i am troubled that i am not getting a rush of emails along the lines of "WHEN in february, oh my darling anne, can i crush you in my arms and look deep into your pretty blue eyes and confess that for the eleven months you are not here my life is entirely devoid of meaning?" i know you're lying, but seriously, if you want to hang out in february you best book it early and often. i'm saying. i have vegas to attend to, you know.
on saturday i saw a woman on the bus whose hair was shellacked about five inches off her skull and her makeup was so heavy i could see not merely the line of makeup along the jaw, but the thickness of the line. it facial braille by mary kay. she was wearing jeans and a puffy coat; i waited for her head to detach and go wherever it was going, which was certainly someplace different from the rest of her body, but she was all still in one piece when i got off at my stop.
and saturday continued to be weird. saturday night we were in this nearly-deserted restaurant playing scrabble and the waiter told us (over the hum of the television) that this was a classy establishment in which one could not play games, as it disturbs the other customers. pointing out that the other customers totalled about 10 in a room that seats 100+ was not persuasive, and so we had to leave. it was like getting kicked out of denny's for studying, i was like, "whaa--?" the next place we went to we asked permission, just in case the earth had reversed polarities or something, and the waitress looked at us as if we had lost our entire minds. "yes, of COURSE you can play games here!" thank goodness. conversation is all well and good but i won't rest until i've spelled CRAZIEST instead of just lived through it.
things are generally good. i got back to sleeping through the night after nearly a month of frantic insomnia, and we're all much happier for it. a freakishly clean house, a dozen ambitious projects (started, rarely completed), and an insane ability to work without even stopping for cigarettes is all quite entertaining for me, but i gather it is not much fun to live with. also, i never seem to get done the stuff that NEEDS to get done. it's like, "you know what? i haven't cleaned the tiles with a toothbrush in a really long time! i should get on that! what, pay the bills? oh, yeah, plenty of time for that later!! now... where's that toothbrush?"
it is a good thing i am very very pretty because sometimes i am also very very stupid. but charming! and charm always carries us through the dumb stuff, right? even if we don't think it will. charm is a total SuperPower. people think they want, like, the ability to fly or something, and those traditional superpowers may be useful, like with invisibility one could rob banks and look at naked people without getting caught, but charm has useful everyday applications. for example, i will probably need it to sort out that bill i missed last month. awhoops.
I must confess to envy at your freakishly clean house and your ability to work without stopping for cigarettes but I have the charm thing too so I don't envy you that except to say that damnit I'm not charming enough. I need more charm. Without what I have, I'd be sunk. It's gotten me further than sheer gumption or ability or any of those other things. But just think what even MORE charm could have gotten me.
I miss riding the bus for the very reason of the fascinating characters you find there but in my town, there are no really interesting freaks. Where I used to live I once saw a female Elvis impersonator with drawn on sideburns (she was '70s Elvis). Is it the cold weather? Where are the characters? I think people on the East Coast keep their eccentricities on the inside of their heads whereas in the West it seeps out into the garb and the front yard. Is it that way in the CR or is this woman unusual?
Posted by: ozma | December 13, 2006 at 07:11 AM