble, or wonderful, or lovable. It just makes them pains in the ass from time to time.
