The meaning of OW!

Today I was walking downtown in Winston-Salem, and I heard this behind me:

SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE YOUR BOOTY

WOOOO YEAH SHAKE THAT BOOTY

YEAH BOOTY SHAKIN’ OWWWW

and I thought, “surely he isn’t saying that to me!”

But then it kept getting closer…

And then he was beside me! But he just kept walking and singing!

Then he looked at me and said SHAKE YOUR BOOOTAY……OWWWWW!

And I didn’t know what to say, so I said “who me?”

And he went on the longest rant about how he wishes he knew what they meant when they said OOOOWWW! and how he was so young when that song came out, but one day he was going to get enough money for that CD and he was going to figure out what they meant when they said OOOOWWW!

And then we got to a crosswalk, and he went OOWWW! one last time and went the other way.

It was one of my favorite moments ever.

I just saw a group of old ladies bending over and standing back up repeatedly in the grass, and I thought, "well, maybe they're looking for Easter eggs!"
It's a silly thought, but it's the first thing that came to mind. And then I realized that Easter was last Sunday, and I felt overwhelmingly sad.
It's so perfect that I re-read Slaughterhouse-Five last week because this quote sums up my life so perfectly: “The time would not pass. Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric clocks, but the wind-up kind, too. The second hand on my watch would twitch once, and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.”

Kites

Today I told my mom I wanted a kite, and she told me I’d never been a kite person. “It’d get stuck in a tree and hang there for weeks,” she reminded me, “or the string would get all tangled.” And she's right. So I'm leaving this post here, just as a reminder, that I'm just not a kite kind of gal.

After tomorrow, I will be one week closer to freedom. This means that in a few more weeks I:

• will never have to take another math/science class again.
• can finally read all I want. I can read about the most glorious things! I can read without feeling irresponsible.
• can devote tons of time to political "activism."
• won't need insane amounts of soda-pop just to stay awake all day.
• can go everywhere!
• can finally be nocturnal again. Well, without having to pay for it.
• CAN SLEEP ALL SUMMER!

Anyway, I needed motivation, so there's that. Goodnight!

Today Hallie pulled me all the way to her car by my wrist. Our bookbags were causing us to hunch, and our laughter spilled onto the air like water that splashes and falls out of a toddler's cup the first time he tries to drink all by himself. I'm realizing that right now we are stuck in the most beautiful eras of our lives - the time between adulthood and childhood; we're skeptics, but not so much that beauty is impossible to see, and we are still free to be as silly and chirpy as we please.

Sometimes I try to imagine what my life would be like if I'd had never chosen to attend the Early College. The thing that always scares me the most is that one tiny, wrong (well, I never would've known how wrong it was) decision could've kept me from my "twin soul" and my best friend in the whole world.