coming off the caffeine rush...

I forget that it's halfway through February, coming home and wondering why it's so damn cold so I'm wrapped in a blanket, listening to wintry music, too sleepy to do anything really coherent, ignoring phone calls that involve either going out to the bar around the corner even if it'd be chill or anything that involves listening to someone talking about their relationship angst. As someone with a literary bent who finds life and people to be more interesting than most recent fiction, I've got a higher tolerance and an often frequent enjoyment of anecdotes and stories, but not for endless regurgitation of dysfunction that's woefully one-sided.

We celebrated my uncle's birthday tonight, over the usual wine-and-politics preliminaries where everyone's all over the place politically, some people say things that are totally absurd, and I try to remember to be sure that what I say is coherent and not completely acidic, and still finding ways to laugh.

Me and my brother-in-law were trying to come up with ideas for a bestseller that would combine the worst elements of 2012 Maya weirdness with the neo-Hal-Lindsey predictions of the evangelical wing, joking about neocon babies (my sister said that the baby is constantly leaning to her right), and spelling out EVIL HERO with the OVER THE HILL birthday candles.

I end up aiding and abetting my grandpa by sneaking him brownies (he's diabetic but watches his sugar instead of taking insulin), discussing Neil Gaiman novels with my becoming-very-cool younger cousin who now has a green streak in her hair and is learning to play the guitar, talking to my sister's belly where my unborn nephew will be for another three months telling him that I'm sorry that the world he'll be born into sucks but that we still love him and God is good and maybe he'll still do ok.