Escape Hatch

Tonight I'm going to my last night class for graduate school. This has me more freaked out than I would have imagined. The road from here on out to graduation in May is a long, lonely uphill trek wherein I'm supposed to complete a bunch of independent reading hours, put together my thesis, and then complete some giant how-much-do-you-know-about-the-history-of-your-genre exam, while still somehow dealing with the current realities of my job and trying to figure out some future money-making endeavor. When I think too long on any one part of that last sentence, it makes me sick to my stomach. Without dwelling too long on the point, let's just say I get it now, the wistful deus ex machina logic some women employ when they light on sudden pregnancy as an answer in the face of inevitable uncertainty. Luckily, though, I'm just tasked with the one life to muddle through right now.

ANXIETY-INDUCED CHANGE OF SUBJECT

So it's the beginning of the Really Cold Days, officially, and to mark the occasion I'm wearing my ass-busting boots. They got their name one cold rainy day in Texas, remarkably similar to this Fresno morning, when I went charging through the UT Student Union on a mission for waffle fries and felt the damp slate floor skid from beneath my turning heel and the entire world came shooting up from the perpendicular to the parallel, and my elbow, shoulder, and head hit the floor in rapid succession. The fall was so bad someone else screamed. Days later, assessing the injury list beyond the mild concussion and terribly bruised ego, I found that my sweater had somehow left its own waffle-knit print bruised onto my elbow. I'm still not sure how that's possible, but it was the prettiest bruise I've ever had.

And somehow this leads me to thinking about our upcoming winter trek. Pants and I have established the tradition of abandoning both our families (sorry!) during the Most Wonderful Time of the Year to blunder selfishly off in search of icy adventures in the American West. Last year took us through Arizona and Nevada to Utah and this year we're hitting up the Redwoods and southern Oregon. This year we actually plan to camp for four days in the snow, even though it's well-known by now that cold makes me homicidal. Fortunately, it's also well-known that I have no pride when it comes to staying warm. My dad has this ridiculous suit-thing that his company hooked him up with when it looked like he was going to go work in the Arctic Circle, as in, the no-shit, abandon-all-hope cold, and then when it looked like the deal was off for a while, he sent me this ridiculous suit-thing, and oh how I rejoiced. It's bright blue and has a massive, nubbly-lined hood and a big stripe of reflective tape across the back, and when it's on, I look like a six-foot-tall starfish and walk with the stubby gait of an Ewok. I'm most definitely bringing it to Oregon, and if I have to get it out and put it on, it will be a shaming statement for Pants, who will have to acknowledge to passersby that he actually married this thing, and that yes, underneath all that, it is female.

In other news, I went to a wedding this weekend ended up on the roof of the squadron's short bus, which was remodeled on the inside to have black leather bench seating and a wet bar. It was cold, but the reception was outdoors and the space heaters few and far between. Consequently, the only option for warmth was vigorous activity, and the music wasn't working for me. Hence, bus-climbing. I know how it must have looked, not only to wedding guests but also to the legions of rehabbers whose half-way houses ringed the B&B on all sides, but sometimes you get an idea, and then you get bored listening to two hours of child-rearing conversations, and then the DJ plays "Achey Breaky Heart" more than once, and suddenly you're stacking coolers on top of each other and busting out the escape hatch. Plus, the view was nice.