+1 skill point

All the doorknobs in my apartment look like this.



The apartment is old and the building's foundation has shifted enough times that most of the doors don't actually latch when you close them.

Jack has caught on to this and has made it his mission to figure out how to open the doors around here, many of which stay "closed" but not quite closed.

His technique? Standing on his hind legs, stretching as far as he can, and hooking one singular claw into a vacant keyhole, letting his weight and gravity do the rest until the door swings open. He's surprisingly effective at this, and when I catch him trying to do this to the doors that actually do latch, I can't help but laugh because the doors don't budge, which means he just gets stuck there, his one little claw extended to its limit, his weight baring down so that he can't retract it. He tries to fake it like, Oh, hey man. I was just ... hanging around. Pretty nice day out. Saw some dustbunnies float past a minute ago and I just heard you fill up the food bowl. But I'm hanging out here for a while. Sniffing the breeze. Catch you later, man.

But I know. Dumbass.

Born to blog

This morning (I'm being generous; it was 11ish) I hopped out of bed like a little sprite and sprang into cleaning action. Last night I had stopped by Rite Aid to ready myself for the cleanliness rapture and stock up on cleaning supplies. My apartment has been filthy and crammed with random crap for a very long time now, and I really only spruce it up on the surface when I have people over. But it's been a long time (read: probably never) since I really cleaned it.

I brewed the world's tiniest pot of coffee (my new $8 coffee maker from Fred's is among the most adorable appliances I have ever laid eyes upon) and proceeded to down two black cups as I worked my way through the kitchen and bedroom. I meticulously scrubbed the baseboards and moulding. The air conditioner got a nice little rubdown, as did my dusty dresser and nightstand. But my magnum opus today? The closets.

My closets have always been prone to abuse. Call it a walk-in closet and I will eventually treat it like an offsite storage unit, crammed to the brim. But lately I've been feeling so insane and so suffocated by unseen forces that every time I opened my living room or bedroom closets, I fantasized about saying something dramatic and throwing myself off a bridge. Yes, it got that bad.

So today I was ruthless and just started chucking stuff and piling everything else up to take to the Goodwill. My old stereo, DVD player, desk lamp, printer, feather boa, phone, answering machine, beaded curtain, you name it. If it was in my closet and I haven't touched it in six months (aside from my old Dell and my box of old drawings and journals, which I'm still not ready to part with), it's gone.

Kind of. It's all sitting in my hallway right now, but that's only because I want to drop the stuff off during the Goodwill's business hours. And I also kind of figured I might unload some of the electronics stuff to people I know. But by tomorrow evening, that shit is outta here. I feel a hundred pounds lighter. Not in my ass, unfortunately, but in my heart. I just lug so much around with me that sometimes I can't breathe from the weight of it.

Does this mean I'm done with being a slobby packrat? Hell to the naw. That's in my genes. And besides, if I wasn't a packrat, would I be able to up and produce a gem like this letter I wrote to Dear Abby when I was twelve? I think not. Behold! A twelve-year-old's infinite, pithy wisdom: completely uninformed, yet full of opinions. And to think I've continued that legacy to this day. Amazing!



[This is funny on its own, but to think that just seven or so years later, I'd be writing something like this? Priceless.]

A visual answer to Sarah's question

Miraculously, they look and feel just like they do the day I bought them.

I think perhaps we can credit genetic engineering. Still, I'm afraid to crack them open for the fear that it will be nothing but a maggot metropolis. So, they sit.

Mission update, for those who care

The balcony is clean. I am filthy.

Success!

Smashed

I broke one of my great-grandmother's awesome striped drinking glasses Friday night. That makes two of the total stash that have fallen victim to the hardness of my floors. I didn't break the other one myself, but it's still just as broken. My own clumsiness is going to turn me into one of those people who always subconsciously looks for glasses just like these when she goes to flea markets and yard sales, and will end up paying an exorbitant amount for similar glassware as long as it evokes the same kind of fuzzy feelings.

Saturday morning the cats decided they needed to perch on the kitchen windowsill like mountain goats, and knocked off the little cordial carafe my sister gave me one year for Christmas. It smashed into a billion pieces on the counter. You may recall that my cats also broke the Galileo thermometer she gave me for Christmas one year. She's going to start thinking that I'm using "my cats broke it" as an excuse for why I don't have any of her gifts anymore. Effing cats.

I'm reminded of what Virginia Woolf said about every woman needing a padded room of her own. That was Virginia Woolf, right?

Everything in the '70s was upholstered

Even purses, like this one my sister found in my parents' attic over Christmas, and summarily awarded to me, because I'm the weirdo in the family who hoards odd crap like this and hangs it on the wall as art.

Day 354 — Snowglobe

Project 365

Day 348 — Pink Mosaic

Project 365

Day 341 — Tiles

[for Friday, Dec. 7]



Project 365

Day 340 — Wrinkles

[for Thursday, Dec. 6]



And I wore it anyway.

Project 365

Day 338 — Suede

[for Tuesday, Dec. 4]



Project 365

Great, now my neighbor thinks I'm a prevert

One of my very favorite things to do when bored is read the Craigslist "casual encounters" section (of lots of different cities to chuckle at the colloquialisms) and get my laugh on at all the creative ways people ask strangers on the internet to have sex with them.

Often the entries with photos are quite hilarious.

Just now I was laughing at a photo of a man's junk measured up next to a soda can (classier than a ruler!), and I heard a door slam. I looked back and realized that my windows are wide open, and I saw the blinds on the balcony door at my neighbor's place swinging. Lucky her, she's got a perfect view into my living room and of my computer screen.

Day 332 — Map

Some day.

Project 365

Day 331 — Jewelry

[for Tuesday, Nov. 27]



My jewelry collection still proudly includes items I got when I was in second grade (the turquoise Mardi Gras beads), a necklace my father wore when he was a kid (the leather-and-chunky-beads ensemble), love beads my mom wore in the '70s (the pink and light green beads), and damn near every seed bead I've ever bought at Wal-Mart.

Obviously I'm not a big fan of "real" jewelry.

Project 365

Day 330 — Desk Lamp

[for Monday, Nov. 26]



Project 365

Should be a good day

It's awesome waking up early to get ready for a roadtrip, and then noticing little cat footprints — Where did those come from? — and following them into the kitchen where THE ENTIRE FLOOR IS COVERED IN WATER FROM WHERE THE PIPES UNDER THE SINK FELL APART WHILE THE DISHWASHER WAS RUNNING LAST NIGHT AS YOU SLEPT.

Day 317 — Headless Angel

[for Tuesday, Nov. 13]



Well, technically she has a head. It's just not on her.

My sister gave me this several years ago when I was confirmed.

The poor thing got broken the last time I moved. It's high time I get some super glue, I think.

Project 365

Day 316 — Packrat

See all this stuff? This stuff follows me around wherever I go. I have tried time and time again to exorcise my clutter demons, and I have given bag after bag after bag of stuff to friends and Goodwill. But still, at all times, no less than ten substantial boxes of ... stuff ... trails behind me, stashed in a closet, in a bureau, under the bed, in some spare cabinets.

I'm talking broken Furbies, miniature sticker books from when I was 12, every diary I've ever owned, broken desk lamps, loose-leaf notebook paper containing serialized and incomplete stories, sketchbooks from high school art class, billfolds given to me for Christmas when I was in third grade, creative-writing journals from my senior year, three Ziploc bags full of lead pencils and highlighters, CDs I haven't listened to in years, dusty paintbrushes given to me by my grandmother, a lamp with broken colored glass glued to it that I've never once been able to hang up, erotic poster-board paintings of featureless women, the business card of an Indian restaurant I ate at the first time I ever visited New York City, a stuffed Aflac duck, keys that go to who knows what, four spools of unmarked CDs, three boxes of photographs, my (incomplete) Sidelines clip file, bills from 2004, tiny beaded change purses stained by melted candy, wallets I've never once used, scrapbooks that have gone untouched, Christmas and birthday cards I've accumulated over the past decade, a broken ceramic angel my sister gave me when I was confirmed in our church, my old Dell desktop and its accessories, bags and purses I never use, letters from my dead grandmother and great-grandmother ... the list goes on and on.

I have this ritual once or twice a year where I pull everything out of its polite hiding place and go through it in order to "clean up" and hopefully get rid of some stuff. It almost always ends up being an exercise in pointlessness from a purely pragmatic standpoint. I throw out maybe one garbage bag of paperwork. But it gives me a chance to get reacquainted with all the stuff I've stashed and forgotten about. I get to read through my horrible adolescent poetry and cringe at the creative-writing journal I actually let a teacher read and grade my senior year. I get to tear up at the recordings of our band concerts (we were good for a bunch of little twerps). I get to remember all the bands I absolutely loved and then completely forgot about. I get to reconnect with the people in my family who have moved on, but who left me little pieces of themselves in letters and photographs.

I am a sentimental fool, see. Having little bits of my past kept stacked up in my closet helps keep every passing year within reach. If I threw these things out, how would I remember the circumstances in which they were created? My memory's not so good. I need all the help I can get.

A lot of people don't understand this attachment to things, this tendency to hoard. I think we packrats don't understand the capacity to so easily throw most things away.

Project 365

Day 306 — Surveying

[for Friday, Nov. 2]



I can sense her disapproval.

Project 365

Day 298 — Glasses

[for Thursday, Oct. 25]



Project 365