all over but the shouting
Sunday 30 March 2008 | I like a cookie
It’s 11:45 pm on my birthday and the Brujo is zonked out in the next room and I should be too, yet I’m holding onto Sunday even harder than I usually do. All day I’ve thought of so many great blog post titles/opening sentences that I almost thought I should write a post consisting entirely of titles. Tantalizing and/or meaningless; plus, most of them I tend to forget as soon as I say to the Brujo, “You know what would be a hilarious blogpost title?!” and then we laugh and then, pouf, estrogen-depletion, c’est tout à fait moi. I should write them down, I know. Life, work, and lifework cut into my blogging time unconscionably but there seems little I can do about it until May 1. Pleh!
Birthday well-wishers, thank you for wishing me out of the well. Without you, I’d be without you; and that would be equally unconscionable.
And there’s so many interwebs felicities I’m always saving to share:
Today was about the weirdest birthday I’ve ever had and somehow one of the best. I pulled weeds for maybe four hours in the yard, much of it by myself. I know, that 
sounds crazy. It was LOVELY. I thought about everything and nothing and then I looked for the next thistle in the grass and then I pulled it. I didn’t call anyone and I didn’t return any calls (though they were all warm and dear and at least one message made me laugh aloud, when the Professoressa pretended to be a disgruntled comp student). And then I had an hour-long soak in an earth-destroying amount of hot water, nearly sizzling with lavender and rosemary and eucalyptus fumes. Then the B. made dinner (artichokes and butter, broiled ahi, potatoes with mushroom butter, mustard greens and shallot butter…are you detecting a theme here) and did the dishes while I bagged the trash. And then we went to CVS to fill my prescription, and horsed around in the aisles acting weird while the pharmacists repeatedly screwed up my order. And the Brujo bought me a packet of bird stickers, and then we drove home.
I know, right? But I feel miraculously better than I did just a week ago, even though I should be PMSing like a crack fiend right about now. Is it the 20,000%-of-your-US-RDA sublingual B-vitamins, the longer daylight hours, or the fact that I have so many loving friends and so much kickass medication?
On ne sais jamais. I just know that I’m 39 today, and that today it’s okay. And that the B. makes a mean, mean créme brulée.
AND I started out the day scoring a piece of Hello Kitty fabric for 99¢ plus shipping. I’m baffled by my attraction to Kittychan—is it because she’s gayer than springtime? is it, as oleoptene has mused, her inscribable mouthlessness on which we may project our unacknowledged feelings?—yet I remember very clearly being utterly charmed when she first appeared in 1976, and can still sing the moronic, creepy little jingle that accompanied the television ads:
hello funshine! hello sunshine!
hello kitty—hello! hello! (&c.)
Then there was the eerie unsettling half-nap post-paroxym dream, sleeping lightly, lightly held by a similarly half-napping Brujo, both of us in unfamiliar positions on the bed, having landed where we’d fallen, me sometimes twitching or yelping us both re-awake, medication’s extra-pyramidal side effects yielding permanent neurological damage and rendering me a delight to sleep with, a dream in which the mermaids from the new Heather Ross Mendocino collection drifted slowly upward past me, rippling like kelp, looking at me curiously, dappled by wave-shadow.
When I first saw these I’d thought I didn’t like the colorways at all, but in my nap-dream it occurred to me that these retro aquas and oranges and mustards and magentas in fact tinted all of my childhood picture books, thus in some way must lodge in my unconscious. I woke up all afire for mermaid fabric but it is not yet available, for love or sushi.
Speaking of which….another anomalous birthday week development. So Tuesday morning before class, frozen by anxiety, unprepared to teach and in my usual seven-a.m.-cold-sweat, the one which has befriended me since my three years at the Tribal College when I also, strangely, taught T/Th mornings, I cruised around teh Interwebs looking fruitlessly for Heather Ross’ old line of fabric, munki munki sushi. This stuff is simply not to be found, not anywhere, so it was the perfect pointless search for my familiar terrified-stiff avoidant panicked lockdown. Most practiced habits, one; Unnarrator, zero.
Right. So I happened to find an editorial lapse on her website, and because I was in mega-avoidance mode I decided (sensibly enough, when I should have been already been dressed and packing up books and papers) to email the web staff and let them know. But surprise, I couldn’t find any address but hers. And surprise….she wrote back immediately, thanking me and asking, “Did you find what you were looking for?” Startled, I wrote again before I could know what I was doing (by this point standing at the desk with my arm through one sweater sleeve), telling her that people were buying up her remaining pajama line and cutting them up for the fabric. At which point (glugging coffee, a rumpled Brujo offering an obviously-late-me a ride to school) surprise holy crap surprise, she wrote back asking for my address.
Um, I’m sorry, there must be some enormous, inconceivable, time-travel-related, potentially-history-altering mistake. Because I’m me, and you are HEATHER FREAKING ROSS, and people are GNAWING OFF THEIR OWN LIMBS for your out-of-print fabric, so don’t MESS with my mind, lady.
All of which leads me, however circuitously, to…an important birthday decision. Because I somehow managed to overpay my old credit card (when I balance-transferred to a new 0%-APR one), I now have $20 in credit, plus another $20 of their inane make-you-buy-stuff “cashback bonus”—and God forbid I should use said credit to, I don’t know, like, pay a bill or get the oil changed in my car or or or or whatever else desperately needs doing). Alors:
• So do I buy…fabric?
• Do I get one of the last four pair of HR munki munki sushi pajamas ON SALE, even though they are medium and I am small? and even though I don’t really wear pajamas?
• Or do I just order some sushi cotton and make my own damn PJs? Since I even have a pattern already? And since it seems I’m about to receive fluffy mail from AN INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN FABRIC DESIGNER?!?
It’s just that it will be the end of the semester before I can get around to sewing of any kind…but eventually, I will. And lawn work. And writing.
Dear Jebus, I sincerely hope I’ve turned some kind of annual corner and will only blog for the rest of the year about my craft or sullen art and not my angst. Thank you and it’s totally okay about the pony, I understand. Amen.
May 1. May 1. May 1. Our septuagenarian neighbor Mary stopped by our weed-pulling party to give me chocolate-chip brownies (!) from her freezer and asked the B. and I if we were going to teach this summer. Us laughed and laughed some more. And ate freezer-flavored brownies and pulled thistles.
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