I know what you’re doing, Boston.

I know what you’re doing, you miserable frozen tundra, full of six-foot tall snow mountains defiled by dog pee and car exhaust. I know what you’re doing with your epic commutes that take three extra hours, the minutes ticking by on those enormous digital clocks they installed at the Copley T station instead of, I don’t know, using that money to make train doors that don’t freeze open at the outdoor stops. I know what you’re doing with your  sinister icy patches that exacerbate my clumsy-person PTSD, the knowledge that this winter’s inevitable wipeout is just waiting for me and my tailbone and my poor, long-suffering, perpetually-bruised patellas. I know what’s going on.

You’re trying to break my goddamn spirit, and I’m not going to let you.

We’ve spent seven long, hideous Februarys together, Boston, and while it is true that you are a horrible fucking bastard from January through March you are certainly at your ugliest during this, the cruelest of months. But lately it’s occurred to me that I’m somehow complicit in your reign of snowy terror: to paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, no one can make you feel homicidal without your consent, and I’ve spent the greater part of my twenties letting you have your wintery way with me.

Not this time.

I’ve got a plan, Boston. I’ve got twenty-eight days of gray, slushy hell staring me down, and I am going to get through them with a smile on my face if it kills me (which, all things considered, it very well might). I’ve got four rockin’ all-girls weekends lined up. I’ve got an Oscar party to plan. I’ve got a kilo of Emergen-C to consume, a sewing project to start, and the first season of Vampire Diaries on its way from Netflix. I’ve got a story to finish and a tattoo artist to find. I’ve got twenty-eight salads to eat and some frivolous-but-amazing Pottery Barn furniture to purchase. I have hamstrings to stretch in front of new episodes of The Good Wife, and I’ve got celebrities to obsess about over at completely delightful. Do you hear me, Boston? I am not afraid of you, and I will beat your ass.

But first, I’m going to need some more coffee, and possibly a hat.

When we grow up and have money we are going to start Apple Tush Farms, a for-profit agricultural endeavor in upstate New York with chickens and pigs and goats and maybe horses, except that Sierra has a fear of horses, so maybe not horses. Alpacas, though. For sure with the alpacas. At some point we’ll have to learn to loom.

Marissa is going to make the pies and take them to the market. Jennie will grow all the herbs. Personally I would like to supervise the sexy fieldhands (as its name suggests, Apple Tush is a sexy farm), though I suspect that’s a responsibility that will have to be shared.

We’re considering starting a summer stock and giving classes in sock-monkey construction and Contemporary American Cheesemongering. We’re keeping our options open. I think mostly we just want to sit in rocking chairs and shell peas and talk to one another, fireflies flicking, animals settling down in the barn behind the house.

Plus, you know. The fieldhands.

via The Big Harumph. Sent this one out to Jackie last week (because I do).

In New Paltz with Sierra and Marissa we go into a store that sells small hand soaps in the shape of small hands.

“That is the creepiest effing thing I have ever seen,” I say, gaping down at them, arranged in a ghoulish little formation on a table with their tiny fingers splayed. I’m not particularly squeamish about stuff like that–my sense of humor is frankly tasteless a good portion of the time–but Jesus. It looks like a dozen waxen babies have been tortured in an Iraqi prison camp. I absolutely one hundred percent cannot stop staring.

“It’s a joke,” the shopkeeper  tells me, like maybe I just don’t understand the pun. He rubs his palms together as if he’s washing. “Hand soaps?”

“I get it,” I tell him, and we stare at each other awkwardly for a moment. He’s still rubbing his hands together, and now it’s sort of sinister-like, as if maybe he wants to make soap out of me. “Thanks.”

“You get it? Because–”

“Yup.”

Outside, we cannot stop laughing. I dig my gloves out of my purse.

Fact: ten years ago when I was fifteen I wrote half a novel. It’s blatantly autobiographical, about girls trying to fit in and boys who look like pop stars and people having Big Conversations while standing outside on the street in the middle of the night.

I reread it just now in the middle of looking for something else in that way I have of getting distracted by (not so) shiny things and remembered so clearly how much I liked working on it, how good it felt to come home and finish my homework and write. How doing it felt like a hopeful thing and I thought: this is what I want to be when I grow up.

It is full of embarrassing, ham-handed descriptions and words like “ethereal”.

Other than that, it’s actually not so bad.

1. Resolution #1 for 2011 was “stop eating sandwiches for dinner four times a week like a lazyass” so I broke out all my cookbooks, bought expensive salad dressing and sun-dried tomatoes,  and got to work making PW’s chicken pot pie and Ina’s vegetarian lasagna and chili with actual ground beef in it instead of eleven cans of beans and some red sauce. Two nights ago I made bread pudding. On New Years I made turkey roulade. I want to show you pictures of these things, but I can’t because I dropped my camera and now it won’t turn on. Other things I have dropped lately include: one MacBook (unharmed), one large Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee cup refilled with ice water, one tray of meatballs. We ate the meatballs anyway, though the floor was kind of questionably clean. Resolution #2 for 2011 is: buy a mop.

2. Jackie’s birthday party is this weekend in NYC and we are going ’cause we like her. I asked her what I should wear and she said: “Well, I will be wearing black harem pants like on Gossip Girl.” My sister, ladies and gentlemen.

3. Resolution #3 for 2011 was to read more on my commute instead of spending an hour every morning staring vaguely out the subway window at the wall of the tunnel. This week: Stephen King’s On Writing, and oh man I love that guy. He’s so weirdly wise. Also, did you know that he used to work in an industrial laundromat and also in a mill? Because I did not know those things.

4. Wednesday was a snow day and I spent it in a blue sweater with toggles drinking coffee and watching Friday Night Lights with Tom, who likes Lyla the best but has a soft spot for Riggins. Neither of us really like Street. Both of us really like coffee.

5.  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF9-sEbqDvU]

Happy weekend. I cannot stop smiling.

On Christmas Day I have a rage blackout so Jackie takes me to the Dunkin’ Donuts palace on Central Avenue. “You’re like one of my kids,” she tells me, as if she’s the big sister. Jackie teaches preschool and has two-year-olds who bite and pinch. “I say to them, ‘You need to take a walk?'”

I need to take a walk.

At the Dunkin’ Donuts palace, which used to be a Kentucky Fried Chicken, we wait in line in front of a man who tells us he is Santa Claus, and that he likes us equally.

“That man is not Santa Claus,” I mutter, though in the moment I do appreciate his eye toward fairness.

Back in the car we turn up the radio and drive south, aimless, talking and not. Jackie tells me stories. I look out the window, cross my ankles, wait for snow.

completelydelightful.wordpress.com

(don’t say i didn’t warn you)

The Kenny Loggins Christmas CD is the weirdest and most depressing of all Christmas CDs.

“Jesus Christ,” my father says, looking at the car stereo as if it’s done something to offend him. “What is this? It sounds like he wrote it sitting alone in a dirty bathrobe with a shotgun in his hand.”

“And a plastic bottle of vodka,” I add. “Don’t forget the plastic bottle of vodka.”

“In a ratty armchair.”

“With four days’ worth of beard.”

Unsurprising: the Kenny Loggins Christmas CD is also our undisputed, gut-busting favorite.

*

I feel like I just told you everything you will ever need to know about my family.

*

Every year since things went weird with my parents Jackie and I make a schedule for Christmas. We’re very organized. We write everything down. Sometimes there is cake and usually there are movies and always there are a lot of quotes from The Office and a mix cd entitled Happy F*cking Holidays to be listened to at great volume while consuming copious quantities of iced coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts next to the Indian restaurant on West Hartsdale Avenue. For awhile we were worried about starting new traditions but by now this is a tradition in itself, peculiar and piecemeal, sure, but one I look forward to as much as anything we ever did when I was a kid.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong in the broken places.

I didn’t think it was possible.

I’m proud of us for making it work.

*

“We got the tree,” my mom says on the phone. She’s coughing; she’s got a cold.

“The two of you got it together?” I ask, listening with half an ear. I’m on my cell phone on the darkening street outside my office, heading for the train and trying not to slip on the ice.  “How was that?”

“Fine, actually,” she says, sounding pleasantly surprised. “It’s a beautiful tree.”

1. Jennie sent me this picture of hot pink cake in my email this morning. My friends are the coolest.

2. WHAT UP, YUPPIE GROCERY STORE AT BROADWAY AND I STREET. American Provisions, you appeared this week like a beacon in the dark December night of nail salons and questionable pizza joints. I look forward to perusing your artisan cheese case and no longer waiting on line for my convenience-store coffee behind men who are purchasing a six pack of Bud Light and a tin of Skoal at seven o’clock in the morning.

3. Laura’s fun, brainy theater website, The Craptacular. Go for the shirtless men! Stay for the culture.

4. This weekend: shopping, baking, elving, merrymaking. Am feeling rather festive, myself. There might even be eggnog involved.

5. “This is Peter McCallister, the father. I’d like a hotel room, please. With an extra large bed, a TV, and one of those little refrigerators you have to open with a key.”