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You know, I can't sleep, so I was lying there thinking... writing is so not a glamorous profession. Being a writer can be glamorous, but only when you're not actually writing; the literal act of putting down words isn't very interesting to watch. You could never have, like, The Phantom of the Fiction Workshop, where some deformed, disgruntled professor-wannabe lived in the subterranean tunnels below, like, the student center or something, and, like, came and kidnapped me from my dorm to take me down to his underground print shop, where we would write the Noveeeeellas of the Niiiiight. Because we would be sitting there arguing over who got the laptop, because I can't write longhand anymore, absolutely cannot, and then possibly he would have to risk life and limb to get another laptop rather than listen to my constant, pointed observations that my RIGHT HAND IS CRAMPING UP AGAIN (ARE THESE THE ONLY PENS YOU HAVE?), and possibly he would have to murder one of the computer science guys to get it. And that's just not cool. And let's not even talk about the actual writing. We'd be sitting there in our pajamas with a half-eaten pizza and a bottle of Aristocrat, tippity-tapping away at our keyboards, and every three minutes he'd be like, "Where are you now? How many pages do you have? Are you on a new chapter yet?," and I'd be like, "I swear to God--work on your own thing, man," and he'd be like, "I can't, I have writer's block," and I'd be like, "How can you possibly have writer's block? You're freakin' holed up under the Spanish department sleeping on newspapers and eating stray cats--isn't that enough to write about, Mr. I Am the Angel of Writing?," and he'd be like, "Uh... maybe I should be the Angel of Editing," and I'd be like, "OH HELL NO," and I'd end up using my student ID to unlock the door, you know, like that credit card trick, while he was out stealing another carton of NutraGrain bars from the caf, and escape back to the dorm. And then he'd get so mad he'd try to win me back by crashing my next open-mike night with his scathing three-hundred-page novel/manifesto about the empty emptiness of modern existence and the futility of keeping it real in a materialistic world and you know what the saddest thing would be? Nobody at the reading would notice anything out of the ordinary. They'd just roll their eyes and order another Tazo chai.

(no subject)

I love how I'm stuck on my paper but I can come up with half the lyrics to "Novellas of the Night." Ain't that always the way.

So we just finished decorating the tree. I don't know if you guys do this, but we get very territorial over whose ornaments are whose. My mom has these tarnished old glass balls from her great-grandmother that she has to hang, and until a few years ago had a tiny white bell on her ribbon that was also passed down through the family (it was lost somehow; there's a second white bell that came to me, and I still hang that). She also has these cloth-and-porcelain dolls that are bitch-ass heavy but always have to be hung in the depths of the tree anyway. And then there are my ornaments: the little albino doll in the swing, the frosted glass unicorn, the iridescent glass bells hanging Russian-doll style within each other, the weird little wooden ornaments of, like, bears and mice in sleighs or deck chairs or whatever that my preschool teachers gave me. Sister Girl has blown-glass Wizard of Oz ornaments and a Statue of Liberty from the time she marched in the Macy's parade and Baby's First Christmas-type things. This doesn't even include the mountains of generic glass balls and angels and Santas (Icicle Santa! Wreath Santa! Disembodied Head Santa! Mountain-Climbing Santa!) and things. And God forbid one of us should start hanging before the others do.

Well, except this year we started without Sister Girl, because she was still trying to pull herself out of a pool of her own mucus. In fact, she was so sick she let us hang her ornaments while she... baked Christmas cookies (YAY). She's back asleep in bed now, so I'm going to see what kind of dinner I can go rustle up...



Okay. I had the pictures. They had to be done.