You're the Jackass

Thought for the day, paraphrasing Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens from the FX series Justified: “You run into a jackass today, OK you ran into a jackass. You run into jackasses all day long, you’re the jackass.” (Only Raylan uses a more vivid word for it.)How right he is though: Some days all you want to do all day long is pick a fight with people, only you don’t know that’s what you want. You think the people who irritate you are just idiots. even if they happen to be people you love, and you’re dying to tell them so.It’s happened to me more than once, but now I have Raylan’s maxim to help me get right in my head.I mean to use it too. Because what’s true is that on most of those days when you’re trying to pick a fight every minute the whole time what you really need  but can’t seem to ask for... is a hug.Humans! When will we learn ?

You Know It Was a Good Weekend If...

You know it was a good weekend if you (a) got to sleep past 7:00 both days – even just a few minutes past - and (b) you couldn’t quite remember where you were in your life when you woke.

This happens to me all the time: Am I six months old and waiting for that large friendly face to lean over my crib like the sun peeking in at the window?

Am I 16 ? Oh God am I still 16 with a term paper due in two days? Am I 91 like Uncle Ed, who every single day canes his way to the bathroom for that shower-and-shave ceremony drilled into him as a daily ‘must’ by his three-year hitch in the Army?

I was 32 when I woke up yesterday. I’m often 32 after sleep. It’s the age I expect to be in Heaven. But back to our checklist:

You know it was a good weekend if you got to look out the window even for just five minutes to watch the birds taking rides on the wind.

You know it was a good weekend if you love to exercise and you did exercise. If exercise is just OK in your book and you drag yourself to the gym every working day of your life, you had a good weekend if you didn’t even think about exercising, except for the exercise involved in lifting food to your mouth.

You know it was a good weekend if you didn’t care what you were wearing. I had to dress way up last week to tape a public service announcement even though the camera turned out to show me just from the clavicles up so that awesome new Superbra went to waste and my eyes turn out to now be so wrinkle-crinkled they look sewn shut, like the sleepy rick-rack eyes on your first stuffed doggy.

Well I did my best - what can I say - but the minute Friday night came I pulled on my stretchy yoga pants and the hooded sweater I gave to my son in Seventh Grade that he never wore even once but that I love more than I all other clothes and basically wore them all weekend.

I knew it was a good weekend because I:

• Downloaded and watched the pilot episode of Justified for the first time.

• Watched episodes 4 and 5 of Downton Abbey's first season.

• Watched that early episode of Friday Night Lights where the best friend finally shows up in the injured kid’s hospital room and both boys cry on parting.

That was it for television.

The rest of the time I:

• Sewed something by hand for the baby coming to our family any day now.

• Made that awesome Weight Watcher Turkey Meatloaf recipe.

• Fried up some Dover sole in egg yolks and cornmeal for Old Dave.

• Broiled a filet of salmon for myself.

• And read: it had been all I wanted to do this past weekend: I read a novel, a memoir and two New Yorkers, an Atlantic Monthly and as many chapters as I could manage in A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s history of the troubled fourteenth century.

The sun was gorgeous and then it went down. Stars came out and a big wind tried to frighten the fruit trees which, with nothing left to lose, laughed in its face. The year ticked along and spring grew closer and somewhere around 11 last night as I felt slept closing my lids I felt some internal second-hand surge forward and knew that I was ready for the new week ahead.