on the weekend nobody felt exactly lively. Squire Tuck and i decorated for christmas
finally on sunday, but mostly i sat around in my jammies putting together a puzzle and reviewing my
appreciation of the underrated art of NOTH. whatcha doing? nothing.

on monday Squire Tuck stayed home because he was "sick" and because i’m a
parent who believes that if a kid really really doesn’t want to go to
school, their ability to learn is as hampered as if they were ill, so:
stay home. spare the teacher and yourself. by monday afternoon he had
upgraded to sick (without scare quotes) and by monday evening he was
screaming in pure frustration at Friar Tuck for correcting his pronunciation
of some word or another, and i tried to rub his back and he burst into
tears from the pain of being touched. ah, genuine sickness, i haven’t seen you in a while.

yesterday Squire Tuck felt the christmas spirit of giving and decided to share
his illness with me; by 5 p.m. i was weeping on the couch while we
passed the tissues back and forth and reminded each other to drink more
tea. we watched a bunch of PBS tapes ("in search of myths and heroes"),
which was just so supercool. we talked about shangri-la and how
although religious wars
strike me as ridiculous, it’s not like atheists are above it all: the
cultural revolution wreaked as much destruction as a holy war. we
talked about zeus getting out athena by splitting his skull open, and
whether or not a drill would be a good way to drain the sinuses. Squire Tuck
thinks not but it’s still an option on my table. i cannot go much
longer with the mouth breathing, three more days of this and i’ll be
unable to explain the difference between "it’s" and "its" and then how
will we buy bread.

Friar Tuck came home at about seven with a full bag of fruit and wine and
rum and vegetables. he made this giant vat of vegetable soup and played chess with Squire Tuck and poured
rum punches into me until everything, including the mouth breathing, was
very very funny, and very sleepy, and i went to bed. and slept! and
feel better today, although still unable to breath through my nose.

Squire Tuck’s already back in school.

last night i sat in a pile of tissues (one of my 2 disgusting habits)
and thought how lucky i am. lucky that i have a kid with whom i can
talk about cultural revolutions and splitting headaches. lucky
that i have a guy who knows so precisely how to take care of me that i
barely need to explain anything. it’s the difference between falling off the highwire and bouncing on a trampoline.

i am troubled that i am not getting a rush of emails along the lines of "WHEN in february, oh my darling anne, can i crush you in my arms and look deep into your pretty blue eyes and confess that for the eleven months you are not here my life is entirely devoid of meaning?" i know you’re lying, but seriously, if you want to hang out in february you best book it early and often. i’m saying. i have vegas to attend to, you know.

on saturday i saw a woman on the bus whose hair was shellacked about five inches off her skull and her makeup was so heavy i could see not merely the line of makeup along the jaw, but the thickness of the line. it facial braille by mary kay. she was wearing jeans and a puffy coat; i waited for her head to detach and go wherever it was going, which was certainly someplace different from the rest of her body, but she was all still in one piece when i got off at my stop.

and saturday continued to be weird. saturday night we were in this nearly-deserted restaurant playing scrabble and the waiter told us (over the hum of the television) that this was a classy establishment in which one could not play games, as it disturbs the other customers. pointing out that the other customers totalled about 10 in a room that seats 100+ was not persuasive, and so we had to leave. it was like getting kicked out of denny’s for studying, i was like, "whaa–?" the next place we went to we asked permission, just in case the earth had reversed polarities or something, and the waitress looked at us as if we had lost our entire minds. "yes, of COURSE you can play games here!" thank goodness. conversation is all well and good but i won’t rest until i’ve spelled CRAZIEST instead of just lived through it.

things are generally good. i got back to sleeping through the night after nearly a month of frantic insomnia, and we’re all much happier for it. a freakishly clean house, a dozen ambitious projects (started, rarely completed), and an insane ability to work without even stopping for cigarettes is all quite entertaining for me, but i gather it is not much fun to live with.
also, i never seem to get done the stuff that NEEDS to get done. it’s like, "you know what? i haven’t cleaned the tiles with a toothbrush in a really long time! i should get on that! what, pay the bills? oh, yeah, plenty of time for that later!! now… where’s that toothbrush?"

it is a good thing i am very very pretty because sometimes i am also very very stupid. but charming! and charm always carries us through the dumb stuff, right? even if we don’t think it will. charm is a total SuperPower. people think they want, like, the ability to fly or something, and those traditional superpowers may be useful, like with invisibility one could rob banks and look at naked people without getting caught, but charm has useful everyday applications. for example, i will probably need it to sort out that bill i missed last month. awhoops.

this morning i got up early and took Squire Tuck to the train station; he went with his german class to vienna for the day. i love europe. i then came home and took a two hour nap, in which i woke up a couple times from dreams that were remarkably not horrific, and so i made myself roll over and try some more. it was strange and lovely. i advocate naps but usually 20 minutes is all i can do before my brain starts cooking up new schemes for me to pick at, and so two hours was like an All Nap Extravaganza Variety Show with donny and sonny and cher and marie and purple socks and you babe.

i bought our tickets for february finally yesterday. shopping on the internet is so easy it almost doesn’t feel like i’m trying; i got very angry at the systems that were booting me off for having a different IP than my (US) address led them to believe, the nosey parkers, but i finally got the tickets and it was cheaper than i’d expected, so yay me. i am so adept and whatnot.

after approximately 20 years of dressing as a stagehand i decided last winter to branch out into colors. COLORS! that is exciting, isn’t it. apparently i decided going with just one color to start, and apparently that one color is "wine" because in unpacking my winter clothes i discovered that i now look like a stagehand with a drinking problem. perhaps next i will go for "green" and i can be a stagehand for a play about people who get lost in the woods while consuming a fine merlot. i spent about 20 minutes talking to andrea about this very important issue. i know it is dumb but it was so nice to not talk about something that cannot be solved. i am decided to be Trivial and Bubbly with Extra Trivia and Bubbles for the forseeable future, like possibly even until after new years.

the beer party was fun; Friar Tuck cleverly snuck in three (3!) non-alcoholic beers, despite which we managed to drink off most of our discerning tastebuds well before we made it to the end. this means we have some for the next time you come to visit, but you’d better make it soon, because now that we know what we like, we’re probably going to go through it fairly quickly. slurp.

circus performance next tuesday. pictures then, if nothing before then comes to mind.

1. i often tell people "i don’t have a television" because although we have a set, it’s not connected to the antenna- we only use it for DVDs and videos. so we don’t watch sports or news, but we do keep up with some things. recently i’ve been alternating "big love" and "deadwood" and i have to recommend this formula only if you want your brain to explode from the dissonance. which, i like that.

2. "the big rock candy mountain" is quite possibly the most twisted "children’s" song ever. i found this website which warns "Remember, although this is a fun song to learn and sing, having such easy access to cigarettes and alcohol would not actually be a "good" thing. Smoking and alcohol addictions are harmful to your health," and "…speaking of candy, please also visit Obesity and Your Environment and My Food My World!" hahaha. good thing they left off the verse about being buggered sore like a hobo’s whore; perhaps they don’t have a link to explain why that would be a bad thing.

3. i told Squire Tuck’s tutor that it already seems like Squire Tuck is doing better. "this is not going to be a sprint" pavel told me, apparently concerned that i was going to be thinking things are all better. "this year is more a marathon, and we’re just starting…"

"yes," i answered, "but now it feels like Squire Tuck has finally got his running shoes on."

4. i’m sleeping maybe 4 hours a day and consequently wandering around in a total daze for the remaining 20. my brain is skipping from one rock to the next and i’m playing "don’t look down, don’t look down." i haven’t cooked anything in over a week. i told Friar Tuck i was a good prep cook, because i can focus on one task at a time, but not an assembly, but he says i’m more of a post-cook, which is true. i can reheat like a master.

5. we’re having a party tomorrow, did i tell you? Friar Tuck wants to find out which beer is his favorite. as even Friar Tuck cannot drink 15 whole beers at once, nor can he compare them side by side effectively (because one might get warm while he is drinking the others, etc. SCIENCE) he has decided to have a tasting party, whereby everyone will split the beers and compare them. it’s all very scientific, as it is Friar Tuck running the show. there are evaluation
sheets, and also tables for information. a white board may be involved. Friar Tuck thinks i am making fun of him because i am.

6. what else? is it strange to put "brush your teeth" on the "to do" list? because that’s on mine.

three ways i am stupid

1. games. we like games, we especially like catan but also i am quite partial to alhambra. transamerica was our gateway game. we don’t play as much as we used to but we still play. all these modern games. when my parents came to visit i told my dad, "if you would like to buy us an awesome hostess gift…" (see how we are polite, my family, with the hostess gifts, but how i am also a tactless cow who says what she wants her gift to be? what can i say, we were in the store looking at the box and i was overcome) ANYWAY, i tell my dad, "…buy us ‘risk’."
dude, risk is hard. i don’t mean risk is hard to figure out, i mean it is very hard to sit for six hours watching yourself getting slowly and certainly removed from the board. six hours of my life that i will never get back, the last hour of which was just watching the other three battle it out, as i was already off the board.

so i am stupid in that a) i asked for risk; b) i suck at risk; and c) i want to play again.

2. i didn’t vote. i thought you had until tuesday to mail it, so i thought i would wait until my parents were gone to finally sit down with my two kilos of decision making. i usually decide on the basis of what’s important to me, rather than on party lines, so sometimes it takes me a while, but i thought i could get it done on sunday and off by monday, a day before the deadline. SADLY, absentee ballots need to ARRIVE before the election day. so, whoops. i resign my right to complain for two years. i suck. i don’t think my vote would have swung things in my state, but i feel pretty crappy anyway; it’s the first election i’ve missed in 20 years i think; that includes the year when i knew so little about so many of the issues that i voted largely on the basis of which statement had the fewest grammatical errors, rationalizing that attention to detail was probably just as important as anything else.

so i am stupid in that a) i didn’t vote. there’s nothing more to it.

3. i’ve given up thinking i’m always right and i thought somehow that when i gave it up it would all be easy. i thought that if i was willing to accept that some people were just different from me, and that the choices and opinions they had that would be bad or wrong for me didn’t make the people holding those opinions bad or wrong that it would be over. i thought that somehow when i didn’t want to argue in order to win anymore that i wouldn’t have to argue to defend myself either. i do the wan smile and the yes-i’m-sure-that’s-best-for-you but somehow that’s not enough. i am not stupid for not wanting to fight (and i’ve learned some things by just listening instead of arranging my arguments in tidy formation for the slaughter), and i don’t think i am stupid for smiling til my teeth itch instead of rearing up and screaming you are so wrong, you stupid waterbag of brainwashed idiotic thoughtlessness, not only do i not agree but i would rather cut off my thumbs than… i think i am stupid for having thought that my lack of interest in confrontation would mean i wouldn’t have to be confronted.

so i am stupid in that i thought not voicing the screams in my head would quiet them, when instead it just turned them into a constant stream of static, no less loud and not much less irritating.

that’s all, i think. other than that? perfect. seriously.

we had a halloween party last night and it was fantastic. i am basically delighted with everybody. there are some photos up at flickr starting here.

i am trying to figure out this typepad business and hope someday to get the archives put back in their proper places. my parents are visiting now so it’s not going to happen this week. maybe next. anybody who wants to tell me how much they hate all the color is welcome to do so, but i’m channeling a lot of gare so you may just have to deal with it for a bit.

tuckova fell down and skinned her knees and is crying in the corner about why bad things keep happening to her. don’t take the self-pity seriously. in fact everything’s fine. back soon.