Some crazy stuff has sparked some crazy ideas to my brain lately and I feel a sudden urgency to do the most random things in my life.
1. I am reading a book called
Stiff by Mary Roach about cadavers. Call me morbid but I'm completely enthralled. I even read it while I'm eating. Yesterday, granted, it was not such a good idea. Del Taco and embalming kind of didn't settle well together. But now I want to take Anatomy in school before I graduate. Why not?
The book is full of random facts you never knew you wanted to know about dead bodies. The following is my favorite example thus far:
"...when we're alive, we expel that gas. The dead, lacking workable stomach muscles and sphincters and bedmates to annoy, do not. Cannot. So the gas builds up and the belly bloats. I ask Arpad why the gas wouldn't just get forced out eventually. He explains that the small intestine has pretty much collapsed and sealed itself off. Or that there might be "something" blocking its egress. Though he allows, with some prodding, that a little bad air often does, in fact, slip out, and so, as a matter of record, it can be said that dead people fart. It needn't be, but it can."
I carry this book around with me everywhere. I can't put it down and people are starting to think I'm a little weird. It has the dead people feet with the little time of death tag on the cover. A little disarming, I know. Maybe I should switch my major to forensics. Just kidding everyone!! Just kidding!!
2. Last night my friend helped me replace my radiator in my car. When I say "helped" I really mean he did it. Naturally, I now want to go work in a mechanic's shop for a year or so and learn how to fix my own cars. It's not that hard. I need tools though... Just another expense, no big deal. But all you have to do is disconnect and connect the hoses. I got this.
3. A friend of mine told me she used to institute a practice called "Naked Wednesdays" at her house. The girls would come home, lock the doors, close the blinds, and wander around naked. Gutsy.
(omitting illustration on this one)
4. This same friend made a drive to the California coast just a few months ago because she wanted to. By herself. She slept in her car. Awesome. I'm doing it. But to Oregon. The magical land of my childhood. Cannon Beach, here I come.
I want to be able to tell my kids I did some awesome things. Like walking around naked... Yeah, I'd probably omit that from my stories to them if I ever actually worked up the nerve to do it. Which I won't. So omission is unnecessary.
But I actually might find it necessary to omit to my parents that I'm planning on driving to the coast by myself. I just
need to. In the words of Kirsten Dunst from
Elizabethtown, "To have never taken a single, solitary roadtrip...?" And I want to learn anatomy. I want to fix my own car. I can do this. All of it. Why not? And as my father pointed out, I'll never have more time than I do right now.
