Hokies Win! 35-24

Overhead during the Gator Bowl:

• “He has hands the size of small dogs.”
• “I can’t believe that he got it up.”
• “She almost looked like a drag queen.” (My sister speaking of a cheerleader)

I need to get dressed and start loading up the car for the return to Illinois tomorrow. Unfortunately, I don’t have any energy for such a task. I am energy-free. Unlike, say, gluten-free, energy-free is not really a good thing.

The game starts in about 20 minutes, I think. Maybe I should at least shower. If I had will power or energy, I could carry a laptop to the living room even. Course my desire to watch the game has disappointed some family members. I never seem able to do the right things.

It may not have been the most exciting New Year’s Days for me. I just couldn’t wake up today. I usually can’t, but when I realized that there were no parades and such stuff, I gave up and went back to bed. Why bother? I’m just a slug.

We did have the sauerkraut and sausage fest this evening. It’s a German/Pennsylvania Dutch New Year’s tradition. My family isn’t overly German and not at all Pennsylvania Dutch, but my parents were both from Pennsylvania, and I guess that’s where their families picked up the tradition. One Web site had this saying regarding the custom: “If on New Year’s Day you serve ‘Kassler (smoked pork chops) mit Sauerkraut,’ so the saying goes, you will never run out of available cash.” Another explains that the pork and sauerkraut tradition arose because “a Pennsylvania Dutchman would never dine on chicken on New Year’s because the bird scratches backward.” I don’t find that a very satisfying explanation, as it could just as easily be justification for eel and turnip casserole.

Perhaps the best explanation I found was from the University of Cincinnati Libraries:

Pork & Sauerkraut are a main dish for New Years Day in the German heritage, as pigs are considered good luck charm symbols and cabbage leaves are symbolic of money, thus having pork and Sauerkraut are felt to be the best way to pave the way for the New Year. This goes back to the distant past when farm families who had a pig felt they were lucky enough to have one to feed their families during the winter. Pigs thus became good luck charms and were also used then for saving money in piggy banks. In German one says “ich habe Schwein gehabt,” or I have had pig,” which means colloquially that: I have had good luck!” Little pigs of cake or candy (marzipan – almond paste is popular) are also produced. The custom really demonstrates the ancient rural origins of this particular custom.

No marzipan piggies here, but plenty of pork and cabbage.

Tomorrow is the Virginia Tech bowl game, and it’s time for me to pack up the car. We got the two big, heavy boxes in this evening—the dishes. I’m always afraid that I’ll never fit it all in. I usually end up in frustrated tears as I’m trying to pack. Fortunately, my mother sent the toaster oven to my house, so at least there’s one less huge thing to fit in the car. Course there will also be crying because I’m leaving, but that’s a different kind. I’m such a stupid baby.

This room is beginning to haunt me. Not in the ‘oh no, there are ghosts under the bed’ way, but in the way where I look around the room and see things that just make me sad and teary. Things with daddy’s handwriting on them. His baseball glove. Books that he bought as he planned for retirement. He wanted to start a consulting company. He never got to retire. All these things he used or planned to use. This is his desk that I’m using. When I dug into the closet a bit ago to hang up some wet clothes I just washed, there were shirts and things that he wore. And I still haven’t had the nerve to go check the urn. I know that when I touch it, I will cry. I cry thinking about it. I don’t know how to do this anymore. Just seeing his handwriting on the labels on boxes kills me. How can I go check?

I told someone about a book that I’m reading, Donorboy. The simple plot is that the teen’s two mother’s die and her sperm donor father is trying to raise her now. It’s much more complicated, of course. But the relevant thing is that the father, speaking of his own mother’s death, tells the young girl, “I find that even twenty-six years later, it hurts too much. It never really hurts any less; it just hurts less often” (34-35).

So if I believe that, I’m always going to be reduced to horrible, gut-wrenching tears. I’m going to be lying on that bed, look up and see that baseball glove on the top shelf and be unable to sleep for crying. I’ll look in that closet again, and simultaneously want to take some of his shirt, but know that if I do, I’ll cry when I try to wear them. I’ll look across the room and see the books that evidence unfulfilled dreams and cry like it happened this afternoon.

The ball has dropped. It’s 2006. At midnight, my sister’s dog Snuffles was in my lap, and he got all silly and licked my face. Yes, at midnight, I got kissed by a poodle. Probably the only midnight kiss I’ve gotten actually. I can’t think of others. Yes, my life is that pathetic.

It would be hard for New Year’s Eve 2005 to top yesterday, so we didn’t even try. My nephew is still alive this morning, and apparently not feeling as horrible as he should be after last night’s performance. After hearing all the stories, we have a better picture. It seems that he crawled from the bedroom to the bathroom and ended up throwing up in the sink. My sister, his aunt, saw some of this. Unfortunately, when he tried to turn on the sink, he yanked up on a potted plant, rather than the faucet. After he finally recognized that the plant was not the faucet, he got the tap turned on and laid his head on the sink, which was rapidly filling with water. He had to be told to turn down the water unless he wanted his head under water.

He attempted to crawl back to the bedroom, but gave up in the doorway. He was only on the floor a few minutes before my brother got him up for the woozy drunk walk to his bed.

Later in the evening, he burst into his sister’s bedroom, through the closed door, opened a desk cabinet, and looked in confusedly. She asked what he was doing. He replied, “nothing” and left, falling into the door on his way out. We still haven’t found out if he remembers any of this.

To his credit, when I went down around dinner time tonight to ask the questions that I needed to ask, all I had to do was walk over to his desk. He looked up at me and said, “I made a bad choice.” That sure makes it a lot easier. No need to talk about the evils of overdoing it. I did quiz him on whether he was drunk when I left, and he assures me that he wasn’t. The friend who was supposed to pick him up just never showed. He says that’s not why he was drinking though. Maybe he’s scamming me, but I’m choosing to believe him for my own sanity’s sake.

I did some work on the manuscript, finishing another subsection of the chapter. I just can’t get going on the next section though. I need to probably jump ahead, but I’m too linear in my thinking and I just can’t write out of order. Maybe I’ll have a break-through tomorrow.

I heard a few minutes of Dick Clark, and sort of wonder if putting him on TV really was the best choice. Oh well, no TV in this room, so I don’t have to listen.

We were supposed to go to dinner at 8:30 tonight, because that allowed my brother to join us. Mama wanted to leave the house at 8, so that we could get the table taken care of before everyone gets there. It’s a place that doesn’t take reservations (Texas Roadhouse) for large groups.

Mama and the sister who lives here, my niece and I are in the car, all waiting on my 21-year-old nephew. Mama is getting pissed because he’s not there, and his mother doesn’t seem to know what’s going on with him. My mother is fuming, so it’s my job to try to solve the problem. I get out of the car and go in the house. I check on him, and he’s still wearing only boxers and sweatpants (see earlier audio post).

I go back outside and tell mom to leave that I’ll bring him. I get in my car to warm it up while I’m waiting for him. At 8:25 or so, after waiting for at least 15 minutes, I begin to wonder what is going on. I go back in the house. I can’t find him. He’s not in his room. Not in the bathroom. I’m wondering if he went out the back door to a friend who lives nearby and just didn’t tell me. I go through the utility room to see if I can tell if he used that back door. Instead, I find him coming in from the garage in shoes, shorts, and a hoodie. He looks like he has a headache or something.

I ask what’s wrong, and he tells me that he never wanted to go to dinner with us. He says that his mother said that we would be having dinner at the house tonight, and he didn’t expect us to be going out and certainly not so late. He tells me that his friends (a different group) were supposed to pick him up at 9 to go play pool, etc. He makes it clear that he doesn’t want to go, but, well never mind all that. So I said, I’ll tell them you have other plans, and I’ll go ahead without you.

I make him confirm that this is what he wants. I leave him in the house. We come home a couple hours later or so. His dog is loose in the house, and the front door wasn’t completely closed. My sister (his aunt, not his mother) calls for us to come downstairs because he is lying on the floor of the bathroom and hallway downstairs.

When I get there, he won’t answer anyone who asks him what’s wrong. My brother waves everyone off, hovers over him, and says, have you been drinking? Yes, he says.

So there was once a gallon bottle of Jim Beam that had about 3 inches in it. It’s empty now. There has been nothing but fighting and yelling and arguing since, and none of it directed at him, cuz he’s passed out and had to be carefully walked by two people back to his bed. He’s thrown up a little at the last report.

He was one of the drunkest ppl I’ve ever seen, all toppling over and woozy. No telling when he started drinking, but he wasnt drunk like that when I left him. I thought something was wrong, but he told me it was that he didn’t want to go to dinner with the family because he had other plans. He apparently hadn’t eaten much today, and drank that 3 inches of Beam. His mother is flipping out and yelling and crying. See, today is her birthday; so Mr. Drunk skipped her birthday dinner to get drunk alone at home. At least that’s how it’s being perceived.

I’m sure it’s more complicated than all this. I don’t know if his friends didn’t show or what. I feel horrible because I’m afraid that I should have noticed before I left. He looked stressed or like he had a headache, but not drunk. I feel like a horrible person.

We flew through the ham on Christmas Day, and everyone talked about wanting to bake another one. We took one out of the freezer and set it out to thaw in the frig. This afternoon at 4 pm, I found out that I was baking it for dinner. Usually one expects more advanced notice on such things. And I wasn’t prepared for side dishes at all. I finally gave up and used things that were on hand. People were fed and happy, especially with Traci’s Crazy Mashed Potatoes.

Tomorrow we take my sister’s poodle for a trip to the groomer’s. No telling where else we’ll end up. I finally got out the notes for the book manuscript and did a little writing. Not much, but at least I remember where I left off last summer. Now if I only knew where I was going with it.

Women Narrow the Internet Gender Gap, Survey Finds, which, if history is anything to go by, means that men are about to move on to something else.

Life and Romance in 160 Characters or Less—of course brevity doesn’t always equal clarity.