wrinkle spray

The people (and I do mean four or five people) who used to live in this apartment left everything behind when they moved out.

So I kept their cleaning supplies.

These cleaning supplies were put into utility by me (over the year and x amount of months I've lived here) on a desperate-need basis.

Because I hate Fabreeze and its ilk.

Still, a particular product stood out. And not even remotely for its utility.

I'll explain.

It's this something that's meant to "release" wrinkles, which - although it sounds lazy, and is lazy, smells incredible.

And now, it's scent sends me back in time. I'm sentimental about this scent.

Which is funny because I haven't lived here more than a year (and a half) if that (not a very long time) and I admit (I really don't know how long I've lived here) it feels like forever.

I'm starting to believe that time is elliptical.

It's called rain. This wrinkle spray.

It's a product from another land that is neither Chicago or America.

I'm sure there is a counterpart called sun.

And I'm sure sun smells like oranges.

But Rain is not sun.

Rain is a dark, gloomy, defiantly unhappy blend of white musk and black pepper.

That's my take.

A rainy day spray. For un-sunny days.

That removes wrinkles. Without an iron..

Victoria lives in Chicago and writes in her blog occasionally.

don't take this the wrong way, ok?

Ok.

I won't..

Immediately assume the attitude of taking it the right way.

(ahem)

Certain elements of conversation are impossible. Certain things can't be said.

Things such as:

what makes you think that I care what you think?

That's too many thinks.

And retorts get confused by awkward language. They lose their mojo.

Less words. Always good as a rule.

For that matter, less twenty dollar words.

Sometimes the five dollar word is more effective.

Sometimes someone must tell another person bad news about something they have done.

Ok. No problem.

How does the recipient of the bad news get it across (to the messenger) that they are ok with this?

Because anything the recipient says in that respect will seem defensive.

So the recipient says nothing.

But there's the nagging question of why exactly did the messenger make such a production of breaking such news (to me) so gently?

Wasn't it a bit contrived (the kid glove handling of one who is clearly already a well adjusted recipient of so much bad news)?

Had the recipient ever given the messenger any reason to feel that they couldn't simply, unemotionally inform the recipient of ANY bad news?

Had they?

And as I write this I realize that there's an episode of Seinfeld about this.

One time I mistakenly wandered into a website that was designed to teach kids strategies for defusing potentially violent situations with words (complete with colorful graphics).

It listed every possible insult one might endure.

When I clicked on an insult, a matrix of non-escalating responses would open up.

The person who designed the website had considered the myriad of ways these conversations could go.

The responses were designed to unravel hatred via mild confusion.

So that the response to:

"..hey nice Kmart t-shirt.!"

might be:

"..thank you, it's 3pm.."

Brilliant. Sad.

This led to googling verbal self-defense.

Millions of things popped up.

Just as I suspected.

bookcase

A quick note on blogs:

I realized today that some of the blogs that I used to read are now gone.

I'm editing my blogroll as I write this, as I found certain addresses bought out by either adult or splog sites.

That kind of discovery is alarming.

..what on earth has happened to you.. where was I ..? maybe I could have helped.. I had no idea it had gotten so bad..

Others blogs were abandoned, that is, not updated in over a year (in one case, eighteen years).

Where was I?

It's about time and interest. I get it.

I have no time and little interst. Yet I update today.

Why?

Why don't I let go of my blog?

Yes, why..

********

I got a new bookcase and it turns out that I hate organizing books.

Arranging books by color is pleasing to the eye- but simply makes no sense.

I don't want to stage my apartment as I stage things for a living.

So I put my books into catagories. This alone took hours.

And some things fit in more than one catagory. So this required that I decide some things about my books (in some permanent way). Something that I knew as I was doing it would not matter to me whenever I walked away from the bookcase, but mattered so much right then.

And the new bookcase is tricky. At first glance the shelves look to be uniform in height. In reality, they increase in size in increments of a quarter inch from top to bottom.

This threw off my (finally) established catagories in bad way.

So I worked on this all day.

Now all of the books are in the bookcase and it probably weighs about five hundred pounds.

And I stand back and realize that the whole thing needs to move about six inches to the left.

And the books look ugly..

(though they make sense)