March 28, 1997 - A slightly better day

~~A slightly better day~~

Friday, March 28, 1997, 11:30 a.m.

There was a package in the mail last night from Barb--a fat envelope full of magazine and newspaper clippings, a beautiful card (hard to describe--a watercolor of a cat jumping across the seat of a chair, under the arms. The top of the chair is decorated with mittens . . .), and a Floaty pen of the San Diego Zoo pandas. I went to the Floaty site, hoping that they would have a picture of the panda pen. They didn't, but there were a lot of new ones up that I hadn't seen before. I love the one of the man pulling a bolt of fabric off the shelf, but I'm not too sure about the "new baby" one (the copy reads "Congratulate your friends and loved ones - see a cute newborn float from Mom into the world and Dad's waiting arms."):

There's even an O.J. one, with the white Bronco driving down the highway, and a Floaty Oracle (ask a question, then tilt the pen for a yes or no answer).

I feel better than I did yesterday. I'm trying to do good things for myself, like I'm always saying you should do, and I think it's working. I cut my bangs this morning (which always gives me a lift), I'm wearing clothes that I like, I stopped trying to cut down on my caffeine intake (just for today, maybe), and I'm eating better today. Yesterday was some sort of monthly quasi-celebration at the office and lots of food was brought in. I probably had a few too many cookies, and although I no longer allow myself to feel guilty about what I eat, I think the sugar may have contributed to my mood. There's still food out today, but so far I've limited myself to Triscuits, sweet hot mustard and raw cauliflower.

10:00 p.m.

I finished "The Pillow Friend" at lunch today. A really interesting, absorbing book, if pretty strange. Agnes Grey has a depressed, distant mother, an eccentric, exotic aunt, a doll that talks, an adolescent girl's dream of a horse, the perfect high school boyfriend, and, finally, a lover--the British poet whose picture she sees on her aunt's wall and who has been the object of her fantasies for most of her life. The only problem is that she has a little trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality.

Magic had rules, she knew that from her reading. Things didn't just happen because you wanted them; Myles was not a mechanical doll designed to speak to anybody; she would have to earn his companionship, learn the rules of his magic. She knew she had started on that path. Their relationship had changed on the day that Leslie had given him back to her. He had let her see him for the first time as he really was—as he could be. For the first time, when she looked at him, he looked back. Now she had to find out how to make herself the kind of person he would talk to.
~ Lisa Tuttle, "The Pillow Friend"

A quite evening. Leftover pizza for dinner; intermittent loads of laundry; Bob upstairs fighting World War II all over again on the computer. I've decided that I'm not ready to make a decision about a new car this weekend. I've got all summer to think about it, and I don't like being pressured to do something so quickly. Besides, I really think I'm paying too much now for this car. Who knows, I might get motivated and actually do some comparison shopping, although I admit it's not likely. But not tomorrow. Sunday we'll go out and have lunch with my family and if things go as they usually do, I'll end up spending most of the day and evening there. I need tomorrow to myself.

So, tomorrow--lunch somewhere nice, a bookstore or two, the drug store for vitamins and gourmet jelly beans, Pier One for an Easter basket for Bob. I did a search on the web looking for information on Lisa Tuttle and ran across a reference to a book by Phil Rickman that I haven't read, so I'm definitely going to look for that tomorrow. Rickman writes enormously long, detailed horror novels about Wales--December, Curfew, Candlenight. The new one is called "The Man in the Moss," and I don't know anything about it, but I've liked everything I've read by him, so I'm very interested in finding it.

I also need to go by one of the computer stores and get a copy of Norton Utilities. I looked for it last weekend and could only find the Windows95 version on CD, but my laptop doesn't have a CD drive. The CD version was on sale for $65, so I called the Comp USA telephone order number to see if I could get the diskette version. I could, but it cost $119.00. I declined to buy it at that price, but now I'm thinking, well, if that's what it costs, that's what it costs. Sometimes you just have to pay the price.

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