A Girl...

Toothsome

Not much going on today. Eating a disappointingly mushy apple. Working through lunch, my manuscript now punctuated with exclamations of strawberry jelly. I have a really annoying itch on my left boob, and I'm trying to scratch it inconspicuously so as not to skeeve out my officemate. Could be worse; the woman in the next office over is using a breast pump.

***

Simon heads to England in just a few short days, so everything we do is, to me, the end-all-be-all of [fill in the blank]. "What Netflix movie do you want to be the last one we watch before you leave?" "What should we buy at the grocery store to make up the last meal you'll eat at home before you leave?" "What do you want to do during this, our last weekend together before you leave?" You'd think he was being deployed to the jungle for two years rather than vacationing in a civilized nation for ten days. I enjoy being overwrought.

***

This morning he dropped me off at the train station (for the last time before he leaves), and as he was driving away (back home! to work from bed!), he threw hard-rock horns at me and in return I made a hideous face that involved crossed eyes and a slightly pornographic tongue wag. A stranger coming up the escalator saw our exchage and chastised me with a smile: "Well, that was a nice good-bye!" he said. "He likes it!" I said. "I bet he does, heh heh *WINK*." I totally asked for that one.

***

During my first few years at this job, a lot of important people died: Mr. Rogers, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck. I had a collection of "cool dead guy" portraits posted by my desk, grainy black-and-white printouts that came to be called, collectively, my Man Wall. This was around 2003. Several years later, almost to this very day, I found out that Simon had a similar collection; since 1998, he'd been taping pictures of dead people to his computer monitor. I found out via one of our infamous Photo Swaps of Extreme Dorkitude (named posthumously). Those are my feet on my desk in the monitor and, it looks like, a Softer World panel on my screen.

I was reminded of this because today I noticed that our refrigerator is being swallowed up by not Hollywood obituaries but birth announcements. Mira, Leah, Helena, Kate. Shannon, Max, and Victor are in the mail as I type this. I need to print out a copy of the sonogram of Simon's niece or nephew to add to the bunch. Our kitchen has become a cabbage patch, each petit choux tagged by weight and length.

It's always good to acknowledge and remember the dead, but as far as hairless, toothless crowds go, I much prefer this new crop.