Nothing is more embarrassing than becoming Facebook friends with your old English teacher, finding her blog, and then reading her poems.

The sporty car in front of me had a vanity tag, so I sped up a little to read it. WOOOF, it said. It was a Miata. It changed lanes, and as I passed it I was able to see the driver: an older man, happily sucking his thumb. Not biting the nail, but sucking his thumb, 3-year old style.

Hey, what’d you get for Christmas?

I got lots of stuff, including lots of books. Earlier today I was typing to someone that I got a load of books, only I typed a LOAF of books, and thus, I am calling it that from now on. Anyway, here are the books that make up my loaf:

Ballistics by Billy Collins
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell
Official Book Club Selection by Kathy Griffin
The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

You know I’m reading the Kathy Griffin book first.

We live in an older house, built in the 40s, and as such have limited storage. Thus, we tend to stash a bunch of stuff in the attic. As I do not enjoy rickety pull-down stairs, the attic is Larry’s domain. The other day when I asked him to put some stuff up there, he kind of had a tiny hissy fit about how much he hated going up there. So today, when I still needed some stuff put up there, we had this conversation:

Me: So…about that stuff that needs to go into the (pause, pointing upstairs) a-word.
Larry: (in a stage whisper) Do you mean “asshole”?
Me: Yesssss. I need you to put the rocking horse IN MY ASSHOLE.

Say the newspaper is all over the dining room table from where you were looking for one of those 50% off one item Michaels coupons. You and your family are eating dinner at the table. The cat is sitting on the table as well. You don’t mind, since he has zero interest in getting near the food. Then he starts barfing. On the table where you’re eating. However, he is barfing on the newspaper, so do you move him to the floor, where you will have to clean up cat barf, or do you let him continue to barf it up on the newspaper, where you can just wad it up and throw it away?

Decisions, decisions.

I let him continue to barf. The baby thought it was funny.

This blog post made me literally laugh out loud. And then I kept reading the hillbilly part, excerpted below, and laughed some more:

“I hope they can start the car, when they get here,” Ian worried.
“Well, if they can’t, they’ll tow us home, won’t they?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course.” Ian was relieved.
“We won’t be forced to live here for the rest of our lives, like people you read about in the papers.”
“Yip,” said Ian in a hillbilly voice. “We bin livin’ here fifty years. It suits our purpose.”
“It’s a simpler way of livin’,” I hillbillied back at him. “We just livin’ off the land, well, livin’ off this car park. Back to Nature.”
“We jist couldn’ git home one night so we jist stayed here and we like it,” Ian agreed.
“When times are hard we jist eat shit,” I chimed in. “When folks park their cars and go into Sainsbury’s to do their shoppin’, we put the shit on their cars to heat up, cuz their engines is still warm. We cain’t do it on our own car cuz she don’t work no more.”
“We ain’t botherin’ no one,” said Ian. “‘Cept maybe the folks whose cars we put shit on. Sometimes they take exception to that.”

The top drawer to my bedside table has gotten out of control — not only is stuff crammed in there, but it’s too heavy to open/close with one hand. Last night I pulled the whole thing out and found the following:

4 pads of paper
17 pens/pencils/Sharpies
6 tubs/tubes/vats of lotion
2 bottles Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear nail polish in Cherry Red
3 other bottles of various nail polish
3 glue sticks
1 Queasy Pop
3 orphan socks (one adult, two baby)
various expired and (score!) non-expired drugs
1 cassette tape with this written on Side 1: KC – Cyndi Lauper – James Ingram – Nena – Yes
2 almost used up tubes, 1 brand new tube of my all-time favorite lipstick (Rimmel Balistic) that is apparently now discontinued! I nearly wept with joy!
Target gift card for $3.64!
a dream from 2006 where “Liz’s friend Krista had a new way of eating Cool Whip”
3 bottles Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion
more barrettes than you can shake a stick at
2 bags Tender Vittles
this picture, in which I apparently tried many times to draw a horse (and failed):

1. My new washer and dryer are all fancy and digital and thus show you how much time is left on the load. This is awesome, especially when they’re neck and neck — currently, for example, the dryer has 38 minutes and the washer has 37 minutes left. Sadly, I know from experience (i.e., running in there every few minutes to announce the time situation to Larry and ask him yet again which one he’s rooting for) that the dryer is going to win.

2. So, to recap our animal situation: there is Pete, o he of the murderous nature towards everyone on earth except the inhabitants of this house; Bob, Larry’s former office cat; Icky, the crusty outside cat who JUST WANTS TO COME INSIDE FOR CHRIST’S SAKE; and Lulu, the long-suffering dog. Pete sleeps wherever the hell he wants to, either on one of Lulu’s beds or on my shoulder, Bob sleeps in the laundry room, and Icky sleeps outside in the shed. On a heating pad! It is luxurious! But yes: we are assholes who throw poor Icky outside every night.

The other night, however, it snowed. And apparently my cat-inspired assholery has a limit, and thus everyone slept in the house at the same time, and I didn’t even put Bob in the laundry room, and no one clawed anyone else’s eyes out, and Icky got to wind his long black tail around my neck all night. The moral of the story is this: for years we have tried to make stupid Pete happy by keeping the other cat(s) away from him, but screw that. Nothing is going to make Pete happy! With that knowledge, the other cats are now much happier. As I type this, Icky is asleep beside me in the bed and Pete is perched atop a piece of furniture I will call a dresser but which we call “the yellow thing” because it’s really a weird, possibly Scandinavian kitchen cabinet thing with doors and drawers and a pretty glass detail and also: vents for hot pies to cool. It houses stationery and old videotapes. Bob just walked through to get a snack. No one growled, fought, or died. The end.

3. So I finished A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book last week, and whoa, what a ride. Do I sound like Keanu when I say that? It was, though: lots of characters, lots of time passed, lots of historical events [that occasionally I skimmed when it became clear that one of the 10,000 characters wasn't going to interact with someone famous in that passage], and near the end, everyone’s fates were sealed and reported and it was tragic and awesome. Oh, and then I tried to go immediately to sleep. Didn’t work.

4. I also read Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked — finished it last night. It is good: maybe not as good as About a Boy but better than How to be Good and A Long Way Down. I think I would like to come back in another life as Nick Hornby’s career. Stable, entertaining, straddling the line between art and pop.

5. Yesterday during Spike’s nap I decided I would wrap all of his presents so I wouldn’t have to keep shooing him out of the guest room. So I did that, and then moved on to Larry’s presents. Still asleep. People, at the end of Spike’s almost three hour nap (!), I had wrapped all 46 presents. The tree looks lovely.

For roughly 100 years, I have had these words on a random post-it: “What Liberty / A loosened spirit brings –.” I knew it was from an Emily Dickinson poem, but dumbly wrote nothing else down for reference. Lo and behold, I found the whole poem recently.

He ate and drank the precious Words –
His Spirit grew robust –
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was Dust –

He danced along the dingy Days
And this Bequest of Wings
Was but a Book — What Liberty
A loosened spirit brings –