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My recent efforts to be more active have been rewarding, but today I'm suffering from a great deal of mental resistance. I guess I can blame part of it on the fireworks keeping me up last night with constant strobes and bangs outside my window, but I think it's really the accumulation of a lot of activity in a little amount of time. I'm super sleepy right now, but I'm getting my work done and hanging in there, so it's okay...just quite yawny. And all that activity was flipping awesome. Let's recap.

I woke up early on Thursday morning to get downtown to meet istar and Cristal and Garrett at a yoga studio in the Pearl. I'd never been to that studio before and didn't really know what to expect, but ohmygoodness it was amazing. I have never sweat more in my life. I mean, I'm naturally a sweaty girl, but we're talking constant flows of sweat for a full hour. There were puddles around me. I'd feel awkward about it if the class itself weren't so incredibly wonderful. It was just the best yoga I've had in a long time. Perfect combo of hard work and relaxation. I felt great all day after that.

I took a brief nap in the afternoon, then headed out to Happy Valley to hang out with Cristal and her kids some more. They're visiting her dad at his place there, which is so enormous and beautiful it's like satire. Anyway we chatted a little and then played some games with the kids. I really, really love her kids. I haven't spent a lot of time with them, but they're super fun and I love the stories she tells -- I just feel like I know them really well and they're fantastic little folks. Gabe, the six-year-old, decided that he's going to collect bottle caps (all kinds, but most of the collection is soda bottle caps, I think) to "make Paris." I love that he just came up with this and is going to do it. It was so DI to me! So I've been giving Cristal bottle caps to pass along to him every time I see her. If you have bottle caps that you'd like to donate for the construction of New Paris, you can send them to me and I'll get them to him :)

In the evening, we went to Chez Datloff for bridge and dinner. It was a good time, but I was pretty well spent by the end of the day. We left as the fireworks were getting going, and had a nice view of them on the river as we drove home. The neighbors were having a pyro party when we got back, though, so it wasn't super easy to crawl into bed and sleep. I probably got about 5-6 hours last night. Not terrible, but not exactly restorative.

Katy is coming to stay for the weekend. She wants to go shopping on Hawthorne (fine by me!), and I'll also take her to the park to shoot hoops if it's nice out. Nothing else on the agenda. Maybe she'd like to see This Is The End. I'd totally see it again. I bet even Z would hang out with us if we did that...

(no subject)

Whenever I hang out with friends who have kids, I always end up sharing stories about my nieces and how my brother and sister-in-law are raising them. Naturally, these stories focus on highlights, but the response is always the same: "Your brother sounds awesome!" Yeah, he is.

William was born to be a dad. I was his constant companion through his teen and young adult years. He would often pick me up from ballet and take me to Newcomb Hall at UVA, where he was a student, and we'd play pool and eat pizza there. Or we'd hang out at his house downtown and play chess. When he went on trips, he took me with him. He explained things on my level, but always explained them. He wanted me to know about equality, tolerance, history, math, physics, the environment, and all sorts of things most people don't bother talking to little kids about. I'm the bleeding heart peacenik that I am today because of his influence. 14 years older than me, he cut his parenting teeth by spending more time with me than most siblings who live in the same house do. He moved to North Carolina and then New York City when I was in middle school, but he was a constant presence through my most formative years, and I'm so grateful for the relationship we had back then.

And now he's got three next-generation Megs in his household. They're not exactly like me, of course. They're only 50% Massie, though Massie is a pretty dominant characteristic. Emily (Lucy's mom) and Rachel (WT's wife, mom to Frankie and Bess) play their roles in shaping the girls, and they do a phenomenal job, too. My nieces are fabulous people, and I love them to pieces, but I'd think they were some of the raddest kids on earth even if they weren't mini-megs. The little games my brother plays with them, their little routines, are just so unbelievably adorable. He teaches them refrains from popular music, and cues it up for them so that they communicate in the most hilarious ways. If the answer to a question is "no," they answer Amy Winehouse "Rehab" style, singing "No, no, no." If you ask Frankie what's on her mind, she'll tell you "I got my mind on my money and my money on my mind."

He takes the girls to protests and gets them involved in social justice. They held signs at Occupy Wall Street, and have marched in picket lines with teachers for education reform. And they're not just little robots that my brother tells to hold a sign and they do it -- he's teaching them why they're there, and they know more than most Americans do about many current issues. He doesn't tell them "we believe ____." He tells them "___ is going on. Do you think that's fair? What do you think is the problem with that?" He was a national debate champion, after all. He's raising them to use logic and reason.

All three girls look very much like I did as a kid, and I guess the resemblance is still evident in my adult face. But I think they're going to grow up to far surpass me in awesomeness. No matter what they do, though, I'm going to love the tar out of them for ever and ever because nothing in this world is better than being Aunt Meg. And they're the ones who turned me into her.