Musings
part of something
today at 8:05am the husband, the kid and myself walked into target to get some wii action. (for those of you not in the know, which would be me if not for the husband, the wii is the latest console game thingy from nintendo which was released today.) we didn’t know what to expect. what we found was a long line about 120 people deep and a bunch of people with tickets. it seems that the tickets were handed out around 7am to the many people who had either spent the night or shown up in the wee hours of the morning. since we had arrived at 8:05am, we were way past any chance of finding wii action. we stayed in line anyway, just cause, and after a couple of minutes this dude walks by and asks the people in our part of the line if anyone needs a ticket. no one responds except me, which i still don’t understand, cause none of the other people around us had tickets either. so the dude hands me a ticket with a number 9 on it, we walk up to the front of the line, pick out a couple of games and in a few minutes we’ve bought a wii. a crazy stroke of luck.
we made our way home and ever since the husband has been glued to the tv learning the ins and outs of the wii. this is the fun part for him. he has verbalized his fascination and joy many times with “look at this” and “cool” and “ohh, ahh”, but for the most part he has been silently taking it in. he has played a couple of games and i have played a couple of games. it’s a very different type of video game and i think i will enjoy it much more than a typical video game system, but for me the real fun happened at the store.
the feeling of driving to the store not knowing what to expect, walking in and seeing all of the people, learning what’s going on from others and just being a part of something that exists for only a few moments in time and place, no matter how trivial, is fun for me. once the hunt is over, i’m less interested. i wonder if this is a me thing, a female thing, a lots of people thing or what?
all grown-up
i remember watching the made for television movie “the day after” when i was 10 or so. it was a movie about an atomic bomb being dropped somewhere in america and what would happen in the days following such an event. mainly, lots of people died and it was all quite horrible.
i think of that night as a small turning point in my life. up until then i had believed that people older than myself had all of the answers and pretty much knew everything. after the movie i asked my very old and mature 14 year old sister lots of questions, expecting her to have all of the answers, but she didn’t. older people didn’t know everything. i’m sure to some kids this would have come as a relief, but to me it was a very disheartening realization. i ended up feeling more troubled by the realization than the movie.
now i’m 35 and i don’t feel much more informed than i did at 10. adults don’t have all of the answers, yet we are supposed to make the decisions. i never thought i would be one of the grown-ups and it’s still hard to think of myself that way. yet, here i am…all grown-up.
yeah, that's right, i'm smaller than a redwood...
and so is my landscaper friend, Ann. We came to this realization while talking on the phone, and poof a blog was born.