Hillary, Todd, and some little girls

I PASSED I PASSED I PASSED! Last Friday I took the most difficult-to-study-for test ever. I felt so sick and scared as I was studying, I cried for a day, I had trouble sleeping a couple nights before, but when I took the test I felt really good and today I found out I passed!!!!
Probably due to the twenty-something prayers I said while studying.

i just adore my husband. he is so funny. he is so cute. he is hilarious in the kind of way that is our sense of humor and the more i laugh the more he laughs and then the more we cry-laugh. he is up-beat. he is thoughtful and gentle and always so excited to see me. he smiles so humongously it is contagious even if i'm in a sorry-for-myself mood. he sings me to sleep when i need him to. he does anything i want/wish/ask...which is perhaps him being the best ever, but i think partially because we love most of the same things. like one night i called him and told him i wanted to go see this band some night and he should get work off and he does and we go and date and it's delightful. he kisses the best kisses. when i'm going about my business in my bedroom he will lift me up and throw me onto the bed (i have come to know that relaxing my body before i hit the bed makes the whiplash hurt less). most of our dates are on a whim and sudden. i love being in the same room as him. he will stay up with me all night to help me finish a paper or prepare for a presentation. he will do anything to help me calm down. when we were first married (and i was a crazy person on crazy pills) and we would fight (because i was a crazy person on crazy pills) i would try to leave the house, but he would hold me and make me talk about my issues and feelings (crazy person/pills), which means that he taught me how to discuss my life rather than holding it in and feeling bad for myself. this is why we're best friends. i tell him everything i think about everything. he's so supportive of my life and my goals and my passions and dreams. i think that they're more like our goals and passions now. every paper he's written since we've been married have been about art history...so we've amalgamated. this is too long now, but he is just the best so i wanted to talk about it.

Retail retail retail. What to do with you. J'adore faire du shopping, but working retail is (as James Swensen would say) another animal completely. These are some things I will not miss about working at Victoria's Secret (only one S. She only has one secret. I hate it when people call it Victoria's Secrets.)

I've been listening to Ziggy Stardust (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) for the past few days.

So I went to the gym. I did weights for half an hour, ran for an hour and fifteen minutes, stretched and rode my bike home. I felt strong and good like I do after I exercise. As I was riding to the stop light on Riverside and State I wanted to get up onto the sidewalk so I could push the button for the crosswalk. I saw the dip of a driveway in the curb and though I noticed it was an inch or two higher than any smooth dip transition I knew it would be fine because on my bike I am always going up and off curbs. I don't know whether it was because I was on Todd's bike and I'm not used to it, if his tires were too full to have any give, or if I just went too parallel to the sidewalk but the bike, in slow motion, toppled over sideways. I heard myself say quietly, "sh*t! ow!" I felt and saw and heard everything in slow motion. I knew I was going to fall. I felt myself falling. I felt my body scrape and slide against the gritty pavement. I sat there in shock for a moment. I felt myself get short of breath. I looked at my hands, bloody and full of tiny pieces of gravel. I knew every car that went by looked at me sitting partially on the sideways bike and the ground. I don't know if it was the surprise and I just felt like an idiot, or if it was because I was genuinely hurt, but I cried nearly all the way home. I really wish Todd was home to take the rocks out of and clean my hands and to feel bad for me. I can't really bare to wash them very well because they're uncomfortable.
This is the second thing that makes me feel just like a helpless, crying child who really wants a mother (or a Todd).
The first one is throwing up from the stomach flu.