Sep
14

Aaaah.

Last weekend the Actually and I took a much needed vacation. We didn’t go far—merely downtown, to the twenty-first floor of a fancy hotel. We were less than nine minutes from our front door, but what a difference nine minutes makes. After all, lying in our bed at home, we do not look straight ahead and see this:
night
Nor is our bed customarily king-sized, freshly made, and free of cat hair. Nine minutes away, at home, there is no room service. Or complimentary lavender-citrus shampoo. At home I generally wake up, step out of bed and see the crack running diagonally across the opposite wall. Whereas on vacation, I stepped out of bed and saw this:
day
And then a nice man came and brought me sausage. (Breakfast sausage! Get your minds out of the gutter.)

We ate crabcakes and bacon salad at our favorite restaurant (cleverly located in our hotel!) on Friday night, and Saturday walked around the pretty city buying shoes (me) and a handbag (me) and eleventy hundred books (both of us). That evening we watched Superman Returns, which I had to stop several times so that the Actually could explain various things. I have never seen a Superman movie, or a Superman TV show, or read a Superman comic book, so my knowledge of the masked man caped crusader(?) is as follows:

1. Changes in phone booth (though this has always seemed suspect—don’t people notice a grown man changing into a brightly colored costume in a phone booth? Also, ew. Have you been in a phone booth lately?)
2. Fond of Lois Lane
3. Flies
4. Allergic to Kryptonite
5. By day is Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter
6. Is faster than a speeding bullet, but is neither a bird nor a plane

I did not know about the weird messiah overtones of the Superman story, or that he has fire-eyes and freeze-breath, or that he is an ALIEN, or that we are supposed to believe that a pair of glasses, for god’s sake, are all the disguise needed to keep people from guessing that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person. With all of our sophisticated homeland security face recognition software, I guess we had better hope that no terrorists hit upon the brilliant scheme of donning a pair of spectacles and mussing up their hair a bit.

Anyway, I spent most of the movie letting the Actually explain to me about the Fortress of Solitude and marveling at Kate Bosworth’s ringlets and thinking how obscenely lucky I was to be in a hotel room twenty-one stories in the air with both the man that I love and a piece of chocolate pecan torte.
It was the perfect weekend. There was much alternately giggly and dead-serious romping in the fluffy hotel bed, there were persons bringing us foodstuffs on shiny trays, AND we picked out the first two items for our registry: gorgeous dishes and wood-handled flatware.

This week I returned to a 33-volume publication deadline and looming final papers, but rather than mewling with fear and cowering under a large object (as is my wont) I have been calmly making lists and humming as I ignore the piles of paper threatening to bury me alive. I am running a slight fever and may very well be getting sick again, but do I care? Not in the least!
Let the Avian West Nile Flu Virus do its worst. I went on vacation!

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |