4:57 am

It’s hopeless. I just wasn’t meant to sleep tonight. I wonder if God had some awesome plan for me tonight, and I wasted the opportunity by being mad at my bedsheets.

Things I have done to pass the time:

    - eaten a mango
    - arranged all of my unopened mail in order by size
    - stared at my snoring dog for 20 minutes with my laserbeam eyeballs and mentally willed her to wake up (it didn’t work)
    - googled all of the coworkers I could think of. I had to stop when I embarassingly started to actually find things.
    - folded one pair of socks before getting bored of doing chores. Then I unfolded them and put them on.
    - watched a DVR’d episode of The Hills
    - watched an infomercial for the Malibu Pilates gadget.. which I kind of want now
    - opened my freezer 92085 times, not sure searching for what..
    - googled McDonald’s to see when it opens, so I can go get an egg mcmuffin
    - pored carefully over a J.Crew catalog and earmarked about $2000 worth of clothing that I’m not going to buy

The pictures of young women wearing cocktail dresses in the J.Crew catalog brought up a very old memory for me. My sixth grade graduation was a big event. We had a rehearsal and learned a song to sing and everything (I think it was a lil ditty about being friends forever). All of the girls were going to wear these scrunchy frilly hot pink dresses that were much too tight and horribly slutty for 12-year old girls.. but it was the fashion of the times and I would have cut my right arm off for one. I dragged my mom to the mall at least a dozen times and modeled the slutty dress for her, purring at myself in the mirror and testing its stretchiness, and willing her to see what I saw. But, my mom very practically said This is a dress you’re going to wear one time. And it’s very ugly.

I cried.

My mom altered a dress for me to wear for my big day - I regret that I don’t know what the dress looked like before she began, since I was studiously ignoring her while she worked hard at it. I was such a little brat. The dress was a sleeveless cream colored fitted dress with pretty amber and pale blue stripes along the bottom and around the waist. My mom also magically made me a headband to match. Looking back, it was entirely pretty and I should have been so proud but instead, I put it on and thought only about how horribly plain I was going to look next to all of my super cool classmates, who were going to be wearing makeup and channeling very cool and very neon Debbie Gibsons.

But.. when I stomped into the living room to show my dress off to my dad, his eyes lit up and he said You look like a princess!

It was the nicest thing he had ever said to me in my entire life. And to this day, it’s still somewhere in the top ten.

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