For the second time this winter, my car has been scraped by some anonymous angel (perhaps related to the Parking Lot Angel who helps me find good spots everywhere except Meijer?). The angel apparently only works on days when we get upwards of five inches of snow and there is no school. I'm noting this not to complain, but to try to discern a pattern so that maybe next time I can catch him (or her) in the act and thank him. I would like to know who is out there taking care of these minor inconveniences in my life, as usually that job falls to my dad (and for this i am very lucky and not ungreatful). Right now my best guess is that the guy who shovels our front steps and walkway is going beyond his call of duty, or else Judy is slipping him a few extra bucks - perhaps drawn from the rather exorbitant laundry fees I've recently been suffered to tack on to my rent - and making him do it . Whatever, or whomever, is the cause, I would just like to know.

This is the story of what happened to me between 3:23 and 3:29 this morning.

I had finally fallen asleep, which was significant because lately I've been having trouble doing so. Something about switching back to a school schedule after more than two weeks off, plus I can't seem to stop thinking about biscuits, showers, and random cities in Ohio right around bed time. It's very odd, and certainly a little ridiculous, but those have been my nights lately, so it was nice to be sound asleep for once. Until the lamp by my bed blazed to light.

Here is the tangential back story: Daisy the Cat has figured out how my awesome K-Mart bedside table touch-lamp works, or else she has gotten very very lucky many many times. Somewhere in here walnut-sized cat brain, she seems to intuit that by nosing this metallic surface, she can almost instantly elicit a response out of me, as long as I'm in the room. She has only-child-syndrome (picked up from her roommate, no doubt) and starts to resent being overlooked pretty quickly, so when I'm doing things like reading, grading, or sleeping, she likes to make a ruckus, and this lamp has now become one of her primary disruption tools.

So it's 3:23 in the morning and my light is suddenly on. I know this game, so instead of rolling over, I swing my arm in the general direction of the light source, because this lamp is so great that you just have to touch it and it will turn off. However, in my haste to make it dark again, I swing a little haphazardly and instead of tapping the lamp, my arm connects full-force with Daisy trying to make a swift get away. She loses her balance as the momentum from my swing effectively pushes her into the lamp and instantly there's a whole knot of cat and lampshade and light bulb in a pile on the floor.

Great. So now I get to fix this before I go back to sleep. Sleep that I kind of need and was certainly enjoying (sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care). The thing about this lampshade is it's kind of cheap and terrible. The construction is problematic in that the shade is only attached to the base by some flimsy fabric glued to these thick spokes that are nearly impossible to reattach after it's torn, and the shape is awful because it's slightly tapered at the top in such a way that I kept getting it stuck on the spokes coming out of the base that it used to be attached to (by the fabric. does that make any sense?). Anyway, I groggily struggled with it for way too long before figuring out that if I just turn it over, the smaller top will sit on the spokes and the shade will at least kind of look like it's back on the lamp in a hobo sort of way. This arrangement was convenient A because it allowed the shade to still do it's job so I wasn't blinded in the morning, and B, the cattywompus slant would remind me to fix it for real when I got home the next day. So everybody won and I finally got to roll over and commence to try to fall back asleep.

Right before said sleep-falling occurred, I remembered a story my dad told me a long time ago about when he was a boy at Catholic school. One week he didn't have anything to say at confession, so he made up a lie that he'd broken his mother's lamp (that way if the following week was slow too, at least he could confess about lying at his last confession), and through the fuzz of oncoming REM cycles, I imagined that somehow I had just settled a tab with God (the bartender, apparently, in this analogy), and I fell back into a sleep of divine justice.

PS - Given that the Reader's Digest version of this story is: "I knocked my lamp off the table last night," you can imagine the magnitude of my desire to procrastinate right now. I'm not going to not like Ulysses, am I?

Do You Love JD Salinger Too?

I've finally figured out why I don't like New Year's (Punctuation Sidebar: Does the 's' on New Year's take an apostrophe? I would argue that it does, since the full phrase is New Year's Eve, so the eve clearly belongs to the new year, necessitating the posessive apostrophe; but every time I see it written, the apostrophe is left off and it's starting to bug me). The problem with all, or at least most, of my New Year'ses (oh yeah, I did.) up until now is that I have been approaching them from the wrong direction entirely. There was always a great amount of expectation surrounding the ball-drop and the magical moment when the numbers change, and when the moment comes and goes and nothing happens except flurry of kissing and toasting and then a whole lot of feeling exactly the same, albeit with a slight tinge of disappointment added into the mix, I am always faced with the undeniable fact that New Year's is a whole lot of preparation in honor of a whole lot of nothing, which seems like a dumb thing to celebrate.

But this year changed my mind. I finally discovered that New Year's must be approached from a passive stance (one does not set out to celebrate the night, instead the night proves itself a time worthy of one's celebration). I learned this by accident this year when we planned a party because friends were going to be in town, and this party just happened to land on the 31st of December, yet because of the people and the things, ignoring and perhaps even despite the date, we managed to have a perfectly mirthful night, completely devoid of dissatisfaction.

So I think I'm going to do it this way from now on.

A rundown of the actual events of the night (for those who like details of the nitty-gritty nature rather than lofty abstractions and sporatic italics):

We actually didn't mean to ignore New Year's. There was supposed to be a reservation and tickets and a fancy party, but complications that I'm going to go ahead and dub providential got in the way, so five of us girls ended up cobbling our own evening together instead. We started out driving through the beginnings of a snow storm to wait for a table at San Chez. For our first course we got mojitos from the bar instead of tapas, and drank them in the atrium while we waited. This nineteen-year-old waiter kept rushing past us with trays full of delicious things, and I was about to exercise some feminine wiles to procure us a papa frita or something, then our buzzer went off, so I didn't have to. Also, considering that I was too shy to even approach the host's stand to ask how much longer we had to wait, the wiles were probably going to stay under wraps all along.

So we're eventually seated, and we commence to order and consume delicious victuals for the next couple of hours. Can I just say that it's amazing what the Spanish can do with a little spicy sausage and cumin-flavored mayonnaise? We tried to eat slowly because Meredith was unavoidably detained by her mom's invalid daschund, Clarke, and we knew that she would want some kabobs and sangria when she eventually arrived, but it was difficult since our waitress had neglected to provide us with bread OR water while we waited for our entrees, so we were practically famished when round one (or two, counting the 'jitos) came.

But Meredith did finally join us, and she was just in time for dessert. After chocolate-chili trifles, truffles, and other flourless wonders, we paid our staggeringly affordable bill and retired to Danny's. Though the way was wrought with much snowing and blowing, we managed to rock out to a little Tally Hall and arrived in high spirits.

After that I suppose we don't need to go into too much detail, and there are facebook pictures to fill in most of the gaps. We stopped for a couple of minutes to watch the ball drop, but that's not really what it was about. It would seem that the combination of CatchPhrase, Bop-It, ten-dollar 'champagne,' cookies, and video games mixed in proper proportions comprises the recipe for a very jolly (though certainly not the most hip-and-trendy) night. It was a very refreshing change of pace, as far as New Year's parties go. Can I hope that the rest of 2008 will follow suit, or would that be asking too much?