When someone has died and we are told about it, so often our first inclination is to say, "But I only saw him a few days ago!" We say it incredulously, hand against mouth, the mouth open: "The last time I saw him he was fine!" But oh, the terrible insignificance of the occasion. Should we have known? If only we had known! And that time we ran into him downtown a few weeks ago, should we have had lunch with him when he'd asked?
So do people still go to Pizza Hut?
Whenever I have to turn my cell phone on---and this is often, because I'm forever forgetting to charge it and so it dies a slow death, complete with desperate mewing sounds, which I guess are actually warning beeps, and then I realize that no-one's called me for a whole day and start panicking that I have no friends and no-one likes me, before I realize that my phone has just shut itself off because the battery's dead and PLEASE, I need to stop being so neurotic---it has a message for me. (Which is not "stop writing insanely long sentences," surprisingly.)
While I wish I could pretend that I get my caffeine fix at a local coffee house where the owner bakes fresh flaxseed muffins every morning and her domestic life partner plays Joni Mitchell covers during open mic night, I've got to admit that more often than not, I am guilty of feeding the Evil Starbucks Machine. This is primarily because it's right around the corner from both my apartment and my office, but also because the only other place that's directly on my route to work is Whole Foods.
Last night during prime telemarketer time, the phone rang and Sean answered it. I was, as usual, reclining on the sofa---as I am wont to do after returning from a hard day's work throwing fake boobs against my office window---and this is what I heard:
Here in Charleston, we're a little bit behind when it comes to the Swanky Fancy Gym Department. (And yes, that is its official name, though it's possible, of course, that you may also have heard it referred to as the Holy Crap, I'm Not Paying That Much Every Month Just To Have a Personal TV On My Treadmill Department, which is its alternate name in many parts of the country.) I suppose the thinking is that we Charlestonians will get our cardio by chasing each other through the cobblestoned streets or doing some vigorous bell-ringing in one of our eight million churches.
Dear Greg,
The other day my sister told me that she didn't like the picture of me at the top of this site. She said---and I quote---"it looks like your nose is dripping off your face."
So if you'd needed a kidney yesterday, I would totally have given you one. Not because we're super best friends or anything (although we are! right?) but because yesterday I was at the point where I would gladly have CARVED OUT MY RIGHT ONE WITH THE PLASTIC SPOON I ATE MY OATMEAL WITH, just to get it out of my body. It was hurting, you see. Well, something was hurting---I sort of assumed it was one of my kidneys, because there are no other major organs lurking in that area (are there?
There's something about me you should know: I don't trust other people's mashed potatoes. It's possible there's some deep and complex pyschological issue behind this, but I think it's more likely that I just refuse to believe that anyone else could be as dedicated as I am to the task of making sure that ALL the lumps are gone from the finished product. As such, you'll never catch me ordering mashed potatoes in a restaurant or partaking of them voluntarily if they're on the table at a communal gathering.
There are three pieces of advice I've been given in my life that have seemed to stick with me. The first was from my friend Ellen, with whom I lived in The Coldest House In London during university, weathering such everyday hurdles as the male flatmate who left his forest-green underpants to dry in full view on the radiator and disappeared into the (communal) bathroom for hours at a time with the collected works of Ezra Pound. Oh, he was a sweet boy really, a little dorky but ultimately harmless.
