SWEET NOTHINGS

• If you precede a phrase with “My therapist says,” you can get away with pretty much anything. There’s the true and somewhat reasonable, “My therapist says that I need to practice better ‘sleep hygiene,’ so I’m buying this lavender lotion,” and then there’s the fun, false stuff you can play around with like, “My therapist says that eating anything green will trigger a bout of self-hate, so I’ll have to pass on that creamed spinach you just put in front of me.”

• Tonight I witnessed a guy in a truck decorated with a bunch of love humanity-themed bumper stickers  wig out at a pedestrian for crossing on a green.

• When it comes to food preferences, texture is my overwhelming decisive factor. Though I sort of want to, I can’t get behind custard-drenched bread dishes. French bread. Bread pudding. I’ve never liked that stuff. The only bread pudding I’ve enjoyed is some my mom made that isn’t mushy, and I only tried it ‘cause she really insisted.

• After listening to a Studio 360 podcast today wherein Kurt Andersen interviewed the composer, I really want to see Broadway's Matilda. So someone please let me know when it travels west. New York is inconveniently far away from Sparks, Nevada.

• Since I deeply love false, drug-induced slumber, I miss Ambien like I’d miss an amputated limb. But even though I’ve got 45 pills left, I’m off the stuff. Shame and a teacher’s pet complex were my motivators. My doctor wanted me to be done with prescription tranquilizers more than a month ago, and if I happen to call on her for work and she happens to ask if I’m still taking Ambien, I’d be ashamed to admit that I am. I want to be the Good Patient and please my physician.

• The more you say/write, the less impact your words have. I wish knowing that could stop me from over-explaining as I'm so often wont to do.

• Yesterday evening, due to flooding in the area, my power went out. And for a few minutes I was utterly flummoxed as to what to do with myself without technology as a crutch. After a while I landed on origami, an activity I found to be challenging without light.

• My dog won’t jump up on my bed without an invitation. “What excellent training!” you might think. Not the case. I have no idea why she needs a verbal go-ahead to jump on the ottoman and then onto the bed she sleeps on every night. It makes me nutsy. She’ll get up in the night to go outside and then when she comes back upstairs, she taps her paw on the ottoman until I wake up and growl, “Good grief, get up on the bed already you dumb dog.”

• When I told Jim that I had dinner plans with friends tonight he was appropriately dubious. The man knows activities like that are pretty far outside his girlfriend’s norm. Me? Social? By choice? Inconceivable! I avoid socializing because I’m baffled as to why people would want to converge with me. I wonder, “Why me? What in the world do they they want with me?” It’s not a question to which I’ve ever landed on a sound answer.

• I couldn’t be further from needing more yoga clothes. But boy oh boy do I want some.