and not really about christmas at all

On top of our tree is a sock puppet that Marissa made last year with green googly eyes and orange pipe-cleaner hair. Before I put it up there I followed Tom around with it for awhile and he laughed for a minute and then he said, “No, really, cut it out, that thing is creepy as shit.”  In a related story, tonight I went to Marissa’s for dinner and she showed me her collection of Judy Garland Christmas ornaments and a youtube video of a chocolate bunny having its face melted off by an iron.

*

Sierra says: “Don’t you think it’s great how You’ve Got Mail is appropriate to quote in all four seasons of the year?”

(152 insights into my soul.)

*

Meg came for dinner and to sit by the tree (that’s a lie, Meg came for cheese and spinach dip and one gallon of wine) and so I made Deb’s cranberry upside down cake which, while rather unremarkable as Deb-type cakes go, was still pretty delicious. Topics covered: people who marry people who are considerably less hot than they are, why I am too old to buy jeans at Hollister, Meg’s recent discovery of procedural television in the form of a season and a half of Lie to Me. “I think I’m an expert at reading facial tics now,” she said, and I sort of believed her. I’m a pretty badass sex crimes detective, myself.

*

It’s seventeen degrees and windy and there are holes in both my gloves, right in the webbing between the fingers and the thumbs, and I’m not wearing a hat because they have not yet invented a hat that doesn’t make my bangs go all wispy and weird. The T breaks down, which I don’t mind so much because I have a New York article to read about My Boyfriend Ryan Gosling, who apparently works in a deli when he is not being a Method actor and setting girls’ loins on fire with his smoldering kisses. I suspect Ryan Gosling is who James Franco really wants to be.

The bus is late. Standing in front of the library I overhear a conversation between two men who clearly haven’t seen each other in years, catching up on jobs and girlfriends. “Same old,” one of them says, stamping his feet against the frozen sidewalk. “Same old.”