Darling Ones,

This is just to say that about 36 big balloons came loose from their moorings and found their way to my house.

I noticed them this morning as I was drinking coffee and staring aimlessly out the front window listening to that Anaïs Mitchell record I am obsessed with.

Since the balloons were on the ground I was 99% sure this wasn’t a grand romantic gesture by a secret admirer. Nevertheless, I picked them up off the ground and for about 30 seconds I stood in the doorway and pondered throwing them out into the street where the wind would make them someone else’s problem.

Instead, I dragged them into the living and took some pics, as one does when this happens. I didn’t want this to be a pics or it didn’t happen situation. I thought about admiring them for a little while, but then one popped and scared the shit out of me. After the smoke alarm fuckery I think I forgot to tell you about I was all, “I CANNOT LIVE LIKE THIS WITH RANDOM LOUD NOISES SCARING ME OUT OF NOWHERE.”

Do you have any idea how stinky 36 big balloons are? Very. My house smelled like balloons up until I browned some ground beef with peppers and onions that will become my diner. Now it smells like onions and garlic.

Also, another thing I didn’t know, 36 balloons take up a lot of space. Stinky and space-hogging. Balloons, I am no longer your biggest fan.

I wasn’t sure what to do with the balloons. I thought popping them would be obnoxious and loud. So I literally googled “how to quietly pop balloons.” The sanest method involved cutting the balloon right above the knot where there is some slack. Since I was feeling pretty sane, I opted for this method.

This lasted about four balloons. First, it was a pain in the ass trying to separate the balloons to get at the neck. One popped in the process. Plus, I was getting that balloon stink all over my hands.

So I took the pointy-scissors and went after those bad boys like a madwoman. It was super fun and oddly cathartic. It was like popping bubble wrap, but way more satisfying. After that, I gathered up the remains and tossed them into the garbage and went back to Mondaying like someone who doesn’t have random magical things happen on a grey February day.

Yours,
Jodi

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Today is Sylvia Plath’s birthday. Probably, the most famous literary suicide victim. It struck me that today was her birthday and seemed an oddly fitting way to bring my recent musings and readings about suicide to an end. I mean, it’s all just really odd coincidence isn’t it?

Then tonight over tator tots my friend who is defying a nickname at the moment started talking about how she has become obsessed with the idea of nostalgia and how it’s longing for something that never was, a longing to go back to a fantasy. I told her how I had just written a bit about being nostalgic and that AC, an I Will Dare reader, had some interesting things to say about it. Again, just weird timing. Right?

So when I got home tonight to find not one but two e-mails from people I knew back in 1994 (the very time my I was being nostalgic about) my head popped off. Seriously? How weird is that. I am not even sure if these two people even know each other. One was reading the ‘Mats book, I think the other was trolling Facebook.

Seriously folks, how much synchronicity can one person brush off? And, more importantly, what does it all mean?

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After I spent many minutes wishing for a robot maid to bring me some sort of sustenance, I got out of bed and checked my e-mail and Google Reader. Lo and behold there was not one, not two, but three jobs that I might be qualified for. Three potential jobs that were not there this morning. And even if I am not perfectly qualified for all of them, I am going to apply. Just the fact that they are there reassures me.

Tomorrow I am going to write a self-piteous post about how I never, ever win the lottery, have private concerts with Elvis Costello, or get to have sex with Al Gore, and frankly how much it terrifies me that those things don’t happen more often. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

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This is some of the advice I left for my friends Scooter and Anna at their wedding last night. Being that I was the only single person over the age of 8 in the joint, I thought I’d be better offdispatching wise words to live by for people of any sort of couple-status and not just love advice for newlyweds.

I gotta say it was a little tough being the odd wheel. Generally it doesn’t bother me, but when we sat down to dinner the servers had a hard time dealing with the empty seat next to me. It kind of freaked them out. Perhaps they’ve never seen an Old Maid before. I am not sure what their problem was but before serving each course they had to ask and ask and ask again if the chair was empty. In their defense they did have a pretty cool synchronized serving technique reminiscent of Top Chef, but still.

The empty spot flustered them so much during the salad course that they just placed a salad in front of the empty chair because they didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to die. When you go to a wedding solo you are already acutely aware of your singlehood, having the servers repeatedly point it out to a table full of people, over half of whom you don’t know, just makes it all the worse.

Thankfully I drank enough to smooth over those feelings of odd-duckness and unworthiness to make it back to my larger group of friends in one emotional piece (there were nine of us and we had to bust into three different groups at dinner) and had a complete blast snarking and watching the cutie-pa-tootie rockabilly band.

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It surprises me how uncomfortable I was with burning the book. It felt really, really wrong. Even though I didn’t like it, it hardly deserved such harsh treatment.

Of course I spent a lot of time calling Lee and Seamus fascists and Hitler. Which made them decide to do dramatic readings of the pages before they burned them.

Still it was weird. At one point I said, “Even the dad in Footloose was against book burning!”

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