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Dress With A Head

Wait, wait, there’s a good reason for no journal entry yesterday, honest! I was updating Justine’s diary and got so involved in it that by the time I was half way through I was too exhausted to do any more with either her diary or do an entry in mine.

(Being mean is tiring *grin*). Todd and I were checking Justin’s diary on Wednesday night and it turns out that, aside from that awful domain name (those of you who read his entries faithfully can probably guess what it is) he’s also completely changed the background and layout, so I wanted to work on my parody yesterday so that it still looked like a parody, if you see my point.

So good old Justine is caught up to November 21. By the time I got to that point I wasn’t only exhausted, I was also starving (pot of coffee, three cups of caffeinated tea, no food at all) so I put on my coat and put the pop-psychologist on my walkman radio and walked down to a different deli to get a cheese sandwich and some french fries. It was freezing and slushy, but I had a wonderful time anyway — there’s something about snow that feels so familiar to me, and comfortable. This is the same deli where they gave me hell for ordering a sandwich from the place across the street and then coming over to their store to buy french fries — I worried that now I’d be crabbed at next time I went to the place across the street, but realized that with my hat and coat I was unrecognizable. I’m easily bullied by store owners, can you tell?

Last night Todd got home at around seven thirty and walked in and said, “Hey, quick — if we hurry we can get to the used bookstore,” because there is nothing in this house to read — well, okay, there’s a sci-fi book by Dan Simmons which I managed to crawl through a chapter of and then was sitting on the bed with Todd before we turned off the light to go to sleep and the following conversation ensued:

Todd: What do you think of that book?
Sage: It’s kind of dry.
Todd: Dry? Tell more.
Sage: It’s about as emotionally satisfying as a lecture on tax laws.
Todd: (laughing) Aha, I see. Let’s go to the used bookstore tomorrow, then.

So we rushed to the used bookstore and it was closed — since they’re not supposed to close ’til eight we figured that they probably didn’t even come in that day at all because of the snow. We went all the way to Barnes and Noble instead, and I bought two more mysteries by Ellen Hart, who I only just recently discovered at the used bookstore. When we got home I ordered a pizza with pineapple as the topping and read to Todd for a little while from the Tanith Lee book, he ended up falling asleep and so I waited up for the pizza. I guess no one felt like cooking last night because there was a forty five minute to an hour wait. I’m realizing how funny this is in retrospect — I was sitting here about to type, “The pizza delivery guy was unbelievably perky” and realized that in this area he was perky, in a different part of the US he probably would have been termed “reticent”. I love living in a place where saying “Hi” and “How are you” is unusual. It suits me.

So I woke Todd up when the pizza came and we ate it together then he fell asleep and I stayed up for about an hour reading. I’m very much looking forward to the weekend — we talked about it this morning and probably won’t go over to Sarah’s tonight, it seems a bit overwhelming to try to spend time with other people and we’ve both been pretty tired lately.

Oh! Dress With A Head!

We just received a christmas card from a high school/college friend of Todd’s — they were best friends for years and years and I liked her very much when I met her. She reminded me tremendously of Julie’s college roommate (also named Julie, which led to some confusing conversations — “So Julie, Julie’s-roommate said…”) and we ended up having a great time going to a movie together one night. And it was really surprising to both of us when she turned around and married this creep of a guy. She called us up one day and said that she didn’t know what she was going to do, that he’d actually said that he was reconsidering getting married because she had a skin problem with her hands when she did dishes and who would do the dishes if she didn’t? Yeah, that kind of creep. So it was very sad when she ended up marrying him anyway, and then doubly sad when, oops, she got pregnant. The baby’s just a few months old now, and she sent a picture along with the –

Gosh, I feel teary. The mail came as I was typing that sentence and Svea’s (Sean’s wonderful girlfriend) parents sent a christmas card saying that we were always welcome to stay with them, that they’d read some of my writing off of the net and found it very touching, that they loved Sean and after hearing so much about both of us felt like they knew us as well. What a lovely thing to do!

Anyway, back to the story about this woman. So she sent a picture of the baby along with the card and it made both Todd and I laugh really hard because I swear to god, it looks like an enormous pink dress with a head on it. You can’t see anything of this baby except the head, and it’s one of those babies who has so much chub that the actual features of the face are hard to make out. And then she called and left voice mail asking Todd what his address was, because she’d sent a birthday card and it’d been returned “addressee not known” or something like that. When Todd got home I said:

Sage: Hey, pinkie, did you hear that phone mail message from —?
Todd: Huh uh, what was she calling for?
Sage: She wanted to know our address ’cause the birthday card she sent got returned.
Todd: Oh. How did she sound?
Sage: Frazzled. And frantic. And panicked. And freaked out.
Todd: (chuckling) Well, you know, Dress With A Head can do that. Just imagine Claire, but more mobile with a louder voice.

Traveling Through the Phone Lines

Disappointment Sucks, Dammit