[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]
Below is an inelegant menagerie of things I thought about, today, in no specific order and with no specific meaning. Before finishing this, I went down the deep, dark rabbit hole known as Zillow. What I was looking for exactly, I wasn’t quite sure. Every house I saw was either ugly and rundown and affordable or overpriced and gorgeous. Do I need a house? No, not really. But there is something very satisfying about looking; judging the layout and paint colors while also understanding that I am in no way positioned to afford any of them.
1. Today I found one of my cats whiskers on the floor the other day; a long, white, stiff hair lying innocently on the dark hardwood. My insides melted a bit, and I thought about the day, years from now, when my cat will inevitable pass away. Whiskers on the hardwood will be one of the things I miss the most.
2. In the middle of a rainy workday, I stared out the window for a second and had a short bout of fantasizing. I’d like to be reading a large, old, musty book in a coffee shop right now. I’d just sit there all day while it rains, doing nothing but reading a book. Maybe Grimms Fairy Tales or something witchy and a tad bit morbid. I’d drink latte after latte and my butt would go numb and it would be the most glorious day in the whole world.
3. I drank an Ashland hard seltzer with dinner tonight. Mango Strawberry. Fruity and delicious and extremely feminine, from the flavor to the lettering to the pale pink can. I also ate three individually wrapped Swedish Fish, which tasted slightly of plastic, and wondered what I was doing with my life.
4. Sometimes I think about stabbing my hand straight through with a knife, or crashing my car into a light post or falling off the edge of a mountain. I don’t mind my dark imaginings, but they do make me feel like I might be psychopathic, or like my therapist may have missed an important diagnosis. I tell myself that it’s normal to have dark thoughts, that most people have considered what it would feel like to drink liquid dish soap or tear their toenails off one by one. It’s normal, I tell myself. Totally, absolutely, horrifically, humanly normal.
5. I bought a gel manicure kit the other day and gave myself first a pedicure, then a manicure. Despite my trembling left hand, my manicure turned out swell and now my nails shall never be naked again.
6. Speaking of being naked, I met a pair of nudists once and they were delightful people. I also went to a nude beach once, and most of the people there were saggy old men so I kept my pants on. Fewer bad things happen when you keep your pants on.
7. I used to work from an office, and the first thing I’d do when I came home was take my pants off. There is no reasons pants should be so uncomfortable, or why they must be always too long or too short or too loose in the waist but tight on the thighs, or why the sizing system is absolute arbitrary trash. Pants are demonic, and that is a hill I am more than willing to die on.
8. There has been a lot of rain here lately, which means that the mountains are buried in snow, which means that everyone is losing their goddamned minds. My favorite time to go do things in Southern California is when it’s raining, because nobody, and I mean no-bod-y is willing to go out. When I stopped by Trader Joes, there was a tumble weed in one corner and all the soup was gone, but there was hardly anybody in the store.
9. When I was a kid, I drug an old ceramic sink out to the yard because I thought it would make a nice piece of yard décor. Eventually, it filled with water and a very fat toad took up residence. A toad squatter. I hated that toad, and my mother hated the sink, and I don’t recall what ever happened to it.
10. In college, I took an Oceanography class and my teacher was the sort of crusty old man who has mustard stains on his neckties and who never figured out that he ought to sort his dark laundry from his light. Once, he fell asleep in front of the class. He had an old slide projector, one of those big round ones that are now found in museums. Every so often, a slide would get stuck and he’d pull a popsicle stick out of his breast pocket to un-stick it. I went to college in the middle of Illinois, a state situated in the middle of the country with more corn than people. There was a smelly brown river but no ocean to speak of for many thousands of miles.
11. My boyfriend is much older than me, and like many men of his generation, he never learned to type. Typing was a female skill, probably. Jokes on him, because now, I watch him slowly type emails as I write page after page of nonsense without once looking down at my screen. He has an idea for a book, but no way to type the book, so he’s set on dictating it instead. To start, he wrote down an outline on lined paper, none of which I could read even if I wanted too. Penmanship is dead. Cursive is dead. Writing with our hands is dead. We can just talk into the void, forever. We can listen to books instead of reading them. It’s a wonder any of you are still reading this, right now.
12. On the street outside the tiny, crumbling studio apartment I used to call home, an ice cream truck would pass by, almost daily. Ice cream trucks were not a core childhood memory for me. I don’t recall ever buying ice cream out of the back of a musical truck. We bought ice cream in pound-sized buckets from the grocery store, like normal people. I recently learned that the cost of a new ice cream truck is roughly $60,000, which is a *lot* of popsicles and which seems, at first glace, a poor investment.
13. One of my neighbors in the building of the tiny, crumbling studio apartment I used to call home, gave me a business card one day that only said his name, nothing else. First name, last name, full stop. To hell with titles and phone numbers and email addresses. Don’t call me, don’t contact me, but here’s my name.
14. I called somebody in Alaska the other day, and she was a delight. She reminded me of Jewel, who grew up in Alaska, which reminded me of Shania Twain, who grew up in Canada, which reminded me of that Family Guy episode about how nice Canadians are. I’ve only known a handful of Canadians, but from my minute sample size, I concur that all Canadians, and all Alaskans are in fact, very nice.
15. I find it annoying to eat, especially multiple times per day. Some days, lunch feels especially intrusive and chewing feels like quite a chore. I bought some protein shakes but they taste like how a box smells. I’m not sure why you’re still reading this, but I do appreciate you, very much.
P.S. Read about the most affordable places to live here, read a list of the best ice cream in every state here, or read some fun facts about toads here.
xoxo
Sarah Rose
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