My tidal wave quote from yesterday was from Johnny Bravo, and A. has corrected me, it was actually:  “I’m a tsunami, baby, and you’re oceanfront property.”  My apologies to Johnny Bravo and his family. 

I need wellies.  It’s raining today, and I won’t complain because most of the days have been delightful, but when it rains here it’s mean so I want new wellies. 

I want wellies, T. wants pictures, A. has all the pictures … what does A. want?  Probably a lot of money so he can buy me wellies and an exterminator and someone on-site who will clean my house hourly.  Heather’s birthday is December 6th or very close to it.  I will be in bend.  Send her a cake.  (I will, too.)

Oh, I know, I said I’d be busy. And I am, I can’t stay here all day, let’s make this quick.

There’s news.  I’ll number it. 

1.  We got Tedsy yesterday, Tedsy’s a teddy bear hamster, she’s Jr.’s.  She’s orange and white and rolls around in a little plastic ball and pees on the floor.  I am crazy about Tedsy.  We are emotionally attached, we are simpatico.  I missed her when I went to bed last night, I think of her when I’m at work. She has a fat little body and she squeezes it up a tube to crawl around in another little tube on top of her cage, and then she climbs down and spins in her wheel.  I want a cage, I think it looks fun.

2. Theresa DiFalco is now on Facebook.  However, she is not me. If you are my friend, please have nothing to do with her. If you are her friend, well I’ll tell you right now you should instead be friends with me. She has an “h” in her name, for one thing.  I’ll think of other stuff, too, give me a second.   (Update:  I thought of something! See #7.)

3. I’m working on my synopsis today, the synopsis goes out with the book.  The synopsis is 3-ish pages, or maybe 5.  It’s like extended book jacket copy.  It’s hard to write.  Why is it so hard to write?  I’m having a hard time writing it.  I’m reading my book.  I have no idea, really, what it’s about. A man and a woman. I’ll just write that.

4. My friend Deborah’s holiday wine picks are in the Oregonian today.

5.  A. has a new profile picture.

6.  My middle name is “Lin”.

7.  “Theresa” DiFalco, the one with an “h”, recently lied to her mother.  See what I mean?  What kind of person does that.  Friend me, not her.  Me! 

8.  That’s it. 

First of all, I want to marry Shelly Kramer.  Do you know her?  She sent me the nicest note in the world and I want to marry her.  She’s a writer and a singer and a songwriter, which makes her far cooler than I, but she flattered me.  I’m almost always trying to marry people who flatter me – do you remember in August when I wanted to marry The New York Times?  Well, I did.  If you want me to marry you, you need only to flatter me senseless.   

Second, I bought some shoes.  I went to Joe’s — they used to be G.I. Joe’s but then inexplicably insisted we call them just “Joe’s” from now on, whatever.  Joe’s.  I bought a pair of shoes at Joe’s, sneakers.  If I buy two more pair this year, it makes me a leader.  It’s true, someone said it.  (Click on this link.)  I don’t know if I’m ready for leadership right now, I have a lot on my plate.  I may just stick with the one pair.

Regarding my plate:  C. has cracked the whip.  No more frowny-faced sad-sack excuses about books, she says, send them out.  Get it out, get it out, out, out, get that damned thing out like Lady McBeth’s spot.  She’s right, I want it out of my life.  I want it to be Scribner’s problem, not mine.  Or maybe FSG’s.  I want nice editors somewhere to shake their fists and call my book names while I move on to bigger things. 

So that happens this week, going out.

Third, well … I missed lunch with the fabulous RSG.  I’m sorry, RSG.  I drove to RSG’s town, and then I called her to see where she lives.  It would have been lovely, it was a great plan, I was thrilled with the plan.  But then sitting in my car outside of Walgreen’s — I left a message, I had only to wait for the call back — I had the urge to drive, I couldn’t fight it.  I drove, drove, drove, I drove past horses and hazelnut trees.  I wanted to drive until 9:00pm, but I didn’t, I came home.  I don’t know, I’ve been off, I’ve told you as much.  I’ve been off and I fear you’re tired of hearing it, so I try to act as though I’m not off, but still I am.  I’m doing odd things, I watch myself do them and know they’re odd.  I’ll tell you what they are, just not right now, let’s wrap this up. 

My friend Rob — this is so like him — bought a brand-new Cadillac Saturday, the SUV kind, a big one.  Then on Sunday he hunted geese and threw the dead geese in the back of his Cadillac.  Don’t be mad that he bought a Cadillac, an SUV one.  He’s beautiful and has a heart bigger than its gas tank, I swear to you, so it’s okay what he buys. 

I don’t know what color the Cadillac is, and I also need to call him to find out what he does with the geese, I guess he eats them.  A goose, people eat a goose; I don’t think I have.  Unless foie gras counts, maybe it does.  So then I have.

I don’t know if you’ll see me this week – it’s very important that I get this thing out, I’ve now promised C., she’s not a good person to break promises with.  I’ve promised C. and plus, I need to send the thing out so I can live my life, I mean it.  So I can jump up a little and say, “yippee!” and then make dinner or learn to sew or take up kayaking … or go to Steve’s birthday party on Friday, something. 

Jr. wants to cross-country ski this year, and also buy Mousetrap, the game Mousetrap.  I think we’ll do both.  I want adventure this winter, I do.  My book will be in New York, I’ll be in the snow, and at the lodge while I dry out my snow pants I’ll play Mousetrap with G. and young A.  It sounds easy, doesn’t it?   Shouldn’t it be?  All of it?  Easy?  (I think so.)

There is a movie called Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and I watched it once when I was little.  My parents were gone and I was staying with a friend of my mom’s.  She lived by herself in a big scary house and she let me watch scary movies — she obviously hated kids.

I don’t remember the movie, really, so much as the feeling:  It scared me to death.  I think people were trying to scare Jessica, I think that’s what the movie was about.  The point is, now they’re here in my house and they’re trying to scare me.  To death.  And I’m sick of it.

I’m sick of them with all their ants and spiders and dust balls trying to scare me to death.  I don’t want to let them win, and they haven’t been winning, they really haven’t.  You should see the spiders I run into out in the guest house, they’re huge fat-bellied things with thighs like pontoons and I just “meh” at them and walk past.  I am dealing, people, with my anxiety.  I’m facing it down.  I am not letting evildoers win!

Sigh.  But in the end they always do.  The deck feels stacked.  Because here’s what they did today, the invisible evildoers in my house, and it seems so totally not fair and I feel I have no recourse. 

They dropped a spider — not a thin translucent ethereal little fairy spider, mind you, but a THICK, brawny, bull-dozing, cigar-chomping spider – they dropped THAT spider, the hairy, big, bloated-belly fat one INTO MY WATER.

Here’s how I know there was a spider in my water.  I picked my water up, while I typed, and took a big drink.  There was something in it, a black thing.  Yes, a black thing and the black thing was swimming toward my NOSE! 

I threw the glass, it didn’t break.  What are glasses made of when they don’t break?  Is it glass?  It landed on a rug, maybe that saved it.

I feel ill now.  I feel faint and ill and shaky and defeated and sad.  I don’t know how I can beat that one, you mean people trying to scare me.  That “Live Spider in the Water Glass” thing, that gets me every time.

Sick bastards.

Will my winemaking friends at Biggio-Hamina please recommend a pairing for spider terrors.  Red or white?  Sweet or dry? 

This is perfect timing:  Joan Acocella on overparenting. 

It’s perfect timing because my friend Colleen and I have been grousing about it back and forth, how enlightened moms get screwed.  We want Betty Draper’s job.  She gets to smoke in the kitchen, pour a drink before 5, send the kids to other rooms or to bed. I’ve never seen that woman with flashcards.   

I told A. this morning that I’m done being a mom.  I’ve overparented, I’m guilty.  I piped the Mozart in, I read them James Thurber and the Short Stories of Fitzgerald.  We watched the Hitchcock oeuvre, took Italian, they copied out all of Noel Coward’s letters.  I gave them an overview of Freudian vs. Jungian analysis and had them demonstrate on Scruffy, we made it most of the way through most of Homer.

It got them nowhere, they still pick their nose, so I’m reducing my mothering hours for personal reasons.  I’ll send a note out to Clients.

Practice your piano, don’t practice your piano.  Eat potato chips, chocolate chips, poker chips, I don’t care.  It’s time for me, now.  I’m taking lovers and commanding my career, I’m getting my helicopter license, I’m off to an ashram.

Oh.  Are you reading this, A.?  See: “tongue in cheek.”

I went to the dentist today, and then the shrink.  Now what should I do?

I learned, while at the dentist, while waiting for my happy shiny smiling dentist, that Eva Longoria gained 10 pounds.  She was on the BodyWatch page of People, it was terrifying.  I also learned, from reading the article, that she was able to take steps to correct that, the 10 pounds.  It’s gone now.  Phew. 

I was also reminded at the dentist, how sucky my insurance plan is. 

Unrelated, everything seems to have changed in these three short hours of orthodontial and mental evaluation. 

First parsley, now notes, I can’t get new notes. 

A. left a sweet note for me yesterday morning because he left before I was up.  It said this: 

Hi Sweetheart,

Hope you got a good night’s rest.  Have a good day.

I love you,
A.

P.S.  Just turn coffee on. 

Awww.  Sweet right?  So today A. left again before I got up — by the way, A. leaves at like 3 in the morning — and again he left a note by the coffeemaker.  And again, it was sweet.  Because it was the same note as yesterday.  Not the same words, it was the same physical note.  He added a line, “hope you like it,” about the coffee, so in his defense, it was updated.

I did like the coffee, but I spilled some of the coffee on the note.  It’s in decent shape, though, for tomorrow, and there’s still room to add to it, A., if you want – for example, maybe wish me good luck at the dentist.

A. had a dream that I made out with someone and I had a dream that the Very Tall Vets and the J.s came back from the sun and I told them I wasn’t talking to them anymore for calling me from a Caribbean pool.  G. had a bad dream and showed up at four in the morning and Night Ranger sang a song about that exact same time.

Here’s an article about Robert Silvers, who along with Barbara Epstein (deceased), founded the New York Review of Books, which is one of the loveliest publications in all of the world, it is.  You should write Mr. Silvers and thank him for it.  He probably gets sick of telling the quaint story about it’s founding, the one that reminds me to nag you to come to dinner and found something with me.  Still … it’s raining out, it’s not a bad read. 

A. is taking the recession very seriously, did I tell you?  Fresh parsley, for instance, is out.  Where I used to take for granted that I could write words into a list and A. would collect them at the market, now there are some words I’m asked to defend.  Like parsley.  Was I sure I needed parsley?  Yes, I was sure.  I needed parsley. 

A. produced a package of parsley from one of the drawers in the refrigerator, they call them crispers, I think, though they don’t crisp things.  The parlsey he produced was yellowing and brown in some places, but when we examined the recipe that asked for it — Green Goddess Salad, NYT Sunday Magazine — it turned out to be one tablespoon, one tablespoon of parsley.  There was easily one tablespoon of green left in the parsley bag.  I smiled sheepishly, and A. crossed parsley off the list.  He was brisk. 

Parsley, though, is one thing, coffee’s another.  With coffee I might take a stand.  Coffee is integral to my productivity, to the completion of my book, to whether the completed book gets reviewed in the Times or the McMinnville News Register.  Coffee is vital to this whole operation. 

This morning A. (sweetly) left the coffeemaker set up so I’d need only to push the button.  I love that, by the way.  We have one of those beautiful machines, from my mother-in-law, H., where you put a little capsule of coffee in, press a lever, and have a perfect cup in three seconds.  But when we run out of the capsules, as we have (and I fear how our new recession rules will affect their replacement), we go retro — glass pot, filters and that. 

So I pushed the button, and when the time came, filled a cup and drank the worst coffee I have had in 11 years.  I was swept with nostalgia and disgust simultaneously, is the curious thing.  And nostalgia won out, I poured a second cup.  Before I explain, let me say that none of this is mean, there are plenty of things I make that disgust A., and some, I hope, are endearing. 

Shortly after A. became my fiance (which was three hours, I think, after I met him, maybe four), I spent a week at his house in Clifton, New Jersey.  It would soon be my house, too, for a month and then we’d soon move to Weehawken, across the Hudson from my city job on 42nd Street, but you don’t have time for all of that, you only have time for the coffee. 

I think it was a weekday so A. had gone to work and when I got up there was a newspaper, a sweet note, and the coffee all ready to go.  A can next to the coffeemaker said “Chock Full O’ Nuts,” I thought it contained hardware.  I also thought it intriguing to find hardware in the kitchen right out on the counter, what kind of crazy ride would this be?  I poured my coffee into the cup A. had sitting out for me and it was the most awful thing I’d ever put in my mouth.  Then I realized it came from the hardware can.

Shortly after, I noticed the hardware can in a store, in the coffee aisle, and there was a sign for it, even, in Times Square — Chock Full ‘O Nuts, with a big neon mug that had fake neon steam rising from it. 

I felt I was entering a fun and crazy new life and I kept drinking it for awhile.  Really, A., I did, I think I drank it for a long time.  I have fond memories of awful coffee, of being so young and cute with you, and taking my little bus through the Holland Tunnel to work with M. 

Anyway, that’s what the coffee this morning reminded me of and in honor of the recession I’ll drink it for awhile.  I assume it was got at a bargain. 

case #:  652704921