ShW threw her first annual holiday brunch this morning, having made hella pastries all day yesterday while I was sleeping. We sat around on the floor and swapped Meyers-Briggs personality types. I gave birth to two enormous, malformed omelettes. They looked awful, having fallen apart all over the plate and spewed forth their vegetable goodness. Strange to say, one of the recommended jobs for INFPs, like I, is that of Writer (note: none of the personality-types covered Chef or Sommelier, which just goes to show you how flat society would fall on its face if we all did what we were suited for.)
ShW's awesome friend E left very early this morning after having spent most of the week cracking the world's best fart jokes (get it, cracking?!). I had the most fun ever sitting on the sofa with her while she knitted (knat?), eating Christmas pudding and watching Box of Moon Light and Living in Oblivion. I need more smart, unrestrained people in my life. Although it is true that more than a soup�on of earthiness usually overpowers other flavors in a discourse, it is an essential spice. Luckily, speaking of earthy, MG showed up just in time to help me finish the bottle of CabSauv my parents left behind. He stayed for brunch this morning and drove me into work at three, singing his best Nell Carter for me.
MG is very quick to warn those around him of impending inner changes by puffing up very large, like a sea-creature, talking a lot about his inability to cope, and coping quite nicely without really adjusting anything at all. This is frustrating at the time since it tends to monopolize his stream of consciousness, but I'm glad it all works out for him in the end. My friends, bless their hearts, will never quite get used to the fact that I do, on occasion, open up, and that it might be in their best interests to listen when I do so, without trying so very hard to have exactly the same problems I have but worse and with more people involved. SLB is particularly guilty of this, although she can be partially excused because she quite often does have it worse off than I do. Few literary monitions ring so constantly down the stoae of my mind than Miss Bates's assertion that her sore throats were always worse than anybody else's, and I wonder if, in my sedulous avoidance of those comforts to which I am not most strictly heir, I might possibly have set my self up as emotionally impervious. I am neither wildly popular nor wildly unlucky, so I tend to occupy rather less space in the discourse than I feel is my right. Especially given how smart I am. Damn it.
Now, I have a reputation as a prime bitcher. It is true, that I can elucidate the faults of my fellow man at any time and in any rhetorical, philosophical, or ecclesiastical mode, nude or clothed, but, and I must underscore this, I choose my bitching topics very carefully, based almost entirely on what is occupying my interlocutor's mind about the situation. This is one of the few things keeping me and my opinions from being completely unpopular: if I were to speak my mind fully, I would live far more happily than I do now but on my own. Only about three people on this planet are worthy of my complete honesty and you know who you are. Of course you're one of them, dearest diary. I would never lie in print. That's a perversion of the noble vocation of writing.
[The crumhorns have just kicked in. For those of you unfamiliar with the crumhorn, imagine the love child of a kazoo and an oboe, reflect it into four (or more) differently-sized mirrors, and on them play Renaissance harmonies in dippy syncopated rhythms.]
Another CD sadly missing: Paul McCreesh's recording of the Praetorius Christmas Mass, which I last remember listening to in a dorm room in suburban Philadephia. With my god-damned cœur g�n�reux I probably lent it to some shifty friend or other and will never see it again. The worst example of this involves the loss of one of a two-cd set of Bach organ works by Gustav Leonhardt, which I lent to a Chinese exchange student. I suppose I can always pick it up from him next time I'm in Beijing.
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Thompson's Index for December 15, 2001:
Number of times Proust was mentioned at P**t's today with respect to madeleines : 1
Number of times I looked at J's underwear as he bent over to pick out tea leaves : about 20
Number of my offspring I would give to lick caramel off the small of J's back, etc. : 3
Number of people (other than J, whom I haven't asked) willing to prostitute J to me in exchange for children : 0
Amount, in dollars, offered for MG's ass by a co-worker : 1
Actual price, in dollars, of the upkeep of MG's ass, per month : over 500
Number of Lloyd's names who might do themselves great injury should MG's ass get saggy : 6
Number of goth people I found myself staring at in public places today whom I didn't know: 3
Total number of goth people I found myself staring at in public places today: 7
Relationship of this number to the total number of goth people I know: fractional
Number of good reasons I'm including this in my diary: o
Number of songs I've made up to sing to ECG about the skinny whiny boys whose music is sold at Other Music: 1.5