I’m typing this at 4:14 am. As you know, I am not a morning person, but I’m always thrown off without Cute W. Usually this happens on the other end of the evening. Without Cute W to go upstairs to bed or fall asleep on the sofa, I don’t notice how late it’s gotten and I look up from my laptop to realize it’s 1:30 am. But now I’ve noticed the pattern and try to avoid it, so I was upstairs reading by 10:30 pm, definitely asleep by midnight. Then came a persistent and repetitive sound that dragged me out of sleep. I still don’t know what it is. A radiator tap? Nah, it sounded farther outside than that. The kitty? Nah, she was definitely inside when I went to bed. Except that you know what happens when you’re absolutely sure that the cat’s been inside overnight, except now it’s 4 am and you’re not exactly sure where she is? You start doubting that she’s inside. So after spending roughly 10 minutes listening for that repeating sound that has stopped repeating and wondering if perhaps that sound was your cold, miserable cat scraping the door to get inside, you end up getting up and out of bed, just to double check. And then, in the living room, you run into your cat, who’s walking up to you like, “Dude, what the hell? It’s too early even for me, but as soon as I shake the kitty sleepies out of my eyes imma start meowing my furry ass off for a delicious ground tuna breakfast, because if we’re up for the day, imma need me some ground tuna.” I mean, under normal circumstances I think that she would have said “I’m going to,” but she’s startled and a little cranky about it.
And yes, now it’s 4:30 am and I re-read that paragraph and had to change “meowing piteously” to “meowing my furry ass off,” because if my cat’s imaginary speech was too sleepy and discombobulated to articulate the subject and predicate correctly, it certainly wouldn’t include a 4-syllable adverb. Some would argue that neither the cat nor I should ever use adverbs, at all (I’m lookin’ at you, Stephen King). And I’ll concede: that argument has some merit. So both in terms of character development and general clarity, I’m going with “my furry ass off.” These are the kinds of Deeply Artistic Debates one has with oneself when writing at about 4:30 am. Who knew?
It’s a compelling argument to go right back to sleep.
And yet, here I am.
Cute W is away at a soccer tournament with M, the first of the club season. It seems to be going well. First of all, GPS is ridiculously organized. Like, almost comically so. Prior to the tournament the coach sent out a schedule for the tournament including drive times and links to maps and facilities and a team dinner time and a curfew time. I mean, it was almost comically organized. In the past, Cute W almost always took it upon himself to organize a Saturday night dinner for soccer tournament weekends, and frankly, it was a pain in the ass: finding a restaurant, figuring out where people could eat in the hotel, collecting money, providing plates and napkins. Now someone else does that. So that’s awesome. I am cautiously optimistic in general, actually. After our first indoor games the coach distributed a post-game analysis with strengths and weaknesses and what to work on for next time, another super-organized, competent thing to do. M’s been a little stressed out because she always plays defense, and the coach has been playing her in midfield for scrimmages. She’s much more comfortable and stronger in defense, and I was wondering if he realized that, since they’re new to each other. But for the tournament, he’s got her playing defense, which makes me hope that he’s well aware of her defensive comfort zone and is just trying to get her to stretch out and be a little more flexible, which is a good thing. In fact, Cute W is on Team Midfield because even though she likes defense, she’s aggressive and has great endurance, so we’ll see how it goes. In any case, I’m feeling pretty good about GPS. I hope that the girls are having fun and starting to bond.
But poor M, she’s been absolutely swamped with activities! In the past week she was waking up at 5 or 5:30 am to study before school, then doing track after school until 5 pm, then following it up with either a club soccer practice or a ticket-taking gig at Proctors. She’s tired! And of course you’d hope that she could recover over the weekend, but instead she’s got this soccer tournament down in NJ. Here’s the bag of schoolbooks she packed, hoping that she could get some of her homework done in between games:
I mean, ouch.
She has a huge pile of homework to do over the weekend and this tournament runs the whole weekend. Then, if she manages to get home at a decent hour, she’s got her school soccer banquet. Frankly, the outlook on banquet attendance is not looking good.
It’s a good thing next week is Thanksgiving–she’ll get a little break.
Okay. It’s hours later. I ended up feeding the cat two breakfasts because she was disoriented by the first one. Now I’ll spend the day operating on a sleep deficit and Isis. . .
. . . will not. Not like I’m bitter.
#iamtotallybitter
