Please forgive me.

(Dear Christy Henderson with Storm Team 7:

Yikes, I was rude, wasn't I? I'm so sorry. I've been working on this, you know. My verbal dysentery has gotten the better of me again. Hence the blog.

Can I be your friend?

Affably yours,
Tee Ache.)

Dear Christy Henderson with Storm Team 7:

I thought I should clarify this confusing little news nugget for the benefit of readers everywhere. I saw on the news that you had to make an emergency landing with your plane, as shown below:



Ms. Henderson: If the plane is upside down, you haven't landed it. You've crashed it.


Cordially,
Tessicle.

P.S.--So glad you're safe. That must have been horrific. ... Seriously. Give me a call sometime. We'll talk about it over caramel macchiatos. I'm Theresa, by the way.

Check it out--

This poster gives me vivid, hallucinatory "Logan's Run"-eqsue waking dreams.



I want a Nikon DSLR more than ever now.

Suckerpunch! Suckerpunch! Suckerpunch!

Things I've learned this week:

*Cats have tails and whiskers. But mice also have tails and whiskers. That's where things get confusing for me.

*I am, for the most part, incapable of returning rented/borrowed items in a timely manner. (Library, Family Video, and Mrs. LeBerth--please, please forgive me. I am so full of shame right now.)

*Serifs are apparently more difficult to read on-screen than when printed. So, my blog = fail. Besides, you know, the obvious reasons for it being a failure. (See: two-year hiatus, lack of interesting topics.)

*There's no shame in having shame, unless it's a really embarrassing secret shame that you keep locked away, and when you tell your closest friends about it, they laugh at you and tell you that your shame is pretty darn shameful. This makes a person the worst kind of loser.

*The word "precipitous" can be overused in conversation.

Not all who wander are lost, but I am admittedly terrible with directions.

There's a certain point in almost everything in my life where even if I have the intention of doing something, I know that no one actually thinks I'll follow through--so I just don't bother for a while. Eventually I'll get around to these tasks, but not before every person out there has forgotten I intended to do those tasks in the first place. Then, when I get them done ... BAM! I'm all in your face with having accomplished something, and it's completely unexpected.

Shortly thereafter one normally recalls the fact that, "Oh, yeah, you said you'd do that for me eleven months ago," and then my face would be shoved centimeters from a steaming pile of my own mediocrity--"Bad Tessie! Naughty Girl! Look at your shame!"--but I can counter with the fact that i the end, I got it done, so what's the big deal?

This leads me to my next point--I actually updated this blog. I got it done. In UNDER two years.

Thursday last, as Husband and I were in the drawing room, he carrying on with his seasonal needlepoint and I skimming through Lady Chatterly's Lover to find all the good bits, he asked me without lifting his head, "Whatever happened to that blog you used to write? You know the one about you being sorry because you do everything wrong all the time?"

"I got busy," said I simply. This was a half-truth. I have been busy. Babies keep you busy with their poop and their need to eat and all those other things. But I have also been incredibly lazy, and I'm sure that at some point I could have turned off "Lost", called Sesame Street to see if it could babysit for a hour or so, and actually come on here to apologize for the thousands of wrongs I've committed since November 2008. (Thousands.)

So, to everyone who doesn't read this anymore because there's been nothing to read--I'm so sorry. It must have been excruciating. I hate myself for you. Please, please forgive me.

(Also, don't even bother with Lady Chatterly's Lover. Too wordy.)

All my misplaced affections,
Tessers.

Atonement! Atonement!

Would the following individuals please forgive me?

Trey--because when I said the cabin my Father rented for Thanksgiving was going to be a peaceful retreat to provide you with uninterrupted writing time, I liiiiiiied.

I wasn't trying to be a liar--but, clearly, I should have thought the whole idea through a little more thoroughly. I did not think about:

a) Joan Crawford movie marathons
b) The inconvenience of parents who refuse to sleep on the same floor as one another
c) How utterly needy I am towards you when I'm around my family for extended periods of time (You are my coping mechanism.)

Rachel--I'm sorry I said I was going to blow your brains our if you wouldn't eat at TGI Friday's with us. I was just very hungry.

The really pretty couple that I sneered at in Downtown Gatlinburg last night--I'm sorry. I just really don't like exceptionally pretty people. That's not your fault, though ... I get that. So, I'm sorry.

Everyone who came into contact with me in the past 48 hours. I know I was unpleasant. I do not know why. There was no need for me to be that way.

Mr. B, the patron who was just in the library--I'm sorry I sniggered at your hot-pink gloves. I was rude.

Mr. Compton--I'm sorry I was nearly responsible for your family receiving condolence cards before your actual demise.

To be fair, when the caretaker said "They took him off life support, soooo...", I assumed the "soooo..." meant that you had met your maker.

Still, I should have asked.

NaNoWriMo--I'm sorry I've failed you for the second year in a row. I did get some writing done, which makes me feel good. I tend, though, to make a habit of committing to the impossible (or something that's possible, but which I'm entirely too lazy to do).

I'm sure that's not all. But I need to take a breather.

Here's the Skinnie, Minnie:

Lessons I've Learned Over The Past Five Months (a.k.a. Why I haven't been blogging):

* A cookie is a dangerous promise. It's also a delectable morsel that one may be willing to lose a spouse over.

* There is nothing good on TV. Now or ever.

* So, yeah, maybe we could probably clone mammoths; but why would we want to?

* I lovelovelove everything about MTTS.

* I am two months overdue for a friend purge, but can't seem to get around to it because my stupid pregnancy mood-changes have made me unwilling to do the deed. I'm feeling the stress of not getting rid of my more toxic of acquaintances. (If any friend is reading this who's due for the purge and I haven't gotten around to it yet, can you go ahead and just not call me? ... You know who you are.)

* People think Pres.-Elect Obama is the Antichrist. Wrong... Here lay the Beast.

* Pregnancy makes you do two things pretty consistently: sleep, and complain about things. Guess which of those habits I've been frequenting?

* My house has reached a "COPS" state-of-being again. Have you ever seen those episodes of COPS? Where they break into a house and there's trash piled everywhere, and a lame Spanish-speaking parrot on the floor peeking out from underneath a Pizza-Hut box? Well, that place is where I live right now.

* Apple Jacks taste a little like apples to me.

(And, yeah, I know that it's taken me a while to blog. If you bring it up, I'll cry. Sorry, okay?)

Cordially,
Tessalah H.

I don't ever want to smell like that woman who was just in the library smelled. Because it wasn't good.

Part of my job working at the library is utilizing our materials to help people find solutions to everyday problems. Another part of my job is dealing with really, really smelly people.

This is admittedly one of my least favorite parts of my job, and yes, of course I'll be obliged to detail the different types of scents I encounter throughout the day:

* Vindaloo Curry + Glycerin
* Chlorine + Firewater
* Twenty years of four-packs-a-day + One case of budweiser
* Elizabeth Taylor's White Diamonds
* Falafel + Disgrace
* Human Waste

I don't mind little smells. Everyone has little smells. I can handle cigarettes, must, day-old basketball play-off, wet dog, wet cat ... these scents are a part of society that I must accept as a public servant.

But, come on. Do some people purposely swathe themselves in these musks at the door so they've achieved maximum potency seconds before leaning into me over the counter? ... Okay, I'll assume these people can't smell themselves. Has no one told them? I'll be honest with Trey if he needs to hop into the shower before interacting with other Human Beings, and I expect him to do the same. Do these people have no one to love them that much?

If I had known smelly people had no one to love them, I'd have been much nicer to them.

Please forgive me ... this same time, tomorrow.

Here are my two biggest lately-sins:

--I cannot stop thinking generally terrible thoughts about people. Right now, chances are that in my head I'm circling around some very heinous thought about you; about what a whore you are, or how fat your head is, or why you giggle like that when things aren't funny (or why you leave books on the counter, right above the bookdrop, or how you check out the same four wrestling magazines over and over ...). I'm seething all the time.

It's a terrible thing. I've been making up for it with manual labor--lots of manual labor--and that does make me feel better about all the bad things I've been thinking this week. The only thing I dislike about penitence is that it's difficult to stock up on it for future sins--penitence tends to have a short shelf-life. I can scrub the kitchen floor by hand tonight because I know I'm going to say something nasty about you tomorrow, but all that work just won't take the sting out like it does when you're scrubbing that floor with hard-earned shame.

--Pride. I don't normally struggle with this, but lately I've become slightly more than egotistical. Oddly, I do it in my own "Tesstastic" brand: I own my flaws and sins rather pridefully. I think I've come dangerously close to bragging about my inferiority complex. I'm not lying--I *do* actually have an inferiority complex a massive one. I'm not trying to make myself look a martyr, not trying to make myself look good; quite to the contrary, I'm trying to make myself look bad. So, I proudly, unashamedly parade my shame and weakness before my coworkers, friends and people I meet in convenience stores. Do I do it to protect myself? To give myself the power of owning my flaws before someone else discovers them? Ah, I don't think it really matters. Any respectable Tessie would keep her shame to herself.

There are so many more that I could address, but I'm pretty certain I need to be working right now, because being lazy on the clock? Totally a sin.

!!!

Here's a cover of The Ramone's "I Wanna Be Sedated" by Octogenarian choir, Young@Heart.