I feel iffy on dressing up. Really strange thing about me that I try to analyze and typically fail. Sometimes I love attention. I like being noticed. And, on the same hand, sometimes I hate being noticed and I don't know what triggers what and how to reconcile those two. But I do know it's been a, a lifelong feeling that it all started -- or at least was initially recognized when I was in preschool and for show and tell, one of my classmates brought in, uh, his proton pack -- his toy proton pack from the Ghostbusters. And also I think maybe a Ghostbusters, like, you know, uniform which was s- -- I don't know, above and beyond. It was so extra honestly. But I remember watching that show and tell and I'm like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. I want nothing more than to have the opportunity to wear that outfit and wear the proton pack 'cause I've seen the commercial for the proton pack so many times and I always knew my mom and my dad would never buy that for me. And so like I had this dream of using it just once and lo and behold, you know, after show and tell, other kids in the class were supposed to get an opportunity to use the thing you brought in to be shared. And when it was my turn, I remember being struck suddenly with this extreme sense of self-consciousness where it's like all I wanted to do was dip into my fantasy world where I could be Peter Venkman with my proton pack. But all I could think about was that I would have to do that in front of others in the classroom. Who were all playing on their own. They would have never cared or they, they would have looked at me and said, "Well, yeah. Of course he's pretending to be Peter Venkman. It's the whole Ghostbusters get up." But I refused as a kindergartner when it came down -- er preschooler, sorry, when it came down to it. I said, "I -- no thank you. I can't do that. I, I don't want to put on the Ghostbusters stuff," even though it's what I wanted more than anything. And that's kind of like, carried on to the rest of my life. I don't know if it…

I live in a rural area, and we have wetlands and that involves cattails. And I don't know if you know this 'bout cattails, but at the end of the season they basically turn into milkweed, kind of. Like, you know, milkweed pods, they have little seeds and they're on floaties. Or, like, dandelions. Imagine that but like cattails. Like, you're, you're imagining like this hotdog, corn dog shaped thing. If you squish it, it actually loosens up just a ton of these tiny little seeds. Like, imagine like a dandelion but compact. And so you can basically explode them and their floofs go everywhere. And on the way to work, because he [someone the diarist is seeing] also escorts me to work on bicycle, I picked a couple of cattail heads and I left them in the basket of my bicycle during my shift. And so when he came to pick me up after my shift was done, it was past the time that the store closes, so nobody was there. Doors were locked. We exploded a couple of these cattails under the canopy of one of the entrances. And then, one of the other guys I'm seeing, the next day, was like, "Hey, so I had to go grocery shopping this morning and I noticed under the entrance canopy there was a bunch of fluff. Was that you?" because I am very known for being playful, and I was like, "Yeah!" He's like, "What was that?" And I was like, "I exploded some cattails." And the rest of the story is then my next shift after that, I exploded a cattail -- 'cause I picked another one on the way to work again -- under the canopy again, and I was a little bit early for work ‘cause I like to do shopping a little bit like for my lunch and stuff, and anything I need. And I also get ready at work -- at work. So like, I put on my shirt, and I do my hair and everything like at work so that I look presentable, 'cause riding your bike to work destroys your hair and makes you sweaty and everything. And so I'd exploded this cattail and then I came back down after getting ready. I still had some, you know, time to waste, and the person I was seeing was still there after shopping…

Back in the 1960s, my grandmother wanted to do something fun for all of her grandchildren. And so she decided to make pajamas for everybody in the family for Christmas. This was before this was a thing that people did like they do now. And this was my grandmother deciding to buy -- I don't know -- like, a hundred yards of striped flannel. It was the stripes that reminded me of it, and my cousin called since I’d recorded a few minutes ago and that made me think of it. Anyway, my grandmother made red and white striped nightgowns for my mother, my aunt, and my cousins -- the girls, and I. For our fathers -- my uncle, my dad, my grandfather and my two cousins that were boys -- she made black and white striped flannel pajama pants. And coming out of the box, they looked pretty cute…‘til they all had to put them on and modeled them. Well, they looked like they were a bunch of convicts from some prison. It was very, very funny. But they didn't want to hurt her feelings, and so, since we all stayed at my grandmother's big old farmhouse, we all wore our pajamas that night and she was very happy. My cousins got to go home. But my dad -- we had -- mom and I had to stay for another few days and so we had to wear our pajamas for a couple more days. My dad was later bit by the snaps at the waist because my grandmother didn't squeeze them tight enough and the metal part started to come out. And after a couple of days, my dad decided that as soon as we got home those pajama pants were going to be toast. But actually I think he cut them up into car polishing rags, which he probably got a lot more use out of. But it was pretty funny to see our entire family of 14 people wearing either red and white or black and white striped pajamas in the 1960s. Not something that people did back then.

We, we made french toast that morning. It just felt like, it just felt like we're doing, like, these, these adult things. When you're 18 or 19, and for the first time, it's just at the outset of, of college, and you're like, buying food materials on your own, it feels so novel. Went out and bought a brand new thing of cinnamon for our French toast, and -- but, the same hand, you're still kids. Because I remember when we were done with, um, when we were done with breakfast that morning, we were -- again, were just kinda hanging out in my best friend’s kinda, like, basement apartment area that he had as a part of a bigger house that he shared with fellow college baseball players. Goofing around, and somehow, some way this, this girl that I had just met recently that I knew was gonna be so special in my life as long as I don't ruin it… We were goofing around. She was laying on the floor. I remember pouring -- what I was trying to do is pour bottled water into her mouth from like four feet in the air, like it, “This is kind of a cool trick, like look at us go.” It, it's so stupid. I don't know why. I don't know what compelled us to do that other than, like, flirting. It can be very strange for people. I guess, like, we just wanted to goof around with each other. And so I remember, though, I was doing the thing where I was pouring water into her mouth, and I looked to my right, and I saw the cinnamon that we had bought that morning for the French toast, and in my head I remember thinking like, “Cinnamon tastes so good in French toast, and it tastes so good in cinnamon bread. All the cinnamon I've tasted has tasted delicious in my life.” I said, “What if I do this girl a favor, and I, and I swap the water that I'm pouring into her mouth, and I just pour the cinnamon instead. So she gets, like, this tasty treat when she's not expecting it.” It turns out I'm an idiot. This is before the cinnamon challenge. So this was not widespread knowledge -- well, granted, it probably was widespread knowledge, but not for me. So, uh, when I poured…

My aunt, my son's great aunt, passed away, and she wanted all the nephews to be her pallbearers. And my son was 16 at the time, and he was a nephew, so he became a pallbearer. And I explained to him what pallbearers do, and he was like, "I gotta get in the grave?" And I said, "Heck no, you don't get in the grave. You just bring the, the casket to the grave and set it on a, a stand and they take care of it from there." Well, not my aunt. My aunt had the pallbearers put her in the grave. And then the funeral home director said, "Oh my gosh. She requested that her head be facing north and it's not." So they had to pull her out of the grave and flip the casket around and, and put the casket back in. Well, while this is happening, the casket slips and now it's tilted. And my son, bless his heart, he was 16 and a weightlifter and a football player and he was very well stacked. And he jumped in the grave and he held up the casket until they could get the ropes back around it. Climbed out of the grave dusting himself off. And they lowered my aunt into the ground. And I promised him that if he's ever a pallbearer again, that would not happen. My aunt, she was funny.

I was in a cemetery on December 21st, 2023, for the winter solstice. I went to Kaleva, Michigan. They have a big Finnish population in Kaleva, and there is a Finnish tradition that you go to the cemetery on Christmas Eve and light luminaries and put them on the graves of your ancestors. Well, Kaleva decided that people were kinda busy on Christmas Eve usually, so they decided to change the tradition or make their own tradition to be the winter solstice, so the longest night of the year. So they have volunteers that come and light luminaries and place them on the graves all throughout the cemetery there. And it is a very large cemetery, and I think that they said that they light over a thousand luminaries now. And it was beautiful. So, it's obviously dark when you go. They start lighting them I think around four o'clock. And then by the time they're finished, it's dark and then you can either drive through the cemetery or get out and walk and see all of the, um, the graves kind of lit up by these luminaries, and you can look across and see all the dots of where the luminaries are lighting the, lighting the cemetery. So it was a pretty cool thing. I heard about it a long time ago, and I am not often, um, up north then, or in Michigan. I -- when I lived outside of Michigan, and if I, you know, when I came home for the Christmas holidays, I would usually get there, like, the 23rd, sometimes the 24th and very soon before Christmas. I normally didn't have that much time off work to be able to go sooner than, you know, a couple of days before the holiday, but this year I decided to take a little bit of time off before the holiday and was able to go up to Traverse, and then my mom and my sister and I who actually had flown in that day, like she flew -- er no, she had flew in the day before -- late the day before. And we were able to meet a friend of mine who I worked with when I lived in Muskegon. She lives in Manistee, but her husband's family is all from Kaleva, so they actually have ancestors in that graveyard. And we were able to find…