Freedom's just another word for

get me THE HELL OUT of this house! Actually, I've been singing a happier tune for the last two days since Comet went back to school, but the weekend followed by two school holidays and a Comet sick day almost finished me. I gots to get the hell out of this (or any) house for at least an hour a day, preferably alone in the car or I lose my shizzle. I have always been this way. Since I was a kid, I was the first one waiting at the door when there was even a rumor that someone was going to the grocery store. When anyone said the words "I'm going to the," I was quick to shout out "I wanna come!" before they even finished the sentence. Often the sentence ended in "kitchen" or "bathroom." Then I would add sadness to my thwarted wanderlust.

Could it have something to do with my incarceration, er, childhood, in scenic Jetersville, population no one cares? Where my nearest neighbors were Black Angus cows--their field was about ten feet from the bathroom window---who would occasionally escape and run around my house until Mr. Puglisi came and rounded them up? Where entertainment was walking over to the country store across the street and buying a soda from the machine. Big entertainment was when the phone company put in a telephone booth next to the store and you could call people up but they couldn't hear you unless you put in the dime, and guess what? We never put in the dime! Ah, good times.

Could it be because I didn't have a car until well into my twenties and was dependent upon the kindness of friends and the strength of my tough little legs in a town with (formerly) crap public transportation? Though my tough little legs were in some good shape in those days. There is a side benefit to this earlier deprivation in that I don't feel guilty about using gas. I grew up in the sticks and never went more the ten miles from home and didn't have a car till I was twenty-six. Ya'll suburban brats can feel THAT shame. I'm just using my share from the seventies and eighties!

Actually, I'm blaming my most recent hatred of humanity/bad moods on the almost recent snowfall we experienced and the internally horrifying, scarring FOUR days that I was stuck/at home with my loving family. My boys were pretty happy, but I was ready to chew off my own leg and limp down Route 20 just to see the bright lights of Food Lion before I bled out.

GameGuy is a man who could stay in the house for weeks and not even notice as long as there was enough food and people kept showing up to play boardgames, yet he understands me. Comet could stay home forever and he's only five and doesn't understand anybody. It's GameGuy who makes sure I get THE HELL OUT at least once a day. During the at home days this week, he supported me as I ran (drove) out for forty-five minutes to an hour over his lunchtime so that I could maintain. He knows that his girl has got to move, see the world, see people I don't know and don't have to talk to or ever see again. I need to be in the impersonal flow of humanity, be it ever so humble as a walk through our dubiously named Fashion Square Mall (it isn't square, either). He knows I'll never be gone long, and he really gets it when I tell him, "Baby, I was born to run (to the store)!"