Easter with the Sopranos

Easter, Easter, Easter. I spent it working, reading (a fabulous disaster book), updating my quotes pages, and watching the first disc of Season 2 of The Sopranos. Oh, and listening to my upstairs neighbors gather with their extended clan for the sole purpose of tormenting me with their noise levels. (So, in turn, I jacked up the volume on my TV so their Easter would be peppered with Tony Soprano bellowing “You fucking fat sack of shit!” and the like.) Also, the first thing to fully wake me on Easter morning wasn’t the noisy neighbors getting ready for church, but the sound of Plath vomiting on my bed. Then I realized that my period had started, too. Happy Easter to me!

Well, it’s not a holiday I celebrate anymore, anyway. To me it really only matters if you’re religious or a kid. Or, if neither applies to you, it’s worth celebrating if you have nice family traditions to uphold. We started going to a fancy Easter buffet at the Hershey Lodge and Convention Center when I was in junior high, I think (or maybe 6th grade at the earliest), and this was something I always enjoyed. The meal was great, there were loads of decorations and a big ice sculpture, and a tux-clad pianist played lovely tunes while we ate. Plus the hostess looked like Dionne Warwick, which, back in the ’80s, I thought was kind of cool. This all began before my parents divorced and my grandmother died, so as the years progressed, the tradition felt like a relic from a better era (even though, okay, technically things were much better after my parents split—those are two people who never should’ve married each other). But when we stopped going to Hershey ’round about 2001 or 2002, because they were raising their prices and the food quality was dropping, I took that as my cue to stop celebrating the holiday altogether. There just didn’t seem to be any point to schlepping up to PA for a holiday that didn’t matter to me.

My sister invited me over for dinner, but I wanted to make some headway with my latest freelancing project and also tackle some long-overdue website updates. Plus I just didn’t feel like getting dressed or going anywhere. Getting dressed and going somewhere are so overrated. For Easter dinner I ate some vegetarian salmon and that was the extent of my celebratory fressing.

My plans to check out the cherry blossoms with Mom and Bill on Saturday fell through. We cancelled on Friday night because we thought the weather was going to be worse than it was. The weather was okay in the end (it remained quite cold but we only received a dusting of snow), but by then it was too late to really do anything about it. I added quotes to my website, watched an excellent German film (The Tunnel), read the aforementioned disaster book, and edited two chapters of my freelancing project.

Since I’m moving backwards here, I’ll mention that I cleaned on Friday night for the first time in ages. I even went to Target beforehand to stock up on new cleaning supplies. Although I knew Mom probably wouldn’t visit after all, because the weather forecast wasn’t looking so great, I decided that a clean apartment would be good for me; perhaps it would even disrupt this paralyzing stasis I’ve been in lately. But really, part of what drove me to clean was my embarrassment over Wednesday’s intruder seeing my disgusting apartment. He used or at least looked at my toilet, and it was foul. It seriously looked like a toilet from Trainspotting. I was just so humiliated, it drove me to clean.

Oh…wait. Did I ever mention my intruder? It’s not a huge deal, really. Last Wednesday I got home from work and one of the first things I noticed was that the door to the laundry room was hanging wide open. I figured the cats must’ve pushed it open—it’s happened before, although never that wide. Then I noticed that my thermometer/hydrometer, which is perched on a little shelf outside the kitchen, was facedown on the floor. Then I noticed that the big plastic container of cat food that I keep in the laundry room was sitting in my living room. Then I noticed that my toilet seat was up, like a guy pissed in it. What. The. Fuck. Well, I’m not that stupid—I understood that someone had been in my apartment. And that someone was clearly one of my upstairs neighbors (the laundry room connects my apartment to their side of the house) or a service employee sent in there to examine the house’s phone connection box, or the water valve, or the gas/electricity meter (all of them are in my apartment). But why? That’s what I want to know. Why would they come into my apartment? And not call me beforehand? Or, in an emergency (like if flooding were imminent and the water valve had to be turned off immediately), why didn’t they at least tell me afterward? Nobody said a word to me. I was pissed. And I felt violated to some degree. Plus, let’s not forget that the last time they had a service employee enter my apartment without asking me, he broke the stained glass star I’d just brought home from Iceland. And there was that one time my previous landlord entered my apartment (without first asking me), to fix one thing or another, and ended up breaking one of my San Francisco magnets and the stained glass Chagall piece I bought in Chicago. So, to say that I’m touchy when it comes to upstairs people entering my apartment without my permission would be an understatement. And since then, I have been locking my door every day. Yes, I learned my lesson, thanks.

So…back to Friday. I’m not an unclean person (haw haw haw, well, in some ways I am)—I’ve always prided myself on keeping a clean and tidy apartment. But ever since my landlord and landlady died two years ago, leaving me thinking that I’d have to move, my apartment has been in disarray. Possessions are packed away and boxes are stacked everywhere. I gave up dusting and cleaning except on a sporadic basis because I just didn’t care anymore. All I want is to get the hell out of there, but naturally the housing market exploded when all this began, and I couldn’t afford a home. I could move into another rental, but…ugh. No thanks. I need to avoid that if I can, for a lot of different reasons.

Anyway, so I cleaned on Friday to eliminate the Trainspotting toilet and all the other nastiness plaguing my apartment thanks to my apathetic sloth. Halfway through the cleaning frenzy I ended up getting badly scratched by Freyja, who I tried to put into the living room while I was vacuuming the bedroom. She’d been in the bedroom and got a crazed, wild-eyed look of panic when she thought I was going to corner her with the vacuum. I decided to carefully pick her up and move her into the living room so she wouldn’t feel trapped. Simple, right? It misfired. She became a puffy, yowling ball of knives and within seconds I was spurting blood. Excellent. But I have to say that I’m impressed with her ability to rip a gash in my chest without actually tearing my shirt. That’s quite a skill to have.

Speaking of cats, the disaster book I just finished mentioned that the narrator’s cat was a gray tabby who yelled a lot. I nudged Plath and sneered, “Why does that sound familiar?” Then the cat disappeared for a while and the narrator was afraid that one of her starving neighbors ate him. I scooped up Plath in a death-clinch, buried my face in his stomach, and screeched, “Plathy, I won’t let the neighbors eat you! I WON’T! I’ll smother you and your sister before I allow the neighbors to eat you!! I’ll keep you safe, I promise you! I won’t let you be their dinner!!!” He was just like, Oh, Jesus Christ.



song heard most recently before posting:
Con te partiro—Andrea Bocelli