The hubby's flight plan was supposed to be Atlanta to Dallas to Long Beach. Apparently, Dallas is on tornado watch right now, so they're shuffling a bunch of flights around. He was supposed to be arriving at 9:49 pm in Long Beach. Now, he's coming in at 12:35 am in LAX. He's going to take a shuttle home instead of having me pick him up. I have to leave the house before 9 tomorrow, so getting back from LAX a little before 2—especially on the three hours of sleep I got last night—wouldn't be the best idea.

Damn!

And, on a different note: today, I remembered something I read when I was nine. I have no idea why it popped into my head; it was in a newsletter for a program I went to once a week. Someone had decided to interview little girls in gifted and talented programs about whether they'd rather have someone tell them they were pretty or that they were smart. The idea was that the answer would indicate which quality the girls valued more. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of them said they would rather be called pretty. But the people conducting the survey didn't always ask the girls why they gave the answers they did. One of them provided a reason anyway.

"I want to be told I'm pretty," she said. "I already know I'm smart."

Twenty years later, I still don't know quite what to make of that explanation. I find it funny, to be sure, but there's more to it than that. I wonder how the responses as a whole might have differed if the girls had been asked about qualities they thought they possessed rather than qualities other people thought they possessed. I wonder how we come to believe things about ourselves, to just know them in a way that makes a compliment pleasant but superfluous, not an act of validation. (And what's the difference between "just knowing" and being arrogant?)

I wonder what that little girl—we were about the same age—is doing now. I bet I'd like her. Anyone who can summon that kind of snarkiness (and I do think she was being snarky, though in a childlike way) at age nine is all right by me.