Welcome to My Brain

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

Below is an inelegant menagerie of things I thought about, today, in no specific order and with no specific meaning. Before finishing this, I went down the deep, dark rabbit hole known as Zillow. What I was looking for exactly, I wasn’t quite sure. Every house I saw was either ugly and rundown and affordable or overpriced and gorgeous. Do I need a house? No, not really. But there is something very satisfying about looking; judging the layout and paint colors while also understanding that I am in no way positioned to afford any of them.

1. Today I found one of my cats whiskers on the floor the other day; a long, white, stiff hair lying innocently on the dark hardwood. My insides melted a bit, and I thought about the day, years from now, when my cat will inevitable pass away. Whiskers on the hardwood will be one of the things I miss the most.

2. In the middle of a rainy workday, I stared out the window for a second and had a short bout of fantasizing. I’d like to be reading a large, old, musty book in a coffee shop right now. I’d just sit there all day while it rains, doing nothing but reading a book. Maybe Grimms Fairy Tales or something witchy and a tad bit morbid. I’d drink latte after latte and my butt would go numb and it would be the most glorious day in the whole world.

3. I drank an Ashland hard seltzer with dinner tonight. Mango Strawberry. Fruity and delicious and extremely feminine, from the flavor to the lettering to the pale pink can. I also ate three individually wrapped Swedish Fish, which tasted slightly of plastic, and wondered what I was doing with my life.

4. Sometimes I think about stabbing my hand straight through with a knife, or crashing my car into a light post or falling off the edge of a mountain. I don’t mind my dark imaginings, but they do make me feel like I might be psychopathic, or like my therapist may have missed an important diagnosis. I tell myself that it’s normal to have dark thoughts, that most people have considered what it would feel like to drink liquid dish soap or tear their toenails off one by one. It’s normal, I tell myself. Totally, absolutely, horrifically, humanly normal.

5. I bought a gel manicure kit the other day and gave myself first a pedicure, then a manicure…