Tomorrow, November 1, marks two years since I've had a cigarette.

In case anyone's been wondering what's with my personality, it's this: I am still very much a smoker, and it's been two years since my last smoke. Anyone who quits and says they don't even miss it is either lying or has a spiritual levity that transcends the physical urges of mere mortals.

Nevertheless, after two years I am obliged to celebrate somehow. I'd most like to blow it all on 6 cartons of B&H 100s or perhaps Belmonts (but no DuMauriers because they taste like salty dirt), but instead I'll fete my abstention with my usual reward: new shoes. Woot.

Whenever I want to return Help! Bats! Everywhere! to its roots as a Standary Whiny Girl blog, I always think about my dear audience of Stumblers (all five of them) and how much I'd hate to alienate them. So here instead is a word:

nychthemeron (nik-THEM-er-on) noun: A full period of a day and night: 24 hours.

Happy Halloween.

“Just as an anthropologist’s presence among the group he is studying can alter the behaviour of the group, or as the bombarding of an atom alters the pattern it is meant to illuminate, so the style in which an artist explores reality may alter the thing explored.”
-The Art of Fiction by John Gardner

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Laurie Lansens, author of Rush Home Road, and more recently The Girls*, wrote in the new Quill and Quire about a book she thought was forthcoming until she had to abandon it: “I began to write my story, slowly at first, then more slowly, and slower still. Like walking on a fractured bone, it didn’t matter how slowly I was writing, it was painful. I blamed exhaustion, the demands of the children, my basement workspace, anything to explain why the process was so difficult.”

Quel dommage. So today, instead of pretending I’d write the big book about all the people, I baked a cake. I photographed it in my basement. Please note: wood paneling, 1977-1986 National Geographics, and the Young Rascals’ Good Lovin’. Happy Birthday Miriam. If you see this blog before your party tomorrow, that’s your birthday cake.



Notes:
* The Girls: It’s about two Siamese twins conjoined at the head, and the correct term for this condition escapes me. I just started it.

How to change your family forever, on a Friday night, as told by T-Bomb and Becky B.:

"We're having a baby. It's due on April 30. Here's a photo. It's 4 centimeters long right now."*

Everyone is counting on me to be the subversive aunt, but at the moment I'm also the one who stands in the corner, stunned.

It's due on April 30. This is already a very good time to be born, and my May 2 birthday makes me legit to say so. Earlier that month is a wedding, my 9 days in Italy and probably Amsterdam, then Pesach, then my birthday, then my father's, then Mother's Day, and somewhere in there my new neice or nephew. NEW!

It's over. I ate my mushroom lasagna and caesar salad and soda water with orange juice and half a bagel and melons and fruit flan and oranges and maple creme brulee. Totally worth it after 26 hours.

Atonement-mania!

3 hours till fast-breaking . . .

I only go into synagogue for weddings and aufrufs anymore, so the real substance of my atonement on Yom Kippur is the fasting. Like every other year, I spent the week dreading my sundown-to-sundown fast, ignoring of course the fact that it's once a year, it's probably good for me, and it sure as hell in't no Ramadan.

But it's been 21 hours with not so much as a drop of water. I'm kind of getting high on the no-food thing, and just a few minutes ago I did that thing where you look at your friend and see a talking steak. Except it was my cat and he was a talking profiterole. Goddamn, Spike, you can't be so tasty like that.

From Post Secret.

This being Thanksgiving, and a lazy-day post, all I feel like announcing to the world is my favourite confessions from the Grouphug.us book Stoned, Naked, and Looking in My Neighbour's Window:

"I forged a 'free pie' coupon at Marie Callendar's, and I gave it to my wife. I didn't tell her it was a forged coupon, and she got arrested.

Bail is $750, and I can't afford it, so she's still in County Jail.

Sorry honey!"

and

"I faked sick and stayed home from school on 11/22/63, I was in my room poundin' my pud when my mother rushed in and told me Kennedy was shot...I feel like it's all my fault."

and this

"We did it and I am glad. She is great, both in bed and to talk to."

Happy warm poultry day.

Shana Tova to by brethren and my jewesses. I made matzo balls for the first time ever. They're lighter than air. I've never been quite so proud of myself, except for that one time when I was 10 and read Les Miserables.

This holiday is the good one. Next week is The Day of Atonement and I can't eat for 24 hours. Woot.

I forgot about mojitos. Ah, the drink of kings and floutists:

Make a syrup of 1 c. sugar with 1 c. water, boil to dissolve sugar and chill in the fridge. . . Mash about eight chopped mint leaves in the bottom of a tall and flamboyant glass with a tablespoon of the syrup. . . Add 2 1/2 oz. light rum, the juice of half a lime and a slice or two of lime for garnish. . . . Top up with club soda and there's your magical drink.

On October 30 I see the Go! Team play, and until then I will have no alcohol except for the glass of Carmel on Rosh Hashanananana. You know it's time for hiatus when the idea of sobriety excites you.