Plus one makes life different

I’ve lived alone for most of my adult life, save that toxic year or three with my mom in the early 90’s, and even though I’m lonely at times, I think there is a lot to be said about living alone. You can:

• walk around nekkid
• watch stupid TV shows like “I survived a Japanese game show” and not have to apologize to anyone for it.
• eat trans fats freely and not be reprimanded about possible impending heart attacks.
• not polish your redwood coffee table for 27 years and be ok with it.
• talk to yourself…and answer yourself…and laugh at your own jokes.
• drink directly from the diet coke bottle without disrupting any kind of bad karmic equalizing factors.
• and most importantly you can revel and delight in the fact that you have so much cat fur floating around your apartment, you could probably manufacture at least two more adult sized cats and not have to go to the SPCA and face all those sad kitty faces. Why? Because you can make your own cats at home, silly!

My best friend just came to visit from California. The same one whose husband had condemned the entire state of New York last year as “dangerous”, you know because of all our drive by shootings, thugs, drug dealers and…well, just all that stuff. I mean, the most exciting thing that has happened in the Village in the last month was that a certain big name rocker got busted for cocaine a block from my apartment.  Was that unusual? I’ll say. It was more unusual that he was even in the Village (his band was playing at some Indian casino about 40 miles away). I mean, we’re mostly famous for REAL snow. Not the kind you put up your nose.

So anyways, my friend’s husband finally realized that my neighborhood was relatively safe (guess he didn’t know about the nationally televised drug bust. Heh…snort…snort. Inside joke. Bygones!!) and “let” my friend come back for a visit this last week. Alone. Well, kinda. I mean besides the 29,000 cell phone calls he made to her to discuss what he had for  dinner, about how their 9 cats were, about what happened when he walked out to their hot tub in the yard (nothing apparently. He survived. And no SWAT teams were called in. Thank god!!!!), and what temperature their pool water was.  

oh. my.god. Are all marriages like that? He’s a Libra. Maybe he was just lonely or their cable TV was out and only my friend could put it back in for some marriage related reason.

It was nice seeing my friend though. Her visit was somewhat expected, but I had no idea when. She had said she wanted to see my art show and I guess she realized it was only up for another week. She has free flying passes since her entire family worked in the airline industry.

It did make it a little freaky for me though. I had just taken my mom to the mall to buy a bedspread. Talk about fun. I’d say it pretty much ranked up there with my colonoscopy a few year ago.  She is still pretty slow from her surgery of course. Okay, basically she shouldn’t have been out shopping for bedspreads, I’d say. I was emotionally exhausted when I got home. 

But then I had a message from “S” on my machine saying “I’m coming to NY but only if you call me back immediately, otherwise I’m going on to my daughter’s in Vermont.” The message was 2 hours old. At 10 p.m. So I called her immediately and fortunately she hadn’t left for the airport yet. Can you imagine though having someone descend into your life with absolutely no warning? Especially someone nervous and neurotic, who only has about one human in their house about every 7 months? But we did connect and she was going to be getting in at 8:40 a.m. the next morning. Can you say “Massive House Cleaning in 2 Hours”?

I had met “S” when we had worked together 27 years ago at M@cy’s. She’s older than me and had always been a sort of surrogate mother figure I guess. Very energetic. And what I didn’t realize until this trip…very very very talkative. Maybe it’s because I don’t socialize much anymore, but I felt a little overwhelmed by it. I talked too, of course. In fact, I kinda got in a little therapy session, since I haven’t seen “A” for a while. But she talked alot about problems with her family, with a great deal of anger, which was something I had never seen before. And suddenly I flashed upon how it must feel to be a shrink. At times, it just seemed endless and emotionally draining.

I also felt a little stung by some of her criticisms or (cough) “observations about my life.” Yes, I am a delicate little flower. I admit it! But she was commenting on things like me drinking Diet Coke (soda is bad for you), me not eating vegetables and salads (that’s very unhealthy, DO YOU TAKE A MULTI-VITAMIN???), me not having a cookie sheet to bake cookies on (Oh witty, I can’t believe you’ve never baked cookies in your entire life. Well believe it. Not everyone with a vagina knows how to bake cookies), me not checking all labels for trans fats (I just learned what a trans fat is in the last 6 months, and its a little late now), me not polishing my coffee table with Pledge (hey, I live alone. Guardcat washes her butt on that table. And yes, I do wipe it down every day or so), me not having a Scrabble dictionary (and who am I playing Scrabble with. Guardcat?) and then making comments about mental illness (truly not intentional. I did jump in and mention that not ALL mentally ill people are homeless and that we can occasionally have an IQ higher than 12). I guess she did notice that I started to snap back a few times, as I am want to do (right Mom?), because she finally started to apologize.

I don’t want you to think her visit was a total disaster though.  I took her for some nice walks around the Village and out at the Canal (no pervs this time, fortunately). We looked at photos and played Scrabble, minus the official Scrabble dictionary.  We had dinner out once and then I cooked her several dinners and was totally amazed that I could. I mean WTF? I can cook? Really? I almost fainted. And here I’ve always been wishing for a guy who could cook. Maybe I just won’t tell him of my exquisite cooking prowess and then I can have him make me waffles wearing only an apron or something. 🙂   

Anyways on Monday, we finally went down to my art show, which closes next Friday. Happily, she liked one painting so much, she bought it! Yay! Although it was one of my favorites… as in, one of the ones I kept in my bedroom as part of the decor…as in, I had put an impossibly high price on it so it wouldn’t sell….but, since my butthead car decided to break down in July, I guess I had to say goodbye to…

Oh well. (weeping profusely)

The night before we had baked cookies (I’m practically like Martha -frickin-Stewart now), and something really weird happened. We had been playing Scrabble and I went out to the kitchen to get the cookies out of the oven. When I put them on top of the stove, I turned to grab a cookie off a dish on the kitchen counter behind me and there was this tiny little perfect black cricket climbing around on top of the cookies.

WTF? A cricket on TOP of the kitchen counter? How the hell did he get there? I’ve never even seen a cricket, let alone a solid black one, anywhere near my apartment. I squealed like a little girl when I saw it. “S”  thought I was scared. Frankly I don’t know what she did with it when she came to look at it, but I think it was an obscure sign of good luck.

Why? Because the next day I got another month long solo art show for September in a small art gallery in our city’s art trail.