...wow...
My little sister, who I would've cheerfully sold as manual labor to uncouth evil Bedouins while we were children, is a very strong woman. She's worked some tough jobs (teacher, real estate) and raised three very fine boys to near-manhood without drowning even one of them despite numerous causes for which not a court in the world would convict her. She's managed to remain open-minded and a thinking woman in a town where (though I do and always will love the place) the atmosphere remains to this day strongly conservative and opposed to original thought in many ways. (Prime example: my oldest nephew had a 'Vote Obama' sticker ripped off his truck; a woman who's been posting Obama signs in her yard has had four of them burned there so far.)
Anyway... we send each other stuff when we're having bad times. Might be a CD, might be something else; I sent her a 7-part care-package a while back with silly stuff like a trashy romance novel, a box of Ghirardelli brownie-mix, an antique horseshoe and a CD I'd burned, all because she'd been having a stretch of bad luck.
So when she told me I'd be getting something in the mail yesterday, I didn't exactly expect... well...
We both like Coldplay a lot; I like the philosophy in the songs for the same reasons I've always loved things by Rush (thinking-music is good) and other bands who aren't just emo-emo or whoo-bed-now. Not that those are all bad, but-- anyway, she's going to see Coldplay in concert in a week or so, and we'd talked through a bad patch on her end last week and... anyway. She found out that they were playing in Phoenix (Glendale, actually) and bought me three tickets.
And I'd been having a sucky day, and that was just freaking AMAZING. ^_________^ I wish I could take everybody with me, but I can't, so (hopefully) me and a couple of local friends (LJ's being weird and not letting me load their lj-names, wtf?) will head out on 11/26 and have a fantastic time.
So, if I can get disgustingly philosophical, as much so that I'll remember this as for any other reason? Moral of the story time again, only MUCH better than yesterday's: People care about you even when you're thinking so hard about how bad it's gotten that you forget this. Even when you forget it doesn't stop them caring, any more than the existence of the desert destroys the rain.
Thanks, little sister. You're a jewel worth more than rubies.