I was awakened this morning, not by our alarm, which had been set for nine am on Friday, because neither of us had wanted to leave bed at eight, but by my aunt calling from Connecticut. To be fair, most people are (or should be) out of bed at ten AM, even on Saturday, but most people don’t routinely stay up til two or three, either.
And at that point I would have gotten up /anyway/ because I had to use the bathroom.
But anyway, she called, and apparently will be here next weekend. And I’m torn, because I’d love to take next Monday off, but she has a history of being unfashionably late/cancelling at the last second/just not showing up. When my grandmother was still alive, she’d send Patti (who is the youngest and therefore the favorite) plane tickets to visit her, and then Patti would cancel at the last minute and later use the tickets for something else.
For five years my grandmother lived with my parents, who took care of her, hired a nurse to spend the day with her when they had to work, and Patti, who happened to call one time when she was alone for five minutes had the nerve to chastise my parents for not being the 24/7 entertainment committe. When asked if she’d like to take my grandmother in, my has-a-PhD-from-Stanford-and-had-her-first-teaching-job-at-Yale-but-had-to-quit-because-otherwise-she’d-have-been-fired-for-not-publishing aunt, who now makes ends meet by teaching part time at Wesleyan and editing papers for the chair of the Yale English department, and lives in an apartment that doesn’t have a bathroom, because she “just isn’t cut out for real work, the way you and your mother are, Zoetrope,” said she was too busy.
So, I probably won’t take time off, and if she really does deign to drive the twenty minutes from the overpriced decorated-by-folks-who-have-all-their-taste-in-their-mouths house of her friends Joan and Marty in Palo Alto, she’ll have to fit her visit into my schedule.
Because, you know, I love the woman, and she’s my godmother (failed at that, didn’t she?) and stuff, but her selfishness pisses me off.
On the other hand, sometimes she can be funny. Like when her ex-husband (who is a tanner buffer version of Chris Reeve in his Superman days, and whom I really miss) cheated on her with some 18-year-old (whom he later married), she called the chick’s mother on the phone and said, “Do you know that your daughter is fucking my husband?”
But those cool moments are few, and far between.

In other news, shopping for office furniture ended in a fight today, because I wasn’t in love with anything we looked at, and Fuzzy wasn’t in love with anything we looked at, and he doesn’t like change, and when I said, “Let’s re-think this and work on other projects” he grumped at me. Apparently, in the rules of Fuzzyness, you have to submit ideas for weekend projects three years in advance, in triplicate, and then talk them to death before you do anything.
I’d rather just /do/ something. Anything. Don’t care what at this point. Paint the hall bath, maybe. “Oh but we can’t because I might have to use the other bathroom once.” Yeah, well, I use the ‘other’ bathroom every day. This isn’t a great tragedy.
We won’t talk about the adventure to Fry’s in Palo ALto. Nope. Won’t even go there.
***
But I did have a lovely salon appointment today. And my nails are RED. Like fuck-me-dead red (which, by the way, was once an actual Wet-n-Wild make-up color). It’s silly, but they make me feel like such a bad-ass bitch when they’re red.
And that, aside from having hands so small the average third grader’s are larger, is why I rarely paint them so.