technicolor camouflage
I have declared it a Day of Nothingness. Not as bleak as it sounds. I am recovering from the normal holiday crazy that everyone experiences, plus we spent a week out of town even before the holidays started (more on this later), so today? NOTHINGNESS. I am not leaving the house and I am not leaving my sleepy pants. I am going to putter like never before. The only chores are brainless things like laundry and orchid maintenance and slathering various gifted skin goops on my body. Everyone else is still sleeping, I have had two pots of tea, three candles are burning, two cats are sleeping on the couch (Lola, the third, is probably upstairs sleeping with Aaron, the only one of us she truly loves). COZY AS FUCK, this Day of Nothingness. Hygge Void. (Also my new band name.)
However, I did spend the first 30 minutes of my DoN convinced the cleaners had stolen my vitamins. I take a somewhat stupid amount of vitamins and supplements, including things in which I do not wholly believe, like fancy probiotics and weird exotic mushrooms. Maybe it’s dumb but I am sure you spend your money on some dumb shit too, so leave me alone. The cleaners did their cleaning thing yesterday and sometimes they move stuff that is in the way of their cleaning, which I fully understand and which does not annoy me in the slightest, but I usually find the stuff quickly. Just when I was convinced someone had pocketed a pill organizer full of a week’s worth of overpriced capsules and realizing that I could never in a million years get into a confrontation about something so stupid, I found the pill organizer in the dishtowel drawer. The cleaners didn’t just want my snake oil out of their way, they wanted it out of their SIGHT. That’s cool, I guess.
The week out of town was spent in Cleveland, where we went for a surgical procedure for my son—outpatient thing and then a week or so of chilling out before driving back home. I am not going to share a lot of details but if you think about it for two seconds you will probably figure it out. It felt weird to be going to a much smaller* city than the one I live in for medical care but the Cleveland surgeon is like the king of the particular flavor of this procedure. He will tell you as much too; one of his first comments at the follow-up was “wow, I did a great job, that looks amazing.” Surgeons.
*MUCH smaller! In my head Cleveland is just a quaint small Chicago, but there are drastically fewer people. They try to get away with inflating the number by including the “surrounding areas” (like Cleveland Heights, where we stayed) but that would be like Chicago including Berwyn or Niles. I have nothing against Cleveland Heights (or Berwyn, or Niles) but separate mayors = separate count, come on.
I did love the Cleveland rental house quite a bit; it was eerily like my own house but luckily never turned into a Jordan Peele horror-movie situation. It had charm and wood floors and an electric fireplace and a kitchen that I cooked three whole dinners in, which is a pretty high ratio for six nights away from home. Aaron was easy to take care of; more annoyed by drains and dressings (and not being able to do push-ups or shower) than experiencing any actual pain. He did take one of the TWENTY-FOUR oxycodone pills (holy opioid crisis, Batman) prescribed to him and that is where I learned that my child is not sedated by these things but instead becomes extremely chatty. We stayed up too late watching popular music videos. I have seen so much Dua Lipa in a bra.
Speaking of drugs, Cleveland has a bunch of these fentanyl pretzel billboards and I do not really understand this ad campaign. If I were an addict, wouldn’t fentanyl pretzels sound amazing? Are pretzels a harm-reduction alternative to cocaine? On the other hand, I can sort of see the message for the casual cocaine user; someone who is occasionally around the stuff and would never expect it to kill them. The next time someone offers me a fat rail I will inquire about a pretzel alternative.
So glad to be home. My mother took care of the cats. Despite my warnings that she would probably never see Murphy (he hides from everyone except the three of us), she got weirdly upset mid-trip and texted me about how she COULD NOT find him and had been searching the house for an hour. I was like MOM. You can’t find a cat by searching! Cats are so much better than that, and Murph is exceptionally talented at being an elusive secret agent. Not five minutes after we finished hauling stuff in from the car Murphy was out and about, asking for pets and telling his Readers’ Digest True Survival Story: “They Searched For Me!”
I almost forgot the most important task on the puttering-around DoN to-do list: getting rid of Christmas. Begone, Christmas! Tomorrow we are on to the next holiday and it will be happy birthday to me. Brunch! Presents! Wine! The horror of existence!
—mimi smartypants: running towards nothing (again and again and again and again)