To Semi-Accurately Quote My Father: "Why should 'nuisance of cats' be plural? It only takes one."

Last night was my first night house-sitting in the Land of Wind and Snow. After lugging all my stuff inside, through the aforementioned wind and snow, I went to get the mail. Discovered the snow plow had come by. Evidence: mailbox looked like it had been hit by a mean right hook. It was off-kilter, dented, slack-jawed and appeared to be wincing. It reminded me of the flower in Catullus 11. But mostly it was funny.

I passed a reasonably pleasant evening locating things in the kitchen, unpacking my stuff, and making the acquaintance of all three cats--one brain-damaged, one feral and one which seems fairly normal but may be possessed of some hidden madness. I also re-learned how to use the kind of television that doesn't have a remote control. It's been a decade since I heard the term "UHF." Amazingly, I did not miss it.

Upon retiring to bed, I quickly discovered that the cats, all of them, expect to sleep in the master bedroom. With me. Sitting on me, creeping over me, meowing at me, doing everything but actually sleeping. As a result I have been wide awake since 5am. This in combination with the opera that is playing right now at work, and by playing I mean terrorizing my ears, may prove to be terminal, which is why I am blogging at work. I will die before they have a chance to fire me. And my cause of death will be "surfeit of cats."

Yes, I did just photograph my chest and post it on the Internet.

This post is going to be about things I forgot to mention at the time. For instance, for my birthday, I got a truly amazing sweatshirt from Ivan, specially embroidered with that timeless exclamation, "Nargh!"

Viking loungewear


While I thrust my narghy chest in everyone's face for a month afterward, saying "DON'T YOU WISH THIS WAS YOURS? WELL YOU CAN'T GET ONE! IT'S ONE OF A KIND!", I never posted about it. It came with Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and smelled like chocolate for weeks. It baffles my coworkers. I guess they don't realize that Vikings are intrinsically funny. Some people are weird. Anyway, I've been thinking of other things that would be great on a sweatshirt and although many of them are Latin obscenities I think also a large HWAET! would be enjoyable as well. But only for me and the two other people who have read Beowulf.

For Christmas, I got something I should have taken a picture of and posted immediately. My grandmother, the one who met President Bush and said later she almost bit him, saw this in a catalogue and apparently thought of me.

Patchogue


As far as I know, Simon and Ivan are strangers to her, and so it is rather a startling coincidence, really. It is named Patchogue, after a town on Long Island near where my grandparents live. You can't tell from the rather yellow quality of this picture, but Patchogue is olive green, patterned, and in every way splendid. You should have seen him with his wig. Also splendid.

Also concerning my grandmother: she learned that I needed a hat and after Christmas, I got one in the mail. It was grape purple, thick, and . . . splendid. About a week later, I got another, modeled here by Patchogue.

Hat


The note said "For your more fantastical occasions." Indeed! My grandmother descends from ministers and educators practically as far back as Plymouth Rock. When I was little there seemed to me no explanation for the strange ways of my family other than that all these forefathers were Puritans, whose hellfire-and-brimstone work ethic had been passed down to us later generations mainly in the form of an unbelievable consistency in preparing meals with all the food groups, going to bed before ten, and using the television solely to watch the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour. But I guess the truth is that my grandmother is a sort of New Puritan, the kind that buys a sinfully gaudy hedgehog doorstop, knits a jester hat really just for the hell of it, and would happily bite the leader of the free world as revenge for him being a total idiot. And even if New Puritanism involves eating a lot more vegetables than a rational person would ever want, I think I could really get behind that lifestyle. Unless it forbade me to take pictures of my chest and post them on the Internet. That right I will never surrender.

In other news, and I don't have a picture for this, I am no longer Simon, Girl Reporter. I gave up my job at the local paper because I was very bad at it. Also I hated it. Also I had one of those moments of clarity when you realize you are wasting valuable time doing something that brings you no joy (except for the rare occasion when somebody says something SO outrageous it's funny, like "Why can't we close the parks on Sunday mornings so kids don't have to choose between sports and church?" Answer: "Because of the Constitution.") and you might as well use that time doing something that brings you monstrous levels of frustration, irritation, and anger, such as writing. If I did have a picture of this moment of clarity, it would be of me at my computer surrounded by Greek muses cooperatively engaged in throwing thousands and thousands of hardcover copies of the Riverside Shakespeare at my head. Parts of me would be bleeding, but the general feel of the composition, I believe, would be happiness. Because while procrastinating I would be posting pictures of my chest on the Internet and blogging about it.

that darn cat

Maude moved in last week. She's a rather intimidating spider, but she curled up in the corner such a sweet, non-threatening, "i'm going to die in four or five minutes so don't worry about me" way, that I let her stay. We fell into a routine, a rather elaborate ritual where I would blow on her to see of she was alive and then yell "What are you doing wasting your life in a corner! What did he do to you! No one puts Maude in the corner! Pull yourself together, Maude!" and she would extend one leg, as if trying to pull herself from the depths of despair, and then crumple into a shape that only a severely depressed spider can achieve.

That was life with Maude- until I let the Cloudy in. The cat has taken to mewing for thirty or forty minutes outside my room in a manner I can only equate with Chinese water torture and I was so close to digging my eyes out with a fork I opened the door. Cat made a beeline for Maude and knocked her cruelly, brutally, from her corner. She curled up and took the beating until I pulled the cat off and threw it back into the living room. "Maude!" I cried. But she was motionless. Goodbye Maude. It crossed my mind she might be faking, that she might just be wounded, playing dead to fool the cat and that she might be angry I didn't intervene earlier.

Naaahhhhh. Maude's dead. I went back to watching TV but for some reason i felt the need to look at the wall RIGHT next to my head, AND THERE WAS MAUDE.

AND SHE LOOKED ANGRY. Now she's stalking me. I swear to god wherever I move in the room she follows. She's no longer depressed, she has a PURPOSE in life. So in light of Maude the killer spider, I'm letting Cloudy hang out. He seems pretty hell bent on eating her and I have to say, I whole-heartedly support his efforts.

The Missing

The pasta strainer went missing just after the new year. I was annoyed for six or seven days but I got over it and started using a slotted spoon. And then the pasta strainer magically reappeared and I find myself wondering what exactly one of the roommates was doing with a pasta strainer, in their room, for sixteen days. For all I know they've been using it to strain stray hairs out of their bathtub or as a planter for whatever strange fungi grows on their side of the apartment. A pasta strainer should never leave the kitchen. It serves no purpose other than to drain water off your soggy noodles... Either way, not knowing where it's been makes me never ever want to use it again. I've been thinking about building a cage since it's now unfit to drain food. I will rig the pasta strainer so every time that stupid cat comes near my room it will drop Mouse Trap style and teach the damn thing a lesson. Yes. That is what I must do.

zephyr

it's windy here in january. no one really cares about a breeze when it's 75 and sunny, but since it's the only climate related abnormality we have, it's officially a conversation piece. so it was inevitable on the walk to seven-eleven that someone would say "it's windy out here," and it just made my day when dylan pointed to the man with the leaf blower and said "yeah, those things sure are powerful."

Christening

This is my car. It suffered four months without a name. But it suffers no longer. Now I suffer, having discovered the mischevious spirit that lurks within its innocent, shiny white exterior. This car longs for one thing and one thing only. Mud. Not the fine coating of grit that every car develops in the winter, as if it hasn't shaved for three days. This car wants to wallow. It wants to sit in a mudhole and flap. It wants to dig with its snout in the saturated earth, and it wants to roll over, and it wants to wiggle its wheels in the air as it coats itself in mud. And it takes every opportunity it sees to do this. I could have named it Questionable Turning Radius, or Needs Better Treads on Wheels, or Thank Goodness Its Small Enough to Push Out of Holes, but those are obviously too cumbersome to shout when its back tires start gleefully spinning mud up, over, and onto the windshield. And they do not do enough to implicitly absolve me of any part I may have had in the escapades to which I refer. So I name it, with affection, Pig, and please forgive me if instead of breaking champagne I pour a bottle of Mr Clean over its hood.

Snapshots

I was pretty happy to put 3,000 miles between me and my family (glad none of you are talking, good way to keep the verbal abuse down) and I have to say, I was in a decent mood when I got to my apartment Sunday afternoon. It was a nice day of unpacking, watching tv, flipping through the mail... flipping through the mail! wait! a letter from the Traffic Violations Bureau. what?! I have no violations! I am an excellent driver! (no comments, please). I opened the letter and found pictures of me in the process of what the state of California calls a "Fail to Stop Red Signal" and what I call "Making it Through the Intersection in a Timely Fashion". For my convenience they provided two candids of my crime, enlarging the second to reveal the driver of my vehicle. In this case it was in fact me screaming "FUCK" and making faces at the person in front of me because they STOPPED in the middle of the intersection and that is why I didn't make it through. The ticket was issued by Deputy Zenon Porche. Zenon Porche, closely related to Ford Prefect, reviewed my photo and decided the best way to deal with me, the menace to society that i am, was with a $350 fine. $350 for a traffic violation he did not witness! Zenon Porche, had you actually been sitting on the corner of La Brea and Santa Monica instead of at your desk, eating doughnuts and looking at pictures of people who committed NO REAL CRIME, I would have some respect for you. Alas, I think you're a raging ARSE. I googled you and found you'd given over 5,000 tickets in the West Hollywood area. JERK. So, let this be a warning to all those visiting southern california: Big Brother is Watching and he thinks you're a terrible driver.

Warm Wishes for a Very Merry Armageddon!

This came in the mail at work. Surely I will not be dooced for scanning it (at work) and then posting it on my blog, because I have cleverly removed the name of the company that sent it to us. I don’t think we work with them anyway, which is much to my relief because all I could think of when I saw this was Harold Pinter and his “comedies of menace.”

Harold Pinter, whom I had never heard of until my class on British playwrights, is, surprisingly enough, a British playwright. He writes what critics have called “comedies of menace” which are, surprisingly enough, plays that are both comedic and menacing. When the Nobel Committee chose to award Pinter the Literature Prize in October, they specified that he “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms” and that is precisely what he does, usually much to the theater-goer's discomfort.

If this postcard isn’t the very picture of oppression’s closed room, I don’t know what is. It could easily be an illustration from one of Pinter’s later, little-known forays into children’s literature. It is never too early for the little bastards to learn that a socio-political Armageddon is on its way, and that they had better prepare themselves for the ugly truth that Jolly Old Saint Nick is a fascist who claims to know everything about everyone and dispenses justice quite freely without so much as a glance of recognition at the Hague--and all this while posing as a kindly father figure whose great beneficence it would be unthinkable to dispute.

Meanwhile, little Rudolph, easily recruited on account of his unpopularity with the other reindeer, finds himself under the thumb of a ruthless tyrant. Below, the text of Pinter’s timeless children’s classic, “Christmas Eve.”

Santa: Ho, ho, ho.

Pause.

Santa: Ho, Rudolph, pleasant evening, wouldn’t you say?
Rudolph: Yes, sir.
Santa: Nice and cold.

Pause.

Santa: Wouldn’t you say?
Rudolph: Yes, sir.
Santa: Then say it!
Rudolph: Very cold, sir. Very nice.
Santa: Yes, I think so, too.

Pause.

Santa: What does my watch say, Rudolph?
Rudolph: It is approximately half past five, sir.
Santa: Is it? Oh yes. I must have looked at it upside-down. I thought it was nearly midnight.

Pause.

Santa: If it were nearly midnight, you’d be in bad shape with those Christmas cards, wouldn’t you? You’d be five minutes from the deadline.
Rudolph: Yes, sir.
Santa: You know why the call it the deadline, don’t you?
Rudolph: Yes, sir.
Santa: You say you do?
Rudolph: I do, sir.
Santa: Brave of you to keep up the leisurely place, then, isn't it?

Pause.

Rudolph: Yes, sir.
Santa: Very brave indeed. Well, good luck, Rudolph.

Pause.

Rudolph: Thank you, sir.
Santa: And Merry Christmas.

Slight pause.

Santa: Ho ho ho.

THE END.

The moral of this post is: Do not send Christmas cards to your friends that make them want to phone Amnesty International and turn in Santa Clause.

Abbie, Doctor of Philosophy

My mother has been teaching the dog to count.

She says, "I teach, it's what I do. I don't care whether it's a dog or not, I'm going to teach it."

Apparently, for the last nine years, my mother has been counting Abbie's muddy paws as she dries them. When I asked whether she did it the same way every time, whether Abbie knew her hind left foot was #3, she said no, and seemed to think that was odd.

Abbie stood there and panted. Outwardly she was saying, "Duhhhhhhh, I'm hungry." But inside that furry little head she was thinking, "I have already extrapolated the existence of the quadratic formula. Now feed me, because I am a genius."

The only thing holding her back now is not having opposable thumbs, but I'm sure she'll take care of that as soon as she maps the canine genome, which is probably her plan for next Tuesday between 3 and 5pm. Until then she will devote her time to deconstructing the Shakespearean canon with an eye toward his treatment of women in Greek myth, and in her spare time she'll fine-tune her artistic style which, until she gets thumbs at least, will likely be reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's.

Any day now we'll come home and find that someone has painted "Four legs good, two legs bad" on the garage door. Inside, we will hear the strains of Abbie fluently speaking multiple languages as she simultaneously disarms the Iraqi insurgency, creates peace in the Middle East, opens a can of whoopass on North Korea, and practises juggling with bowling pins.

So I guess some good can come of this. But I want my collection of Dickens back and no, I will not man the keyboard so she can try to beat my time in Minesweeper.

Harriet Goes to the Dark Side

[There is a heating man checking out the insulation in the ceiling.]

Otto: Does he realize he's stuck up there if we move this ladder?
Eloise: You could mention it to him.
Otto: Hmm.

[clatter, bang]

Harriet: I can see I'm going to have to keep a better eye on Otto.
Otto: What?!
Harriet: Did you just move the ladder?
Otto: Oh, I was just getting water!
Harriet: Did you put it back?
Otto: Yes!
Harriet: Good.

[Pause.]

Harriet: God, wouldn't that be funny?

Atkins would smile

i purged all products containing grain from my cupboard yesterday- not because i believe in the benefits of a low-carb diet, but because my rice was starting to grow wings. yes. wings. like, each kernel is going to fly away, wings. my bags of rice and whole grain pasta and my box of grits were completely infested with grain moths. i don't know how they got there, but they actually burrow into your food and spin webs in it and hatch in it and i'm so ridiculously grossed out, that i can't bring myself to eat carbs again. grain moths: yet another reason i will smile when california falls into the ocean.

awesome is...

awesome is: ending a verbal altercation with your coworker by shutting the door... on your boss' hand... severing the nailbed and breaking his fingernail cleanly in half... and then spending the evening with him in the emergency room... while he calls his friends and leaves messages like "hey, yeah, my employee cut off the top of my finger... we're gonna have to postpone the golf game".

plea to a psychic spider

i was watching a spider on the wall. and then i got distracted. and now i can't find it. last time i lost track of it, it showed up in one of my sweaters. and yesterday it was on the bathroom windowsill. it knows i washed it's cousin/brother/wife (who can tell with spiders) down the drain last year. and i watched my boss kill a black widow with a golf club last week. psychic spider knows these things. please forgive me, spider... and please don't climb up my nose while i'm sleeping. please. please.

A Simon and Ivan Thanksgiving

The proper Simon and Ivan Thanksgiving begins, as all good things do, with Wegmans. In fact, it is with Wegmans that this post is principally concerned. Where else can you have a five-course meal starting with poached Etruscan salmon, just by strategically hitting up free sample booths? Okay, maybe Harrods. But where else can you wash down your kingly feast with Magic Hat #9? Only Wegmans. Thus, the traditional celebration starts with a midafternoon drive to Wegmans, which is always always always held up by the traditional Slow/Drunk/Extremely Aged Driver whose Tercel we generally follow all the way from the blinking red light on 251. Thanksgiving just wouldn't be the same without this person. It would be a lot better.

This year, both of us being persons of independent means (or practically), we allowed ourselves to be seduced by the case of glazed fruit tarts and tartlets, custards, eclairs, napoleons, and mousses. They have names like "Dôme Chocolat" and "Napolean Vanille" because this is the "Parisian-inspired desserts" case. Evidently the butter is French and the vanilla is from Madagascar. I don't care if the butter comes from native Iowa cows, there's nothing like a glistening fruit tart in a fancy box that would have cost £6.50 at Betty's.

So that took care of the Faux Parisian Dessert food group. We still had the Nacho Cheesier food group and the Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hand food group, which holes in our nutritional pyramid we filled with a swift trip down the snack aisle. And then we decided that was enough because even during the holidays, you don't want to overindulge.

A Simon and Ivan Thanksgiving is not complete without a ritual viewing of Anne of Avonlea, during which one struggles with the following issues:

(1) Do you or do you not feel sorry for Morgan Harris when Anne rejects his proposal? (Ultimately it was decided that Morgan Harris might be dashing, but Gilbert Blythe has better handwriting.)

(2) Do the charms of turn-of-the-century fashion (i.e. gloves, the vest/skirt ensemble, the dramatic poofy hair) outweigh the glaring horrors of period headgear (i.e. giant hairbows and things that were clearly walking around saying cluck cluck or tweet tweet or hee haw before they were shot and made into hats)? Still undecided.

(3) Do Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island have anything to do with Idaho? Yes, but we can't say why.

If there was a Simon and Ivan Thanksgiving Blessing, it would go like this: Dear Bob, thank you for Wegmans and Kevin Sullivan Productions and old friends. And thanks also for mint M&Ms. Better late than never.

I'd Like to Issue a Statement

Last night I did some laundry.

I realize now that this was very irresponsible of me and I would like to apologize to the families of those people who will surely suffer as a result. Sorry, Cheneys. Sorry, Blairs. Sorry, Other World Leaders, namely U2 and Oprah.

There is reason to believe my socks are planning a world takeover, and I know for certain that they will not be defeated by the discovery that this planet is 70% covered in water. They know. And they're not allergic to soap, either.

Their ringleader is a certain sock of mine whose identity cannot be ascertained. Whenever questioned, my socks pull a Spartacus on me and tell me they are all called Joe Boxer. (This is the name of their gang, which is tattooed in their soles.) We will call this sock Agent One. Agent One is a Ringspun Cotton Double-Cushion Reinforced-Heel-and-Toe Quarter-Cut Women's Shoe Size 5-9 Sock, but don't let his nancy-boy description fool you. This is a heavy, durable, almost bulletproof sock. A sock you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley.

Agent One has made several escape attempts already. It falls on the floor between the washer and dryer whenever it can. It hides in the dryer every single week, waiting for its chance. It jumps out of the laundry basket regularly and has been intercepted during escape several times by my mother, ever the foiler of evil plots perpetrated by laundry, or the worlds of mathematics and science. Agent One is motivated entirely by either

the desire to become the Pre-eminent Sock Emperor of the Millennium (the fact that it spent a year in Europe in and is still going strong is evidence that it is working on technology that will someday render it immortal) or

freedom.

It will stop at nothing to achieve these sinister aims.

This brings me to last night. Last night, whilst doing my laundry, I made the terrible discovery that Agent One, too high-profile to do it himself, sent out another sock as a scout. Right now, the suspect, which we shall call Agent Two, is roaming free. It is a thin, slightly dressy Gold Toe sock, which is why I never suspected it. It made its escape at approximately 8:27 EST and hasn't been seen since, but is known to be in communcation with Agent One and the Joes Boxer. I suspect they are planning further atrocities.

It is on the strength of this evidence that I suggest that in order to prevent the assassinations and widespread barefootedness that will occur if Agent Two is not quickly apprehended, we should raise the Terror Alert Level to Orange and go about our daily activities with extreme caution. The sock is on the march.

Obviously written during a lunch break.

First I want to say that this is the season of apples. Apples should be everwhere, they should be fresh, and they should be crisp. Yet what I find is that the apple I have before me, sitting innocently on my desk, is of abominable quality. It is misshapen, first of all. Its color is lacking: beneath the pleasant red-green blush lurks a foundation of brown. But these are merely cosmetic flaws. The real problem is that it is irreversibly bruised. Not the kind of bruises where your mom tells you about all the starving people in the world and makes you eat it anyway. No. Not that kind. The kind where, if it was a person, they'd amputate. The kind where eating it is like nipping through a minefield. For the taste of rotten apple flesh is the taste of DEATH. These bruises are terminal. We must learn to treat apples with care, as we would treat, for example, a hemophiliac. If you know an apple farmer, or a supermarket manager, please tell them to stop holding impromptu baseball games with their produce before selling them to the unsuspecting public. This is abuse and it must be stopped.

Overheard

"The TRUTH?! ... The truth only sets you free and that's not even true."

CRAWL FOR IT!

And that's just one of many things Ivan and I will yell at trick-or-treaters, after hurling their candy as far into the darkness as possible, when we are acerbic but spry white-haired cat ladies.

X=Eat the doughnut.

If someone at work brings in donuts for your birthday, and the apple you brought for lunch is suspiciously squooshy, do the combined factors of (1) it being almost the 30th and (2) your healthy food having literally rotted make it okay to substitute two donuts for the one apple? There is so much air in doughnuts, and apples are so dense. In fact, if I were to establish an equation describing the relationship between apples and donuts, it would probably say A+3/2G=3D(2H)(1/2R), with A being Apples, D being doughnuts, G being guilt, H being death by heart attack before the age of thirty, and R being the part where I vow to run every morning for the rest of my life. And the numbers being randomly assigned so as to create the illusion of complexity. Unfortunately the equation is rendered undefined on account of the fact that I can't figure out which spelling of donut/doughnut is correct.

Wanted: Small-Town Lex Luthor. Must Refuse to Mow Lawn. Desire to Subdivide and Develop Property Required. Untrained Black Labrador a Plus.

I was promised juicy material when I signed up for this job with the local paper. I was told the meetings would be full of yelling and that I shouldn't give my phone number to local officials because they would use it if they didn't like my articles. I was made to believe I might find myself uttering the words, "Look, mister, this town ain't big enough for the both of us," and "You better make like a tree and leave, bigshot." But this showdown has not occurred. Nor have any showdowns occured within my hearing. Negatory on the showdowns. In fact, here are some words I wrote down at a recent planning board meeting, to give you an idea of what an adorable and harmless town we really are:

Big Bertha
clambake
Doc Whatsit
signage
verbage
cow

So harmless we are almost lethal. The closest I've gotten to scandal is the following statement: "Yeah. That's what we listen to in the Clerk's office. Cop-killing rap. That's what me and a bunch of 65-year-old ladies listen to. [Pause] They complain if I play country." So, not very close. Welcome to Lois & Clark: The Boring Edition.