Suzy Says

I completely struck out at the Body Shop yesterday. My plan was to pick up a couple of things for John as a tiny surprise, and one thing for me, since I can hardly ever buy a present for someone without buying myself one, too, no matter how small.

But…the Body Shop near me had none of the things. Not one. So, I decided to try and get the stuff on-line, instead. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the only things you can buy from the website are “selected gift items”. This pretty much blew my mind, partly because you can buy just about anything on the Web, including castles, and partly because the Body Shop is supposed to be so forward-thinking. What is the point of having a website where you can read Anita Roddick’s views on hemp products, but you can’t actually buy any of their products, including the hemp-based ones? Call me crazy, but I would have thought that one of the things they would want their website to do is actually sell things.

What could be a ruder awakening than the shrill, hateful voice of the alarm clock (a necessary evil, or evil necessity, if there ever was one)? A cat leaping from the floor onto the bed at 2:00 a.m. and landing with all her weight, reinforced by velocity, on your relaxed, sleeping, and unsuspecting tummy muscles, is what. I can completely understand now why Houdini died of being punched in the gut before he had a chance to fortify his muscles against the assault. Damn. There’s a physics lesson I could have done without.

John and I have swapped obsessions this week. He lent me the stupidly named, yet incredibly gripping Disturbia by the brilliant and erudite Christopher Fowler. The story is set in London, a place Fowler obviously not only knows well, but loves well, and the ancient city is as much of a character as its lower class, would-be journalist protagonist, Vince. Vince gets caught spying on a secret, very upper-class, and murderous society, and to avoid being killed by the society’s members, has to solve 10 London-related riddles in the space of a single winter night. I couldn’t wait to get home and read the next installment, and the ending was both shocking and satisfying. This one screams movie. Bad news, though: seems you can only get it in the UK.

I lent John what is possibly my favorite book ever, Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart. Mikal is the infamous Gary Gilmore’s little brother, and his unflinching look at hs family’s doomed, damaged history, leading with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy to Gary’s execution, is brilliant and deeply moving. When I first read it, I carried it from room to room so I could get in a few more sentences, and it stayed with me for weeks after reading it. One of the saddest and most brilliantly written books I have ever read. It has cast its spell over John, too, who also can’t wait to get home and read more of it. Yet we would probably never have read these books if it weren’t the other. I think that’s kind of cool.

John and I had brunch with Richard on Sunday at Rex Caf?. It was warm enough to sit outside in the sun, and although I was with two redheads, and the only one wearing sunscreen, I was the one who ended up with a slight sunburn. Malibu Suzy! The food was OK, but not great. We’re beginning to run out of good breakfast places on Polk Street. But it was good to catch up with each other.

You may remember that the apartment across the hall from us was bought by a couple with the same last name as John’s, a truly remarkable coincidence considering there are only 6 apartments in the entire building, two on each floor. What are the chances that both apartments on the same floor would be owned by people with the same name? It’s not a particularly common one, either.

And although this is a city, sometimes it seems like a city masquerading as a small town. On the weekend, we picked up John’s three prescriptions (with gratitude for my excEt medical benefits, since the actual cost was $250 and we only had to pay $15), only to be told by the pharmacist that Mr. Same Name’s mysterious and expensive prescription was ready. The pharmacist was amazed by the coincidence, too, and kept joking about it. Then when we were at the Good Guys on our toy shopping expedition, the computer brought up another guy with the exact same name as John’s, who also lives in the city. Yet we never win the lottery.

Well, accessory shopping was a world of fun. Besides the CD burner, we got a fabulous digital camera, which meant that John spent most of the weekend taking very silly pictures of himself, which he will probably be posting here in the next few days. The camera really is amazing, and so teeny! Not to mention no more bad pictures, worrying about where the negatives are, etc.

Can you tell that I’m the one who always has to label the pictures and make the copies? I started to do this obsessively afer helping my godmother clear out her family’s home, where they had lived for more than 80 years. They accumulated a ton of stuff during those 80 years, and we ended up throwing out boxes and boxes of photos because we had no idea who they were.

Speaking of copies, my older sister Beth sent me copies of some really cool pictures: Dad’s parents when they first got engaged; Dad’s first day of school when he was about 5 years old; pictures of Dad’s grandparents standing proudly outside their butcher shop in Chiswick; a picture of Dad’s father as a baby in 1893, wearing…a dress. And holding a flower. The Victorians had very different views on what children should wear. Not to mention adults.

So the weekend was a fun mix of the past and the present, verging on the future to the technology awed, like me. I also bought myself a little present to make my next trip to England slightly less hideous. I’m planning to go to London in June to help my stepmother clear out Dad’s things. For those unfamiliar with my recent past, my father died suddenly in August, and I flew back from his funeral in early September. This was the last time I have flown anywhere since 9/11, and I hate flying at the best of times. I don’t think anyone would say this was the best of times. I am actively working on conquering this phobia, but thought that this mini-CD player and recorder would make the 11 hour flight a little less scary. You can get 2 & 1/2 hours of music on each little mini-CD. Not to mention the fact that it’s adorable. I can justify almost anything!

I see the ever-popular Friday Five is all about vacations this week. It’s amazing that I ever even go on vacation when it looks like this, right here, right now, right outside my window. You gotta love it that it’s been 70 degrees and sunny for the last week of February. This is why we pay the big bucks to live here.

I have travelled a fair bit, but there are still places I’d like to visit. Some are impossible, though. I’d love to visit Egypt 50-100 years ago, before the tourist traffic got so heavy that it started ruining the very things that attracted the hordes in the first place. Hawaii, 50-75 years ago, ditto. I’d like a decent hotel, but not high rises on the beach. Unless they get going on that Star Trek instant travel thing (and why haven’t they?), I’m not going to Thailand or Australia, even though I want to. I can’t face 14+ hours in a plane for any reason whatsoever, even first class. Too boring, too long. And since time travel, too, is still impossible (what have scientists been doing all these years, anyway?!), my Number One vacation wish remains impossible: to spend a week in Bar Harbor, Maine (where we spent the summers when I was a kid), as a 9 or 10 year old. But it would have to be 30 years ago, when I really was that age, and life was fearless and good and the summers were endless.

Within the realm of the possible: Greece; Morocco; Tanzania (where I would go on safari with an old friend who lived with us for a few years as a student before returning to his native Tanzania); Easter Island; Tahiti & Bora Bora.

So it’s Friday, and sunny, and I’m counting the hours until I can get out of my office building and start living my real life. I’m meeting John after work today and we are shopping for a CD burner. We have our iMac back and our joy knows no bounds. In order to show it how happy we are that it’s home, we are going to buy it a lovely new accessory, which has the added bonus of being fun for us, too. I might even get the new Joey Ramone CD and copy it for my bro and sis, so I can bring it up when I visit them in a couple of weeks. Joey’s gone, but the music lives on, and you haven’t really lived until you hear his version of “Wonderful World.”

To recap: sunny, beautiful Friday, shopping on the agenda, and the iMac is back. Yes, I may have poisoned John slightly with last night’s leftovers, and it is just when everything is going great that Fate usually gives me one of her nastier surprises. But I am giving way to a cautious, uncharacteristic optimism anyway. Stay tuned.