10.01.06: Squirrels Are Different from Apples Because They Bite Back

I dote on his very absence.
Portia, The Merchant of Venice (William Shakespeare)

Squirrels Are Different From Apples Because They Bite Back

October 1, 2006

Oh, my gosh! Has it been a whole summer since I wrote in this journal?! I meant to write, really I did, but then I was busy with INSERT MEL GIBSON JOKE HERE and then I INSERT STEVE IRWIN JOKE HERE and then Suri Cruise said INSERT PSYCHIATRY JOKE HERE. And also INSERT BILL CLINTON JOKE HERE. (Aren’t you just thrilled that those are making a comeback?)

It’s been a pretty exciting summer around here—not, unfortunately, in a foreign-teen-movie kind of way, where everyone spends the summer wandering through scenic countryside and experimenting sexually with their waifishly gorgeous friends and staring thoughtfully off-camera for minutes on end and learning bitter, beautiful truths about life. No, I mean exciting in an American-teen-movie way, where everyone gets high and kidnaps livestock and boinks their best friend’s grandma and then get picked off in gory ways by a serial killer. (Only my summer didn’t have David Arquette, thank God.)

But now it is autumn, a beautiful Minnesota autumn clad in brilliant hues of tan, beige, and puce (we had a drought, the colors are crap). The summer heat has given way to a small but stimulating nip, like the kind I take from the whiskey bottle every morning. The apples are frisky, the squirrels are ripe, and the tree-lined sidewalks are littered with nuts... which is why I don’t walk them at night anymore.

If I seem a bit odd today (all together now: “Today?!”), you can blame it on the guy who invented cough drops—those things pack more of a buzz than you’d expect. My husband and I are both snottily, sore-throatedly sick this week; I’ve gone through a whole bag of cough drops in three days flat, and Tony’s nose has been blowing like the French horn in a Haydn symphony. This would be craptacular any time of the year, but it’s especially lousy right now, because tomorrow is my birthday and I hadn’t really planned to spend my twenty-third birthiversary gagging on menthol and mucous. At this rate, I won’t be blowing out my birthday-cake candles, I’ll be sneezing them out. Adding insult to injury is the fact that tomorrow is also the beginning of Yom Kippur, which means I’m supposed to atone for all my sins, which... on my birthday? Atone? For sins? Ha! Nothing doing. If anything, I’ll be doggedly racking up more sins, because my birthday is the one day out of the year when I get to drop my whole Mother Theresa facade and let my inner beast loose. And my inner beast wants cake. LOTS AND LOTS OF CAKE.

Meh. I’m just trying not to drip phlegm all over the keyboard right now. Work, then nap, then hot chocolate, then bed. Tomorrow: BIG BIRTHDAY BASH—of which you, dear reader, will of course be informed.

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Reading

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman
Not quite as good as the first book in the His Dark Materials series, but it’s still a decent read; I’m just not as interested in our world as I am in Lyra’s, and I wish the story would focus on Lyra as it did in the first book.