Wednesday: Yesterday, I took my normal lunchtime walk through Twinbrook, and I fell down, hard. I really have no idea why. It wasn't wet or icy, and I didn't trip on anything, or step into any holes. I fell off my shoes. That's the best way I can describe what happened. One minute I was up, and the next minute I was down.
I don't generally wear high heels at all. Whenever the subject of shoes comes up, I always joke that I have to be able to run for my life in my shoes. Everyone laughs at that joke. Only I'm kind of serious. But I was wearing a kind of chunky-heeled sandal, and I guess I stepped the wrong way. I skinned my left knee pretty badly, and scraped my right hand, with which I partially broke my fall. I'm pretty sore today, but it could have been so much worse.
Like most adults who fall for no apparent reason, I immediately looked around to make sure that no one saw me fall. I'd just walked past several other people who were walking, and had passed a house where two people were sitting on the front porch. When no one ran to my aid, I couldn't decide if I should be relieved that no one had witnessed my embarrassing failure to remain upright, or outraged that witnesses who had likely seen me fall to my knees didn't rush immediately to my aid. But as I said, the damage was relatively minor, and so no aid was needed.
But still.
*****
Friday: I'm working from home again today, as I normally do on Friday, so I'm marinating in the blend of fake outrage and indignation that is emanating from MSNBC, which is on as background noise. How is it possible that McConnell and Feinstein and Grassley and Schumer can even maintain straight faces as they decry hyper-partisanship and lament the passing of civility and reason in politics?
*****
Saturday: Well.
*****
Sunday: I'm so cranky today. No, not because of that. That doesn't matter. It was all but inevitable.
Well, it does matter. But it's not why I'm cranky. I'm cranky because I'm in the middle of the FAFSA. Which I started right after I registered one kid for winter sports, which is a 40-step process that meanders along through 27 or so electronic pages. Then after the thousandth click, the long-awaited "submit" click, you see the dreaded red error message, and you carefully examine each page to find the one error that is preventing your exit from this hell. And you find that the error was your failure to answer one required question: In addition to the sport for which your child is registering (Boys' Swim and Dive) is he or she interested in participating in pompons?
This was a yes/no question, but perhaps they could just offer pompons as a sport for which to register, thereby obviating the need for this question. And what is a pompon? Why only one M? Everyone calls them "pom-poms."
According to Grammarist, the original word was pompon, but because most people misheard it as "pom-pom" (of COURSE they did), the two-M version has come into more common use, and now each version of the word is equally popular. Grammarist might be right about the origin part, but they're dead wrong about the relative popularity of "pompon" vs. the far more common (and rightly so) "pom-pom."
So that was fun.
Then I had to pay for a field trip for another kid, using another 40-page web form, which required me to first create a "profile" of my student, and then select that profile from a drop down.
And now I'm on the FAFSA.
And I'm a little stabby.
And my knee still hurts.
So that's all for now. I wrote about something real last week. This is the best I can do this week.
Pompons.
Ridiculous.
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