through the alley dodge the cans
Hello hello hello do you not just LOVE it when every day is exactly the same? It’s the best! Sometimes I give myself really bad coffee jitters on purpose, just to feel something. Sometimes I experiment with my level of COVID-19 bravery, like maybe I’ll put “schedule haircut appointment????” on my to-do list and then I get to that part of the list and go oh hell no. Similarly with the few friends who invite me to go out to heated patios at bars and such—I’m sure everyone is very careful and it does sound briefly tempting—but then I think about logistics, like train? Bus? Uber??? And masks? And bathrooms? And how crowded is it? And the poor waiter, and how I would feel terrible and have to stop at an ATM in order to tip $100 on a $20 tab as a gesture toward “I’m so sorry, what the fuck are we doing here, putting your health at risk for our Millers High Life and hot wings”? So that’s another oh hell no, and we go back to our regularly scheduled Nothing Much, but at least we had the brief excitement of a moral/infectious/risk calculation dilemma.
I suppose Christmas will be somewhat different than the other days. My 5-member, inside-the-bubble, isolated, certified virus-free family is coming over briefly, with an all-appetizer spread instead of dinner to minimize our sitting-across-from-each-other time, and we’ll wear masks and hold up our gifts from a distance to admire. Even though it will be a shorter day with less prep, it somehow feels more stressful? I am in Christmas Avoidance Mode and grateful for my mother’s tendency to bring too much food, because the less I have to do the better. God we are all going to be so awkward once socializing is a thing again; I will probably drink too much every time I see anyone. It will be like when (eons ago) I stopped social-smoking, and a drink and a cigarette turned into a drink and a drink. Please be gentle with my dumb ass once we are all vaccinated, okay?
My spouse will also get to debut his beard at Christmas. He had one during the Yemen Year (because you kind of have to, to fit in) but that beard was absolutely disastrous, patchy and odd-colored and almost…pubic? It did not survive much longer than our reunion at the airport. But this one, although it has come in white (help! we’re old people!), looks good to me and I am into it. Is my taste in men changing even though I am still with the same man? I should be grateful that the taste changes and the actual man changes are lining up nicely.
My mother always asks me if we’re “keeping busy.” I don’t know? We have jobs, and school (but not at the moment, yay winter break!) The phrase “keeping busy” makes me feel like I am in a secure facility, having been deemed a danger to myself or others, or like a Victorian lady who had the gall to talk back to her husband once or twice and has subsequently been packed off to the seaside until her reputation has recovered.
ARE YOU KEEPING BUSY?
Aaron and I did this puzzle. It was a good puzzle.
The kid also spends long hours playing guitar and I am once again struck by people’s personality differences; I used to play violin and I “practiced” and took lessons but I got better (never truly great) by default. My favorite thing was to sound good, so my favorite pieces were ones I knew and already played well—slightly show-offy, sounds-harder-than-it-really-is types of things (there are a lot of these for violin!) Whereas my son will puzzle out the most difficult songs, with a combination of tabs and “shapes” (the what? says the sheltered ex-violinist) and even just watching other people’s hands on YouTube. He truly has a process rather than just wanting a praiseworthy finished product. I admire this.
Reading! I’m on book 146 of 2020. If anyone cares I can share the Google sheet where I kept track but is there a way to do it anonymously? I guess I could create a random Gmail account and post the link that way. A recent one I enjoyed is a book called Sounds Like Titanic, you can read a somewhat-too-thorough synopsis here but it may be more fun to go in relatively blind. If you’re allergic to the second person it may not be for you—it is not constant, not like Bright Lights Big City,* but it has a presence. Also my copy had one infuriating error where our favorite uptight NYC roommate from Sesame Street was referred to as “Burt.” But other than that it was really nice to read a memoir about something specific that happened at an appropriately distant point. I am not going to name names here because that’s rude, but I will always remember reading a disjointed memoir on a Big Topic and then finding out that the author was 26 at the time of writing. No disrespect but maybe let that marinate a little longer? Why this memoir rush? I blame graduate school.
*I remember reading that the summer before high school and finding it impossibly chic. All I wanted back then was to work in publishing and have access to lots of cocaine. (Mission partially accomplished!)
For LT: brewing alcoholic ginger ale in the basement. It’s a nice break from his homebrewed beer, but maybe veers uncomfortably close to a prison concoction? Very dry though, not sweet at all, with a nice little champagne-ish burn at the end. Would be good with cranberry juice.
Watching the juvenile hawk who keeps visiting the backyard (pictures already spammed all over Twitter, but here’s another).
The hawk is very exciting but now all the little brown birds are too scared to visit my feeders, so the surplus seed sadly sits. Say that three times fast.
Doing Heather Robertson workout videos. Look for the “low impact” ones if you are like me and would happily do one thousand squats rather than jump even one time. Jumping sucks balls and I hate it.
More Aaron: gathering college acceptances in his metaphorical Basket of Achievement. About half of what he sent out has come back, all yes.
WE CONCLUDE WITH TINY MYSTERIES
For some reason today I thought about this neighbor kid I used to babysit when he was about 3 years old. The kid had a stuffed animal that he carried everywhere and he always held it upside down. Like if you handed it to him head-up he would automatically turn it head-down for holding. He ate string cheese wrong too, taking bites out of the sides like corn on the cob and refusing to “string” it no matter how many times I demonstrated. Huge chaotic energy, I wonder what he’s doing now.
There was a pistachio shell in the dryer’s lint trap. How?
—mimi smartypants, a visible accumulation of textile fibers.