Rainy rain...

I wrote my first song when I was three or four, and that was the title. And, for that matter, the lyrics. I've been thinking about it a lot this past week or so, when I haven't been plotting routes to my classes that involve as many underpasses and large trees as possible.
Rain--especially this kind of wintery, cold, gray, improperly drained rain--is no fun. The streets and sidewalks turn into miniature rivers, and a harmless-looking patch of water on the ground could be a bottomless puddle that soaks the bottom half of a perfectly good pair of pants right when you have thirty seconds to get to class. I'm thinking of breaking out the six-inch vinyl platform shoes just so I can emerge from this week with dry pants.
On a different subject: I realized, this past weekend, why people have children. I went to a memorial service for my stepmom's mother, and it was her (the mother's) four children who organized everything and gave speeches. I also got the impression that if it weren't for his children, my stepmom's father, who was married to his wife for fifty or so years, would have completely fallen apart. So do people have children because they want to bring life into the world and continue their family line and blah blah blah, or because, at the bottom of it all, they don't want to die alone and forgotten in a nursing home? Right now, they don't seem worth it to me--they kill your social life, they make you fat, they drive you insane--but when I'm an old woman whose friends are all senile or dead, I have the feeling I'll think about it just a little differently.