Very Slightly Surly Thursdays

If I didn't have this weather headache, it would be difficult to work up any degree of surliness at all. It's been a good week. Shelved books at the library, worked out with Pam, laughed myself silly trying to learn how to play The Pink Panther theme song on the piano with Angus, built a barn out of chocolate milk containers with Eve, and yesterday I had a date with Susan, who I'm borrowing from Patti. I met Susan because her daughter dances with Eve and Olivia, Patti's daughter. Susan has tornado/candy floss hair that makes her look like a nature goddess - like all her humour and creativity is constantly exploding out of her through her hair. Sometimes stuff gets caught in it, which I like because I say "something is caught in your hair" and then I get to fondle it on the pretext of taking the fluff out. Susan lives in a fairytale house surrounded by trees - you have to go through a gate in a hedge and I always expect elves to be on the other side. The house is sort of crooked and messy inside, and all the rooms lead to other little spaces, and there are murals and waves and dots painted on the walls, which reminds me that I always thought when I had my own house I would paint words on the walls, and write poems on beautiful paper and glue it up and paint over the edges so it blended in with the paint, and write the line about the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun around the ceiling, but I never did.

Susan is an artist, and I hadn't seen any of her work before yesterday, and I had no idea what to expect. I think if I thought about it, I expected pictures of flowers, which shows a sad lack of imagination on my part. I don't even know how to describe the actual paintings, except I think they look like some dreams I've had, where the whole world is a swirl of red/yellow/orange or blue/green/indigo/purple, and there are trees in the mist and beasts that can only be half-seen, and forests made of words, and everything is beautiful and mysterious.

This is the kind of visit that makes me feel sad and filled with longing for a little while, as if I'm living the wrong life, as if I lived in a crooked house with secret spaces I would be a painter with dangerous hair too. But I wouldn't. I would be me, living in the wrong house, complaining about the bathrooms, and my husband would roll his eyes and be passive-aggressive every time I tried to paint something on the wall, and my hair would still be difficult and uninspiring. I will just have to try to be me better, and keep visiting Susan.

Last night I picked up a book I've had from the library for weeks because I love the author, but for some reason I couldn't make myself start reading the book. Then when I started I couldn't stop reading it and I stayed up way too late until it was done. There were funny echoes of my day in it - an old house surrounded by trees; the man meets a woman who's an artist and the first time he goes to see her work he suddenly realizes he forgot to worry that it might be awful and he won't know what to say, but it's not awful. I don't know if the book was as riveting as it seemed, I think I might just be in a slightly manic episode; when I finally turned off the light and laid down, my thoughts kept bouncing around in my mind like popcorn.

Both kids have baseball tonight. Tomorrow I will tell you if Eve managed to bat. And also the story of why Eve is now afraid to bat.