Skip to main content

Save me, Superman

Image
By
"I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there... please save me, Superman!"


It's 5 am, I'm lying in my childhood bed in my childhood bedroom, staring up at the still-glowing stars I pasted on the ceiling some two decades before. My husband and sons don't arrive for hours, my brother not till the day after. It's feeling uncomfortably like it might really be 1992 again.

I send my mom a text with a question for the coming day, figuring she'll see it in the morning morning. Instead there's a loud chime from the bedroom 12 feet from mine.

"What's that?!" [alarmed!!]

"It's Sarah!" [surprise and confusion!]

"What did she say?!" [more evident confusion, processing concept of notes texted, not taped to the garage door! what is going on?!]

"She wants to move the old furniture. ... THAT'S FINE, SARAH." [yelling as though I might be very, very far away instead of close enough to hear the family dog licking himself at the foot of their bed]

"Did she tell you what else she's going to do?"

"No, she just says: [reads my text aloud]."

"Well, have you seen the room?" [very alarmed now!!]

"Do you want to just ask me," I answer back to them, "or would rather just keep speculating on your own?"

"WHY DON'T YOU TELL US?", they yell back in case I might have just now developed a hearing impairment.

"Are you going with her tomorrow to pick Jesse and the kids up at the airport?"

"I'LL BE FINE," I yell, not sure how far sound travels here.

"She's so tired, she needs someone to go with her."

"I CAN HEAR YOU!" I yell, burying my head under the covers.

Save me, SUPERMAN!

The author... in bed... under glowing star stickers... 
wearing the glasses she wore in 1990.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Two Religions Tell Us About the Modern Dating Crisis - TIME

By
This article is so interesting to me, and seems to touch on so many different aspects of our current culture, both secular and non. I have no objection to cosmetic surgery. I've had both lasik eye surgery and liposuction over the years -- the former an equal measure of laziness and vanity, the latter pure vanity. I'd hated that little spare tire since I was 6 years old and so one day I had it delightfully sucked right out of me! But the stories over the years about the enormous amount of plastic surgery -- particularly breast augmentations -- performed in Utah have been eye-catching (not the least of which because the Church frowns so heavily on other much-less-invasive violations of the body-is-a-temple principle, like tattoos and multiple ear-piercings in an earlobe). When we were still friends, the husband of my old roommate continually pushed her to get a 'boob job' because everyone else in their ward had gotten one and he wanted her to have bigger breasts....
Post a Comment
Read more

Dear Jeff: Part One

By
A response in two parts.  Part One.  There is a Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton and it’s not Donald Trump. It’s Mitt Romney.  Most of what shapes your opinion of Clinton isn’t true. Rather, it’s truthy , and the direct result of a 30-year-long smear campaign, very little of which has ever turned out to be true. It’s the way that many Democrats still think George W. Bush went AWOL during Vietnam even though the documents alleging it were almost immediately debunked and the way some liberals think Romney paid $0 in federal taxes because Harry Reid said so. Accusations get a lot of coverage, particularly in partisan media; debunking gets almost none. T his is what I do for a living, so I end up hav ing to read everything. I don’t design jet engines or treat patients or program software or fill cavities five days a week. I do this.* I like to joke that I read more National Review and American Spectator in any given week than most of my Republican ...
3 comments
Read more

Policing Facebook

By
My husband says I’m a contrarian who disagrees just to disagree. To which I say, “No, I’m not. You’re wrong!” A friend shared this blog column on Facebook and I basically disagreed with every word. First and foremost — and viscerally — I disagree with policing what other people post on Facebook and shaming them for failing to follow someone else’s arbitrary standard. It’s an authoritarian impulse that I understand — dear Lord if I could prevent all sports-related posts, I would! I would! — but let's call it what it is and not cloak it in some kind of moral high ground. We can have our personal pet peeves without dressing them up as proof of society's decline.   And to be clear, these are arbitrary standards we're talking about. I’ve written before about the social media conundrum that if you only post positive things about your life and happy-smiling pictures, you’re criticized for image-branding. But if you post honest comments about depression or divo...
2 comments
Read more