The Year in Review

I stole this idea from ND Heathen, whose page is listed on the right. Below you will find the first line of the first blog of each month this year. Also, I have added a new post to "My Favorite Mistakes" list. It is called 'Inner Peace,' and I don't mind saying that I think it is pretty funny stuff. Anyway, in honor of my one year blogging anniversary, which just passed, here is my year in review.

January: There's really no delicate way to tell this story.
February: I am the advisor of the student newspaper at the high school where I work.
March: We've had institute days for the past 1.5 days.
April: Spring break, the last extensive recess of the year, officially comes to an end tonight, hence the sad face.
May: I don't have much to say.
June: I was married once for 8 months.
July: I TiVo "Inside the Actor's Studio."
August: I am off to St. Louis this weekend to visit my friends from college
September: I'm supposed to be grading right now.
October: I have always been fond of tests, surveys or inventories that purport to classify my personality.
November: Thanks to those of you that have pushed me to come back.
December: One of the best Christmas gifts I ever got was a huge box filled with various types of medicine.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Panic

I am nothing if not predictable. Monday-Friday, I eat the same food for every meal. I wake up at the same time every day, go to bed at the same time every day. By 5:00 you can find me at the gym, 6:30 eating dinner, 7:00 on the couch grading/blogging/watching tv/emailing friends. If we make plans for 7:00 on Friday, I'll be there at 7:00 on Friday. If there is a chance that I am going to be more than 5 minutes late, I'll text you or call you to tell you so. I have told my boyfriend that if ever I tell him I will be somewhere at some time, and I am not there within a few minutes of when I say I will be, call the police to tell them to start searching for the bloody remains of a 30-year-old white female on the side of the major roadways in the Chicago.

I am like this because my parents made me this way by being the two most predictable people on the face of the Earth, leading me to this story. It takes place over the course of about 25 minutes, which, in my family, is 20 minutes longer than is needed to make my sister and me totally hysterical.
My parents were supposed to go to my sister's house on Thursday night. I was at book club when my phone rang at about 8:00, and I saw my niece's (adorable) face on the caller ID, indicating that it was my sister. Because my sister never calls me at 8:00 on any night, I picked up the phone, assuming it must be important if she was calling me at this hour. She told me that my parents had said they would be coming over, but they had not yet shown up. This is not at all like them, and my heart immediately started racing. I said goodbye to my book club friends, and started toward my boyfriend's house, which is about 10 blocks from where book club was being held. I called him to tell him what was going on, and he told me to keep calling them and to try some of their friends to see if anyone had heard from them.

On my way to his house, both my sister and I tried home and cell phones multiple times. When I say "multiple" I mean I made about 15 calls in those 10 blocks. They did not answer any phone. When I tell normal people this story, they might think, "Well maybe they were at dinner or a movie and they had their phones off." Wrong. Not only would they never go to dinner and a movie when they said they would be at my sister's house, but they ALWAYS answer the phone. My dad could be at the consecration of the Pope, and he would take a call in the middle of Holy Communion. We do not screen out the phone calls of family members in the Mischke family. If we do, and the person calls 15 times in the space of 10 city block's drive-time, we come to our senses and pick up.

My sister lives only about 15 minutes from my parents' house, so she drove over there to see if they were home. To me, this meant my soon-to-be permanently scarred sister was driving to find the bloody remains of our parents. At this point I was sobbing, hyperventilating and sweating, while trying to figure out how I would deal with the news media that would inevitably descend upon the home of the tragic suburbanite family who had its loving parents slain in some awful way in their quiet neighborhood. When she got there, she opened the garage door, and all of the cars were there. This sent us both into a complete panic (as if we were not in one already), and she hung up to call 911, as my boyfriend told her it was not safe to go in the house alone if something might be wrong. *For some reason it took the cops about 15 minutes to arrive, which gave my sister and I plenty of time to sob on the phone together while she sat in her car in front of their house, and I sat helpless in the boyfriend's living room 25 miles away.

When the cops came, they went in the house, and my mom was sitting on the couch, probably watching soap operas, and my dad was upstairs, probably watching 'Seconds from Disaster'. They had gotten in an argument; they "weren't in the mood to talk," so they didn't pick up any of the three phones that had rung 30 times in the last 25 minutes. Unacceptable. I have never been so terrified in my whole life.

*My heart is literally racing just telling the story.

Stocking up

(The picture is irrelevant, but those are my adorable nieces and nephew)
One of the best Christmas gifts I ever got was a huge box filled with various types of medicine. At the time, I just thought it was funny, but months later when I had a sore throat and actually had a remedy for it in my house, well, I was never so grateful. It was from my now-former father-in-law, and he bought it because I had become notorious in their family for not keeping medicine in my home. Their son, who was prone to getting ill, had to drive over to their house to pillage the medicine cabinet everytime he had a headache. Poor bastard.

In my "medicine cabinet," there are no cures for any kind of ailment (except wrinkles, dry skin and bad breath). Once I had a jar of ibuprofen, but that belonged to a roommate. Currently, I have a box of halls that my boyfriend bought me when I had a sore throat. The only thing that bothered me more than the sore throat was the taste of those lozenges; only one is missing from the 2-year-old box.

The lack of medicine in my life isn't just because I don't get sick. It goes deeper than that. Some people are planners. Take my roommate for example. Under her bed she has one of those giant rolling tupperware thingys filled with backups of every beauty product she'll ever need. Shampoo. Conditioner. Cotton swabs. Hair brushes. Rubberbands. It's a virtual pharmacy under her bed. Under my bed? Giant dust bunnies, summer clothes and a duffel bag of the journals I've kept over the years.*

I have only one of everything I need. I don't deny that it makes sense to live like my roommate; I even envy the sense of stability she must feel. Yet I cannot bring myself to buy something at the store unless I absolutely need it. I have to be down to the last squirt of contact solution, the last squeeze of the toothpaste tube, before I will venture into the drug store section of my grocery store. I've even tried buying things I don't yet need. Every so often I'll see a bag of cotton balls displayed at the end of an aisle as I'm walking toward the items I actually need, and my body simply will not allow me to buy the cotton balls when I know there are cotton balls in the cabinet at home. Or when I bought my multi-vitamins a few months ago, I stared at the shelves stocked with Tylenol and Advil type products, and did the math in my head. Sure, I drink a lot of wine. But will I get $8.00 worth of headaches before this thing expires in four years? Nope. Back to the salad dressing.

Just like everything else, it stems from my childhood. Growing up, we were not allowed to get sick. Our medicine supply was limited to a box of generic aspirin under the sink that my dad stole from his first-aid kit at work. Beyond that, if you got really sick, you either had to ask mom to go to the store and buy you a cure for your ailment or suck it up. Either way, you were going to school. I could be bleeding out my eyes, and my mom would have handed me a square of toilet paper and said, "Go to school."

I'm afraid I am making my mom sound like a total bitch. She's not at all. She's actually the best mom in the world (seriously), but she is intolerant of the not-deathly ill. I mean, I heard the woman just two weeks ago call my dad a pussy for having a cold. And my dad never gets sick, so on the rare occasion that he does, you'd think she'd have some sympathy for the man she's been married to for 33 years. Nope. Suck it up, old man, and go to work.

What's in your medicine cabinet?

* I'm really hating this personality flaw right now, as I was in a mini-quiche eating contest last night and lost, and I would kill for some pepto bismol. A bottle of ibuprofen would be nice as well to combat the wicked headache I'm fighting because of the bottle of pinot I drank just before the quiche eating began.