Critique of Everyday Life

I haven't been cooking much lately. The oven's thermostat was broken when I moved in, and the new unit promised by the landlord in October never arrived. The temperature on the one I have now simply keeps rising, regardless of where I set the gauge. My solitary alchemic saucepan returns everything I give it in the flavor of geranium-scented dishsoap, so I've been heating soymilk for coffee in the wok. The 3-tier hanging fruit basket is now in the study, freeing up precious desk space. Notecards, tealights, and dictionaries replaced sprouted garlic, spotty bananas, and split-seamed tomatoes. The spider plant from the bedroom took the fruit basket's place in the kitchen. That room seems to have better morning light, and I've promised this one, with its expectant white blossoms, that it's not going to die. This morning, inspecting its tips and roots, I told it I wasn't sure how long its yoda-toes were supposed to grow, as if it were one of the cats.

The only sources of heat are the fireplace and a single space heater in the bedroom, unless you count the oven, which I don't--an unreasonable anti-nostalgia for the ramshackle apartments of my adolescence. My place is too old to have central, and it was 25 degrees last week, but it always made me feel homeless when my mom did it, so i wait for the fire. Most nights and some mornings, I build a fire. I began with the fake wood from Publix, but as it's gotten colder, I've moved on to crumpled newspaper, small batons of plywood, pine fat lighter, and chunky oak logs from Ward's. The logs are always slightly damp, since we've not only been having cold weather, but tornado warnings, too.

A week ago I began re-organizing the books. The plan was to remove every book from the floor, which required three new bookshelves. This process produced room-eating piles: poetry, pre-war fiction, post-war fiction, biography, memoir, something I suppose could be listed as popular culture, Japanese textbooks, Japanese dictionaries and grammar manuals, Japanese fiction and poetry in translation, textbooks for the teacher of American literature, waves of theory. The rugs are clean. The couch is in a new place. The television my brother gave me six months ago is, against my better judgement, off the ground and on a shelf. I plugged it in the other day for the first time and discovered I have cable. The litter boxes are undetectable and I've laundered all of my blankets.

i threw out the pair of brown suede moccasin boots in the trunk of my car that had practically sprouted a new pair of shoes. I bought a carpety sage green coozie for the toilet seat. It looks ridiculous, but it's not as bad as the puffy plastic that's got so many tears it's starting to give me junkie-ass. I've driven out to the Waldo fleamarket one Sunday a month for the past year. i never found the little table for the kitchen window I thought I needed, so I'm eating breakfast off the ironing board that folds out of the wall. If I ever actually use it for ironing, my shirts will betray this tumbledown breakfasting with coffee creases and pleats.

Dylan's Self Portrait. Bowie's Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Joanna Newsom. Kafka. Jameson. Housekeeping.

A letter from the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (Writing the History and Monitoring the Future of Generation X) found me a few days ago. I was randomly selected as a sixth grader to participate in their yearly surveys before my generation had a name. When I was in the sixth grade I lived almost exactly a mile south of where I live today. I rode my bike to school every day, which is something I still do. The letter says, "The purpose of this follow-up study is to examine how your years of schooling influenced your choice of a career and how satisfied you are with the way that things are going."