What Possessed Me

Home again.

Oh hi. Remember me? I'm the one who ran off to Iceland and then to Florida to visit my bereaved aunt. I'm the one who likes the baby animals. To jog your memory I give you Ying Yong, a baby tufted deer with an unfortunate name and a weight of roughly four pounds. That's less than a sack of sugar, folks. FEAST ON THAT, PEOPLES OF THE INTERNET.

I'm very happy to be home. I missed the Hawk, I missed The Fucking Cats, I missed New York, I missed my friends, I missed the balcony garden, I missed the couch. I guess I'm more of a homebody than I thought.

I also missed the blog. My blog and your blogs. I missed your quiet presence in my life.  Since visiting my aunt, I haven't felt like writing much. Instead, I've had a quiet time thinking about family dynamics and growing old and the complicated process of dying. I've been thinking about my parents and how much I cherish them and how life will seem gray when they are gone. Finally, I've been thinking about facelifts at eighty, why no one makes savory ice cream, and what I'm going to wear on my first day at work on Monday. (Black suit, black and white striped scoop neck t-shirt, hot pink patent leather skinny belt: SNOOZEFEST 2009.)

I'm soaking up my last days of freedom. All of a sudden, time seems so precious.

xoxo.

BRB

Hi everyone!  Sorry I haven't posted in a few days.  I'm working on a collection of a few thousand baby-animal photos that'll be available for your viewing pleasure next week sometime.  Because of the large number of photos, I won't be able to display them in a post; you'll have to download them as a ZIP file.  Currently the size of this file is 45.6 gigabytes, so you might want to get ready for the excitement by going out and buying a new hard drive.  They're really cheap these days; I just bought a 500-gigabyte one for $59.00.  (You could probably get one for less on Ebay, but I'm not sure if I'd recommend that.)  But yeah, so: baby-animal extravaganza!!!  I'll warn you, though: some of these pix are so cute that you'll look at them and you will die.  Literally.  You'll be alive and then you'll look at one of these particularly super-cute photos and then you'll be dead.  But the thing is, it'll be totally worth it.  Just wait.  you'll see.

Sorry, so this isn't really P.  This is S, aka (on this site and nowhere else) Fauxhawk, P's boyfriend.  We've met before.  You don't remember?  We met in January, when I told you eight things about P that you didn't already know.  You don't remember?  Really?  I was the guy with hair that you wouldn't describe as a fauxhawk.  No?

Whatever.  Anyway, P isn't here at the moment.  She's in Florida, because her mom's sister's husband passed away after a long illness, so she's down there helping her mom to help her aunt to deal with things.  So I'm Macaulay Culkinin' it this weekend, posting here because P asked me to let you all know that everything's fine with her and that she'll be back soon.   And everything is fine with her: she's just without an internet connection for a bit (I didn't know that they didn't have the internet in St. Petersburg either, but... yeah, they don't, I guess).

P also welcomed me to "set the record straight" (I'm not sure if those were her exact words because we speak to each other in Icelandic now, so there may have been ESL issues) about anything she's written on WPM that I don't believe to be true.  In general, I don't have any big complaints.  There are a few small things -- e.g., there's often mention of a place called "my terrace", and I'm not sure where that is (we have a terrace which is attached to our apartment, the apartment I've lived in for nine years, but that one is ours, so she can't be talking about that one, although she has planted a lot of stuff out there) -- but no serious complaints.  Or, no complaints that I haven't voiced by leaving comments on the relevant vaguely misleading posts (sorry, "vandalizing") to set the record straight.

I can tell you a few things about our recent trip to Iceland that you don't know, though (and/or you can read them).  One is that P was so excited about seeing puffins there that whenever we discussed the topic of when we might go and look at some, she would say/blurt, "Puffinnnnnnnnnnnnns!  Puffinnnnnnnnnnnnns!  Puffinnnnnnnnnnnnns!"  There was less of that after we went down to the harbor in Reykjavik and went on a puffin tour on which we saw no puffins, but I don't think that P was particularly devastated or even disappointed not to have seen any.  I think that it was unnerving for her, prior to our trip on the cleverly but deceptively named Puffin Express, to think that there were puffins available for viewing which she had not viewed, while other people had viewed them.  But once she realized that in actual fact there were no puffins available for viewing by her or anyone else, she was fine.

And she's fine now; just away from the internet for a few days.  She'll be back on Tuesday.

The Iceland Files: The Return of Mrs. Schwartzfarb

This is a puffin.

I am not telling you this from personal experience. Sure, I "saw puffins" - the same way you "see Cassiopea" when you're on a first date with some dude and he points in the general direction of the sky and you're like, "Oh yeah! I totally see it!" even though you have no effing clue what he's talking about and are just playing along so he thinks you're romantic and adventurous despite the fact that you're not even sure you really like him anymore after he pulled the very tired constellation seduction bit.

So, right. We plunk down the equivalent of $60 USD to get on the "Puffin Express"-  a tiny boat without sufficient seating for the number of people crammed in - and squint at some tiny, microscopic dots off the coast of an island. According to the guide, who recounts insightful tidbits such as "the puffin comes here to lay eggs and then goes off to other countries to live," the island is teeming with puffins. There are puffins everywhere.

Except no one can see them.

Of course it's a loud American with an abrasive Long Island accent who speaks up.

"WHERE ARE THE PUFFINS? I CAN'T SEE THE PUFFINS!"

Bless her - she's thinking what everyone else is thinking (but is too European to say).

"They're right there!" says the guide, pointing at a minute blur of black and white.  Everyone squints.

"WHERE?! I CAN'T SEE THEM!" I feel as though I want to hug her, even though she is appalling.

A man with a three-foot telephoto lens rolls his eyes and snickers. Homeboy can see puffin genitals. He is prepared. The rest of are idiot fuckwads with useless aim-and-shoot cameras, frantically snapping pictures at the open sea. In an unhealthy act of optimism, an Italian takes live footage of water on a handheld camera for what will be the most excruciatingly dull home movie ever created.

I put my camera down in defeat and contemplate the fact that I have transformed once again into Mrs. Schwartzfarb, the eighty-nine year old woman in my head who complains about change and noisy music and puffin tours.

I was lead to believe there were going to be puffins, says Mrs. Schwartzfarb with her inside voice. I paid good money to see puffins. I was told there would be baby puffins and that I would have an opportunity to hug them and put them in my pocket. But do you see any puffins? No. And to add insult to injury, this boat is very drafty.

We get off the boat.

"That was dumb," I say to Fauxhawk. "Let's get hotdogs."

All it takes to muzzle Mrs. Schwartzfarb is a hotdog with everything on it eaten on a sunny day. On rare occasions, she is easy to please. Iceland is looking up for Mrs. Schwartzfarb.