Jan
01
2008
So I'm not dead. You know, in case you were wondering. I haven't been lying in a ditch on the side of the road (you were so worried! you were worried sick! couldn't I have called?) and I haven't even been, like, eaten by wolves or something cool like that. Or wildebeests, that would be even cooler.
(Wildebeests? Or wildebeest? Which is the plural? Help me out, my ratio of Hours I've Been Asleep to Hours I've Been Awake is hovering around the 1:10 mark.)
Our featherbed was the second thing Sean got to defenestrate this year. Do you know what "defenestrate" means? I didn't until very recently, but you should look it up, it's an excellent word. You won't get to use it too much since it means "throw out the window" but it's pretty awesome all the same.
I haven't quite decided yet whether a blog is supposed to be a collection of moving and sensitive and humorous personal essays, each of them singular and separate from the next, or whether it's more like that one long email you send to a friend you haven't spoken to in ages, chock-full of updates and apologies for not having written back sooner.
My mother is not going to want to hear this, and would probably appreciate that I just didn't tell her about these sorts of things, but last night I intercepted a cracked-out homeless woman trying to get inside the lobby of my apartment building.
(I initially started this as a comment in reply to some of the other comments on the post below, comments which I felt the urge to respond to, even though I never intended this website to become a place of dissent or a place in which I felt I needed to defend myself. But, um, the comment grew. And if you have no opinion on the post below, then absolutely feel free to skip this. I’m sure we’ll get back to talking about nice, fun, uncontroversial things sometime within the week, because that’s the kind of conflict-free, lipgloss-heavy website this was always meant to be.
Sean is in the living room, playing tennis. Where do we live, you ask, the Playboy Mansion? Buckingham Palace? What a thing to be doing in the living room! And in argyle socks, no less.
But no, no nets have been erected between the couch and the TV, no umpire chairs set up. We have hardwood floors, not Astroturf, and really, the blaring neon of those tennis balls would go with nothing else in our color palette. So how has this modern miracle been manufactured, you're thinking, why is he swinging a racket in the spot she normally watches Oprah?
So my cat Charlie is stressed. No really, that's what the vet told us yesterday when we took him to see her---I'll tell you why we took him to see her in a minute---after looking him up and down for a few minutes and stroking his fur. "He's just stressed," she said. "And, you know, he's also kind of overweight." Stressed and overweight, eh? Welcome to America, Charlie. Welcome to life.
Is there anything in the world for which it is worth getting up at half past four in the morning? Well, giving birth maybe. Catching a plane, I guess. But skiing? Is skiing worth getting up at half past four in the morning? Well, if you'd asked me on Thursday afternoon, I would have said no. I was done with skiing, you see. You remember the last time I went skiing, don't you? I had a sort of epiphany on the slopes that time. And the epiphany was this: "damn, I really suck at this. Why am I doing it again?"
1. While out shopping with my sister in Singapore last month, I had to ask her if a certain item of clothing I was debating trying on was supposed to be a top or a dress. I was disproportionately relieved when she revealed it was a top.
