kyria

...actually, it's a 10-year-old greeny-grey parrot named Bird, but whatever. The alliteration of my name for it still pleases me.

*

My mother walks into hotels and turns into a hoarder. Truthfully, she's a hoarder all of the time, and so am I, although I fight very hard against it; but the thing about my mother in hotels is that she hoards things she doesn't even want, and then she leaves them with me. And most of them are food: Seven packets of execrable off-brand hotel coffee, in the individual pouches that fit nobody's coffee maker. Containers of Trix-flavored yogurt (and since when did yogurt come flavored in Trix?). Five bottles of water. Lettuce carried across one week and three states. Five liters of tonic, six bottles of white wine, and at least a liter of gin (I'm just a tiny bit heartened by this evidence that my mother finds me every bit as trying as I find her). Half a packet of water crackers. One pound of cheese. Three bananas, four apricots, three pears, two point one-two-five limes, two apples, two oranges, green grapes, cherries, blueberries, and a cantaloupe. A bagel. Two slices of wheat bread. Four tubs of peanut butter, and two of blackberry jelly. One styrofoam coffee cup (brown), plus plastic lid. Thirty-six paper dinner napkins (I counted).

Random pet peeve: So, if in your warning, you say, "There are no spoilers, except that they X and do Y," then you are spoiling me. I am spoiled.

But then, I've never been averse to ramming deliberately and spectacularly into brick walls - metaphor! - while remaining perfectly aware of the likely consequences, so I'm likely to keep encountering these sorts of things.

That's a trait which might help to explain why right now, despite knowing that my oven is not working and will not work without intervention and at least one new part, I'm making a chocolate-fruit tart. Actually, it's more accurate to say that I'm making a tart because this morning I opened my freezer and discovered six bags of cranberries. It was as though I'd received a visit from the Ocean Spray Fairies! (Who, my literal mind insists, are grumpy New Englanders wearing bright yellow hip waders.) Having discovered them, they niggled at the back of my mind until I gave in and started baking, and while the tart dough I'm using is bitchy, it's not as tetchy about temperature as quick bread is. I'm getting out of the habit of using potholders; these days grabbing things out of the oven with my bare hands seems to work perfectly well.

While I was swooping around the kitchen waving a CD player and a partially-zested orange, I couldn't help but wonder what my neighbors think of me. I know that I'm endlessly irritated by the downstairs woman's blood-pressure-raising meditation tape, which is actually worse when it wakes me up in the morning than it is when I'm trying to relax at night, and that the Contraband Canary and I have a touching long-distance friendship: it shrieks at me through two apartment doors and I say, "Hey, bird! Hey, bird!"

What do they think, though, of the fact that I just gave everyone in the building a free performance of "What a Movie" from Trouble in Tahiti? Even if the people upstairs don't know that I was doing choreography at the same time (no such luck for the downstairs folks, who were treated to me trying to rumba while crooning "the sleek brown native women dancing with the U.S. Navy boys," and nearly killing myself through attempting to turn and keep rhythm at the same time), they still got the music.

Actually, as far as things I've been singing today, they probably think that the full voice, "O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!" was even stranger.

There was a machine I left off the Things In Danger list.

I spent yesterday being hurt and humiliated.

First, I slammed one of my fingers into a drawer, hard enough that thirty hours later I can still feel the bruise under my nail. So I did my usual routine, in front of about six bemused patrons, not all of whom could contain their smirks at the sight of me waving my hand around and chanting, "ow ow owie owie owwwww."

I have never believed in stoic silence in the face of minor injury. No, I yelp, and whimper, and jump a lot, and basically subscribe to the theory that the more noise I make, the less it hurts. When I was excavating, "ow!" was our constant site soundtrack, whether it meant that I'd knocked myself in the head with a shovel handle, stabbed eighteenth-century window glass into my finger, or sometimes just hit a rock and jarred myself off balance. After a few days, nobody bothered asking whether I was alright, even when there was blood, because I'm only really hurt if I'm apologizing for it.

A short while after that, I tripped over a minion's bag, flailed around for a few seconds, and then just went with gravity and fetched up between the reshelving carts and the filing cabinet. I swear to you, most of the six bemused patrons had come back for the occasion - perhaps they're really supervisory imps? - and had added in a smirky fraternity type, who was a little too interested in how my skirt had ridden up when I landed. Eyes front, child. There's only a little bruising, really, and the entire incident was more amusing than painful, but I could still have done without it.

Unrelated: the contraband canary next door is very loud today.