Que Sera Sera

Email from my mother

“P.S. Can I assume that it’s okay to get rid of the VCR tape Monster Truck Bloopers? Your life seems to have taken a different direction.”

Antonia and Ian and Nick and me

Oscar gets so red and loud when he’s angry.”

“Maybe Oscar is the Antichrist.”

“Oscar can’t be the Antichrist. He smells too good.”

“He doesn’t always smell good.”

“Besides, wouldn’t the Antichrist smell really good? All freshly showered and starched shirts, cologne and minty breath, just to throw you off?”

“Wouldn’t Jesus be the one who smelled amazing?”

“No way. I bet Jesus smelled awful. Like hippies and feet.”

“Why else do you think everyone was always washing his feet?”

“Hoo, the Lord is great and everything, but have you smelled his feet?”

“I know, we had him over the other night and it’s great what he does with the wine but oh my god, his feet.”

“We didn’t want to embarrass him so we acted like we have a big deal about feet washing in this house.”

“We were like, Mary Magdalene, get into it, use your hair, act like it’s a thing. I think he bought it.”

“And has he ever stayed over at your house? The stains on the sheets afterwards! It’s uncanny.”

Bad idea jeans

I am updating my site while I have a fever because I’ve run out of crappy magazines and trashy internet. This seems like not a bad idea, which probably means someone should take my computer away. I already embarrassed myself on a phone call earlier by making up the word “comfirable,” the feeling you get from being comfortably confident. I bet the people on the other end of that line are very eager to hire me to make up all kinds of new words for their company.

Yesterday evening on our way to Cringe, we were on the top deck of a double decker bus when I suddenly touched Nick’s knee and said, “Right. We need to get off this bus. Right now.” I somehow managed to stumble down the steps, out of the bus and onto a nice quiet corner of pavement at Elephant & Castle before throwing up into a plastic bag like a professional hobo. Then Nick bought me a toothbrush and toothpaste and bottle of water and I reapplied my lipstick and went on to host an entire night of Cringe, which was brilliant. (I’ve had that confirmed by several other people so I know that wasn’t the fever talking.) I even managed to make cheery small talk afterwards before Nick found us a cab and I shivered under a make-shift blanket of scarves the whole way home.

All night and day, I had twitchy fever dreams about Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz and my friend Hattie and Charles Wallace Murray’s mitochondria. I kept waking up because apparently today was the day our neighbors hired a man to come and bang on all their walls to try and find Narnia.

Oh man, in the time I’ve spent Scotch-taping together this post from old Twitter updates (Pierce was right; Twitter kills writing. He’s wrong about the blog thing, though), I just made an important business decision via email. My temperature is currently 101.2, Tulsa’s home for soft rock and easy listening favorites, in the car, in the office, or at home. This is either going to be a horrible idea or my new thing.

I wish I had some NyQuil so I could make this post actually funny.

Does anyone feel like watching The Last Unicorn? Eh. Me neither.

London Cringe: March 23

Back from travels and ready for more public humiliation and fun, Cringe returns to The George in just two weeks!

Tuesday, March 23, 7:30 pm
Upstairs at The George Pub
213 The Strand, London WC2R 1AP

Still looking for a few more readers, so email if you’re interested. If you’d just like to come along for a laugh, just turn up!

If you’re on Facebook and would like to join the Cringe group, please knock yourself out. It’s full of attractive people with cool names, and only messages you about upcoming Cringe events, never about farm chores or wanting money.

I hope they don't have kids in hell

We lie in bed at night and discuss all the ways we could screw up our future children.

“I don’t know... giving them a sexual or religious hang-up just seems so boring.”

“We could tell them that a long time ago, before Mommy and Daddy met, Daddy was in jail for accidentally killing a little boy who wet the bed.”

“We could tell them that a long time ago, before Mommy and Daddy met, Mommy had a whole other family, but one day those children were too loud, so Mommy had to leave them and get a new family, this one here with you and Daddy. It’s okay because we know you’ll never be that loud, especially in the mornings.”

“We could tell them we’re really aliens, and that they’re aliens too.”

“The way you know you’re aliens is because you have special parts down here. Humans don’t have those parts. Like when you look at a Barbie or Ken doll, they don’t have bits like you do, do they? That’s because they’re made to look like humans.”

“And if you think you see those bits on a human, that’s actually just your alien vision making you see them.”

“But you must never ask grandma and grandpa about it because they’re robots who don’t know they’re robots and definitely don’t know we’re aliens.”

“If you ever tell grandma and grandpa, it would blow their circuits and we’d have to shut them down forever, all because you told.”

“Then we’d have to leave all your friends and toys and go back to our homeworld.”

“We’re very poor on our homeworld.”

“That’s why we left it, but we didn’t get permission to leave, so we’d be in a lot of trouble if we went back.”

“On our homeworld, the way they punish you for doing something wrong is to put your children in jail.”

“Night night, now! Sweet dreams!”

“You’ll let Mommy and Daddy sleep late tomorrow, won’t you?”

Thank you

Hey, internet. Guess what? I’m feeling a whole lot better than I was just a week ago. Our situation is still the same, but my attitude is different. (Eh, that seems like a poor word choice, because I don’t believe depression and attitude are even in the same room together, but I’m just trying to say that right now, my outlook is so much cheerier.)

I think it has a lot to do with the sun finally coming out in London and staying there for nearly a week. I typically like rainy days and anytime the weather encourages me to stay inside and be cozy and read a book, but four months of that is a little much, even for me. On Monday I took Esme to the zoo, and even though it was still cold, it was sunny and bright and the sky was blue and it was so amazing to be out of the house. It was also fun to spend all day with Esme, who aside from being criminally cute is also incredibly good company. While we were walking through Regent’s Park to get to the zoo, Esme kept shouting, “AMINALLLLS! I AM COMING TO SEE YOU!” like she was Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans, and everyone around us kept cracking up.

But most of the reason I’ve felt up to staying out of bed is due to all the kind comments and emails you sent. Nick would read them all at the end of the day and we’d both struggle not to tear up. I know we still have a long way to go and very little to go on, but there’s a whole lot to be said for the kindness of strangers. This feels so cheesy to say, but it’s true. I can’t tell you how reassuring it was to hear that we aren’t the only ones, and that things do get better. I mean, practicality tells me that things do get better, but it’s nice to hear it from someone else.

I wish I could take everyone who wrote and put you all in a room and buy you all pizza and beer. Maybe this room is on our own private tropical island and everyone has their own suite with an attractive, blind masseuse? We’ll work out those details later. But thank you, internet, for reminding me of why I like the internet in the first place.

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