Well It Certainly SEEMS Like a Friday

Here I am, a day earlier and yet still a dollar short! Welcome to my Friday, ladies and germs. As you may recall from a previous post, I now have Fridays off – whether I want them or not.

And do I want them? The way this week has been going? Yer damn right I do.

But wait! What does the iPod, the decider of my weekend, have to say about this?

Heard on the bus this morning:

Idiot Walk by The Hives
Who is He (and what is he to you) by Bill Withers
Immigrant Punk by Gogol Bordello
Barracuda by Heart
Why Don’t We Do It in The Road by the Beatles
High Clouds and a Good Chance of Wayne by Wayne Bergeron
Red Barchetta by Rush
The Wizard by Black Sabbath

A little feistiness, a little soul, a little jazz and we’ll wrap it all up in the sludge-y darkness that is Black Sabbath.

O, Tony, Ozzie, Geezer, and That Other Guy! Why don’t you answer my fan mail?

Insert gleeful cackling here.

My friend Sandra and I have a love affair with words. It’s all on the up-and-up, I assure you. She finds me somewhat risible*, and I find her munificent**.

As I say, it’s all on the up-and-up.

The best part of the whole thing, of course, is that she’s as taken with the beauty of the English language as I am. We are free to be as geekily enchanted with it as we wish without receiving that face people sometimes give you when you use big words.

You know that face. The one that says, “Well, who do you think you are?”

There was a time, right around 10 or 11, when I purposely played dumb. As has been noted in the past, we moved a lot when I was a child, and so while every school was different, one aspect of it always remained the same: I was a good student.

What can I say? I inherited good hair, crooked bottom teeth, a small amount of low-grade anxiety, and a working brain.

I am satisfied with this.

At some point, however, I noticed a certain amount of derision that came my way whenever I raised my hand in class.

In one town in particular, my name was not “Pearl”. It was “Egghead”.

“Egghead”: Because sometimes, being smart is not so smart.

What little girl wants to be “Egghead”? I stopped raising my hand. I stopped arguing when things didn’t make sense to me. I purposely “threw” several tests in a row in order to convince my classmates that my earlier intelligence had been a fluke.

We lived there less than a year.

I didn’t miss that town.

But I was sorry to leave my one friend there behind. I hope her friendship with me didn't affect her reputation for long.



Have a great weekend, everyone – I’m off in search of funny, kind-hearted people, big words, and delicious lime-flavored, salt-rimmed drinks.


* laughable
** generous