Mother’s Day always makes me nervous. Of course, pretty much everything makes me nervous, so this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows me. I want to get my Mom a sufficiently cool present. It has to be personal and say not only how much I care about but also that I love her. Last year I got her a bird bath. I knew she’d like it because she always liked watching birds at the feeder and even had a little book to tell her what kind of birds they were. She loved the bird bath. It also cost me around $130, and I don’t have a lot of money to spare on account of no longer having a job.
I was looking at cards today. I do not like greeting cards. They seem phony to me. It’s one thing if the card says “I Love you Mom.” I can respect that. It’s another when the card says “Our relationship is special because…” or “I like the way you…” It just seems phony to me. I didn’t write that about her; some schmuck at the greeting card company wrote that thing about her, and he doesn’t know my mother.
I got one that was funny and cute. I dunno. I will give her a hug. She will like that. I usually hug her every day before I go off to school or work, but I will do it again for Mother’s day.
I’m driving to california for research this summer, as I’ve said before. I’m very excited about it. I was planning my trip, and in order to save money on hotels I was going to find random college students to crash with. My first plan was to use facebook to send messages to people that I went to high school with. There weren’t enough of them, so I just messaged some random people. This is one reply I got back:
hey i wouldn’t give really care i have two extra rooms in my house and as long as you don’t mind me being maybe a little drunk or buzzed its cool also can you play sequence
I talked to the guy a bit more and decided that although he seemed a little bit crazy, it could be fun. He then wrote this on my wall (which is a little public messageboard type thing on facebook):
so are you ready to hear an okie accent do you think you are up for the task do you think you drink enough here is a topic for you and your boys to talk about stillwater aka stilly gets 3% of the nations alcohol wow ya think you are good a juggling my roomate is also quite good so what kind of whiskey do ya drink i need an estimate on the day of when you might be here
At this point I was a little more hesitant. Still, hotels are expensive and it would be awesome to meet some random dude and talk about crazy stuff with him. I was telling this story to some choir people at a party (I sang in the choir for the baccalaureate mass at Xavier. It was a lot of fun!) and one guy told me he had this website called ‘freeloaders’ or something where people would say ‘you can crash on my couch for a night here in this city.’ I looked that place up and it had some promise.
I mentioned my plans to my parents and they really didn’t like the idea of me staying with random strangers. Apparently my Aunt lives in Ft. Riley Kansas and I could potentially stay there for a night. I thought they were still in Louisiana. Now I’ll be going from Cincinnati to Ft. Riley to Denver to Flagstaff to LA. I think I have a place to stay in Denver, which means I’ll only have to stay in a hotel for two nights in flagstaff, so I can spend a day at the grand canyon.
Now I am going to play some guitar.