Ice Bear Combat
- The weather reports have been frustrating, because they advertise ninety-degree coolness when in reality it feels like a hundred and five, accounting for the cloudless skies and the sticky quality of the air. We have been eating outside on the deck to adjust ourselves. Every night my sister makes hot soup––hot soup––which on one occasion I douse all over my thumb. I text pictures of the large pink bubble beneath the nail to my friends, who have little sympathy. “Why the hell are you eating hot soup in this weather?” And that is a very good question.
- I eat mangoes two a day, which are somehow still being sold for twenty-five cents each at Costco in mid-July. Nobody else is allowed to eat my mangoes unless they ask permission and undergo a routine inspection, in which I stare at them hard in the eyes to gage how much a mango would really mean to them. I’ve gotten used to the itchy, irritating feeling that springs in one’s mouth after they’ve eaten two mangoes a day for weeks on end. I dread my doctor’s appointment next month––learning how even further out of whack the vitamins in my bloodstream have become.
- We keep a list of nicknames for the cats on the fridge on crumpled purple notepad paper. One of our cats is a thin black-and-white princess with rabbit fur, so of course we give the most ungraceful nicknames we can muster to Her Holiness––Cow Kitty, Mint Chip Moo, Squeaker, El Petite, and simply Cat. We also have a less-groomed, nearing-obese gray commoner cat who has a strange hobby for hanging around bathrooms, and we try to make her feel as important as we can––The Grey Lady, Miss Èclair, Daisy Dearest, The Gray Goddess of Middle Tennessee, Baby Belly, and Earth Bender Badger (the last a fitting title we adopted from watching Avatar: The Last Airbender reruns on Netflix).
- My dad and sister are the intellectuals of the family––they engage in such activities as reading The New Yorker for fun and debating about the geography of Zimbabwe. One day my sister laughed obnoxiously loud at “Lexicon for a Pandemic,” which was an article in one of those magazines, and the entire family was left grinning at such plays on words as “Someday, Noneday, Whoseday?, Whensday?, Blursday, Whyday?, Doesn’tmatterday." The other day my sister showed me “The Unexpected Solace in Learning to Play the Piano”––another one of those magazine articles––and I laughed tears and put a page of it up on my wall. After which I thought, “Maybe I should become one of those intellectual people things."
- It’s too bad that classical music is so boring. I would love to use a worldly knowledge of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, and Liszt in quiz bowl and to impress my friends. But it’s all so dull, and my seven-second attention span can’t possibly be expected to stand the tests of little violin ditties. Instead I listen to useless things. I think a need for fun, a need to listen to things I actually like, is my downfall. But sue me––I’m more of a movie soundtrack kind of person. And “Ice Bear Combat” is so much more fun than “Minute Waltz.”