Oh, wow, I’m starting yet another online journal in an attempt to recapture the decade-plus of regular brain-dumping catharsis of my twenties, bet it won’t get abandoned the first time I transpose the numbers in my password or anything.
But until then, hey. How are you? That’s a rhetorical question, because everything is bad. Manners are weird.
I bought a vintage reading lamp last online week. It’s from the 1940s, and it hangs over the headboard of my bed. I put a Hue light bulb in it so I can control it by screaming at my robot slave I mean HomePod, but it still seems to have a mind of its own, this 80-year-old lamp from an era haunted by the nightmares of the most devastating war in human history. Wonder why I didn’t think of that?
It’s made of blue Bakelight and matches the rug perfectly, though, so if it flickers sometimes with the fraught memories of the dead while I read gothic novels at midnight, who am I to complain? Thrifting is the best.
My husband bought a (new and, as far as I can tell, not haunted) bidet attachment about a month ago, when toilet paper was still difficult to find, and I was threatening to weave homemade toilet paper out of cat hair if we got within a few rolls of being out. I’d used one before, but he never had. He likes it. I’m pretty sure he loves it more than he loves me, actually, but he’s too much of a gentleman to admit that.
The pandemic has been good for my marriage, overall, which makes me feel pretty lucky. I was home for six weeks, working (part time, sort of) while he wound up in a new career of trying to file for unemployment. He did finally get approved, after three months of trying and appealing. It could have been more stressful, but we were careful, and it’s not like going out to eat or shopping at the mall was an option we could have taken even if we’d wanted to. We got through all of Key & Peele, most of Downton Abbey, and a lot of movies while eating variations of rice, beans, and vegetables, plus cookies I kept stashing in the freezer for stress-baking. We played a lot of board games too, and bonded with our spicy shelter cat, who we brought home a year and a half ago, but only recently seems to have decided that we’re not trying to murder her with our soft pets, treats, and soothing voices.
I came back to work in mid-May, though I’m the only person in the office, which means my coworkers are eventually going to come back and wonder why I’ve named all of the office plants and given them complicated and dark biographies. But I won’t have to worry about that for a while, since I’m in a state that is seeing a surge in new cases, and all of my coworkers are older and pretty ill, so they won’t leave their homes for anything. So I guess it’s a good thing I have friends like Valentino, the the Snake Plant who killed a man for cheating at cards and escaped Canadian authorities by being smuggled across the border in a hollowed out copy machine.
Speaking of Valentino, I need to get up and go water the plants.
Bye.
Loading comments...