Nightswimming

This weekend was one of the longest in recent memory – which is a good thing – in part because we had a visitor who arrived on Thursday, which made Thursday feel like Friday, which was great, except that I had to work on Friday, which felt like a Saturday, which is kind of on the wrong side of weekends. And now it’s Sunday, and Sunny is refusing to comply with any request, and has eaten three pairs of underwear in the last 30 minutes, and I’m watching the bittersweet end of a delightful weekend roll by like tumbleweed, and I can’t help but wonder: where’d that go?

Tumbleweeds, by the way, are precisely what we’ve got in our living room, because we’ve had not one, but two entire vacuums bite the dust, despite my desperate wailing and jamming my fingers deep into the vacuum to realize that it is indeed sucking and it’s certainly spinning, and yet: nothing is actually being removed from the floor. In this process, by the way, I nearly removed my fingers when I shoved them deep into the bottom of the vacuum while it was still running, which reminded me of a childhood neighbor who decided to stick her hand into a running lawnmower to check to see if it was working.

Right. Well, you can surmise by the fact that I am even recounting this story that it was actually working, and in fact, she mowed off her fingers. For the rest of the time that I knew her, she had prosthetic fingers, which mostly worked, because the missing fingers were the quasi-useless fingers – middle, ring and pinky, if you can count fingers useless, but to remove her thumbs would be to turn her into a dolphin, really. But what was so frustrating about the eerie fingers was that she chose a specific nail polish color and never changed it. To this day, I wonder how or why. Did she say, give me pink, I like pink, and don’t anticipate ever wanting anything but pink fingernails? And they were long. And plastic. And probably melted if she stuck them near a hot pan, wouldn’t you think? I feared for her near hot beverages, even if they were in mugs.

Also, look, I feel compelled to point out that even though it was DAYS ago, Allison‘s “moan-a-toanous” was perhaps the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, and I dare you to try to hold in the laughter while you say it: monotonous. Moan-a-toan-us. Use it in a sentence. Also, if I had a prize, she would totally get it, but alas, I don’t. MOANATOANUS. That beats the pants off of clandestine any day of the week.

Also! Also! Because I always like a report of visits and what people are actually like in person, I was not wrong in my initial assessment: Schnozz is freaking gorgeous. I mean, she’s hot. Very, very hot, to the point if I touched her shoulder with my finger, I am fairly certain it would sizzle. She’s even hotter than she appears in photos, and I know someone will back me on this. She can also attest to the fact that my dog is a kleptomaniac, and will run off with anything in sight, provided it looks like it might be a little bit exciting. Today alone, she discovered a pack of long-forgotten cigarettes from a bygone era, and came proudly sauntering into the living room with a pair of kitchen shears between her lips. In fact, during the course of writing this, Sunny ran off with two bras and a flip flop, and came clambering in with a bra on her head, like she’d just come from a party that involved debauchery, tequila and maybe some strippers. Hot lesbian love, doggy style. Stay tuned for videos to go on sale.

And finally, although I am no longer hobbling around like the gimp, sans rubber suit and ball gag, running seems like a not-bright thing to do until the cotton-like creak is gone. Yet if I don’t exercise, I will explode, so I opted to go for a long swim tonight in lieu of a run or bike or anything that made actual sense, because when was the last time any of you went on a long swim? Do you know how exhausting it is? After 40 minutes of swimming laps, I’m pretty sure that drowning was a very real possibility and that I did not care in the slightest, because at least I wouldn’t be swimming anymore. And it’s further proof that nothing I did when I was younger has any critical bearing on how I do things today, because although I swam competitively in high school and can do a beautifully efficient crawl, its efficiency was greatly diminished by my wheezing, heaving, whale-like self.

Have a great Monday.

*REM

18 comments January 21st, 2007