Today is Friday the thirteenth. A day that supposedly brings misfortune and all that sort of unhappy crap. I don't believe a word of that particular superstition. Almost always, good things have happened to me on Friday the thirteenths. But I still maintain that it would be a little bit creepy if, say, Hallowe'en fell on Friday the thirteenth some year. I think it does that every, like, twelfth year or something...
Heh. Took you a minute, didn't it?
Try it on your mom. Mine falls for that one every damned time.
Stayed awake for thirty-one hours in a row this week. I know, I know, it's not good for me. But actually, it WAS good, because when I finally went to sleep, I was feeling wonderful. I don't remember all the details of all those hours -- particularly after the twenty-four mark had passed -- but I know they must have been nice. I fell asleep writing a love letter to Neil. It was probably pretty dumb. At that point, I was feeling pretty damned stupid.
When I woke up, I was ravenous. So I got some stuff for dinner and cooked a mini-feast. I don't have enough money for a real feast; a small one had to do. I made steak and sautéed mushrooms and corn. I washed each mushroom for two minutes before I cooked them. They were Ostrom's mushrooms. The Ostrom's farm is in Lacey, near where I used to live. Near enough, in any case, to have permeated a lot of my oxygen with the unmistakable smell of nasty, nasty livestock poop. On one side of my former residence was the dump. On the other side was the mushroom farm. I made absolutely sure that every ounce of Lacey was scrubbed off my food. And I cooked them at a pretty high temperature, just in case I missed any minute particle of Lacey.
It's not the poop thing that gets to me... I've eaten some pretty scary food in my life that probably had much worse in it than a little morsel of poop. But there's not much that's worse than Lacey. I refuse to ingest anything that might have any particle of Lacey on it.
It was a pretty good mini-feast. But I decided that, after all that, I'd rather just have a peach than the mushrooms.
There are a few people who would contend that refusing to eat Lacey mushrooms -- even sterilized ones -- is representative of some sort of neurosis. Probably, those individuals would say it's really very typical of MY particular neurosis.
I frequently refute that accusation. Me? Neurotic?
Uh... yeah, I guess I am.
Fine. I am neurotic. I have weird habits and rituals. I have bizarre ideas about the relative cleanliness and dirtiness of things (I subscribe to the "ten-second rule" with food, but I'll be damned if I'll shake a stranger's hand without washing shortly thereafter...). I worry about things that are absolutely ridiculous. I fear things that make no sense, and I'm perfectly fine with things that should probably terrify me. I click pens, even if they're not the clicky kind. I fidget with gum wrappers, bus passes, etc., until they're basically destroyed. I am neurotic.
And the idea of consuming a Lacey mushroom is, to me, a lot like the idea of licking a wall in a New York City subway tunnel. Although... I have done the latter. I have never done the former, at least not intentionally.
Fine. I lied. I am neurotic. But I'm happy. It's a weird world; I'm just fitting in.
There's some weird battley-type thing going on in my guestbook... Seems that everybody's got an opinion about what Helena's really like. Some evidently think I'm a "self centered brat." Some apparently think I'm "smart and self supporting." Someone else apparently thinks I "distill the richness out of just being." All within the course of three days.
Cripes, people... I'm not the type who has to demand consensus -- in fact, I really dislike people who DO need them -- but this kind of ambivalence is weird even to me...
Thank you to those of you who think good things about me. I'm happy that you have the eyes for that. And to those of you who think really shitty things about me -- like that I'm "too much to put up with" -- I'm sorry that that's all you've seen. I am, in fact, not always a nice person, and am occasionally really awful. But if that's all you can see, there's also something wrong with your vision, and I pity you.
By the way... If anybody feels like giving Neil advice, do feel free to email it to me, and I'll be sure that he gets it. Put "Advice for Neil" in the subject heading, and I'll forward it without even reading it. However, if you want to talk shit about him, or my relationship with him, or ANYTHING along those lines, you're fucking with the wrong person. Consider this a first and a last warning. You wanna go there, then fine, we'll go there. But I'm telling you ahead of time, if you fuck with him, you're fucking with me -- a part of me that is capable of probably anything. I would advise you to think REAL long and hard before saying anything other than "Neil is an absolutely wonderful person." Anything any less kind than that is absolutely unacceptable to me.
Just FYI...
I need some ice cream and some sleep. In approximately that order. Chocolate syrup on the former.
Goodnight.
~Helena*