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holiday cheer, only 3 dollars a smile

I should have had a warning sign around my neck when I left the house this morning:

THIS WOMAN IS A ZOMBIE. DO NOT FEED OR ATTEMPT TO SPEAK TO HER. SHE IS NOT DANGEROUS UNLESS PROVOKED. Yes, it’s true, I left the house without drinking any coffee, tea, or soda. (O The Horror!) In case any doubt remains about my fanaticism when it comes to routine, I should mention that the first time I hauled the laundry over to the laundromat I listened to the pop-psych show on my walkman while I walked. This morning, even though I was tired and was only able to grab a bowl of the chili Todd made last night, I could barely stumble around the house, much less think any coherent thoughts, I left for the laundromat fifteen minutes after crawling out of bed. Why? Because if I’d left any later the pop-psych show would have been over by the time I was ready to walk from the laundromat back home.

It took me a long time to walk all the way there, and once I arrived I dragged my duffle bag full of dirty clothes (including The Towel Of Doom, which has been looming in the bathroom for the past few days making the prospect of not taking a shower at all more palatable then using it to dry off) to the wall of dryers and stood in front of them. Eventually my mind reported that what I was supposed to do next was open the door of the dryer in front of me, and I leaned over and started to unzip the duffle bag. Before I started putting clothes into the dryer it occured to me that clothes needed to be wet before the dryer could do any good, so I slogged over to the washer side and started loading up the nearest ones. The Caffeine Police were obviously not on duty, or they would have come and hauled me back home, and rightly so. Just be glad I wasn’t driving.

And hell, I threw my shirt into the toilet after sharing a pot of coffee with Todd, so obviously I need to up my dosage.

We keep the toilet seat — the bit that some people think needs to have a fuzzy blue cover on it, which makes me imagine hundreds of panic-stricken Grovers running from the blue fur hunters — down because we never know what Anita’s going to do next, and given her fascination with the toilet flushing she might well decide to jump right in one day. When I went upstairs Saturday to take a bath (that way I could sit in the tub reading until I tried off and have no contact with the Towel Of Doom) I whisked off my shirt and dropped it, as I always do, onto the toilet seat, then reached up to turn on the light over the mirror so I’d have enough light to read by. So a minute later Todd, who’s downstairs, hears me say in a highly indignant way, “Todd, why the hell did you put a t-shirt in the toilet?” He started laughing and asked if maybe it wasn’t my shirt, which is was. Evidently the toilet seat had been up and I hadn’t noticed it when I was blithely throwing my shirt in.

From the silliness file:

(Sage and Todd are listening to Sting’s album “Mercury Falling” which they borrowed from the library.)

Sage: Wait… did he just sing, “early one morning with time to kill”? Haven’t we heard that before?
Todd: Yeah, I think so. Seems to be a reoccurring theme in his lyrics. I wonder how many start with “early one morning” or “I woke up this morning” or some variation?
Sage: Maybe his writing time for new songs is in the morning.
Todd: Yeah, either that or it’s one of the few things he can still talk about — “I know! I’ll start with ‘I woke up this morning’ — I’m not so rich I don’t have to do THAT anymore…”

I blabbed so much last year about the reasons that Todd and I don’t celebrate any holidays that it seems silly to repeat myself — if you’re curious, the details are in last year’s December 13 entry. Last night someone came knocking on our front door, I thought it must be Sarah, who we haven’t seen in ages, and ran into the kitchen because all I had on was a t-shirt. Todd answered the door and when I heard it close again I came back into the living room, where he was shaking his head and looking exasperated. “Evidently,” he said, “they now expect you to pay to listen to them sing christmas carols. The first thing he asked for was a donation, and then said they were there to sing carols.” A few years from now they’ll be charging a quarter a song, mark my words. Todd said thanks but no thanks. We shut the door and listened to Bel Canto instead and Todd told me about wanting to go caroling all by himself as a boy with his saxophone in tow in his small Vermont town, but his parents told him it was a dumb idea. I would have been glad to listen to him.

© 1996 QN Podcast (formerly Quirky Nomads).