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things I bought myself for Christmas

• green curry tofu. I missed it soooooooooo much.
• Wilco, Being There. It's an old album, but it's new to me.
  
• House of the Spirits, Isabella Allende.
• a haircut. I really really needed it.
  

I ate green curry twice yesterday, and I would gladly do it again today, but my aunt, uncle, and cousin are visiting us from southern Illinois and there's no way they're going to want that. We are making them brunch and I am going to eat all of the smoked salmon. I hope my uncle drives his big rig and parks it in our driveway!


The above picture is Yoko Ono at age 74 [FYI: I am a Beatles fan that loves Yoko. The Beatles needed to break up anyway, otherwise they'd be making shit like the last Rolling Stones album]. Yoko claims that eating a lot of curry keeps you from aging and can make you live forever. I think she also said that about heroin. One of the two is obviously correct, because look at her legs! I absolutely do not want to live forever. Correction: I would not want to live forever unless I could eat a different kind of curry every day: Massamun, red, yellow, jalfrezi, masala... mmm curry.

Edit: I just took a shower and I can smell the curry coming out of my skin. No more curry for a few days. I have some plans that require me to smell like a human being.

MOAR JOY

I was supposed to go downtown today, but this is as far as I can get out of my house:


because it's been snowing for three days straight.


So I spent the day baking!


I am sooooooooo domestic.

CHRISTMAS JOY

I had these big plans to spend a lot of time at home away from home to minimize the amount of hair I pull out of my head. HOWEVER, Chicagoland is suddenly covered by "dibilitating snow" and -30 degree windchill weather, so no one is supposed to leave their house, let alone bar-hop and shop their way to sanity/freedom. Yesterday I tried to go downtown (because I am obviously a crazy person with no regard for my personal well-being and only care about shopping and eating pho with Shelby) but the train switches were frozen, so I couldn't get there. It's probably for the best, but damnit, I want some Asian food. I also really need to get out of the house.

Yesterday my mom was sick, and my dad had to deal with basic food preparation all day, so he's in a bad mood. Honestly-- he had to make oatmeal, toast a bagel, spread cream cheese on it, and at dinner, he had to put stir fry on his own plate. These wimmentasks have obviously raised his estrogen levels so high that he's entering physiological PMS. All yesterday and all this morning, he has been doing bizarrely unproductive cleaning tasks, like washing my breakfast dishes before I am done eating and picking up random things and demanding to know if I needed to keep them (they aren't even mine!).

Two months ago, my mother forced my dad and me to get a flu shot and claimed that she would have no exposure to the flu so she wouldn't need one. Now she claims she has the flu, and it's our fault. I'm not sure that people who have the flu have enough energy to go to the gym for two hours then come home and scream at people/cats, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt so that I can revel in my frustration that I have a degree in biology and she won't let me advise her about how viruses are actually spread. (Honestly, I'm not an expert or anything, but I do understand basic disease transmission. "The only place I go is the gym, where I am certainly not exposed to airborne fluids coming off hundreds of sweating potential flu virus carriers!" OKAY MOM.)

In summary, in case you can't make it through all of that bah humbuggery, MERRY CHRISTMAS from my family insane asylum.

A few weeks ago, before bedtime, I encountered the worst thing that an insectophobic single person can find when she is exhausted and hoping to get a good night's sleep: a palmetto bug (read: GIANT FLYING ROACH) hanging out on the ceiling above my bed.

To make a long story short, I had to chase it around my room with a can of Raid for 20 minutes until I had finally sprayed it enough to kill it, and by the time the whole ordeal was over, I was too freaked out to sleep at all. Since then, I've been having nightmares almost nightly about waking up with insects in my bed, crawling out of the walls, etc. Sometimes I hear my heating vents rattle and I'm convinced that a roach the size of Paris Hilton's dog is skulking around up there.

Is there some kind of hypnosis that could benefit me? Something that would make me think of roaches in the same tomboyish way that I think of spiders, worms, snakes, toads, and mice? Could that remedy be delivered to me in a vodka tonic or tequila shot? Please advise.