INSERT EVIL LAUGHTER HERE

My friend and I decide to take a spontaneous trip into Boston for lunch.  Her daughter works at one of the restaurants in Seaport and we haven't been on an adventure in a while, so we combine the elements of bored minds with empty stomachs.  It takes us a while to secure seats because the restaurant is both trendy and a tourist destination, but once we settle in, we treat ourselves to a pleasant lunch and some time bantering with my friend's daughter and fellow employees.

Once we leave the restaurant, we wander around the waterfront for a short while.  A woman stops us and asks us for directions to the Home Show.  She can't seem to find it, and she is standing on the sidewalk while absently overlooking the harbor.  We point her to the World Trade Center and decide to follow her inside.  After all, my friend just remodeled her entire kitchen, so she is in construction withdrawal.

There are all types of vendors inside the Trade Center at the Home Show.  In addition to the usual window, bath, kitchen, and hot tub booths, there are booths for jewelry, chocolate, pain gels, and things that just don't seem like they belong at a home trade show.  My friend engages in conversation with one of the vendors when suddenly something bounces and rolls toward my feet.  I look down at it when the random item stops after hitting my right sneaker.

It is a brain.  Yes, a brain. 

Sitting up against my foot is a miniature purple foam brain.  A saleswoman scurries over as I lean down to pick up the brain.  "I'm so sorry," she says, watching me examine the object.  She hesitates and then adds, "Uh, you can have it if you want.  We're giving them away.  It's a stress ball."

This.  Is.  Everything. 

I have students who are allowed to carry and play with stress balls during classes and at assemblies.  Their stress balls are usually the standard ones: red, foamy, and slightly bloated like a drunken clown's nose.  My newly acquired stress ball is so very much cooler.  It is an honest-to-god purple brain. 

I am currently on the tail end of a week-long winter break.  I go back to school tomorrow, and, under normal circumstances, the thought of returning to work would be a cause for slight agida.  Not this time, though.  I cannot wait to get back to school and perch my new purple foam stress ball brain on my desk.  I also cannot wait until I get an opportunity to use it. 

I can see it now: "You call THAT a stress ball?  Look at THIS!  It's a brain.  A BRAIN!  A PURPLE SQUISHY BRAIN!"  I'll squeeze the brain in my hand until the purple veins ooze from between my fingers, then I'll let it retract and do it again and again.  I'll hold my brain-oozing fist in the air and shake it while laughing maniacally like I'm Dr. Frankenstein.  "It's ALIVE!!!!  ALIIIIIIIVE!!!!!"

Then, if I haven't been fired already, I'll convince all of my students to bombard their guidance counselors with requests for purple squishy foam stress brains.  It will be awesome.  It will be like Alice's Restaurant only for middle schoolers.  It will be like a movement, a cause, a celebration.

All it takes, apparently, is a decent lunch in the city and attendance at a home show to keep me entertained.  Don't you dare pre-warn my students.  I'm anxious to see who will be first to notice the purple stress brain when school starts up again.  (Insert evil laughter here.)

YOGA MAT DASH

At 6:30 a.m. on a brisk New England morning in February, the strange aura just before sunrise can play tricks on the senses. It's not light, yet it's not dark.  It's invigorating leaving the house in the dark then arriving at work in the light just eighteen minutes later as the colored sky slowly fades into blue.  I am almost disappointed that the clocks move ahead in a few weeks because then I'll be back to the glare-in-my-eyes commute.

For now, this quiet pre-dawn drive takes me the back way down silent side streets.  Occasionally I will pass a jogger wearing bright colors or a walker with a headlamp, athletes trying as diligently to avoid being hit as I am trying to avoid hitting them.  Once in a great while I might even see an early morning dog walker (sometimes still in his or her pajamas), but, generally speaking, my morning commute is tame and serene.

Until today.

This particular back road runs parallel to the two main highways: routes 28 and 125.  It's a peaceful alternative to the traffic crawl on one highway and the break-neck drag races on the other.  As I near my turn, a road so deep in the woods that it was blocked one recent morning by an errant fallen tree, I am surprised by the sight of a woman running full tilt through the darkness.

She is not dressed in jogging attire nor is she rushing to keep up with a dog.  Nope, she is racing around the snow-banked lane in a mid-length puffy coat, complete with fur-lined hood.  Under one arm is her pocketbook; under her other arm is a yoga mat.

And this isn't even the strange part.

As I prepare to turn down the same small street as is she, a pack of women similarly dressed comes careening out of the darkness and races down the road after her.  Twelve or so women, all dressed in street clothes, all wearing puffy winter coats, all carrying bags and yoga mats, running as fast as they can, like their yoga pants are on fire.

This is the strange part.

I stop mid-turn, completely flabbergasted.  These women are all wearing dark clothing and dark coats, and they're running to somewhere. Stranger, though, is the realization that this means they are also running FROM somewhere.  Where did they come from?  I mean, I can surmise that they're running to someone's house for a private yoga class.  This is that type of a hoity-toity town.  But ... a dozen of them?  With the same coats?  Flying along at the ass-crack of dawn?

I start wondering if maybe they're escaping from some maniac.  Should I stop my car and inquire after their safety?  I don't know -- seems like if they're dressed in puffy coats, there couldn't have been such a dire emergency that they'd take the time to dress or grab yoga mats.  It can't be a PTO event or a mothers' breakfast.  It's too early for the first buses to have even come by yet.  How do I know?  I know because I take this route as a way to avoid school bus traffic.

Slowly the car and I both recover, pass the gaggle of women (who appear cheerful), and continue on the way to work, the car on autopilot and me shaking my head and quietly whispering, "What.  The.  Fuck.  What the serious fuck did I just see?"

In the few years that I have driven to work this way, I have never seen anything like the gauntlet-running housewives.  But, if there's anyone out there in the vicinity of Holt and Prospect Roads who would like to explain this to me, I'm not going to lie to you: I'm curious as all hell to know the reason for the spectacle that I witnessed.

Unless, of course, they were running to meet Rosemary's baby.  In that case, forget I asked.  Forget I even wrote about it.  Forget it all.  So help me, if Minnie Castevet comes knocking on my door, I'll hunt you all down faster than those women in the puffy coats and wrap your bodies in yoga mats (which is quite possibly what those women were doing in the first place...).

TRIMMING THE WRITING FAT

Finally.  I am finally getting to four years' worth of writing magazines. 

Oh, sure, I've looked through them, but I kept telling myself to pull out an article here or there then never did.  I could say (truthfully) that I kept the magazines to use as resources for my MA in English (citations), but the whole truth is that I was too overwhelmed to go through them post-degree.  After having to change my capstone project at the last minute, I was too utterly pissed off to go through the magazine pile for any reason.

For more than four damn years.

Finally, this weekend I decide it's time to rid myself of these magazines.  I am ready to exorcise my demons.  I start with 2014 and slowly work my way forward in time.  Obviously there are articles I am not bothering to save, like which literary agencies are searching for writers circa August 2015.   But other articles (like business expenses and tax credits for writers) are worth saving.

So, I sit with my scissors and stapler and start attacking the pile.  It takes me three days.

I still have 2017 and 2018 to shuffle through, but I am fresh from a grand wine tasting, where five tables of multiple bottles of wine each have primed me for just about anything, including tearing out and stapling professional writers' articles.  It's not too horrible when I get home and immediately open prosecco to help me along.  Homemade nachos are just the bonus to this whole scenario.

I must persevere.  Tuesday is recycling day, and I am damned determined to get these magazines out of my house.  It's all about trimming the fat at this point, and these magazines, though helpful, are ultimately the fat of my existence right now. 

Besides, once I clear off the pile of magazines, I can honestly start zeroing in on clearing off the top of my desk for its intended purpose: Writer's Heaven.

I'll post pictures when it's done.

WINE STATE OF MIND

I'm in a wine state of mind.

I have spent the last four weekends refusing to leave my house.  Part of this is because of the weather; leaving the house meant risking immediate and severe frostbite.  Part of this is because I have been in a sucky mood, and I have preferred reading books and scrubbing my toilet to being around people.  I am also willing to bet that a good portion of my need to stay home is tied directly to finally having my house back to near-normal following the Great Merrimack Valley Gas Disaster of 2018.

No matter the reasons, I decide today to finally venture out on a Saturday.

I hit my usual haunt for the weekly wine tasting and am greeted with, "Wow, we haven't seen you in a while!"  Truth.  Four weeks, to be exact.  Good thing I had some wine already stock-piled.  After tasting some great Superbowl-themed wines then buying prosecco (not one of the themed selections), I hit up CVS to spend $8 in extra-bucks (on toe and hand warmer packets).  I even take the time to drive my daughter and her pal to the T-station several towns away so they can attend a country music concert in Boston.

Apparently, I have decided to make up for all my recent weekends all in one day: Go, go, go!

When I finally do get home, I turn on the television to have noise in the background while I do some work.  Oh, look -- The Hallmark channel.  What a surprise ... not.  I am about to turn the channel to something far more original, like Say Yes to the Dress, but I notice that there's a movie on Hallmark about a winery. 

This makes me thirsty.

After the movie ends, on comes another Hallmark movie also set at a winery.  The last time I chatted with my landlords, we got on the subject of wine.  They have a wine cellar in their home (in front of mine), and they handed me a bottle of Montepuciano d'Abruzzo. So, here I am on a Saturday night in a wine state of mind, when work just doesn't seem so important anymore.  I open the red wine, let it breathe a little (because I am impatient and do not have an aerator ... I know ... a sacrilege), open some sharp cheddar cheese, then pour a glass of wine.

Sure, it has been lovely getting out of my house (other than going back and forth to work), but it's even lovelier to be home, watching winery-themed Hallmark movies, eating cheese, and sipping Italian red wine.  Life is good, and we're halfway through winter (officially) here in the frozen tundra of New England, so that in and of itself is a celebration. 

Besides, I don't believe it counts as drinking alone if the bottle is a gift. After all, wine truly is a state of mind, and, since I'm home and sipping along with wine-themed movies, I must be doing Saturday right, so I don't mind; I don't mind at all.