i'll admit it. i'm an incorrigible laundry optimist. and i'm a cheapskate, and since i have to pay for laundry by the load, that only makes the whole situation worse. i make poor judgments all the time:

surely that red tank top won't bleed onto the whites again this time.

dry clean only? they don't really mean that.

reshape and dry flat? well, draping it over the radiator is a shape, right?

anyway, tonight's laundry mishap was worse, because it's not my laundry. see, i got roped into taking on wardrobe duties for the show i'm stage managing right now. no big deal, really, i just have to do a bit of ironing pre-show, and wash a load of socks, t-shirts, table linens twice a week. well, that's where i went wrong tonight -- this play is a five-course dinner party, and the cast has to eat quite a bit on stage, and they wipe their mouths on cloth napkins. which i tossed into the washer along with all the clothes. which unfortunately stank of salmon, even tho i shook them to remove any lingering crumbs. which spread the small but potent quantity of salmon oil evenly throughout the load, so when i took the clothes out of the dryer, everything smelled like a stinky fish.

and all this because i was too cheap to put the napkins in a separate load.

on mom's advice i am now re-washing in hot water with a long soak cycle and a half cup of baking soda added to the mix. the fish smell may go, but will i have shrank everything in the process? putting me in charge of wardrobe just has disaster written all over it. if not tonight, then next week, when a pen sneaks past me into the washer, or i forget to separate reds from whites, or i leave someone's sock in the dryer...the possibilities are endless.

i woke up the morning after the election and it was like un-christmas. you know - that drowsy feeling of anticipation, aware that there's something special about the day even before you're awake enough to remember what that is. only this time i had this ugly, black pessimistic feeling as well, like a grey storm cloud hanging over the bedroom.

the long and short of it is:

the half of america that voted for george bush: who are you?

this isn't the america that i know. and while the subsection of the united states in which i live clearly isn't representative of the whole (i can count all the people i know who voted republican on one hand), i feel disillusioned to be so far out of touch with the part of american that is and will be making policy decisions that affect not only me, but people all over the world.

ugg. i'm utterly disgusted. i should have done more.

...was celebrated in understated style this year. my costume consisted of a t-shirt which said "scaredycat" and a pair of leopard-print cat ears: i went dressed as my inner child - a little bit frightened of everything, and distinctly feline in my predilection for napping in sunny places and my high strung nature. zeke found the cat ears most intriguing.

i did, however, torture Andy by engaging in my beloved halloween-morning ritual: downloading "monster mash" from itunes and listening to it at full volume right after hopping out of bed in the morning. i can't explain it; three years of co-habitation with lauren imbued me with a weakness for certain pop pleasures.