Dirt between my toes…
That’s right. Between my toes. I took off my shoes last night and that’s what I found. Dirt.
There is a perfectly logical reason for this. I haven’t given up bathing or anything (granted, yesterday was a day I skipped, so the dirt had two days to congregate), I just had a particularly active afternoon running, throwing, chasing, sliding, rasslin’, and getting beaten with fake swords.
All of which I haven’t done in a while.
Of course, that’s what spending time with the hometown crowd will for you. I was at a wedding on Whitney Drive this weekend and had a marvelous time reuniting with all my old friends from childhood. The wedding itself was fun, but the post-wedding picnic the next day was the highlight of the weekend. For a few hours that afternoon we threw kickballs at each other, kicked basketballs, and engaged in random bouts of wanton violence with fake weapons made six years ago for what I can only call our “Worst. Idea. Ever.” all in a spiraling de-evolution to high school in full view of the parents who watched it all happen five, six, ten years ago. They shook their heads at us then, and they shook them at us now.
But it was fun to be a kid again. Fun to play dodgeball. Fun to ambush poor Greg with a big fake battle axe. I’ve gotten too entrenched in the real world, the grown-up world. And I discovered yesterday: Sending a completed manuscript to our production department just doesn’t give me the same feeling of accomplishment as hitting my best friend in the side of the head with a kickball from thirty feet away. And spreadsheets don’t leave you with dirt between your toes.