The Chronicles Of Jessica

I need to either get a baby or another dog.

Most of you will remember Parker, who was my doggy since she was a little puppy until the time I started getting acting work out of town and entrusted her to Margie, in a very "Losing Isaiah"-slash-"All Things Bright and Beautiful" type scenario. V. sad. Although I guess technically I'm Halle Berry in this scenario, which is probably the only comparison ever to be made between me and Halle Berry, ever. Anyway. Margie and Jim had a beautiful baby! Here's a picture of Parker with the baby. Margie will attest to the fact that Parker was never very good with change; I was a little worried. But so far I have heard no reports of Parker urinating on the baby or near the baby, or trying to stuff her neck into the baby's mouth, or eating the baby's toes like this diabetic guy I heard about once on NPR. My point is: Mazel Tov!

I have been so slack with writing lately. Winter always does this to me. It's all dark out and cold and all I want to do is shop online and eat cream-based soups. I have no energy for anything. Although I have been working out a lot more, which is a good thing. I found that since I joined the expensive gym, the guilt over not going is incrementally higher, which was my plan all along. I can't stand the guilt, so I get over there more often. The principle does not seem to work on Paul, who is still a member of the cheapo gym and hasn't been in three weeks, and feels no guilt over it whatsoever. I might try telling them that he died and see if I can get a retroactive refund for all of November.

So. Lots of excitement coming up, of course. Christmas, which usually sneaks right up on me, is being meticulously planned for and executed this year. I am done with all my shopping, and my cards are stamped and sealed and sitting in a pile on the table because I didn't want to seem TOO obnoxious by getting them out the first week in December. I figured I'd wait to mail them until I got my first card in the mail. My Auntie Kathy was the big winner; hers came Tuesday. My mother and her other sisters will tell you that Auntie Kathy is disgustingly capable and on the ball, so it really was not a surprise. I wish I had inherited that tendency instead of a sluggish metabolism and sensitive skin, but I am also a crackerjack with a one-liner, so you take the good with the bad.

Also of course, there's the inauguration, which apparently we are not invited to (WTF?) but that isn't stopping us from making a lot of plans surrounding what I like to call "The End of an Error." Julie and Jamie are coming up from Mississippi and James' sister is coming out from California and there will be so many thousands of people here we probably won't be able to see much more than a Barack-ish speck but who cares!?!?!? My office will be closed, like everything else in town, so we are going to party like it's 1999. Except that it'll be 2009 - which is kind of weird if you think about it. Then if you keep thinking about it, it's not that weird, but if you keep thinking about it, it seems weird again.

I read today that Oprah is going to be doing a whole show on how she's gained a bunch of weight back and how miserable and ashamed she is about it, and it made me feel so bad. (I highly recommend reading this for a lot more interesting speculation and insight about the topic than I could provide.) But I can remember once hearing Oprah say that she considered the fact that she had managed to lose a bunch of weight and keep it off to be her greatest accomplishment, and how flabbergasted I was at hearing that. Given everything she's done in her lifetime (and love her or hate her you have to admit the woman is pretty frickin' accomplished) - she considers diet and exercise to be her greatest accomplishment? How can that be? How is it that we as a society have made it so difficult for a person to accept herself just as she is?

I struggle a lot with this subject personally, and most of the time I'm pretty okay with my body and my looks. I have a feeling that if I weren't an actor I might be a lot more okay with them; maybe that's the trap Oprah fell into herself. But the longer I live and the more people I meet and the more I see women making themselves sick to fit a certain image or to look a certain way, the more convinced I am that not all bodies are made to be thin. Some bodies are just heavier bodies, and you can completely give over to that, and eat yourself to death and wind up a shut-in washing yourself with a rag on a stick, or you can go the complete opposite direction and go around hungry all the time and spending all your spare moments on a treadmill, eschewing birthday cake for as long as you live and resenting the hell out of your lot. Or you can just do the best you can, and eat your fruits and veggies and exercise and take care of your body to the best of your ability. And when confronted with a picture in a magazine of Courtney Cox or Lindsay Lohan or Olive Oyl or whoever, you can just shrug and go, "Huh. I don't look like that in a unitard!" and then go back to doing the crossword.

As roomates go, I guess I've had worse.

I'm an only child, which meant I had years to enjoy a room of my own and a share-less existence before I had to start dealing with roomates. I wish I had appreciated those years more. No one ever told me, "Someday a guy you live with will steal the keys to your car and make copies so he can drive it when you're not around" or "Keep an eye out for nymphomaniac tendencies which might cause your friend to start routinely accepting UPS deliveries in a much more personal way!" It never occurred to me that moving in with people might cause them to completely lose their minds, but a lot of them did. I'd have to say most of them did. I had this historically, epically bad luck with roomates which made me crazy for many years until I married Paul.

What a good decision that was. Not just because he's a great roomate, but really - he is. He washes dishes without you having to ask, he takes out the garbage, he hooks up the electronic equipment swiftly and with ease. He troubleshoots your iPod and computer and he goes to the grocery store without complaint - and he does it all looking so adorable, really. And the best feature about him is that he can be relied upon to kill the bug. This has come into play a lot in the last few days.

Sometime on Thursday night we noticed about 4 or 5 houseflies hanging around the apartment, which seemed weird, given that we live on the third floor and it's DECEMBER. By last night there were at least fifty. We have no idea how they're getting in, so we have no idea how to get rid of them. Flaky Landlady has been, as you can imagine, astonishingly unhelpful. On the upside, we have discovered Paul's hidden superpower - housefly homicide. He's amazing. Armed only with a New Yorker and an atomizer, he can swat them down out of the air on the first try and then kill them while they're lying there stunned. If they won't come down from a spot he can't reach, he shocks them by spraying water on them, then he kills them while they're lying there stunned. (While he does this I more or less sit around going, "Get him!" or else just lie there stunned.)

This morning when I came out there were about seven who were hanging out on the living room windows. Not being as handy with the rolled-up-magazine-of-death, I decided to try a different approach. I took out the vacuum cleaner and set up the wand attachment, then I sucked up those bastards with the most satisfying "thwonk" you've ever heard. I guess they might still be alive in the cylinder there, frolicking about with all our dust bunnies and wayward pubes that I've vacuumed up in recent months. Merry Christmas, musca domestica! BOO YA!

I think it's safe to say that this is the worst apartment in the history of apartments. My bad luck jumped from the roomates to the actual premises. We've had mice, mosquitoes, a housefly infestation. We have a persistent draft that rivals an arctic jet stream, I can't dry my hair and make coffee at the same time or the power blows - I bet there are squatters in crack dens that have a higher level of satisfaction with their living quarters than we do. But we have each other! At least until Paul finally loses his mind over all this and I have to have him committed.

I better run, we have some blood coming out of the crown molding and I gotta stock up on Bounty.