She nailed it (oh & April is the cruelest month) 4.1.05

So there I am at my local nail hut thinking I am going to embrace spring with a soothing, cute pedicure in addition to the dull, necessary manicure, and realizing that I don�t have the time to spare because I have sat there for over a half-hour waiting to keep my �appointment.� It was turning into a very Seinfeldian moment with the whole, yes you know how to MAKE the appointment, but you don�t know how to KEEP the appointment�Anyway, the place was packed. Apparently it is now de rigueur for anybody who is anyone in the 6 to 8th grades to return from spring break with an excruciatingly bright shade of hot pink slathered all over their little claws.

So there I am, sitting and waiting, and my mind decides to veer off and start racing unpleasantly along the dim, narrow corridors of bureaucratic thought: must get my taxes done, must square up my godforsaken car registration, must squirrel away more money if I�m ever to enact some kind of fabulousa PLAN B�then two little girls, circa age 11 or so, flop into chairs to let their neon dry and this is what I hear: �Carly, I am so stressed. I�m gonna get a massage. Are you stressed?�

It was adorable and obnoxious in a postmodern bizarre way. I tried to remember if I felt �stressed� at that age. And you know what? It�s impossible to even conjure up the dim memory of lesser stresses when faced with what mires me down now, which obviously leads to this thought straight out of the Murphy legal department: If you think it�s bad now, it can always get worse. It took all the willpower I had not to lean forward and murmur this gentle reminder to my little manicured friends.

But perhaps it was the fumes of polish remover, or maybe even that whiff of youthful naivet� I�d caught, but leaving the place I felt pretty fine. It�s certainly the truth that I�m still a bit shy of ye olde master plan, and I am still feeling slightly more lost than found, but it�s a kind of a fun lost right now. It�s not like I�m stumbling around in the dark, creepy woods or something; no, at this point I feel more like I�m wandering through a nice, classic English hedgerow maze�you know the kind with perfectly pruned walls of green in some intricate pattern. It�s a lovely, organized, perfectly civilized way to be lost, and really rather enjoyable.