And now, a list of things I’m not very thankful for at all. Happily, it’s short…

1. Cat hair. It took three quarters of one of those jumbo lint-rolly jobbers you get at the dry cleaner to divest the couch of cat hair the other day. I cannot entirely blame the cats for this; ordinarily it’s so toasty in my apartment that I can wear a tank top and capris year-round, but last week, I didn’t have heat or hot water for several days, so I walked around in two sweaters and a hat, and the cats put on winter coats. The cats very nicely helped keep me warm last week, so…thanks, cats! Then the heat came back on, with a vengeance, and the winter coats came off, also with a vengeance. Hobey alone has shed the equivalent of a Newfoundland since Thursday, so…”thanks,” cats! Not! Please stop shedding!

On the plus side, the bacchanal of depilation has resulted in a command the cats will actually obey. “Aaaaaaaaand…shed! Good cats!” On the minus side…seriously, there is really really a lot of cat hair around here. Like, the “I thought I’d ask for a tai chi tape for Christmas, but now I think I’ll put an electric razor on my list instead and get my exercise by chasing the cats around my apartment all ‘zzzzzzzzz [ffft] zzzzz [meee-rreeehhh] zzzzzzzz [bonk ping cronk] zzzzzzzzzzzzz [rowrrrrrrrow] zzzzzzzzz [fffff-FFFFFFFFT] zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz'” kind of “really a lot.”

And speaking of the cats…

2. Roving produce. How exactly, you might ask yourself — as I have, repeatedly, and in vain, as I did not major in physics — does an apple that you put on top of the refrigerator wind up under a bookcase in another room entirely? Surely it is not the fault of a cat, since any cat who lives in this house knows that it is not supposed to climb on top of the refrigerator and sleep there, lest it lose its balance and fall into the trash can. Not that a cat has ever done that before; that happened to the cat of a friend. Obviously.

Anyway. The apple bears markings suspiciously similar in nature to those made by claws, but certainly that is a coincidence. My apartment is not haunted, so I cannot blame poltergeist activity. The only explanation: the apple, in an attempt to kill itself, hurled itself off the top of the refrigerator. Then, having failed, it hid in shame beneath the bookcase.

Because, as I have said, the cats would never.

3. The endless renovation of the local grocery store. Leaving aside the ripple effect of the tomato shortage on my enjoyment of food shopping — the two tiny, waxy, tasteless-looking, trying-too-hard-to-look-appetizingly-red specimens I bought today cost me almost three dollars — let’s talk about how the Key Food overhaul is lasting months. Let’s talk about how store management has elected, instead of just closing the whole store for three days and finishing everything in one mildly inconvenient shot, to use a one-aisle-at-a-time strategy while leaving the store open for business, which is taking forever. The contractors can’t really get anything done because the store always full of shoppers, the shoppers can’t find anything because the contractors just heap everything up higgledy-piggledy without regard to common sense (salad dressing in the dairy aisle, cheese in the cereal aisle, no frozen-foods aisle at all for two weeks while they moved the cases — no shit — a foot and a half to the left, and no coffee filters at all because they just put them away, and nobody else in the neighborhood sells #2 filters, because who has a coffeemaker that small? I DO DAMN YOUUUUUUUUU), they shuffled the aisles like a deck of cards for no reason so everyone is bumbling around…and what that particular Key Food needs is not “more bumbling around.” “Fewer customers who will whack a three-gallon container of apple juice down onto your bread,” sure. “A better cheese selection than ‘cheddar or mozzarella,'” definitely. “Livelier lettuce,” you can bet on it. It does not need more bumbling around. It does not need that, and it does not need more aisle blockages. It has pllllllenty. I like to call them “the other customers,” and I would really like to know how many people you’ve got squashed into that three-bedroom house if you need an entire shipping pallet of toilet paper, but hey, whatever — just find a way to balance it on the cart and to steer said cart so that you don’t ram my knees while I stand, pensively, in front of the Archway display.

What? I can’t stand pensively in front of the Archway display? This doesn’t happen to you — you like a semi-obscure cookie, but someone else in your neighborhood apparently likes it too, so if you don’t time your trip to the market correctly, that someone will abscond with the macaroons you consider rightfully yours, leaving you to wonder whether you should compliment the someone on his or her superior taste or curse him or her for forcing you to buy the iced lemon ones instead? Because you like the iced lemon cookies, but they go stale quickly, so you always eat the whole box in about a day and then feel like a hog? A lemony, sticky hog? No? Okay, well, anyway, it’s not like I stand there for ten minutes; it’s just a few seconds, and I only have a basket so I don’t block the entire aisle, unlike certain mother-daughter teams I might mention who go shopping together and do not understand the concept of alternate-side cart parking.

Of course, one of these teams pulled an entire display of Marcal paper napkins down onto their own heads today, so I’ll let it go because that made me laugh and nobody got hurt, but…really. Don’t block the aisles, people.

And as for you, Key Food…I had to live without those confoundingly addictive Green Giant Alfredo Vegetables for TWO WEEKS. Don’t put me through that again. Heal thyself.

4. Gravy that comes in a can. I get that making gravy is a pain in the ass, but seeing the guy in front of me lining up his store-bought gravy on the belt today just made me sad.

5. Paper cuts. It’s dry-hands weather, for starters, and then — I don’t know how, so don’t ask, because I couldn’t do it again if I tried, which I don’t plan on doing — I managed to give myself a bone-deep paper cut across three knuckles of my right hand. With the lip of a manila envelope. “But how –” Like I told you. No idea.

Maybe I should have titled this item “my own proneness to mythically stupid injuries,” but…damn. That shit hurts. And it’s not healing, either. Every time I crack open a can of Diet Coke, my knuckles are screaming all melodramatically like they’re in Johnny Tremain and they just got hit with the molten silver, like, guys? I have typing to do over here. “Aaaaiiiiieeeeeeee!” Yeah, you mentioned that.

6. Exhaustion. When you don’t get enough sleep, you start assigning motivations and personality traits to your own knuckles. Word to the wise.

What I am thankful for: too much to list. And I’m thankful for that fact, too. A happy and safe holiday to you all.

November 22, 2004

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