in the poker game of misfortune, we acknowledge lmo‘s apartment fire with our own living room ceiling, which drips, peels and bulges with un-diagnoseable pipe leakage, causing our manager to threaten Brazil-like reconstruction and the seizure of our living room, and we raise her one late-night trip to the emergency veterinary hospital.

at 2 am on a sunday night, the hospital waiting room was filled with pet owners whose pets had eaten mouse poison, paperclips, polarfleese. there were no kitty flues or kennel coughs, just grotesque emergencies of the intestinal track. one doctor poked his head out of the operatory to explain to the parents of a constipated cat that, “we’re doing the plumbing now,” indicating the angry snarls from within. a nervous poodle paced the waiting room while her seven puppies had traces of rat poison pumped from their stomachs. much to my relief, zeke hadn’t tied his intestines into knots around a twist tie, but instead had spontaneously developed a urinary tract infection. $226 + cab fare (bless you, cab driver who didn’t refuse to pick us up with our cat in tow) later, all was set right with a dose of antibiotics. if you’ve never seen a cat growl and hiss at his own genitals, well, it’s one of the stranger sights i’ve seen.

ah, so this is what they mean by chicago winter. it was a lovely -8 degrees out this afternoon. the extreme cold engenders this feeling of camaraderie among chicago residents, a sort of we’re-all-in-it-together look of sympathy that strangers give one another on train platforms. they wear those big, furry russian hats with the ear flaps without the slightest trace of irony, ski mitts and fur-trimmed hoods. in our drafty 19th century apartment building, the cold creeps in under the windows, rolls off the wide windowsills and creeps along the wooden floors like an invisible fog. the radiators puff, clank and hiss, a comforting sound, and the steam on the inside of the windows has frozen to a thick, sparkly frost. the static electricity in the air has reached new levels; zeke sits on my lap and wags his tail against my polar-fleece pants and it makes all the fur stick straight out. i pet him and the electric shock runs out the bottom of his paws and zaps me through my clothes. even neighborhood errands like going to the bank and getting groceries become herculean tasks. to make matters worse, weather.com is taunting me with photos of arizona. i’ll bet if i were in florida i’d get pictures of vail, colorado…to put things in perspective, tho, i hated the 108 degree humid summer days chicago offered up last august even more than this. i didn’t come to chicago expecting to like the weather – and i don’t. but i like almost everything else, so it’s not too bad a trade.

over at the last embassy, enjelani is closing up shop. metameat is on hiatus and ihateyoutoonces has been silent for weeks. is the blog dead? have we outgrown it? worked out our early-twenty-something growing pains in public, and are now busy with the details of the lives we’ve created?

ever since i was a kid, i’ve had this narrator stuck in my head, this extra voice that put a quick spin on everything i was thinking, seeing, doing – the blog was just the first way i found of working that narrator out of my head and into a format where i don’t just look like i’m mumbling to myself. so slithy tove isn’t folding yet, anyway – i’ve just had a lot on my mind and it’s been hard to focus my thoughts into anything coherent for a while.

christmas was: recovering from the flu (the kind that makes you lie on the couch and moan softly for about five days and wonder why you didn’t get a flu shot like your mother told you to), then watching it snow and snow and snow in a cabin in the idaho mountains. snow shoeing, downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, bickering with my brothers in the usual fashion. below is a picture of Henri, our little christmas miracle, whom we rescued from the animal shelter on Christmas Eve. at 12 weeks old, he’s as fearless and plucky as can be, and weights about half a pound – all fur, claws and a purr. it’s hard to keep track of what day it is, tho, on vacation up there, and life didn’t seem to come back into focus until i got back to chicago earlier this week. new years was simple but pleasant – a couple of friends over for fondue for dinner, then a swank party full of Improv Olympic actors – the dress-up-and-drink-champagne sort of party that makes the new year seem glamorous, but i’m terrible at parties where i know no one. me and andy:

me: hey, look, there’s that guy we saw do that skit about D&D a few weeks ago

andy: oh yeah, he was really good

me: yeah, we thought he had a suspiciously accurate knowledge of D&D, remember?

andy: hehe. i’m going to go introduce myself.

me: uh, i dunno. he’s chatting up that pretty blonde. should we really butt in and accuse him of being a D&D geek?

andy: yeah, that is kinda a cock-block, isn’t it?

eventually we got around to the other side of the room and found a way to introduce ourselves. the actor in question did confess a childhood penchant for gaming, which in turn forced us to admit our own nerdly histories. the beautiful blonde turned out to be his wife, who tried valiantly to make polite small talk with me, which i am very bad at. i retreated to a corner and pet the dog wearing a ballerina outfit. she looked out of place, too.

new years resolutions:

stop working through my lunch hour. it doesn’t really save me money, it just makes me tired, cranky, and more likely to buy junk food.

stop biting my cheeks, tongue, lips. find a new nervous habit if necessary, but kick this one. working at a dentist’s office can really reform a girl.

extend my ban on animal-tested beauty products to the animals i eat, as well. this wishy-washy vegetarianism just makes me feel guilty and crave bacon. better to stick to meat that wasn’t tortured or stuffed full of hormones and antibiotics. plus, being vegetarian when i’m eating out means that i don’t have to be all paranoid about whether restaurants handle meat products safely.

eat more super cancer-fighting fruits and veggies. that whole five-a-day thing is a lot harder than it sounds. veggie go limp in my fridge so easily, and chicago in winter isn’t exactly chock full of farmer’s markets selling fresh produce.

all work and no play makes me a dull girl.

i always did hate the way that saying lacked both meter and rhyme. which reminds me of the harry & david brand advent calendar my mom gave us. behind each door is a piece of very fine chocolate, and a little poem about approaching christmas:

It’s the first week in December

A time to remember for boys + girls.

Twenty-four days to go

Will we have enough snow?

Singing songs of Christmas cheer

Hoping all of Santa’s friends will soon be here.

today is the 12th of december and so far, only ONE of the poems has actually had any sort of meter. apparently harry & david are better at food than they are at composing rhyming poetry.

we are busy trying to build a $4000 set for $1200, and keep a day job, and strike another show, and find a summer job, and prepping to stage manage a new show and seeing some free plays and entertaining andy’s parents and trying not to spend money we don’t have. also it is very brr outside. 10 degrees brr.

have come to the unpleasant realization that i need to start looking for a summer job. seasonal employment is a little manic depressive – just as soon as new-job-jitters are abating, the will-i-be-unemployed-jitters begin to loom. the thought of spending the whole summer just working full time at my day job alternately terrifies me and relieves me – it’d be SO EASY just to ignore that ugly task – compiling lists of companies i want to work for, sending out cover letters, networking, schmoozing, interviewing, then packing up, moving somewhere, learning the ropes at a whole different job just in time to start worrying about where the next one will come from. but on the other hand, at my day job i process insurance claim forms in a dental office that has no windows. i don’t love teeth, nor do i love insurance companies (altho a side effect of looking at diseased mouths on a daily basis is that i now spend considerably more time worrying about the oral health of my loved ones, and my own flossing habits have been thoroughly reformed). and i really don’t love getting up for work at 6am. there’s a reason i keep chasing the elusive dream. it doesn’t expect me to show up before 10.

today we attempt the impossible, when we cook thanksgiving dinner for my parents – a new step in the adult-child-parent relationship: hosting one’s parents for the holidays. the fridge has never seen as much food as it currently contains and i’ve been the house cleaning nazi for about a week now. plans to have purchased a couch by the time thanksgiving arrived were stymied: the operator at IKEA swore she had 80 couches in stock, but they were sold out by the time we found our way to schaumburg. football will have to be watched middle-eastern style, from floor cushions leaned up against the as-of-yet-undecorated walls.

seeing chicago with my parents is like seeing a whole different chicago: we eat dinner at trendy restaurants, take cabs up and down the festively decorated Michigan avenue, see plays where we actually paid for the tickets…it all feels very glamorous. my parents ask, what’s that building? and that one? and we have no idea. our chicago has been full of early morning train rides, long work days, seeing plays that one of us is in or had free tickets to, making “starving actor dinners” of spaghetti or pad thai with other impoverished friends. there hasn’t been a lot of time for sight-seeing (i work in the basement of the tallest building in chicago and i still haven’t been to the observation deck on top), but our vision of chicago isn’t so bad, either. i am thankful for both versions.

there’s a feral bunny rabbit that has taken up residence in my (very urban) front yard. i’ve seen these rabbits a little further out in the suburbs, but never here. he’s been here for a couple of days, just nibbling on grass and roots and stuff and keeping a wary eye on me when i pass. mouse, the pit bull who lives on the first floor, must be going nuts. any sign of trouble, however, and the bunny wiggles through the fence and disappears into the parking lot next door. i worry that he’s wandered away from the huge yard of the church across the street, and now he can’t figure out how to cross the busy street to get back to his home.

secondly, the portion of the downtown loop around where i work smells distinctly like fresh-baked cookies. not just once, but all the time. there’s about a four or five block area in which there is the unmistakeable sent of chocolate chip cookies on the breeze. i certainly haven’t bumped into any giant cookie-making factories on my lunch breaks, so i’m perplexed as to where the smell is coming from. not that i’m complaining, mind you – there are much worse things a downtown could smell like.

bunny rabbits in my front yard and the smell of cookies on the wind. it’s like something out of charlie and the chocolate factory.

paul talks about jonathan frazen; i follow the amazon link to see what else he’s written besides The Corrections. the list of “customers who bought this book also bought these books ” beneath frazen’s How to be Alone: Essays is as follows:

Strong Motion: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen (Paperback)

You Shall Know Our Velocity: Or, Sacrament by Dave Eggers (Paperback)

Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer (Author) (Paperback)

it’s somehow fitting that the same people who purchased Eggers’ novel about personal inertia also can’t be bothered to do yoga, and yet hope that by purchasing a book, yoga will somehow be done for/to them. kinda like the series i purchased in college called Japanese for Busy People (what could i do? i was in love with a boy who had ditched me for asia). no wonder lauren snickered at them – the books might as well have been called Japanese for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Learn Japanese. never did get past the ordering-soup-buying-train-tickets stage.

the first snowfall in chicago followed the first 20 degree night, so that sunday, walking down a quiet, tree-lined residential street, the snowflakes were bumping elbows with the leaves, which were dropping off the trees seemingly of their own accord: no wind to shake them loose, just an imperceptible snap, fibers weakened by the cold night, and they drifted toward the street, mingling with the fat, dry snowflakes.

yesterday was a day filled with chicago regulars: in the morning i rode the crazy old man train up to evanston, upon my return in the evening i was greeted by the dead meat truck vegans. both of these probably require some explanation:

the crazy old man is this older man, neatly groomed, who rides the last morning express train that runs north to evanston. i don’t normally go to work that late, but when i do, i somehow always manage to get into the same car as this guy. i don’t even have to look up from my book; i can recognize his voice as soon as the train pulls out of the station. in a thick greek accent, he preaches a sermon of old testament-style religion, fallen angels and the like, tossed together with thoughts about space travel, robots, and what technology will do for/to our society. he sits staring out the window, speaking in a loud, gruff voice, with the same pauses and intonations that i recall our catholic priest using during homilies when i was a kid. after 10 minutes or so, he’ll break off mid-sentence. a pregnant pause follows for a minute or two, then he launches back to the sermon without so much as a deep breath. it’s as if he’s been doing this his entire life. and this goes on for the 40 minute train ride.

the dead meat truck vegans are a little more annoying and less fascinating. once a week or so, they set up shop right outside of the el station where i get off to go home. they have a van that has roll-up sides, like a garage door, and behind the door is a television showing bloody videos of how cows are raised and slaughtered. the vegans stand up against the buildings, so that in order to pass, one has to choose avoiding looking at the gory cow video or avoiding looking at the smiling vegans handing out leaflets. i’m somehow caught between wanting them to know that i don’t eat meat for the same reasons – slaughter house horrors, antibiotics wrecking havoc on our bodies and the environment, the social irresponsibility of feeing grain to cows instead of to starving people – and wanting them to stop looking so smug and self-important (because somehow they must intuitively know that i secretly crave and occasionally indulge in (free-range, organtic) bacon, and therefore am not a real vegetarian). later i had the misfortune of returning to that corner and having dinner in at S.I.R. (the Standard India Restaurant – indian food you can call Sir! haha) around the same time that the vegans took a dinner break, and so had to listen to them discuss amongst themselves (in voices loud enough for every diner in the small restaurant to listen) the wonders of their conversion to veganism, and how unenlightened the carnivorous masses are.

post script: new words for MS Word’s spellchecker: “vegan” and “veganism”