Thursday, July 21, 2011

Wear Sunscreen

Ok, so I got a stack of books from the library about four weeks ago. I have read one of those books. I really have not read a really really amazing book. Most of the books that I have read are generally blase to me, even though they were winners of the national book award and the pulitzer prize. Maybe my taste in literature is just not as sophisticated as I once thought. The two favorite books that I have read were "Water for Elephants" and "Push". I read "Push" in one day, it was just that amazing. It was the book that inspired the movie "Precious" and all I can say is: wow. Ah-mazing. Read it, I approve it one hundred percent.

Today it has been rainy and kind of gross outside. I know that the whole country has been going through a heat wave and it is normal to get thunderstorms because of the high temperatures. Speaking of bad rain, I never disclosed my horrifying experience with what I believe to be a tornado. It was a pretty regular day and my sister and I were watching a movie. We noticed that it was getting pretty dark outside and strangely windy. We looked on the weather channel and there was no warnings regarding thunderstorms or tornadoes. I decided to check what the skies looked like outside, so I walked over to the front door and tried to pry the door open. I thought that I was trying to push the door open while it was still locked. The wind was so intense that it was a fight to get the door open. I know I had to have looked pretty pathetic, with my wrestling with the door and all. The sky was pretty dark but nothing really bad so I went back in the house.

A second later my sister and I heard the garbage cans outside of our house blowing around. Thinking that they might become dangerous to either our house or our neighbors' houses we decided to run out, grab them, and chuck them in the garage. So we went running out of the garage and stopped midway down the drive way because there in the middle of the sky was the most odd looking clouds. It looked like a vortex, like the whole sky had opened up, revealing a portal to another universe. It took me a second to realize that this was most likely a tornado. A notion that was solidified seconds later when the sky started swirling with menacing rotations. Not the clouds, the whole sky.  I grabbed my sisters arm, pointed at the sky, and then we both latched on to each other and sprinted into the house.

We began chucking everything out of the small closet that we have downstairs, the only area of our house sans windows, so that we would have enough room to hide in the closet with both of the pups. I ran around looking for a flashlight, batteries, cans of food, and whatnot. While I did gather some essentials, I really was just running around in panic. I could no longer think straight, I just shut down for a while. I do remember screaming "Is the tornado here yet?!?!". Just as suddenly as the wind picked up, the gusts stopped and the clouds reverted from the ugly shade of green to melancholy gray. I stopped running around, stopped thinking that I was going to die, and sat down on the floor to finally catch my breath. Luckily, nothing happened. But it was horrifying. I had never seen the sky look so macabre. I mean, I have seen my fair share of bad weather but this was in its own category.

I tried to tell my parents about the tornado, but they dismissed it saying that it was probably just a whatchamacallit because rachel always tends to over exaggerate her stories. This time my sister saw it, but it did little to validate my story. My brother even saw it since he was outside at football practice, but he saw three instead of one. I'm thinking it was a tornado. So, when the weather is as torrential as it has been today I kind of flashback to that day. I always liked that one quote from the sunscreen speech that was remediated by Baz Luhrman

 "The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that
Never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday"

like a tornado on a random afternoon. By the way, if you haven't heard/read the sunscreen speech it is one of my favorite inspirational song/story/speech. I don't really know what it is, spoken word or something like that? It's just good.


Oh yeah, I baked muffins today. But, I lost the recipe. I thought this story would suffice. It probably didn't because those were some spiff muffins! Cinnamon streusel (is that how you spell it?) holla!

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