of all the feelings i’ve had since stuart and i decided to go out on a crazy limb and throw our lives together and move him to new york, there hasn’t been a single moment where i doubted the smashing awesomeness of it all.
until i realized that when my darling is sharing my bed, and my favourite girls come to visit…. THEY WON’T SLEEP IN MY BED. ack! what about the nights of getting in bed, laughing until we’re about to pee, and then getting up and driving to all-nite diners! what about discussing SHIFTY PENGUINS, or telling the roly-poly-sensitive story so wickedly that kate nearly fell out of the bed? what about long talks about life and love and laundry? and the handbasket? what about making fun of people we went to high school with, or each other’s ex-boyfriends? what about staying up all night talking to stephanie about life, and then eating a whole jar of homemade applesauce?
not that i’m not getting myself the world’s best bedmate. because i am. and i can’t wait to spend every single night curled up next to him. but seriously…
SHIFTY PENGUINS NOW AND FOREVER. KOZY SHAK RULES. bff, man. b. f. f.
in the animal kingdom, spring is a time of renewal. yearlings on tottering spindly legs, jellied little tadpoles, veiny bird babies with upturned translucent beaks. families of bears come blinking into the sparkling sunlight, shed coats of winter fat and fur, pick up their brooms and their dustpans, finally throw out that disgusting rug their great-aunt milty gave them -
- no, wait, now i’m talking about humans. we fickle creatures don’t follow the rituals of nature quite as concretely as our furrier earthmates do. powered by something dodgy called “reason”, humans are the wild card of the animal kingdom. instinct for survival? let’s harness nuclear power. protective child-rearing? susan smith. shared labor of the tribe? enron.
but there are some things we do on a level deeper than our self-destructive greedy impulses. we pay taxes and die, yes, but we also we mate, ostensibly, for life. and we clean in spring.
this weekend wasn’t one of my usual laze-fests. on saturday morning, i woke up, drank some coffee, and grabbed a can of white paint. i re-painted the doorframe in my kitchen, the window sill and radiator in my bathroom, and the baseboards in my hallway. then my mother arrived and the real fun began. we emptied and re-organized the two closets in my bedroom. we threw away about two thirds of the crap on the upper shelves. stuff i didn’t even know i had. a useless fog machine my old roommate left behind. a broken fan. a ripped bedsheet.
then, on sunday morning, it got serious. we rearranged my living room. tackling the problem areas that had always bothered me: the music unit being the first thing you see when you walk in, there being no entry table for the dropping of items upon arriving home, the sun hitting the TV in the worst possible way on summer afternoons, not enough prominence given to my beautiful red-framed mirror. in the process, i threw away about two garbage bags full of crap i will never use, and sent home to RI another boxload of stuff i don’t like anymore, but am too packratesque to throw away.
now, with my living room rearranged and de-cluttered, with my windows sparkling clean and my menus organized in an expanding folder, with eight metric fuckloads of laundry carefully done and shirts ironed, with spanking clean sheets on the bed and a sparkling bathroom…
… i still have a list about two pages long of projects that should get completed over the next two months. and i love it.
winter fat and fur shedded? check. blinking in the freshly-washed sunlight? check. clutter de-ed? check. mate found? check.
and this weekend i realized … under all our manolos and reality tv, under the checkbooks and mortgages and stock options, under the “mother issues” and “control freaks”, there’s an instinct-driven beast in all of us.
i’m sorry. i start this new exciting grassy page, and three days later, i haven’t posted anything but a request for music and an attack on care-bears. not exactly luring you in and then fulfilling all your readerly desires. i’m sure you’re asking where my witty, charming pieces have gone – where the erudite observations of new york life are hiding – do i even remember how to log in to my blog? maybe you don’t think i’m witty, charming, or erudite, which is great, because then i haven’t let you down.
it’s just that my brain is rather full these days. believe it or not, i have been writing down my thoughts. just not here. they seem to come when i’m not at a computer. on the subway. in bed at night. walking the streets of the village. so i pull out my notebook and write them down, only they never make it from that page to this one.
my brain is full for other reasons, too. tomorrow is may first. that means, in twenty six days, i will be boarding a plane, full throttle ahead, to launch myself into his arms. i confess that stuart has taken up happy but complicated permanent residence in about two thirds of my brain. it breaks down into…
