melting food and falling needles

Friday night and the needles are falling off of the Christmas tree. The decorations seem so silly, now. The needles make little pin-dropping sounds as they fall one by one. There is dust on the gingerbread house I made in November when I barely had my face above the water of the semester that I like to call Too Much 2007. And I've been off for a couple of weeks and I never want to go back. I just want to run into 2008 like there's nothing looming there. But there's something looming there.

My mother went crazy tonight. If she weren't menopausal, I'd think she was getting her period. She was telling me to find a new place to live. Saying that if I thought this was such a horrible house to live in, that I should find a new place to live. I have no idea why she said these things to me; I didn't say anything about this being a horrible house to live in. She was on the brink of tears, saying that if I moved out I'd be selfish enough to decorate my own house, but not hers.

"Do you want me to decorate this house?" I asked.

"I don't know," she replied, seeming confused.

I don't know what she was talking about. She said she was going to the food court to eat, and dared us to come with her. My dad stood up and put on his coat. I respectfully declined.

I feel weird and lonely tonight. I'm not sure what it is. It could be that my family is currently eating a tense meal in the food court of the mall while I'm alone with nothing but the sounds that the dishwasher is making. It could be that I had a glorious dinner-and-a-movie date last night, and now I've come off the high. Of course, dinner was gross, and the movie was sub-par, but those are just subordinate details that have little to do with the gloriousness of the date itself. So I'm sitting in the lull of Friday evening, thinking that I wish the next twenty minutes would just fly by so that I can watch Jeopardy and yell out the answers to myself.

I'm hungry, but my sister turned off the breaker in the basement this morning to extract the light fixture from the bathroom. It didn't occur to either one of us that the laundry room, which houses the freezer, is attached to the same breaker. Now the entire freezer, raw meat and ancient bread goods combined, has thawed completely. I'm not sure I want to risk salmonella, so I'll just eat Christmas goodies for dinner instead.

My phone is buzzing on the table. It's Eric. It'll be nice to talk to someone rather than listen for the pin-drops of the dying Christmas tree across the room.