I’m supposed to be working on a short story but realized that already it is December 2 and already I am behind on Holidailies. There is shame. Shame and also a very delicious bit of cake on the desk beside me as I work. The cake wins. This should be no surprise. Cake always wins over shame. Wow, who needs psychoanalysis, I pretty much just summed up my world in five tiny words.
Yesterday, I woke up super early and felt extraordinarily well-rested, as has been happening more frequently now that I have a sleep snorkel and was full of boundless energy to jump out of bed, which aggrieves Esteban to no end as he would rather spend roughly five hours lounging in bed, procrastinating the need to put on socks. And while I do give in to his need for pillow time on occasion, I was way too hyper and bouncy to do anything of the kind. Esteban was doing his homebrew stuff with Scotty Boom Boom anyway (if you’re coming to Meatacon, you get try some of their creation on the sleigh ride) and I had, like, a major To Do list. I really have to do something about my To Do lists, because in my head, I planned to finish my short story that’s due on Tuesday, start on my Holiday cards, do at least half of my freelance projects, finish the laundry, go grocery shopping, make soup, buy furniture for the new den (still empty, thank you very much, but the floorboards are up, at least), clean my bedroom, clean the breezeway, buy some cedar boughs for the front porch and breezeway door, dig the wreaths out of the basement and also figure out what to wear for an event honoring my friend Mary Kaye, who in 1997 started the very first GLBT Awareness group at Pope Hilarius (yes, the uber conservative college where Mopie worked when she lived here). Oh, and it was supposed to snow. A lot.
This really didn’t concern me too much, other than the fact that it was a serious mistake to try to go to both the warehouse place (for CDs for the Holiday Card exchange) on a Saturday morning and then the grocery store on a day when the weather forecast was making television meteorologists surreptitiously rub their crotches up against the teleprompter because their erection was driving them to distraction. It took almost an hour at the warehouse place, mostly spent trying to get out of the building after paying for my shit (seriously, why the old lady with the highlighter checking everyone out? They never actually look at the stuff and it just makes a huge logjam of people trying to flee what is usually a horrendous shopping experience in a really dismal place and makes you question the value of buying 178 frozen chicken shumai dumplings for $8 and whether your life has room for that many dumplings in it.
I don’t know why I go to Sam’s, quite honestly, since I hate it so much that I put off going until it’s absolutely necessary and they never have what I want (why don’t they sell Chinese food take out boxes, for instance? Isn’t the entire premise of the warehouse club? That it’s there for small business owners, and not people who feel more satisfied if they have a 12-pack of space toothbrushes stowed in their bathroom cupboard?) and yet the minute I let my membership expire (why do I pay them to let me buy things from them? So many questions!) then I need padded CD mailers and Office Max sells them for three times the cost plus they never have as many as I need, plus they just started carrying 2004 Coppola Claret for $14 a bottle, which is pretty much my favorite winter wine ever, so I guess I’m fucked either way. Sam’s Club, you suck, even though your frosted blue eyeshadow wearing cashier carded me for the wine and said that I didn’t look a day over 26. Bah. Let’s move on.
Then I went to the grocery store, which was packed to the freaking gills, but then it started snowing while I was in the store and I actually witnessed the elevation in hysteria from the shoppers.
I made it out alive, hating people, by noon. Which meant that the furniture buying, soup making, (fucking) laundry doing and other grandiose ideas were pretty much screwed, since I had to meet Mary Kaye at 4 pm. By the time I made it back home, it was already getting sloppy and hard to see, and while I unloaded the Murano’s boot (which is the Not Trunk area that Esteban accuses me of trying to Anglo-ify but I ask you, what else do you call it? “Cargo area” sounds way too self-important and also, I don’t have cargo, I have groceries and usually my school satchel (Anglo-ified!) and all of my reusable grocery sacks. It’s not like I’m touting industrial components around back there. Therefore, “the boot” actually makes more sense inside my head, and also, it sounds much better. Ok, more British. Shut up) the snow had already started to accumulate on the driveway. I spent an hour putting shit away and picking up the million little pieces of garbage that Esteban leaves all over the kitchen (You see, when you open the film wrapper off of a tub of (Mo, shield your eyes) cottage cheese (Ok, Mo, done) then it’s very difficult to walk an extra 12 to 18 inches to deposit said wrapper into the garbage (rubbish bin), therefore the stove becomes the staging area for said garbage until such a time that someone comes home and has nowhere to put a bag of groceries because everything’s covered in used paper towels and vaguely scummy ephemera. AGH!
I only had a few hours before I had to leave so I kicked it into high gear with my short story. By which I mean that I wrote three more paragraphs and played Desktop Defense whenever I got stuck. Creative process, people!
If I had only had some kind of Greek chorus to warn me of the impending cluster fuck when I left for Mary Kaye’s shindig, I would have just saved myself the pain and frustration and stayed home, but sadly, no Greek chorus, no saving of frustration. But that will have to wait until later, as I must get back to the school work.
