Sometimes you are exactly where you want to be. And other times, not so much. By the way, remember how I mentioned that I have another fiction class? It apparently requires me to write fiction. I know! The audacity. I have a story due tomorrow. I got nothing. Nothing. Well, no, I’ve got a story, locked in my head, and the beginning of something, five pages in long hand scrawled out in my notebook. But other than that’ nothing. And the sad thing is that I could probably pull something out of thin air (aka My Head) if I had some time to do it, but time? I have no time. Fucking time. I have ten minutes to write this entry while I’m actually doing something else at the same time (aka Participating in a Conference Call With Phone On Mute While Not Talking So They Can’t Hear Me Type). (Man, that was a lot of capitalization. Ouch, my editor head is hurty.)
I can’t tell you how much I love that Mopie is here. We watched the season opener for Amazing Race last week. Esteban made spaghetti for us and then we had cookies and wine for dessert, laughing every time the Black family was on screen. It got funnier as the episode progressed and especially after we opened the second bottle of wine. Go Team Black! Except not. Ah well, they gave us much joy for the time we had with them. And also, Mopie and I gang up on Esteban and tell him that he’s wrong about Serenity.
Last Saturday, Mopie and I went to the farmer’s market and then to St. Vinnie’s, followed by several rummage sales, looking for furniture to fill her Manhattan loft. Unfortunately, I ended up finding things that I absolutely loved as well, including an white table with an enameled iron top. I have a somewhat unnatural love for enamelware, especially the kind that is a little banged up, maybe showing the black crescent scars. Tilly eats off of an antique Naval enameled tray and my favorite cup in all of Drinkdom is an enameled white coffee mug with a blue koi fish on it, purchased from Pier One imports in 1986 by my great grandmother because she was worried that I would knock over my water glass in my sleep and then step on broken glass with my bare feet. I will cry if something ever happens to this mug because it is the perfect vessel for ice cold milk. So when I spied this table as we were walking out of a church rummage sale, I scoffed at the $75 price tag. This is the same sale that had the coolest 50’s Swedish Modern end tables for a dollar each, tables that would have gone for at least $100 each anywhere else, so $75 for a table that they were calling ‘antique’ but was really just ‘old’? Not really. And the enamelware table was pretty grungy, had several layers of bad paint job, and someone had glued vinyl flooring inside the drawer. Also, the original hardware had been replaced with a cheap inappropriate drawer pull. I pulled out my wheeling and dealing and offered them $30. They told me that they would consider $50 but only if it hadn’t sold by the end of the day. I walked away. There was no way I would pay $75 for it. I went home, worked on freelance, took a shower, and then decided, yup, I needed that table. So I went back about twenty minutes before the sale was about to finish, just as the lady in charge of the bargaining was writing a bigger sign that said ‘Table for Sale’. I offered her $40 and she took it immediately. I could have said $30 and probably gotten it, but I started feeling guilty for bargaining with a charity. And also, I had misrepresented us to the old guy at St. Vinnie’s, so I felt as though I needed to repair some karmic balance. Apparently, ten dollars buys a lot of karma.
But oh, that table looks so good in the kitchen, even with the ghetto drawer action. It fits just so, right below the double windows. It clearly had been trying to find its way home all this time. And now it is. Now I just have to sand and repaint it with five coats of glossy white and then find a different drawer pull for it and all will be well. Which will probably never happen of course (ref: first paragraph). I think I see the problem.
At a social committee meeting:
Coworker: What are we going to do for the Christmas event.
Weetabix: I was thinking that we should plan to have a dinner out somewhere. Get away from work.
Coworker: Something like a sports bar?
Weetabix: Well, something less casual. You know, because it’s Christmas, it needs to be really special.
Coworker: So maybe The Olive Garden?
Weetabix: (dying a small silent corporate death)
Mopie’s plays a game whenever we are driving while listening to my iPod and it is ‘Find Weetabix’s Secret Shame’. She’s really good at this game. She found Barry Manilow, the cluster of Donnie and Marie and the Broadway tunes that escaped my last attempt at making the iPod respectable. She has made me blush with embarrassment at least four times. I think that’s how she knows that she’s winning. However, if loving ‘Part of Your World’ from The Little Mermaid is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I just remembered that there’s some Dan Fogelberg that needs to be relabeled Paul Oakenfold.
