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Friends, this post is to inform you that I am moving. I’m not sure where I’m going yet, but it will be someplace cold (possibly Canada, or an area with “tundra”). I also don’t know when I’m moving, but it will be soon – hopefully before winter ends. While I shall miss all of you dearly, I just really want to get some use out of this down comforter on which I threw away my hard-earned dolla-dolla-bills, y’all.

Cue harp music and that wavy thing they do with the camera when someone’s having a flashback on an 80s television sitcom.

After I got back from visiting Brother in Warshington in August, I started having flashbacks of my hotel bed. But instead of waking up in a cold sweat and hiding behind furniture when startled, I’d catch myself daydreaming about that sweet, sweet nest of luxury into which I’d collapse my weary body each evening after spending the day sightseeing and having my skin seared off by the blazing sun.

Oh, friends: it. was. divine.

Oh, friend, I will not forget you.

So divine, in fact, that I was able to almost-completely ignore my near-crippling phobia of hotel beddding (though I think the sun poisoning lowered my resistance). And after I returned home, I wanted more.

Like some sort of down-feather junkie, I stalked the internet in hopes of finding some kind of affordable down blanket into which I could basically assimilate myself each evening. I would – literally – not rest until The Perfect Bed was recreated within my own apartment. And at last, I met my match through Overstock.com.

This is where the fantasy unfortunately ends.

The furnace-ing of my apartment is such that the bedroom and bathroom become far hotter than the kitchen and living room when the heat is running. Like – very noticeably different. Like, whoa. Don’t misunderstand; this is GREAT when taking a shower on a cold morning! …but it’s not so great for other things.

Like sleeping with a down comforter on top of you.

I thought that I read somewhere that down blankets are good year-round, but this one is apparently not one of those magical blankets. I’m good until about 3:00 each morning, when I wake up soaked in sweat (ok, not literally, I don’t have some sort of condition) and have to turn the fan on. 32 degrees outside and I’m sleeping with a fan on. Why don’t you just kick off the damn blanket? you’re saying. Except I sleep better with a blankie on top of me, I whine in response. It feels weird to just lay there with nothing on top of me. That’s what she said! That’s what she said!

In defeat, I’ve been forced to abandon my wondrous down blanket in favor of the normal old quilt that served me perfectly well for the past eight years of my life (I imagine there’s some sort of bedclothes trash-talking that goes on when I’m away: Haha, sucka! I was here first and I WILL ALWAYS PREVAIL. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!).*

But the memories of Perfect Bed still haunt me, which is why I must relocate myself to more frigid climes (or just sleep with the window open, I guess) in order to once again relive the magic. For I will always remember the good times, Perfect Bed. They can’t take that away from me.

*okay, now my quilt is kind of scaring me.

So my kitchen sink leaks. Or something. Like, you turn it on and water slowly flows from places in the fixture where water Should Not Pass. And I’m no plumber, so I’m not sure exactly what the problem is. My best guess is that something needs to be tightened or turned or caulked or welded or augered.* But what? Surely I can find some diagrams on the internet, I think. Then I can more accurately describe the situation to Maintenance Guy Who Never Wears Pants.

Really - is all this really necessary? Certainly some of those are just for show.

I was excited by the prospect of enriching my knowledge of plumbing when it very suddenly hit me: Why? Why would I need to do this? Mr. Shorts doesn’t give a fuck if I can’t accurately describe what washer needs replacing.** His job is to figure out what’s wrong, and then to fix it. Like a doctor, but in jorts and steel-toed boots. Really, I’d look just as silly referencing diagrams in Plumbing for Dummies while I filed my Maintenance Request as Joe Schmoe telling their doctor what to prescribe or what tests to perform.

I have much better things to do with my time than learn plumbing, anyway. Like write blog posts.

*And there exhausts my plumbing vocabulary.
**Oooh, I remembered another one. See also: Trap. Plunger. Drano.

An entire box of cheese-somethings (what the hell is that word? Can anybody read it?) AND a can of tea?

What more would I possibly need for lunch?! Aside from Cheez-its and bottled water, of course.

Okay: Wasn’t there a movie about this?* Some magic channel-changer movie? Click, I think it was called? Starring Adam Sandler? I never saw this movie, but I’m pretty confident that it didn’t win any major awards. Writing, directing, acting, sound mixing, editing, lighting and producing aside, here’s why (note the caps for emphasis):

We don’t need a fast-forward button for life. YOU ARE YOUR OWN FAST FORWARD.

Sorry: did I not make myself clear? Once again, for the cheap seats:

YOU ARE YOUR OWN FAST FORWARD.

so. freaking. smiley.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. The ability to just will  something to be over would be pretty freaking sweet, wouldn’t it? Just skip on through that root canal, say. Or an unpleasant conversation with someone. Or even something much more significant – the aftermath of a personal or public disaster, for instance.

Like if your family were killed in a nuclear accident. That’d be rough.**

Humans possess the unique (read: kick-ass) ability to not just experience a wide variety of emotions, but to rationally process through them. Is this tricky? You betcha. But does it help us, in the long run? More importantly: DOES IT EXPEDITE OUR OWN HEALING PROCESS?

Oh fuck yes.

A lot of folks have heard that whole “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger” line, right? It’s unfortunately become cliche as hell, but it’s no less true. If we were never tested emotionally, we’d just be a race of flat affect-ed, unthinking morons (who would go positively bonkers at the first sign of trouble).

Man! When you think about it, you really have a whole fuckton of personal power within you! I mean, it might be hard to wrap your head around it right this very second, but geez-o-Pete: whatever it is you’re facing right now… shit. You got this.

It probably doesn’t feel like it right now, but you got this. It’ll suck for the time being, but eventually? Wow. This’ll all seem like it happened ten, twenty, thirty thousand years ago. IF  you let it. IF  you give yourself up to the process of  be-ing and healing and not-wallowing (better word choice? I don’t mean that condescendingly).

Julie, who the fuck are you talking to?
Everyone, asshole. Yours truly included…But I think there are some folks out there who need to hear this. Right now.

*Not the Sedaka family dying in a nuclear accident, that is. I think that‘d be more suited for a PBS documentary, and the project probably wouldn’t involve Adam Sandler. Maybe we could get Bill Kurtis to narrate. Except I think maybe Mr. Kurtis has since passed.

Oh, God, no: BILL KURTIS IS STILL WITH US. Please disregard that last comment. DEEPEST APOLOGIES. Wikipedia to the rescue.

**Unless Neil Sedaka wrote a song about it, of course.

First, the good: I recently discovered that I can clearly hear the tornado sirens in my apartment.  This is important because a) the older I get, the less I want to die in a horrific storm, and b)… yeeeeah, no. No B.

And now the bad: I recently discovered that I’m not quite sure where I would actually go in my apartment if a storm came a-barrellin’ down upon us. Because sitting in my living room, next to the wall-size window, is maybe not the optimum situation.

Basically, there is no safe place for me to hide.

And now, Dear Readers, allow me to refute your counter-arguments for the sake of melodrama.

An interior closet, you say? Of course. Let me just crouch beneath the shitty wooden shelf that my apartment’s FURNACE rests on. I mean, how much could a furnace possibly weigh? What’s one, two or seventeen shattered vertebrae, anyway?

How about the bathtub? Oh yes, of course: the Porcelain Death Trap on the exterior wall adjacent to the breezeway / wind tunnel between apartments. No prob, Bob. After all, the construction of these units is stellar. I can only hear every single conversation my upstairs neighbors have because I have sonar-bat-hearing.

Basically, I’d be safer running outside and flinging myself into a ditch.*

*Okay, okay. I kid. There’s a space that I can wedge myself into between the wall and washing machine. And besides, I think I read somewhere… something about pipes? Go near pipes? Pipes are sturdy? Whatever. If I seriously thought that a tornado was headed my way, I’d climb into the fucking dryer if I thought it’d keep me safe.

No. Instead you have to figure out how to fix the problem yourself, and then call someone to come fix the fixing you attempted, a process which generally costs somewhere in the Four- to Fifty-Billion dollar range.

Really, the only good I can see coming from home ownership is being able to drum up sympathy from your friends when things go horribly wrong. Like if Killer Bees took up residence in your chimney, or Gary Busey moved in next door.

Or, as in the case of my parents’ home this morning, Enchanted Tree Roots waging war against the pipes-or-whatever that lead away from the house and toward the sewer lines, causing a bunch of Nastiness to get all up where it don’t belong.

The initial text exchange:
Juanita: WE HAVE A SEWER BACKUP IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM
Me: Oh no.
J: OH NO IS RIGHT

I vaguely offered my assistance in a “what can I do? And please don’t ask me to come over and mop up the shit water” kind of way, but was (thankfully) declined.

om nom nom nom nom!

Time passes, and Juanita calls with an update. After my father vacuumed up the laundry room floor, he found something curious inside the ShopVac.

“Are these yours?” he asks my mom, holding a decimated pair of women’s underthings.
“Um, no.” she responds.

She tells me this, and my brain begins to fill with questions:

1. When did I decide to stuff my underthings into the floor drain?
2. …or hide them in the ShopVac?
3. Which pair? Were they cute? If so, can they be saved?

As the drain cover was never removed during the clean-up efforts, the unfortunately-mundane conclusion is that, at some point, some errant laundry never made it through the washer-to-dryer or dryer-to-basket transition and got kicked behind something-or-another, only to be discovered many months (I moved out in May!) later in the reservoir of my dad’s ShopVac. The pair in question appears to have not caused the back-up.

Which is unfortunate, because that would have been a hell of a story.

*See also: fine china, children, small dogs.

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UPDATE:
our most recent text exchange:
J: DAN THE PIPE MAN IS HERE
Me: I really hope that’s what’s written on his truck.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,800 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 47 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Depending on your stance, you might want to check it out or stay far, far away.

What are your favorites? Least favorites?

Editor’s note: if you’re not from around here, you might not find this as funny as I did.

Or maybe a movie, but not a super long movie. My attention span tops out at about 46 minutes. So maybe a movie I can watch in parts. That would work.

It should be clever. The dialog can be fast, but not over my head. I get lost easily when it comes to politics or business or corruption. Oh, God, especially corruption. Those are the worst – what is this guy doing and why is it bad? I ask myself. If it doesn’t involve ding-a-linging the hot young assistant or blatantly stealing wads of cash, I won’t get it and you’ll lose me ten minutes in. Read: I don’t do subtle.

But really cheesy, completely improbable science fiction? Sure, I’ll take it. That’ll do.

So it should be clever, possibly science fiction-y, but not about subtle political corruption.

It should also feature people who are easy on the eyes. No uggos.

Oh- it should also have a combination of comedy and drama. Some people call this dramedy, but I prefer crama: more comedy than drama.

I can only handle so much drama.

I mean, a little is ok. Even a little melodrama. The hot main character might have to be imperiled, right?

The main character is hot, I mentioned that…right?

He (it’s a he) can have some sort of Dark Past, but nothing too cliche. Everyone’s a drunk who was beaten by their old man, am I right? Borrrring! Maybe Hot Protagonist has some terrible affliction! That would add some intrigue!

But nothing, like, gross. I don’t want to watch a Crama about psoriasis or Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

…And nothing in his Dark Past should be too existentially-angsty. There’s nothing I hate more than watching some hot mopey moperson mope about his mopey-mope-mope lot in life.

I think, also, someone should have a dog. I like dogs.

Cussing is okay. Nudity is encouraged.

Can it be set in Australia? Or, better yet: New Zealand. No, wait. Canada. It should be set in Canada.

That’s all I got.