on a lighter note...
my parents are road tripping the summer away, and keep extending their vacation. in their old age they'll get a van and turn into hippies again and talk about how beautiful insects are. i can barely wait! you look at your parents and see how your life could be, those two people you're made from, and it can be both scary and inspiring. and you hope you have the same kind of positive qualities that they have, and hope to learn from the pitfalls that they've encountered. and it's awesome to see your parents grow and change and still manage to have fun, and i just kind of breathe a sigh of relief and know that life isn't a death sentence. profound! nolan has this really bad idea of growing old, he says old people are "smiling shadows of death" or something like that. and i'm all like, "nuh uh nolan, that's not going to be me when i get old! i'm going to have long white hair that i keep up in a bun, and i'll wear elegant tunics. i'll have a garden and lots of cats and art openings and either a husband or boyfriend at my side! i'll be all old and wise and drink tea and have my grandkids over all the time. it'll be great." nolan's going to write my eulogy, and he's going to call me a community treasure. i don't know if i'll have money or not, but i will have an old rv and travel around and take photos and write alot. maybe i'll start to paint and swim laps every morning. i'll live out in the country in an underground house, or a haybale house, and have a cockatiel that all the cats want to eat. what can get better than that? nada. the other day i was in iron brush visiting with tyson, and he got a wild hair and decided to draw a really mean picture of me in the future. i had a skull head and no teeth, with wild unkempt hair. he was saying that i'll be addicted to pills and smell like cat pee, and kept referring to the future taura as a "gummer". i didn't like that prediction at all, but could imagine growing up with a different set of circumstances in my life, i could end up there. so, uh, thanks mom and dad for raising me to not be an old drug addled gummer. who likes cats.
speaking of cats, guess who likes me now? bendi. yes, the fat cat my sister molly calls "the most beautiful cat in the whole wide world" and "gorgeous". the cat who my dad rescued when he found her as a stray kitten in the front yard with puncture wounds all over her body, who hisses at me when i walk by. i should say, USED to hiss at me when i walked by, cuz now i'm her best friend. do you know why? because bendi has figured out that i am god, the center of the universe, the giver of life, the bringer of...KITTY FOOOOOOOOD. it's a miraculous transformation, you can only imagine it if you didn't know what an awful cat she was previously. heck, i think i'll go pet her right now.

today is sunday.
tasha and i went to the funeral for mary and adam's baby. i know mary through tasha when they were best friends in highschool and played in g.i. jill together, she's a strong girl. i know they'll get through it together, and my heart goes out to them during this time.
not very many non-travel team skaters are showing up anymore to practice, which sucks cuz the mad maxines (the travel team) have room for alternates and some of the best girls who could be up for the spots, aren't shownig up. and the mad maxines want to skate as a team and work on their strategy against the "left overs", the girls in the league who did not make the travel team. REAL fun. lots of pile-ups and injuries, girls are dropping out like flies. not enough people for a good rotation, so you just play and play and play and only get to sit out once before you're back in. i'm all wobbly on my skates, i'm blaming it on the 2 month break we took where i didn't practice at all, so i'm an easy target for all the girls to take out. tasha hurt her knee today, she's the shortest one in the league right now. i'm not very tall either, and not especially bulky or muscular, when i skate low, my eye level is below some girls' ass level. that's tough. tasha and i were talking about how it would be to skate against girls who were at our ass level, how much nicer it would be to tower over skaters instead of seeing a brick wall of ass in front of you the whole time. but then you see girls who are kick ass jammers and blockers who are about as big as a pencil. so your size only means so much. ahhh... tonight i was jamming and had got through the pack and one of the girls came up behind me and grabbed my hips and threw me down. total major foul. she went to the penalty box, which sucks for her team, but then i'm on the ground and have to fight my way back through the pack again, making the longest two minutes of my life even longer. you'll never know how long 120 seconds are until you have to jam.
someone sent me a cd yesterday, with only one song on it. i've listened to it about 86 times. "i was told that you have a hole in your heart, but it's no longer shaped like me". when i drove home from today's awesome practice listening to that song, i just about lost it.
oh, i don't know, everything's fine. i don't know why i'm being all depressing. but when you get knocked down over and over and your sister hurts her knee and then you start thinking about a little baby who died, you can't help but want to cry.