Random things I've thought about today

1. Crazy people. When I was younger, I often had friends who were high-maintenance, overly dramatic, and sometimes downright crazy. I even dated some of them. As I've gotten older, I've tried to limit the crazies to family members. (If you're family, I'll put up with your crazy ass. If you' are not related by blood or marriage, all my crazy slots are full.) There's only so much time and energy I have. And I got tired of wasting that energy on people who always had problems of their own making, who asked for advice and never took it, and who rinsed and repeated the process over and over again. I've been pretty successful with this goal or strategy or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes I miss the good stories that always resulted from the crazy-people antics, but I rarely miss the crazy people themselves.

2. Why have I been so itchy lately? For the past week or so, I have been itching like crazy. The itching gets worse at night, for some reason. I've looked at my skin and I don't have bug bites or a rash. I'm not using new soap or new lotion or anything. My only thought at this point is that maybe I'm dehydrated and my skin is dry. I'm still trying to figure this one out.

3. Sometimes I think I married a man who is my opposite in small, but critical ways. He wants to plan; I want to let things unfold by themselves. He wants to know spoilers before we go see a movie; I want to know as little as possible before walking in the theater. He has a penis; I have a vagina. Stuff like that. For the past week or two, I've been trying to plan a surprise birthday party for Nate in Austin with some of his old friends. As our trip approaches, Nate has been getting on me to make plans with people because he was worried we wouldn't have time to see everyone, and then he started arranging things himself when I seemed to be dragging my feet. Only, these plans were going to interfere with my party! So I had to tell him what I was doing because all of my lame excuses about why we couldn't schedule this or that were starting to annoy him.

"Why do you want to leave everything up in the air?" he wondered.

Well, now he knows.

4. Why do I love coffee so much? Should I drink something else? Is coffee/dehydration why my skin is so itchy?

5. When Nate and I both lived in Austin, we lived south in the Barton Hills neighborhood. We rarely went north of downtown for dinner, drinks, or to friends' houses. For example, we didn't go to Hyde Park, even though I had lived there before and liked the 'hood and some of the restaurants in the area. Even UT/West Campus was a stretch. When friends who lived north of 15th street or so invited us to visit them in north Austin, we'd usually talk them into coming down south. And because almost all of our friends lived south, this was usually easy to do. Whenever people talked about living in north Austin, we always said, “You might as well live in Dallas.” The karmic justice is, of course, that we now live in Dallas.

The impending birthday gathering, which is naturally to be held in north Austin, has made me realize several things. I don’t know any of the restaurants up there because I wouldn’t drive north of downtown if I could help it. I’ve never been to Trudy’s North (I always went to Trudy’s South and Central). Also, I’m going to have to try to convince south Austinites (the majority of our friends) to drive north.

6. Despite my possibly seemingly cranky self, I am trying to be more kind and patient with people. This is, paradoxically, one of the reasons I try not to spend too much time with people who drive me crazy. Because I think its kinder to all of us to let each person follow his or her own strange path, no matter how odd it might seem to other people, with as little interference as possible. And then we can each face karmic justice in our own ways. Like planning a “surprise” birthday party in north Austin while living in Dallas.