bad metaphor

The other day, I was shivering at home alone, desperately trying to start the fire (I am convinced that if my house caught fire, everything BUT the firewood would burn), when I heard an odd cheeping noise coming from the den. Upon investigation I discovered it was a poor little squirrel, even colder than I, bunching up against our window sill and trying to absorb the sunlight.

His friend, who looked like he was in better spirits, did not seem to be intimidated by my cat Buddy’s presence on the other side of the window. In fact, I thought the little guy might have been a bit lovestruck! You can judge for yourself from the evidence:

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all!

When it’s so cold that the wind chills through my triple layers of clothing, and the icy slush seeps into the holes in my worn out sneakers, I can’t help but laugh. It is hard not to laugh like a crazy person on the street, especially since everyone around me has their heads down, ducking the wind. In their winter apparel, they all look like the Staypuft Marshmallow Man. I look like the Staypuft Marshmallow Man.

So I laugh, so that my face muscles do not freeze into a glowering, sulky death mask. If they ever found my frozen corpse in the snow drift near where I park to go to work (approximately thirty miles away, because I refuse to purchase a $200 parking pass), bundled in mismatched harlequin woolies and with ice-burned skin – at least I’ll have a smile on my face. That, my friends, is the requisite for an open casket!

It is also hard not to howl like a crazy person when I open my front door and find that someone has blocked the entryway with a solid wall of wood, for my fireplace. It makes me appreciate my insane best friends. Maybe it also makes the sheer idiocy of willfully continuing to inhabit a place without central heat, in Kansas, in DECEMBER, a little less painful!

Another thing I don’t want to be when / if I grow up: so obnoxiously bourgeois that I think of eating out in NYC every night for five nights, each meal just under $100, as “budget dining.” I realize that Frank Bruni is the food critic for the New York Times, and this is what he does, dine out a lot in NYC, and nobody wants to read columns about him eating Hamburger Helper at home while watching a Netflix or anything. Still, I wish he wouldn’t pretend to be slumming it for the benefit of us peons. Do people like him and Peggy Noonan have any clue what it must be like to be normal, non-disposable cash-having people?

Or maybe I’ve got this all wrong and this article is just aimed at fired hedge-fund managers and Lehman Bros. executives, who used to be able to light their cigars with burning wads of cash, but now have to tighten the (Versace) belt a little bit. In that case, my apologies for peeping at the platinum section of the NYT!

I love food and would also love to have the ability to eat out every day of the week at fancy restaurants. But even if I had the cash, most nights I’d probably still opt to forgo the “flickering votive candles” and “Lilliputian skewers,” and cook at home. I have more control over where my food comes from that way, and I won’t have to deal with reservations.

I have never been much of a kid person. Some girls will turn into complete mush at the sight of any baby, whereas I think babies have to earn their cuteness. (this is not true of puppies or kitties, all of whom are by default SO CUTE AHH GOO GOO AHH).

Lately I’ve kind of warmed to kids a little bit, though I’m not feeling any biological clock tickings – as long as they are someone else’s responsibility, they are fine with me. Over Thanksgiving dinner, for instance, I had the realization that, combative political wonk I am, I would much rather hang out with the little rugrats than talk economics with my dad’s boring old white conservative buddies from work. Even if those rugrats wanted nothing more than to scream in my ear and tie me up with curtain ties for five hours straight. A year ago I would have minded this, but this year it was actually quite fun.

And I am nowhere near as infant-phobic as Krissy, whose reaction to a cute poster I pointed out on the wall of a restaurant, that depicted a baby in chef’s garb and wielding kitchen utensils: “EWW! A baby! Do not like!” A much more severe reaction than, say, if I were to point out a mouse running around on the dining floor (she’d probably try and add it to her menagerie).

Still, though I no longer actively avoid holding babies or interacting with kids – I hope that some day, hormones do not scramble my brain to the point where I become like my co-worker. Literally every thing she says relates somehow to her kids, or babies, or the apparent golden era of her life, her pregnancies. Example from today:

“My, it’s cold in this office.”

“Yes, I am always freezing…except when I was pregnant, the one time in my life when I was actually warm!” *launches into unsolicited details about her pregnancy, for the next ten minutes*

Reference: her youngest is a two-year old. Shouldn’t the hormones have worn off by now? If I ever turn this way, post having kids – please do me a favor and throw an angry sack of kittens at me!