fat tuesday!

i finished my little beehive painting. i feel funny calling watercolors paintings, though. i don't know why. they seem like too much fun, i guess.

tomorrow is the start of lent, and ash wednesday. ash wednesday is hands down my favorite catholic mass. lots of kids prefer midnight mass on christmas, but there's something about the ashes to ashes, the "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" that always stuck with me. as a child, i was pretty morbid, fairly obsessed with death, and it always bothered me when adults would brush me off. people were always trying to tell me i didn't need to worry about it, that it was so far off, and what was a little girl like me doing thinking or talking about it?* the first ash wednesday i remember clearly was in high school, and just to have the inevitability of death acknowledged was more comforting than any of the "don't worry about it," "don't think about" i heard as a kid. everyone dies. everything dies. in college i took a lot of religion classes, as well as one anthropology class called Death and Dying. i saw a morgue, went to my first funeral, watched a video of a human dissection, and talked about a lot of different cultural attitudes toward death, and the different ways we deal with the actual physical dead. my favorite attitude toward death was the tibetan buddhist one; where every day you think about death, every day you take a moment to contemplate your own death, and at the same time you celebrate it. when the monks came to class to talk to us, they brought us lollipops shaped like skulls. i still have mine. day of the dead was another revelation. happy skulls everywhere? yes, please. i like that there's a little bit of that attitude, at least one day out of the year, in the faith i was raised in. i don't know my way around fort collins that well, and i am a bad catholic at best, but i might hunt down an ash wednesday mass tomorrow.

plus i got a car wash, got trained a little bit more at work, and had a soda entirely too late this afternoon/early evening. the sleeping situation is so strange right now that i'm actually taking sleeping pills in my dreams. last night i dreamt i needed one more, and spent a ton of time looking for the pill that would send me back to sleep. i was already sleeping! that is retarded. but it's friday for me, so whatever. sleep is for suckahs anyhow.

*it got to the point that my parents put a sleeping bag in their room next to the bed, because i went in there so often to sleep with them. i wasn't necessarily afraid of dying, but i felt much more comfortable thinking about death if they were in the same room as i was. i would wake mom up, she would mumble something and i would just say, "death" and unfurl my little sleeping bag and settle in for the night. if pop was on cruise, i got to crawl into bed with her. a few years ago mom asked if i was making the death thing up, just using it to sleep in her bed, but i told her no, i was really thinking seriously about death. i would count her freckles and look hard at her and my hands and think about how someday poof! all gone. still. nothing. i still wake up thinking about it. i know it's weird, but after this many years, i'm okay with it.