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You Call This a Shower?: Part 12

The Tower of London. Uh, not really a tower.

It dumped buckets the entire bus ride into the city of London early that next day, making me remember that we should have packed umbrellas. Oops. I joked that London was the Seattle of Europe, to which no one laughed, but my group had something else in store for me. They were finally talking to me again after the Oxford “incident,” and the type of talking they were doing was dreadful. You see, they all decided to affect a British accent just in time for London, and it was only the members of my group. Suddenly everyone was “bobbies,” “gits,” and “wankers,” and man, those accents made me cringe they were so horrible. But apparently they were planning to embarrass me to death in front of the other members of our party. It succeeded tremendously.

We pulled into the city in mid-afternoon with the rain still coming down in sheets, a perfect shower to clean us off after yet another filthy bus ride (I’m kidding. The buses we used were always immaculate). When we got to our hotel to drop off our bags, we were all exhausted. A trip like the one we were on takes a lot out of you, and we could all see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we were definitely going to have to crawl there in order to reach it. London was our final destination, though, and we were going to enjoy it if it killed us. The hotel was right across the street from the new Wembley Stadium, which was seriously cool, but I had no more memory in my camera card, and there were no more photos I wanted to delete, so my first priority was finding a shop and getting a card if I could.

Look at the little house!

Just like with London we had some free time that first day, but a lot of us ended up doing the Jack the Ripper tour, with the others staying at the hotel. We took the tube into the city, and I was finally treated to those lovely signs that said “Mind the Gap,” and yes, they were plastered everywhere at each tube stop. There were eight stops between Wembley, where we were, and the city center, where the tour was going to start. When we emerged from the underground station we were right across the street from the Tower of London, which was quite surreal. After hearing so much talk about the tower, it was just so odd to finally see it up close and personal right in front of us. Then the tour started. Continue reading “You Call This a Shower?: Part 12”

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Flawless

4362daf57fa21b78372d3b8f1183b595“We are, at our essence, inherently flawed beings who nevertheless consistently insist upon denigrating others for being just as flawed as we suppose we are not.” -Theodicus, 1896

Why do we have an overwhelming tendency to judge others? What is it in our makeup that makes us believe we are better than other people when we are all the same? Everyone has made some stupid decisions in their lives. Some were lucky enough to live through them, while others went completely under. But for everyone who has survived a stupid decision, have they truly survived or are they paying for it through the rumor mill for the rest of their lives? Wow, there are a lot of questions in this paragraph, but it honestly makes me think about the world we live in and why anyone would want to be honest when they’re just going to be judged one way or another in perpetuity.

I’m not saying I’m immune to it either, but at least I think about it. And I am grateful to those people who also think about it before judging others because nobody’s perfect. My father used to always say that the only difference between us and people in jail is that they got caught, and I honestly think he’s right on that one. So many of us have deep, dark secrets that we hope never come to light, even if just for the embarrassment factor, but what we really worry about is the judgment of others. We spend so much time trying to be what others imagine we are that we forget who we really are. And if people are truly your friends they won’t judge you for the stupid mistakes you’ve made.

Hmmm. But wait. Continue reading “Flawless”

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Playing Games

tn-airport_gate-550x450-rd10A young boy sits in a hard plastic seat, head bowed, intent on the pixellated action on the GameBoy in his lap. He sits next to a woman who is obviously not his mother, in her faux fur coat with tan lining and her mini-skirt that is not at all weather-appropriate. She fidgets in her seat like you would expect from someone the boy’s age, but she’s easily three times as old. Perhaps she’s his older sister, or maybe even an aunt, but she’s paying him virtually no mind with her headphones on that blare an Eminem song on a high enough volume to disturb other travelers in nearby seats. The boy doesn’t even hear the music, so intent is he upon proving his dominance over the game on his lap. He wears corduroy pants, awkwardly hemmed as if done in haste, and an old, ratty sweatshirt proclaiming him a Philadelphia Eagles fan.

They are sitting outside of Gate A in the Newark Airport, two people adrift in the sea of chaos that is New Year’s Day, with so many people heading back home after a vacation of sorts that has come to a swift conclusion. Most are hungover even in the early afternoon, waiting for flights with cups of coffee in hands that need warming up. An old newspaper with yesterday’s date sits on the chair next to the boy, but it might as well be his companion for all the attention he gives to it. If he cared to look, however, he would realize the front page of the paper is all about him, but he doesn’t look, and the woman’s eyes are closed so she misses the implication as well. She seems lost in meditation but she is in actuality thinking about all the money she could get if she plays her cards right. Opening her eyes, she glances at the game the boy is playing, then turns her attention to her watch that tells her they have half an hour until their plane will begin boarding.

Time has never been her friend even from the start when she was born three weeks after her due date. She was also the fourth child out of six so there was never any time for her needs, for her wants, or for her in any other way, shape, or form. But she hadn’t spent much time lamenting her fate, instead choosing to use her endless time in planning the great escape. The boy next to her was her youngest brother, the sixth of six, and she had saved up to get him the GameBoy he is playing. It had been worth every single penny because he hadn’t asked a thing about what they were doing or where they were going. In fact, he had spoken only a single word since he had started playing the first game, a word that she won’t repeat and that she didn’t even know he had in his vocabulary.

He is not as oblivious as she thinks, however. Continue reading “Playing Games”

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Unnecessary Proposal

Bruzzy's ReceptionI never actually proposed. There was no getting down on one knee, no ring in the jacket pocket, no sweaty palms in my lap waiting to pop the question and wondering what her answer would be, and definitely no long engagement where we grew old before we even got married. Instead, there was a tacit understanding between us from the beginning, actually, regarding where our relationship was going. It was almost zen-like the way we operated from the beginning, knowing each others’ thought processes and just relying on that in order to make those plans without even speaking our wishes. In fact, at one point I turned to Heidi and I asked her:

“So, we getting married or what?”

And she looked at me like I had gone out of my mind, then she smiled and said:

“Don’t be silly.”

That was it, at least until we actually went to get the marriage certificate. What might have constituted a proposal was when we both said, virtually at the same time, after she had gotten us tickets to Ireland:

“Want to get married while we’re there?”

Seriously, too, it was almost at the exact same time, like a pastel pink lightbulb had gone off over her head at the same time that another one in matching pale blue went off over mine. And that was it. We were getting married. Continue reading “Unnecessary Proposal”