Things That I Wish Weren't Right Now:

  1. The soup I am eating for lunch is a veritable salt lick, and I do mean an entire salt lick reduced into my one small bowl of creamed tomato red pepper soup. My lips keep squinching up. Later, I will bloat.

  2. Oscar, one of our two cats, is smart. He is too smart. His intelligence has lead him to figuring out how to open zippers, and specifically last night, the zippers on my knitting bag. He and Onion, the other of the two, must have been chasing balls of yarn around the apartment for hours, frolicking around chair legs and down the hall, because when we arrived home, there was yarn wrapped around chairs, the bed, the sofa, the desk, and any other upright thing in the apartment. Thankfully, they didn't attack the scarf I am knitting with some yarn that Joan sent me.

  3. My spine is trying to torture me by pinching a nerve in my neck, and the drugs I've got aren't cutting it. I am taking the muscle spasms as pure mockery of my being a slave to the human condition.

  4. I finally received a letter telling me that my colposcopy is on March 7th, and I cannot stop thinking that my swollen glands and cramps and low energy are due to my being riddled with cancer, even though I know that I have a cold, my period, and seasonally affected depression.

  5. My glands are swollen.

  6. My menstrual cycle can go suck eggs.

  7. Seasonally affected depression can go hang out with my menstrual cycle.

  8. As I do at this time every winter, I am convinced that all things are potentially fatal, and I am surprised that neither I nor the Palinode has yet succumbed to a spill down the stairs or a collision with a drunk driver or an accidental suffocation after inhaling a peanut. Even my paperclips look like death's emissaries.

  9. I hate cooking more than I hate doing just about anything else, and I am afraid thay one of these days the Palinode is going to tell me that my food preparation has to involve more than opening a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of salsa.

  10. I used to like being small-chested, and I was until recently, but now my boobs are ballooning bit by bit. I was an A-cup until I was twenty-seven. Now I am a D-cup at thirty-four. I tell them things like You guys are stupid and This late-blooming can stop now and Do you really want to go down this road, because in twenty or thirty years, you are going to look back and wish you hadn't. They don't listen, those earless fuckwads.

  11. I've become so neurotic lately that I actually pause to wonder such things as whether there is something intrinsically wrong with me that, at the age of five, I never had an attachment to Santa and was more concerned with why my parents had bothered to lie to me and then do such a horrible job of it.

  12. I keep suddenly wanting things like some kind of cake or red mittens or a home euthenasia kit for my cats, and I don't have those things. I rarely if ever feel a flash desire for the apple in the basket right next to the sink.

  13. "Jesus Christ Superstar" is stuck in my head, only with the alternate lyrics that I learned in childhood: Jee-sus Christ Soo-per-star, who in the hell do you think you are?

  14. My feet are sweaty.

On the other hand, I did discover something nice today. I found a new word. It is plenipotentiary, and it sounds beautiful when you whisper it under your breath like a secret.