But Call Me Betsy

I don't know if it's a product of being an only child, or if it's like some genetic sensitivity thing, but when I was little, I had this affinity to stuffed animals, but also to other inanimate objects, basically believing that even the bathtub had feelings and would feel neglected if you didn't use it or at least pat it reassuringly on occasion. But my stuff animals, because they were, you know, shaped like animals, all got names and I worried about them a lot--you know, like the fairness of who should get to be in the bed each night. I won't go so far as to claim that my toys were on a rotational basis, but I'm sure that it crossed my mind to dole out the affection in an equal way. I didn't necessarily feel the same about dolls, because dolls could be just this side of creepy. One second, they were little girls that you took care of, and the next second, they could be possessed by demons and try to kill you. I must have seen any early film starring Karen B...

I'm halfway through a book by Lionel Shriver (a woman writer) called Big Brother. The gist of the story is about a woman who tells her brother he can come stay with her family. She hasn't actually seen him in a few years, and when she goes to pick him up at the airport, she's flabbergasted to realize that he has gained hundreds of pounds. He's hugely obese, almost unrecognizable. She brings him home, and conflict ensues as her type-A husband (a disciplined man who bikes for hours a day and only eats very healthy food) is beyond disgusted by the slovenliness of the brother--who does of course eat a lot, all of the bad food that the husband won't touch. While the story is about the huge size of the brother, and how it's hard not to see fatness as the embodiment of all that's bad (laziness, self-indulgence, lack of control), there's an interesting sub plot that circulates. For a living, the sister been very successful in producing these special dolls that...

In celebration of Celia's b-day (among others, Patrick, too, I think) we went to Draught Horse tonight; really the only viable bar on the entire Temple campus unless you count Maxi's, which is a pizza place that closes at like 6. No one wants to go to Maxi's because it is too close to the rest of the educational world of Temple and you can't comfortably drink beers there without thinking that you should instead be studying at the library. Mr. A. X. was there with his dark curly hair and dark eyes. Mr. A. X. is the most well-dressed man in my life and probably also the most polite. He calmly admonished me for hanging up on him earlier in the day. I begged him to do something out of character so that I could write about it in my blog, but he (again, politely) refused: "Aimee, I do not want to be in your blog. And if, perhaps, you do write about me in your blog, please, for the love of God, use a pseudonym ." Fine, Mr. A. X., until you do something more interesti...