Things are crazy these days. Carazay, or however cutsie internetified way you want to spell that. I have no time for anything. Even my side projects have side projects. The only reason that renovations are progressing for the house is because Esteban has taken over. When we’re relying upon Esteban’s initiative to get things done around the house, well, that’s a scary thing. If we didn’t have a bi-weekly cleaning service keeping us honest, we’d certainly be living amidst corridors of FedEx boxes and empty seltzer bottles, keeping the curtains closed so that visitors would think that no one was home. Thank god my hair has grown long enough to pretty much brush and then ignore because I simply wouldn’t have the time to bother with the little pots and potions I normally do to create the careful illusion of having just had frantic sex five minutes ago.
I’m not entirely certain where the summer has gone. It’s August! T-minus four weeks until Mother Nature flips a switch and we get four feet of snow or something. No, I’m kidding. I can’t exaggerate, because a friend will be visiting our fair city for the school year, teaching her literary world view to young impressionable Republicans. I am very excited because my god, one more sane person in Wisconsin! I don’t get kickbacks from the tourism board, really I don’t, but maybe someday the sane people will outnumber the rednecks. And maybe if I’m lucky, I will live to see that day. Come to Wisconsin, everyone! We have great cheese. And all the lame ass car magnets supporting one cause or another you could ever wish for.
Speaking of ‘the people’ (as we call the cleaning people, because we find it much too pretentious to call them ‘the maids’ or ‘the help’ or ‘the grossly underpaid proletariat’, even though ‘the people’ is probably a first cousin once removed to ‘the girl will pick it up, Beverly, don’t worry yourself and have another mint julep’), Tilly has decided that she likes to hang out in the library/storage room, which is one of two rooms that I’ve asked the cleaners to not clean (the other is Esteban’s office, because he is a foul bear of a man about his desk and things and doesn’t want anyone to touch them). However, sometimes the people close those doors, thereby locking Tilly in for hours and hours. Which they did last night, because someone keeps forgetting to write a note asking them to not shut those doors, mostly because someone has ridiculous bourgeoisie guilt and it’s easier to just act surprised when she comes home after they’ve been there, as though the house had been visited by a throng of fastidious elves that have apparated from whence they came only seconds before the key hit the lock.
So when I got home (and dutifully acted surprised that the kitchen floor was no longer sticky from when I cut a galia melon that I swear to God tried to attack me), I wandered around the house and then realized that the library door was closed, so opened it and there was Tilly, easing herself out from a maze of boxes and bookshelves. She acted all nonchalant, but then when I ignored her, she wandered around meowing, as though she were trying to tell me that The People! They were here! People with spray things! They shut the door! The People! My god! Where’s my food! Woe! Emotional eating of kibble! By the way, I pooped on your wedding dress! The PEOPLE made me!
I have still not seen the people, bad or otherwise. Esteban specifically does not work from home on Tuesdays because he doesn’t want to encounter them and his awkward guilt about having filled the living room wastebasket with four hundred seltzer bottles. I left them some Starbucks cards as a thank you, since I was specifically warned by the service that they were not allowed to accept cash tips (which just seems odd) and now they leave me sweet little notes signed with pairs of exclamation points that are also a pair of eyes with a smile underneath. The house elves jones on frappuchinos.
In other news, I have had a succession of canker sores on the tip of my tongue. I don’t know what I did or ate to deserve it, probably the cavalcade of fruits that I’ve been shoving down my gullet in hopes of losing this weird Michelin Man roll effect that has been annoying the hell out of me for about seven months, undoubtedly the ghost of Christmas Cookies Past. So my staple morning breakfast of fresh pineapple and strawberries has been torture, and really, just sitting here writing with my tongue resting upon my lower permanent retainer is pissing me off. Last night we had pizza for dinner and I managed to finish one piece before sulking off to fellate an Oreo ice cream sandwich. I know that somewhere there’s some remedy for canker sores (other than Anbesol, the very scent of which makes me throw up due to the association with three years, two months and two days of wearing braces in my teens) but when I don’t have one, it is as though the very phenomenon of canker sores does not exist. So now God has cursed me with what must surely be tongue syphilis.
While I’ve been perusing the September issue of Vogue, my tongue has been reading Ibsen.
Most of the time, I pretty much ignore canker sores, even though I’m ridiculously susceptible to them. I always suspect that the grout cleaner they pass off as Crest must make it worse, because I never had this problem while growing up as a hippy child and using the horrible natural toothpastes that taste like you’ve just gargled with baking soda and also hemp.
One summer, I was rebelling against my braces (I was a rather bewildering and clueless teenager), I refused to go to an orthodontist appointment for four months. Mostly, I was at the midpoint of my treatment and had another fifteen appointments of jaw-aching and liquid food. My mother, having the whole ‘hands off, autonomy is good, where’s the margarita mix’ approach to childrearing, did not seem overly concerned. After all, it wasn’t HER mouth. She might well have not even realized that I wasn’t going, come to think of it, since I took my bike to the ortho most of the year.
However, my teeth were dutifully moving forward thanks to the rubber bands and there was slack wire in the back of my mouth, growing by minutia each day. It started feeling like a sharp spot in the back of my mouth, then a sliver, then a tiny razor, then an ice pick that would catch the inner soft tissue of my cheek every time I chewed, talked or smiled. By the second month, I had a canker sore that would not go away, but would I go to the orthodontist to get it clipped? I would not. I started chewing Trident and then molding it around the offending metal burr and perfected a maneuver of puffing out my cheeks to hear the tiny ping as the metal detached from my flesh.
One of my firmest memories from that summer was walking along the lakeshore in Door County outside of the cabin we rented each summer, feeling with my finger to see how long the wire was after a particularly bad snag, realizing that it had to have been at least two millimeters, withdrawing my finger and coming back with blood.
Eventually, I hauled myself back into the orthodontist and succumbed to the oral torture, but given the fact that my treatment lasted 50% longer than it needed to because I had missed 13 months of appointments, I lost my taste for civil disobedience. And still have a scar on the inside of my cheek that, if I suck very hard on, er, a straw, it inverts and a little inside-out nub of cheek mocks me for the whole Bi-cuspid’s Last Stand thing.
But the three sequential tip-of-the-tongue canker sores? No mas, man. This is interfering with my personal life.
Speaking of which, someone (we will not say whom and we will apparently start writing in the collective first person) was lying in bed with their spouse and their spouse is a very funny person who kept making that person laugh. Until finally, the spouse accused “Maybe it’s not a good idea to be laughing when you are holding my penis?” Which just made that someone laugh harder.
For the record, the someone in question is not me. Because I have been specifically banned from talking about things of a sexual nature on this diary (the password protected area being one exception) so of course this is not me. In fact, maybe I made it all up? Yes. That is what I did. It’s fiction. But seriously, how could this fictional someone keep from laughing, penis or not, when the spouse started talking like Euro Trash about how he was going to make the someone “be overcome with that ze glow of ze love orgasm, yes?” I can’t even type that out without smirking, for God’s sake.
The comments section is feeling somewhat emasculated right now.
