Squalor Victoria

Wow, once-a-month updates. Hi. To my credit, Clara-the-laptop was out of commission for the past two weeks, and I'm boring and generally disconnected from the world in the best of times. No really. My body interprets summer as "time to hibernate." I spend a lot of time huddling in blankets these days, trying to decide if it's worth the waste of body heat to get up and feed myself. I live in a house without air conditioning in the northern hemisphere, but it's mind-over-matter and I've been reading an awful lot of books about people getting stranded in the snow.

I only feel the heat when I'm bicycling (Gala is now my best friend in the entire world, no offense previous best friends, but you don't provide me with mood-lifting exercise while also getting me where I need to be. Also you can talk and have your own problems and whatever.) but, after shoving my head under a cold shower, it's back to shivering and wondering why the landlord thinks all the windows need to be open and all the fans on at all times.

Discussing my body temperature wasn't my original goal. Let me remember.

Oh right. I have friends who are blogging more regularly now and I feel somewhat obligated to do the same, rather than just comment incessantly on their posts. For those of you who are here for life updates, it's been an interesting few weeks, mostly spent in forced minimalism. I'm a materialist and a pack rat, and I am not ashamed of this fact. I learned long ago that packing light is completely incompatible with who I am, and got over it, as we live in a world where moving large quantities of objects is actually relatively easy, if sometimes expensive. So, when I spent the past few weeks slowly losing most of the objects in my house (the loss of people was welcome, if anything, which sounds misanthropic and maybe is), I spent some rather unpleasant evenings eating four-course meals in the middle of an empty floor, spending hours sorting my piles of books in every possible iteration until I found the most satisfactory, and then a few moving the clock-radio around until I discovered that my scanner-printer makes a great antenna booster (which was about the only thing it was good for, my computer being in the shop). I even purchased and began a paint-by-number of incredibly garish tropical birds.

Now, the end is in sight, but I've managed to turn into an incredibly crotchety hermit, squatting on my piles of found objects and hissing at anyone who tries to move them, having long since reverted to a pidgin of my own construction, based mostly in inscrutable metaphors drawn from my adolescent reading list. I'd feel sorry for the people who get to live with me next, but a recent luncheon with them confirmed that they apparently find my new mental state far wittier than I am when more regularly socialized.



This was a rambling and poorly organized post, and I should have spent the time used to write this making myself dinner. I will do that now instead, and you are welcome to pretend you didn't read this. Come September, we'll be back to pictures of crazy costume parties (heterohopheterohopheterohop) and whining about homework. I really do not look forward to homework.