It's a towel... for the floor!

I hope everyone else had a holiday weekend as mellow and nice as mine was. It's amazing how peaceful life can be when you give in to your basic misanthropic feelings, pull the shades, and turn off the phone.

My husband and I are both happiest at home, lounging around and variously reading or playing video games according to our tastes, so it's not surprizing that we both gave gifts with a sort of Home Spa theme. I gave him all sorts of fun toys for the bath, including a shower cap with bees on it, a vat of bubble bath, and some squeaky toys. The first present I opened from him was a bathmat, the perfect size and the most wonderful shade of green.

To truly understand my joy about this gift, you would have to be privy to some seriously intimate knowledge of our relationship, and you would have had to have listened to the Holiday Spectacular of This American Life over the weekend. Or just be David Sedaris. In which case I am seriously freaked out that you are reading this.

Freaked out in a pleasant way, though, like in the way that Frank Zappa meant when he said freaked out. And with all of the groupie-ness that implies.

Wow. I wonder if anyone ever throws underwear at David Sedaris at his readings?

Other notable gifts were trinkets for my new office, since I will have my own office with a door you can shut and a dedicated phone line for the first time since grad school, which was literally a decade ago. I realized about a week ago that I was entering the land of the desk decorations, and started fixating on what one needs to personalize one's office space with. I've been working in such totally non-office work spaces for so long (show line at a fancy restaurant, live-music nightclub, a children's theatre, the spare bedroom) that I have absolutely no idea what the standards are anymore.

Do people still put pictures of loved ones on their desks? Inspiring bits of poetry on the dry-erase board? Little mementos of past triumphs?

When I was in grad school I used to have whatever bits of Shakespeare or Keats were running through my head that week on the dry-erase board in my office, which was maybe a tip-off that I wasn't wholeheartedly invested in becoming a geologist. My advisor pointed that out when I asked her if there were any good courses available in Early American Poetry next semester, when she was hoping I would maybe take some more Radiometric Geochemistry.

I started working at the nightclub shortly after that conversation.

So I got a few Doo-Dads for the Serious Young Professional this Christmas, and this, which is perhaps more of a give-away of my true proclivities than the pen set and mousepad.

The only drag about the weekend was that I woke up Sunday morning with my eyeball on fire, seriously considering going to the emergency room. I had some eyedrops left over from my last eye infection not long ago, so I emptied half the bottle into my sore eye and felt better after a few excruciating hours of searing eyeball pain. That night I realized that my right eye had become noticeably more nearsighted during the ordeal, so I suddenly need new glasses and contacts. Gah. Why am I always breaking all over?