Thursday morning I woke to an unearthly wailing that sounded as if all the victims of Texas' Death Row rose to extract their revenge on all the living Texans. It was six am. I was in the middle of texting a friend "are you awake, what's that noise?" When my landlady came out and told me that we needed to climb in the tub until the alarms went off. It was a severe tornado warning. At 6am. The only upside to being frightened awake an hour before I needed to be up was that if the weather was severe enough to sound an alarm, school must be closed and I can sleep in. Right? wrong.
Instead, I was in Phonetics, 8am, groggy and irritable. What's worse? No one even mentioned it! Apparently such awakenings are so routine in Texas they're not even worth mentioning!
Friday evening, I went over to hang out with a friend at the house of a PBT family. After four slices of pizza, we went out to Walmart to get t-r-e-a-t-s for the big kids and the children were put to bed. At Walmart, I found the exotic fruit section, and in it, the cactus pear. I picked it up, squeezed it gently to see if it was ripe (not that I know what a ripe cactus pear feels like), and rolled it around in my hands feeling it's uniqueness. You see, I was under the impression that a cactus pear was the fruit of a cactus, not a cactus in and of itself. But I very quickly discovered my mistake as I came to notice the very tiny stickers irritating my flesh. As I moaned about the annoyance i slipped in a small puddle of water and fell in a heap. My friend looked back wondering if I had fallen on purpose "for dramatic effect." I had not! (That would have been overkill and I'm far too talented an actress to make that amateur mistake!) I had decided to eat this cactus pear very aggressively as revenge. We returned home with our t-r-e-a-t, somehow managed to stab a hole in the bottom of the ice cream tub resulting in the necessity to eat the whole container in one sitting. After nursing my pride with ice cream, I nursed my wounds with first tweezer (very cheap tweezers), tape (which pushed them in further), washing (which only irritated it), and finally layers of glue which I peeled off. Still, almost 24hrs later, the stickers will not relent. I ate that pear. (And, regretfully, it wasn't even that delicious)
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