This Afternoon In Drama

I Always Know What I'm Doing

As mentioned, my mom was opposed to me buying a truck.  At first her objection was that it was too masculine a vehicle, and then the protest morphed into the argument that I just did not need a vehicle with towing capability.  "What do you need to carry around?" she quizzed me.  "What are you possibly going to put back there?

"Wellllllllllllll," I said, "Someday I'm going to move again, and boy is that truck going to come in handy!  It's going to save me hundreds to be able to transport my own couch."

My mom sighed in disapproval and switched from questioning to lecturing me.  "You don't need a truck.  This is an unwise decision.  You never think.  You just do.  I don't know how you can live how you live.  You need to stop and consider this."

Little did she know that I had considered it in great depth.  I had done incredibly intensive research on the various blues that pick-up trucks come in, since I knew my truck better be some kind of bright, metallic blue or it might as well be a minivan.  

Also, I thought there were lots of things that I might want to tow.  I've long been interested in learning how to make chairs, and someday I might need to carry around lots of wood.  Now that we have goats on the property, I might need to drive them somewhere someday for some reason.  And I could definitely see myself wanting to put a bed in the bed.  I was open to allowing someone else to get behind the wheel and drive me around as I dozed.  Like a hay ride, except less poky.

So I went and purchased my truck.  My beautiful Speedway Blue truck:

And it took no time at all to prove my mom wrong!  Only a week after purchasing the vehicle, Brent and I were eating out at an Indian restaurant before going to see Year One, and it turned out that I could not finish my Chicken Biryani.  What to do, what to do.  I didn't want the dish to go to waste.  We didn't want to carry it into the theater-- they frown upon that sort of thing.  And we couldn't just leave the container of pungent rice and poultry in the car because then the floor mats would smell like Biryani forever.  I was about to be depressed.

Until Brent said, "Wait, you have a truck."

"I do," I agreed.  "I have a truck."

"So...just put the food in the bed."

Always suspicious, I asked, "You don't think anyone will steal it?"

We walked out of the restaurant, and I nestled the take-out container in the corner of the bed, figuring that questionable characters walking behind the truck would be the least likely to see it hiding there.  When we came out of the movie, it was still safe and sound.  I was delighted.  I'd never had such a good solution for fragrant leftovers before.  As we drove home, Brent started laughing uncontrollably.  "You can tell your mom she was wrong about the truck."  We looked out the back, to where the Biryani was riding comfortably in the fresh night air.  "You needed it to tow a single container of Indian food."

"I did," I nodded.  "I really did."

UPDATE 6/27/09:  Last night, we also needed it to tote half a leftover chicken sandwich:

Found Him

Waldo likes to dine at the place where I have regular breakfasts.  He's gotten a little doughy and feminine and experimental with his color schemes in his twilight years (helllllooooooo teen vampire Internet traffic), but he's still a great hider.  The horizontal lines on his shirt really blend into that brick.

The Road Looks Clearer Up Ahead

We just got news today that Gamma Knife worked and my dad's brain cancer is in partial remission, hopefully to be determined as complete remission soon.  The greatness of this is overwhelming.

My Mom's Already Yelling At Me For Buying A Truck, So Why Not One More Thing?

When my dad landed in the emergency room near the beginning of the year, Brent and I drove down there without packing overnight stuff because we were in a rush.  And then, when we finally went to go to sleep at my mom's house, I wanted to change into some nighttime underwear (you're not supposed to wear them while you sleep, okay, yes, I know), except I didn't have any on me.  I went upstairs to my childhood bedroom to fish around in my old dresser, wondering if I could hunt down some novelty Halloween boxers leftover in there from sixth grade, you never know, but to my deep surprise, I found a couple pairs of real underwear in the top drawer.  It turned out that while my mom's been throwing away my schoolwork and lesser drawings and personal notes over the years, she somehow couldn't bring herself to throw away two of the fake silk panties I used to wear right around my junior year.

So I put on the flowered pair of the underwear because I was feeling like a print, and pulling them up was a moment of real shock because they were SO BIG in the seat-- big enough that you could hold one of those contests where college kids have to cram as many of themselves as they can into a car, except instead you could use my high school underwear-- and I was SO PUZZLED by the fit because if anything, I'm kind of sure my butt was smaller in high school.  Because that was before the years of thrice weekly Kraft macaroni & cheese, which my parents used to ration, and before I spent the good majority of my day waking up, not moving, and then proceeding to write from my bed, and so I just couldn't make sense of what had happened to me...or alternately, what had happened to the underwear (look, I'm well aware the ass needs some toning work, but I've been VERY BUSY, and I'll get around to it maybe.)

Honestly, the pictures don't even do the back of the underwear justice.

They come in burgundy too.

After I put on the flowered panties, I went downstairs to the den to show Brent and his features went slack and he said, "Whoa, those are some underwear," and I said, "I know!" and he asked, "Did they stretch out over time or something or did you actually walk around in those when you were sixteen?"  I tested the fabric and, while it's definitely cheap, it doesn't have much give at all, so the theory that somehow space-time had expanded the seat to these boggggggggling proportions seemed not very scientific.  Which then brought us to the conclusion that I guess I must have been walking around in REALLY BIG underwear while I was taking my SAT's and opening my locker, and this realization proceeded to blow my mind because you never are how you think you are, you know?  I never would have pegged my younger self as the kind of girl who was buying the largest possible size of Morgan Taylor Intimates for reasons I can't really get a hold of anymore, but the simple fact is that I was.  I was.  I was walking around in really, really, really big panties that are not at all big in the front, but gigantic in the back, and I must have been into it.  I swear, you wouldn't understand exactly how big these panties are unless you could get your hands on them in person.

I measured their inseam if you let the crotch hang naturally, and it's around five inches.  To give an idea of the sheer volume of the back portion of the underwear, I wanted to figure out some kind of equivalency, and I discovered that you can fit about half a full-sized bath towel with a relatively serious pile into the seat with zero problem.  Remember, this is not a stretchable fabric; it's a very firm polyester.

It's like instead of going to that woman at Nordstroms who measures your bra size, maybe my mom should have had someone supervise me when I tried on underwear instead because clearly I had some weird ideas about what underwear's supposed to do for you.  Back then, I must just not have known what I was doing, but I have to say that since finding the big panties in my dresser, I've brought them back up here and it so happens I've become sort of fond because when you're wearing them, it feels like you're walking underwater.  It's not bad.  I wouldn't put them under short skirts, though, because they'd give a petticoat effect.