hot hawaiian nights

Tonight after dinner, Meemaw, Peepaw & I will go to Long's Drugs to pick up prescriptions, then stop at Wendy's on the way home for a Frosty, or perhaps Mickey D's for a sundae (you have to say Mickey D's to be in the right frame of mind). It is precisely for moments like this that I moved back here. That, and the fact that my father bribed county road workers to extend the guardrail they were fixing above our house (someone crashed into it yesterday morning) with pineapple plants he dug up from our yard. I am especially excited because they now offer mix-ins to the already perfect Frosty! To my mind, this is a far better change than mandarin oranges as an alternative to fries.

A sidenote, to those of you who are making plans to visit us: we may not have pineapples if you come in the next six months.

With a Butterfinger Frosty under my belt, I'll be on my way toward looking more like a teacher and less like a pre-teen. My friend-since-preschool, Lori, and I visited her grandma the other day, and she told me I look like a freshman. I took my mom straight to Macy's (Kona's lone source of clothes other than hoochie surf shorts and aloha wear) and bought what I thought was a respectable outfit, black microfiber pants & a sleeveless turquoise & black v-neck top. Over the past few days, I have picked apart all the ways in which my students will be able to make fun of me for my outfit, and nicknames they might spread around the school inspired by my skinny, hairy arms; frizzy hair (seriously, I'm like Monica when Friends went to the Carribean); lack of a tan; and of course, diminutive stature. After college, I gradually learned to live with my physical shortcomings, even to relish them, but I have regressed into my high school self, which was essentially a walking bin of self-loathing. Cameron Diaz claims she was traumatized by being called "Skeletor" in high school, but she lies! One day my math teacher brought in a toothpick with a grape stuck on it, showed it to the big group of kids with whom I played Connect Four in her classroom at lunch, and said, "This is what Jill would look like if she got pregnant!" From then on I was known as "toothpick with a grape stuck on it." Very original.

Clearly, I have some confidence to build before I start work. Good thing I'm not doing anything like living with my parents and hanging out at McDonald's to compound the dorkiness.