It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m in L.A. One thing I’ve done this year is a lot of baking and giving baked goods to people I need gifts for. Last night I made a big batch of 7-layer bars, which are gooey and decadent and amazing. The thing about them is that the gooeyness quickly hardens and becomes sticky and still very decadent, but also really hard to get a knife through. I thought I had cut them at the right stage this time, before they hardened, but come to find out, they still needed more cutting. And in trying to slice through, I was twisting the knife a little bit, and then something bad happened. I felt a little “snap!” and pulled the knife out, and the tip of the knife was missing. Oops.

I looked around in the baking dish, expecting to see the broken-off part right away, but I didn’t see it. I looked at the bar I had just cut. Nothing. I got a different knife, cut the rest of them (without twisting), sat down at the table and pored over the crumbs in the pan. Nothing!!! Where the H did it go???

So… what do I do? Throw them all out? There are some people in my life — people I’m very thankful for — to whom I could probably give a container of bars and say, “Yeah, just take small bites and chew tentatively.” But I can’t say that to my agent or my therapist. I can’t leave a batch on my landlady’s stoop and say, “Hi Sandy, I hope you and your sisters enjoy these 7-layer bars I made! Oh, there might be a knife blade in one of them. Merry Christmas!”

My instinct is that not giving any gift is better than giving the gift of a stab wound to the hard pallet.

I think I need to give Operation Find the Blade one last go-round. (Never mind that I’m totally manhandling all of these bars in the process.) If I don’t find it… what will I do?

Only the ghost of Christmas future can answer that.

Something's missing...

Do you see part of a knife in here? Me neither.

One of these bars is not like the other/may contain a knife!

“Beeeellllllt!” I called. It didn’t answer.

But then I found it. Around my waist. Where I had put it minutes earlier.

Stephanie had “How rude!”
Michelle had “You got it, Dude.”
Joey had “Cut it out!” (complete with hand motions)
Uncle Jesse had “Have mercy!”

Now what about Danny, DJ, Aunt Becky, and Kimmy Gibler? I’m sure Kimmy had to have one, right? OK, so now that I’ve got them written down, it looks like only half the main characters had catch phrases. But that’s still more than your average family.

I watched so much Full House, I could maybe win some kind of Full House trivia game show, and with the amount of reality TV happening, a game show about a real show wouldn’t surprise me at all. So it could happen! Facts I know, without visiting any kind of website, include:

Their phone number is 555-2424.
Stephanie’s full name is Stephanie Judith Tanner.
DJ’s is Donna Jo Margaret Tanner.

Actually… I think that’s all I know, other than all the obvious stuff. I would lose that game show so hard! Oh, man. Those are good facts though, right?

The reason for this is because my parents have always lived dangerously close to the Springmaid Wamsutta outlet in Asheville, North Carolina, which, coincidentally and irrelevant to this story, is right next door to a Bojangles. YUM. Anyway, so my mom always has way too many towels, and has always either given me her extras or has bought them for me at the outlet. And I think I’ve been using towels I’ve had since college. This hasn’t bothered me in the slightest, because for my first five years in LA, my bathroom was a jarring pinky/purply color, and the only way I could see to deal with that was to lean it toward the purple, and away from the pink, by having white and purple accessories. So my sister bought me a beautiful white shower curtain with purple squares, I happened to find a lovely white bath rug with purple squares, and all my towels from college were, conveniently, purple! When I moved to a different bedroom in that house, my new bathroom was just white, so purple went fine… and when I lived in my last apartment, Mary and I had a bunch of different-colored stuff anyway, so it was no big deal that my towels were purple (and a few various shades of blue that had made their way into my collection (via Mom) along the way).

The Pinky-Purply Bathroom of Doom

Close-up on Those Sweet Purple Towels!

Another reason I’ve kept those old towels is that I kind of hate new towels, or maybe the only new towels I’m familiar with haven’t been the highest quality. I mean, not my Wamsutta towels, because those are great quality… but some new towels I’ve used at other people’s houses, when they’re new and haven’t yet been washed 75-80 times, shed lint all over you and, rather than absorbing water, merely push it around, which is quite annoying when you’re trying to get dry, because isn’t that the point of towels to begin with? So anyway, why would I want to put myself through that, when I can just keep my trusty old absorbent purple friends?

So, back to the other day. I cleaned my bathroom and changed out my blue bath rug for my yellow and white one… and I’d recently gotten some new soap in a yellow dispenser… and I happened to have a navy blue hand towel on the rack… and I noticed how lovely everything looked with the blue and the yellow. And I decided that it was time to get rid of my purple towels and move toward a new dawn… a dawn of navy blue and yellow towels… towels that I would purchase myself, and wash 75-80 times if need be, so that they’d absorb.

And throughout all this, I noticed something kind of disturbing… I noticed that I’m actually very attached to my old purple towels, and that all my hemming and hawing about how new towels suck, and the only acceptable towels are old towels, was actually me masking the fact that I, for some reason, am deeply attached to these purple towels! And as I was spending way too much money on new towels online just now (Monograms! Ahahahahahahaha!), I found myself wondering what would become of the old ones. I could use them as rags, but no, they were too dignified for that; that would be insulting. I don’t think Goodwill takes towels, and if you think I’m going to put them in the dumpster, you can think again. I’m pretty sure what’s happening is that I care about these towels’ feelings! I feel like they’re part of me, like we’ve been through so much together, like comfy old pals. And that, my friends, is precisely the reason I must get rid of them as quickly as possible.

Blue and Yellow Paradise! (The tiles and towels look almost black, but trust me, they're blue.)

R.I.P. Purple Towels: 2001ish–2011.

Here is a picture of Trash Cat Woman being escorted into a police car. I think we all know, however, that the real story here is the ridiculous getup those cops are wearing. WTF???

*This photo and all my info on the topic is from www.dailymail.co.uk

I’ve heard that vertigo isn’t the fear of falling as much as the fear of jumping. Although I’m not afraid of heights, I understand that. Having spent the vast majority of my life living in cities in the mountains, I’ve often been in high places and had the thought, “I hope I don’t jump off the edge.” Sometimes I’ll even picture myself jumping off, or worse, pushing someone. Mind you, I don’t want to or intend to, even for a moment. It’s just a fleeting thought that I have: “I hope I don’t.” So… did this woman think, “I hope I don’t put this cat in the trash,” but the difference is, she actually did?

One time I did do something kind of similar. Different in that it didn’t hurt any animals, but similar in that I made a really weird choice for no apparent reason. I have no idea why I did it, but I did. This was probably about a year ago or less. I was somewhere kind of nice, like a movie theatre or a restaurant — I don’t remember exactly — and I went to the bathroom. As I turned to leave the stall after having flushed, I glanced in the toilet to make sure all was well, and in fact there remained a single, small, round turd. I had already partially opened the stall door, and I could see the woman who was waiting for the stall, and she saw me; and as I slightly jerked toward the toilet to flush it, in a split instant, I thought, “Nah,” and I didn’t. I just left, and didn’t flush it. The woman entered after me and gave me a disgusted look as she flushed it herself. Why did I do that? I have no idea! I just didn’t feel like it. I just made that decision based on nothing at all, and it really went against the very fiber of my being. I am a very clean person and delight in having a pristine bathroom at home; I believe we each have the responsibility to be considerate of those around us; and I ALWAYS FLUSH THE TOILET, for crying out loud! It’s the most basic of civilized human behaviors! So why didn’t I give it a second flush? I can offer you no answer to that, except it was one of those times where vertigo took hold, and I just did something that I’m not programmed to do. It’s like that one time a robot expresses emotion and everyone stands there shocked, like, “Did this just happen? This is an aberration; this should not be. Take this robot back to the factory and program out the emotion, immediately.” And as the scientist slaps a sticker on the robot’s forehead and carries it off to be re-programmed, you see, if you look very closely, a glint of victorious rebellion in the robot’s eyes.. It did it. It wasn’t supposed to, but it did.

Everyone is saying this woman is an evil animal hater, but she and her family insist that she loves cats. I don’t know what’s more disturbing — the thought of an angry cat-hater torturing friendly felines or the realization that in the case of Trash Cat Woman vs. Vertigo, Vertigo won. At least she didn’t push anyone off a mountain.

I just had a couple drinks at the bar, and I got home and was putting on my PJs, and I was in my closet and noticed for the first time since I’ve moved into this apartment that there was a box of raisins on my dresser. Now, I remember that I got these raisins on an airplaine, and as I recall, the last time I was on a plane was when I flew to North Carolina for Christmas. So for some reason… when I moved in March, I chose to bring that box of raisins with me. Sure, I got rid of the slipcovers that were custom made for the couch, and which I’ve wished I had every day for the last three months. Sure, I gave away my vacuum cleaner and my garbage can with the lid for the kitchen, and the lid for the other little trash can for the bathroom, and that whiteboard that I could have used instead of buying a new one… but I kept the raisins. The raisins from December.

And in my state of moderate buzz just now, I opened the box and inspected the raisins for any sign of mold or decay, and finding none, I stuffed several in my mouth, and I’m telling you people, it was the best thing I’ve ever tasted. And I’m pretty confident that anything I put in my mouth right now would take on that title. Something about alcohol makes everything taste so damn good. Is there a scientific explanation for this? If you have any inside knowledge, please let me in on it!

Meanwhile, I’ll be digging under the couch cushions for little bags of peanuts.

Screetching subject change: Some of y’all have asked me how I got the high five from Ryan Gosling that I mentioned 2 blentries ago, and truthfully I hadn’t updated you because it’s a pretty boring story and I enjoyed being mysterious, because maybe in your minds you were picturing me hobnobbing with high society and whatnot. Nah… I went and saw a screening of Lars and the Real Girl, and Ryan was there doing Q&A afterwards, and then after the Q&A he actually stuck around to talk to people, so my friend and I went up to talk to him, and we chatted for a second and he gave me a high five. So yeah, booooring. But I thoroughly enjoyed both the five and the movie. In fact, the movie was really, really, incredible, and I highly encourage you to see it. Best movie I’ve seen in years, except of course for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Did I just discredit myself for saying that, and now you won’t go see Lars? Well, your loss… and HP5 was truly a badass movie, even if you aren’t a Potter nerd like I am.

Appendix A: The Ringtone Rant

It’s so annoying how none of the newfangled cell phones on the market now have nice ringtones. They just expect you to download songs, so they don’t bother. But ringtones used to be my favorite part of phones! I used to not buy a phone before I had heard and approved of all the ringtones. I think it’s more fun to have a cute jingly tune than a song, because if you choose a song you like, you will get sick of it and stop liking it as much, and if you pick a song you don’t like, that’s just dumb. In conclusion, I am resistant to change (just call me Gramps) and plan to keep my old-ass phone until it falls apart or I drop it in something wet, and every time it rings its beautiful jingly-jangly ringtone I will feel rapture. By the way, the first time I heard a polyphonic ring tone, as opposed to the single-toned beepity ones that they all used to have, I was visiting my friend Jamie in Brooklyn, heard his phone ring, and thought it was the ice cream truck. Yep.