Fables of the deconstruction

bowdlerized stayed the weekend with me, and somehow, the post we planned to make together, a karaoke duet of "Brown-Eyed Girl," never actually got made. Instead:

• Bow told me such fascinating stories about the State of Her on the trip home from the airport that I accidentally ended up on the wrong interstate and didn't notice for twenty minutes or so, and eventually when I realized my mistake and took a shortcut to the interstate we were supposed to be on, we discovered a mile-long strip, seemingly in the middle of fucking nowhere, consisting of nothing but huge car dealerships, one after another, all running together. It was so astounding that we discussed it at odd moments all weekend, as indeed I am discussing it now. And also we saw what looked like some sort of enormous Pre-Columbian temple complex, jutting off a hilltop in the middle of an otherwise perfectly ordinary small town.
  
  The moral of this story is: save your interesting stories for when your host has found her bearings on the freeway, but if you just can't wait that long, at least make sure that when you get lost, you get lost in someplace worth seeing.



• We witnessed my house turning into something like No. 12 Grimmauld place, spewing swarms of termites from the living room ducts to kill us all, or else totally freak us out. You would not believe the number of termites in my living room on Saturday morning. They were all dead within a couple of hours, as apparently termite swarms are wont to be, but AAAAAAAAAHHHHH TERMITES IN MY HOUSE AAAAAAAAHHHHHHLAKSJF;lifjsldg. My skin is crawling as I write this, two days later.
  
  The moral of this story is: do not ever ever under any circumstances at all allow your termite contract to lapse.
  
  (Also, this is not a moral, but what is it about these unwelcome swarms of bugs coinciding neatly with the visits of dear friends for whom I would like everything to be lovely? Ask me to tell you, sometime, of the first night of leestone's visit, and why she was forced to sleep with a roll of paper towels in her bed--assuming she slept at all.
  
  Now that I come to consider it, though, the second moral of this Plague of Termites story, when coupled with the story of the Plague of Palmetto Bugs, is: Good golly, Cammy, it is time to reconsider your life as a nonbeliever, because Someone is obviously trying to punish you, and what does He have to do to make His point, send a Plague of Actual Locusts your way?)



• We drank strawberry daiquiris on the porch, sadly failing to carouse drunkenly because I followed the instructions from the mixer bottle when I made the first pitcher, which unacceptably encourages overuse of the mixer and underuse of the rum and so really it was like drinking glasses of strawberry syrup for ice cream, the kind you squeeze out of the bottle. The second pitcher was a bit better, but by then--you will understand this if you've ever drunk a 16-ounce glass of strawberry syrup--we were sort of strawberry-syruped out.
  
  Relatedly, Bow learned that liquor stores are here referred to as package stores, and we discovered my new favorite place, the package store in my neighborhood, which sports some positively brilliant signage and an appropriately seedy clientele.
  
  The moral of this story is: Do not make your daiquiris from a recipe on the back of the mixer bottle.



• We bought a lawn mower at Home Depot, aka OH MY GOD WILL WE EVER FIND SOMEONE TO HELP US. I found the mower I wanted, and (after, like, half an hour of alternately standing around Looking Purposeful and venturing out into the field to request help) got all squared away, and in the process received a lecture on lawn mower care and safety to rival, in tone and intensity, one of my father's favorite recurring themed lectures, Girls Who Get in Their Cars and Point Them.
  
  The moral of this story is twofold: never go to Home Depot unless you're prepared to stand around and wait and wait and wait. And: If you look like twenty-year-old who's never mowed a lawn before in her life, and you buy a lawn mower from a man old enough to be your father, understand that he is going to assume that you are mechanically retarded.



• We ate much food, of the unhealthy and fattening kind.
  
  The moral of this story is: Don't have company if you're trying to watch what you eat.



• We solved a clothing dilemma by stopping at a Gap outlet at the crack of dawn, and then altering the article of clothing eventually purchased, in a moving vehicle, with a roll of duct tape, while running half an hour late to our final destination. (For the record, I highly recommend this as entertainment for your house-party weekends.)
  
  The moral of this story is: For the love of God, don't forget your black pants.

We did some other things too, of course. We petted dogs and watched movies and had lunch with my parents and wrote a bit and discussed lots of things and inadvertently viewed a fireworks display through a corridor of trees and Victorian mansions. But these other things had no morals--they were just kind of nice--and so fall outside the scope of this entry.