Week is over

And I say: Thank God.

This was a LONG one. Too many nights out away from home even if it was mostly positive stuff (the pancake dinner; the Ash Wednesday service). But all I want to do this evening is to put my pajamas on early and sit down in my big chair and knit and maybe watch a few more episodes of Parks and Recreation.

And go to bed early. I'm beat. I slept badly last night: probably a combo platter of something-is-going-on-with-me (either allergies, or perhaps hormones aren't quite done with me yet), and being out too late and among too many other people, and having been intensely worried about someone (a man from my church who wound up suddenly in ICU and had to have kidney surgery. Last I heard he was out of surgery and stable, so). And I couldn't get my brain to stop yammering at me last night and just SLEEP.

Also, the weather has become changeable, which means it's hard to know how to dress, and the night *before* last night I was too warm to sleep well - so I changed to a shorts-and-t-shirt combo for pajamas last night. That helped a little bit with the "too warm" issue, but I still slept badly.

And Daylight Saving starts this weekend. I hate this transition, it is far harder than going the other way, because you lose an entire hour of sleep (unless you can tweak your schedule, which I'm gonna try to do - try going to bed a half hour earlier tonight, and then another half-hour earlier tomorrow night) but also because when you get up early like I normally do, it is hard like whoa (dragging yourself out of bed at 4:30 or 5 when sunrise is 3-4 hours later is painful).

But yeah. Sleep is needed; hopefully I will get it tonight.

Someone linked to the Totoro-themed Vancouver cat cafe on Twitter and it struck me: one of the things American culture often lacks, at least in things aimed at adults (or at least not specifically aimed at children, as in "childless adults not allowed to enjoy") is WHIMSY. Everything has to be so gritty and serious, or so streamlined and "efficient," and the loss of cuteness and whimsy, I feel it. (You can, if you look, find whimsical things, I guess: I have a set of matryoshka themed measuring cups. But they're not widespread, can be hard to find, and sometimes you pay a premium for them). But yes, I would like more whimsical things like this. (But of course, it's also in freakin' Vancouver, which might as well be Tokyo, for all the chance I have of getting there).

I wonder if the typical Midwestern Seriousness/Earnestness you see has squeezed out a chance at whimsy. Or if so many of us have tried so hard to seem "grown up" (or have been told by others we need to look "grown up,") that we've accepted a loss of the cute and the pleasant from our everyday life. I mean, the average grocery-store trip is....not that fun. For me, it's get in, grab the stuff on the list, pay, get out as soon as possible. (And Wal-mart can, on a bad day, be positively purgatorial). I don't know how grocery stores could be made nicer to shop at and still be sufficiently profitable to neither break the budget of 80% of the people shopping there, or go under. ("Fresh Market" was very nice as long as it lasted, but I can only assume that carrying nicer foods and playing Hadyn and Mozart instead of ads and using soft lighting doesn't bring in the crowds the way "stackin' em deep and sellin' em cheap" does).

I don't know. But I would be here for a whimsical grocery store. (Another thought: perhaps whimsy is deemed terribly unmanly in our culture, and because women are -generally - more accepting of not-getting-just-what-they-want that's why it is the way it is - I have heard stories about "girls will watch cartoons with all-boy protagonists, but boys won't watch a cartoon with girl protagonists," or at least that's how it used to be, and that was used to justify a lot of the stuff that was on. Maybe not true, I don't know, but I've also known enough men who acted grossed out over things like Hello Kitty to think that maybe a nice soft sweet grocery store simply would not fly. Even if most of the grocery shoppers still tend to be women)