(Mis)Overheard in Our Rental Car

Dottie West: [singing] "Somebody's gonna give you a lesson in hurtin'
Somebody's gonna leave you with your fire burnin'
With no way to put it out."

Zach: Wait, what? "Prior burning"?

Mike: No. "Fire burning."

Zach: Oh. I thought it was about female trouble. Down there.
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We spent the weekend in Staunton/New Hope, Virginia, visiting our friends Steve and Jamie. Staunton is an oasis of L.L. Bean and J. Crew in the middle of darkest Virginia. Everyone has a full collection of his or her own teeth and feels that "antiquing" is an okay verb to use. (It isn't. It grates.) They have a Shakespeare Theatre, nary a Starbucks in sight, and beautiful houses that are all cheaper than what our apartment would cost us if we buy. (For serious: we passed mansions that sold for about the same price as our 2-bedroom, 2-bath apartment in the middle of frickin' Rockville for the love of Christ. I mean, these are houses. With land. I don't understand capitalism.)

New Hope? Has a gas station and a grocery store. In the same building. And two churches.

Steve and Jamie actually live in New Hope. Or rather, on what amounts to the outskirts of New Hope next to a predominantly black Baptist church. We were able to hear them all filled with the spirit on Sunday morning, which was charming in that "How adorable! They think that Bible stuff is true" kinda way but I can forsee Sunday mornings where you might not necessarily want to hear that much praising that early. Hi, Baptists? It's Mike: God can hear you just as well if you use your indoor voice.

I also had an ill-timed meltdown in front of our hosts. See: we're moving. Like, soon. Like, in three weeks and while yeah, three weeks is a fairly healthy chunk of time -- tomorrow it'll only be 2 weeks and 6 days or something. Each day is one day less for packing. And, because I'm still learning how to have emotions (like I'm some kind of robot-person from the future), it doesn't take much for me to become all anxiety-ridden.

And boy, is that an attractive trait.

So, we were talking about the move and how it will suck, and it was fine and pleasant in a jokey kind of way. "You'll never get it done." "Boy, you're move is going to suck." And then, all of a sudden it stopped being something I could joke about at all and I immediately became a nightmare about the futons. We have three; we've never taken them apart or put them together; they have to be moved. And I wanted someone else to do that part. You know, hire someone to come and take care of all that. Only Zach's research into movers proved that this was a bad cost-effective way to do this, since all movers apparently start the bidding at around a frillion dollars. And that? Is too many dollars for these homos*.

So, I flipped. I hurt Zach's feelings. And I looked like a bit of an ass in front of people I like. The nice thing is, because they're people I like, they didn't think much of it. Yeah, it was uncomfortable -- but it wasn't one of those "elephant in the room" moments where we had to pretend like it wasn't happening.

I blame Virginia.

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* Word's spellcheck gave me a grammar squiggle under homo. Not a spell squiggle -- turns out, homo's a fine way to spell homo. Word's spellcheck was worried I had forgotten to end the sentence with homo in it with a question mark. Because it starts with Is.