Random Facts

My grandpa always wanted one of his redheaded daughters (my mom and aunt) to play the violin. Neither of them did. I am the last of six grandchildren on that side, and the only redhead. My grandpa died when I was three. In fourth grade, completely out of the blue, with no prodding or suggestions from anyone, I told my mom I wanted to play the violin. I stuck with it through first semester of freshman year of college, when I realized some people were really serious about orchestra, and I was not one of those people. I wasn't bad, it just wasn't my life. Yesterday, for the first time in probably three years, I took my violin out of its case. Took me twenty minutes to tune the thing, and twenty minutes to dust off my rusty skills, but all told, I'm not so bad.

Every time we sing hymns at church, I follow the notes and finger along with my left hand, as if I'm playing violin. I've been doing this since fourth grade. I think this is why I can still pick up my violin and know how to play it without thinking, even after years of not doing it.

One of my favorite features about myself is my lips. They're naturally full of color, and pretty full. When I get out of the shower, I'm extra pale and my lips are extra red. I think it's sexy. I especially love the way my lips look immediately after I've brushed my teeth and applied chapstick.

I'm addicted to chapstick. Jess once gave me 17 chapsticks as a thank you. It was one of the best presents I've ever gotten. I keep them everywhere, and I apply constantly.

There's a lot of family drama on my mom's dad's side. I'd really love to collect it all and write a book, but I don't know if I have the fortitude to go around collecting everyone's side of all the stories.

This year, I made twenty cents in interest. That rounds to zero on my tax form.

For the first year ever, I'm starting my taxes now instead of in April. I really want that return.

I want an ipod touch. So much it hurts. So much I'm considering buying one tomorrow. I have the money, it just wouldn't be a wise move to spend so much right now. ... Don't judge when I tell you that I have one next week.

To raise money for said ipod touch, I'm considering selling my current ipod. (Yes, I already have an ipod. Shut it.) I've grown quite attached to it, though, and the thought of no longer owning it makes me sad. It's an old 3rd gen ipod, the kind with four touch buttons above the wheel. It's a classic. Before selling it, I'd want to find someone who would love it as much as I do.

When I was little, I loved Buddy Holly. I had one of his tapes, and when we were on a road trip once, I put the cassette case in the window, thinking that if people saw it, they'd think he was my boyfriend. Good thing I didn't know he'd long been dead; I'd have been heartbroken.

I love highlighters, but I hate highlighting things in books. I have this fear that someone else will read the textbook I've sold back and judge me for the things I did or did not highlight. In fact, I recently re-read Jane Eyre, which I read for a class junior year, and I judged myself for things I did and did not underline. In pencil. I will only write in books in pencil. On the other hand, I am fascinated by the marginalia I find in books. We spent a whole day talking about medieval marginalia in a class one day, and it was my favorite day, expcept the day we made quills and learned to write with them.

I'm left-handed, but only when I'm eating and writing. Sports, using scissors, almost anything but eating and writing, I use my right hand. When we wrote with quills in the aforementioned class, I used my right hand. Whenever I was bored in a class in college, I'd switch to taking notes with my right hand. It's not good writing, it looks like it may have been written by a six-year-old, but it's legible. Mostly.

Let me paint you a picture.

Oh, the things I could show you if I only knew how to paint. The views from the sky really are incredible. The rare times I get to go into the flight deck during flight, I'm just blown away. I'd never be able to focus as a pilot, I'd be too busy staring out the window all the time. (Then again, they don't generally need to be focused. More often than not they're not even doing anything, except non-flying-related things! Ah, auto-pilot.)

It's unnerving, when you're just flying through clouds. Um, guys? Guys, I can't see anything. Where are we going? Where are we? How do you know what's out there? But then, you break through the clouds, and it's wonderful. Above the clouds are colors, if you're flying during sunrise/set. More shades of white and gray in the wisps and undulations of the clouds than I ever knew existed. Thick, tomato juice orange and vibrant blue and, somehow, enough colors in between to blend those two seamlessly.

Below the clouds is gorgeous. I got to ride in the flight deck one night, because we had an empty plane and my pilots were nice enough to let me. When we started descending, and we broke below the clouds... I want that view, all the time. City lights stretching in every direction. Roads look like rope lights, dark with evenly-spaced fuzzy spots of light. Minneapolis was just sitting there, all together, looking tiny. Like I could pick it up and move it if I wanted to. Like a perfect snowglobe creation. And anywhere I looked, in 180 degrees, there was something to see.

Besides the views from the top, I just see things, everywhere. In the woodgrain of the cupboard outside the bathroom, which I used to stare at when I was falling asleep when I was little, there's a woman holding an over-sized mask to her face. There's something in the wood across from my bed in this room, but I can't remember what. Perhaps I'll find it again tonight. But I'm always seeing faces, pictures, silhouettes, and I see them everywhere: hidden in woodgrain, in clouds, in snow, in the shadows of someone's shirt. If only I knew how to paint, I would show you the things I see.



I canceled my date. Remember the texting? It was just too much. And it wasn't as if I was encouraging the guy by texting back. I was, for the most part, ignoring him outright. But he didn't get that hint. I would have been happy to go on the date, had the texting been slower beforehand. But the more I ignored it, the more urgent it got. When I missed a call from him on the morning of date-day (hey, you know, some people like to sleep in on their days off) and got a text twenty minutes later saying (not asking, asking requires a question mark) "U alive lol", I decided that was enough. I'd been battling a snot-monster in my sinuses for a few days, and decided that was as good an excuse as any to cancel the date.

But canceling the date did not, unfortunately, put a stop to the texting.

I left for a four-day trip on Tuesday. The thing about working on a plane is, my phone has to be off most of the time. And when it's not off, I'm likely sleeping. Or eating. But relaxing and trying to rejuvenate for the next day, anyway. He continued to text me, continued to ask if I was alive, and eventually started to give up. By give up, I wish I meant stop texting, but rather I mean, he texted to me to ask if I had changed my mind. So yesterday, I put an end to it. There will be no dating of RampMan by me, and there will be no more texting.

Well, hopefully.

Dating via texting?

I went to the airport on my day off yesterday to go open an account at the credit union for airline employees and to talk about the possibility of consolidating my loans. (Hey, does someone want to loan me enough money to pay off both my student loans and also buy a new [to me] car? I'd really enjoy only having one payment a month. Thanks in advance.)

As long as I was at the airport, I stopped at the crew store to buy a bigger lunchbox and a cardigan, so that I don't have to be wearing my blazer all the time. As attractive as it is, the cardigan just seems cozier for winter. So I'm wandering around the store, and a ramp agent in there starts making small talk with me. I small talk back, but I don't think much of it.

I leave the store, happy with my purchases and angry at how expensive that stupid cardigan was, and he catches up with me in the hallway. I go through a door into a stairwell, and he stops me with an "Uh.. hey..." I think he's going to tell me I can't use that stairwell (I'm still not totally familiar with the bowels of the airport), but instead he says, "I'm not very good at this. Would you like to hang out some time?"

I go back down the few stairs I made it up before he stopped me, and introduce myself. RampMan and I exchange phone numbers, and plan for dinner on Monday, which we both have off.

I left the airport smiling and feeling pretty good about myself. I mean, I must look adorable, right? And it would be all fine and dandy, except for... the texting.

See, before I even got onto the lightrail to head back to my car, he texted me. That's fine, make sure the number is right, send a test text, okay, sure. But the texting? It has pretty much not stopped. I met and talked to this guy for maybe ten minutes, and he's texting me casually? I'm sorry, I'm just not comfortable with that.

I think texting breaks boundaries that maybe it shouldn't. I mean, I don't know, maybe we should get to know each other in person a bit first before texting back and forth all the time. Just a thought. Especially since we already have a date actually planned.

Or is that just me? Is it weird and too personal? Or is that just the way things are now?

The date is still a few days away, and I'm already trying to think of ways to let poor nervous RampMan down easy.


On the other hand, texting can be quite fun, and distracting, and perhaps a little dangerous. And sometimes maybe I like it to break certain boundaries. Maybe it just depends on the person doing the texting.

Winter driving.

I hate driving in snow. I hate when there are no lanes on the road, and my knuckles are white, and my jaw hurts by the time I get home. I hate when there's a line of traffic following me, and I hate when someone passes me and blows shitloads of snow into my line of vision, so that there is no more vision to be had.

But driving home from a friend's tonight, it was beautiful. No cars on the road, still lightly snowing. A few tracks on the road where people had recently driven, which was enough to keep me on the road. I was not a fan of having to follow behind a giant plow (which honestly didn't even seem to be DOING anything but blowing snow at my car and flashing lights and taking up all the space), but once I got off the highway and onto my well-known road home, I felt peaceful. The snow was there, but not treacherous. It buried the lines, but I know the road well enough to not need lines. It just fell prettily in my headlights while I meandered across lanes without worrying about other cars.

Sometimes it's nice to drive home at 2 in the morning with a fresh coat of powder making the world beautiful again.

Not an update.

I had coffee with D on the 31st. And, as I said, I'm finding it hard to write about. We sat and talked for almost five hours, and it was actually rather nice. Easy, even, besides the first five minutes when I was just trying not to cry. All the shit aside, he did used to be my best friend/roommate/fiance, and I've never been good at the whole spite/grudge/anger thing, when it comes to him. So maybe I don't want to spoil our nice meet-up by making it public. Maybe I don't want you to judge me for not hating him. Maybe I don't want you to jump all over him with hatred that makes up for my lack of it tenfold. Whatever the reason, I just can't write about it. So I'm not going to. And I've also just erased a large portion of this entry, which talked a lot about him and where my mind rests on it all (which is to say, nowhere, because my mind never rests on this issue). Perhaps another day.

Moving on.

Sometimes when I see people, I imagine what our children would be like. It could be a stranger on the street, it could be someone I've known forever and just learned or noticed something new about. I don't discriminate. These things just occur to me, out of nowhere, often accompanied by, "I wonder if we'd have ginger babies?" (I want ginger babies more than anything.)

I have an overbite. I hate it, actually, and generally try to hide it. I make a conscious effort to hold my lower jaw differently so that my chin isn’t all hiding and my lower lip isn’t all ridiculous-pouty-looking and my teeth aren’t all clenched. Seriously, I’m not a fan. And I don’t even know if traits like this are passed on in genes, or if that’s just sort of a luck-of-the-draw sort of thing. (Clearly, I’m not up on my biology, but hey, I was an English major.)

Anyway. I had a passenger the other day with an overbite very similar to mine, and all I could think was, “Man, our children would be screwed.”

He also had a unibrow, but I’d teach my babies to tweeze.

Center of the universe.

I've been a lot of places. I had even before I was a flight attendant. Fourteen countries (well, I may need to amend that…I’ll get to that bit another day), and I’m not even sure how many states. It’s one of my life goals to travel to all 50 states and to get a shot glass from each. I collect shot glasses (and surprisingly enough, don’t actually use them for booze). I’ve been places that people apparently don’t expect me to have been to, like Washington D.C. (twice, actually) and Disney World and Las Vegas and Pompeii. I spent my fifteenth birthday at a bar in Vegas. How many people can say that? Not many, I'd wager.

But there's still a lot of places I haven't been.

I've been watching the travel channel in my hotel today, and I realized just how limited my tour of the country has been. It's pretty extensive, really, but the problem is that our country is HUGE. I've seen a lot, but you can go home with thousands of grains of sand in your swimsuit alone and still never have touched millions of grains on the beach, you know?

I was watching a show about the best bar foods, and now I want to go to all those bars. I want to go to Boston and California and Seattle and Texas and New York City.

Ah, New York City. Once upon a time, I was going to live there. I don't think I'm brave enough to move there on my own, though, and besides, I'm having too much fun with my job right now. But today, today my schedule got changed and instead of going to Kalamazoo, I went to Rochester, NY. I didn't even leave the gate area, but I was in New York today. I was nowhere near NYC, but still, I was in New York today, and that is way more exciting to me than I thought it would be. But it's one of those places I've always wanted to go and never have. Plus, it smelled amazing. I don't know what they had in that airport, but I probably should have investigated and devoured it immediately. I have a few days off in a row coming up, and now I'm seriously considering visiting NYC for a day. I was going to wait until it was a little warmer, but for some reason, the east coast is like an irresistible siren call to me.


I know that a lot of you are probably waiting and hoping for an update on my coffee meet-up last week. I'm finding it hard to write about. I just am not sure what to say, I guess. But I'll keep trying. Just for you.

Happy New Year!

I rang in the new year with a bottle of champagne, a good friend, lots and lots of food, Mamma Mia, and drinking games. We sang, we danced, we stayed up talking till 3.30 in the morning. (And I had to go to work on the 1st!)

What did you do to celebrate the coming of 2009?