Two Completely Unrelated Thoughts

*Do you have a song that whenever you hear it, you break down and cry? For me, that song is 100 Years by Five For Fighting (it's also the background song for a credit card commercial). You know the song..."I'm 15 for a moment. Caught in between 10 and 20 and I'm just dreaming..." I'm usually okay until he becomes 33 and totally lose it when he becomes 45. Mike had never paid attention to the song until we were leaving my parents house on the way to Mike's sister's for Thanksgiving. We're driving along when that song comes on the radio. I'm crying and driving. Mike's never been able to understand what the singer was saying so he never got the message of it. He became incredibly curious about the song because, in his opinion, if a song can grip you in 2 minutes and 30 seconds, it must be good. I tried to explain it to him as best I could but wasn't doing a good job of it. We spent a good portion of the rest of the trip (all 700 miles) trying to catch that song again. When we did, Mike asked me to sing it. I only got to where he's 33 and then I lost it (poor Mike, he finally had to look up the words to the song). What an amazing song. It really makes you realize just how short life is and how you spend so much time either trying to be older or younger. (Of course, this is just a small part of the song. There's more to it than that.) Amazing. Why am I bringing this up now? I heard it on the way to get coffee this evening. I always have to sit in the car for a minute to compose myself. 2+ months later, the song still gets me.

*In an effort to make myself sound smarter than I really am, I pulled out a couple of my old college English books. I have always relied on my St. Martin's Handbook and my Warriner's English Grammar and Composition books. It's so sad. I've always considered myself to be a better editor than writer. Unfortunately, I've never been good at editing my own work.

You'd think that I wouldn't be so insecure about my writing...I took graduate level creative writing courses (and got A's, I might add) as an undergrad. I survived an insane grammar class in college where we had to diagram the Preamble to the Constitution as a portion of our final (I got an A in that class, too). Maybe it's the idea that these are my thoughts and I'm not writing to please a teacher.