It's never enough to swallow those pills

I may have slept as much as ten hours last night. It was great.

Thanksgiving. Not a huge affair this year, which was just as well: everyone I know was coming into the holiday very badly stressed, myself and derspatchel and my parents included. We were joined by rushthatspeaks, gaudior, and jinian, who brought an apple crumble; we listened to "Alice's Restaurant" (1967), because is the tradition, and then "The Ballad of Reuben Clamzo and His Strange Daughter in the Key of A" (1978), because everyone should experience seventeen minutes of Arlo Guthrie talking about humongous giant clams at least once in their life. My experimental dish for the year was a kale and Swiss chard tart, adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi and missing the pine nuts. We had wildly overestimated the necessary amount of dessert, although I have since been informed that there is no such thing as objectively too much pie, so I guess it worked out. My brother and his wife came by after dinner and brought my niece, who is very nearly walking independently now. We took shreds of delicious turkey neck home for the cats and watched them discover, for the first time, meat that did not come out of a can. It confused them initially by not being cube-shaped, but it was gone by the end of the night, so we think they liked it. We'll see what happens when the turkey leftovers are reheated.

Friday. Mostly I worked; I was dreadfully behind on anything that paid. Despite a general aversion to American consumer culture, we went out in the evening and bought a new teakettle, because our old one had rusted out and any tea made with it tasted like overheated metal, undrinkably acrid. The new one is enameled inside, so with any luck its failure mode will be (a) different (b) years away. I am now enjoying drinking hot liquids that do not make me worry about toxic trace elements.

Saturday. I got a late start from not falling asleep until after eight in the morning, but schreibergasse came down from Portland and I met him in Harvard Square in the afternoon. We hadn't seen each other in person in a stupidly long time. He had a new hat. We tried to get into the Harvard Semitic Museum and the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, but they were closed for the holiday, so we settled with very little regret for the Peabody and the Museum of Natural History. After the museums closed and kicked us out, we loitered around Raven until Rob came out to meet us—I got some presents for people and read a chunk of Stephen Berg's With Anna Akhmatova at the Black Gates (1981). And then we took Schreiber' to the Friendly Toast, because he had introduced us to Silly's last October. We had just enough time to re-introduce him to the cats (much larger than the last time he'd seen them, and very interested in his hat) and offer him some of the amazing surplus of pie before he had to leave to catch his bus. I watched three and a half episodes of Mushishi (2005–06) and went to bed before two in the morning.

And last night I dreamed that I was supposed to take part in a performance of a mock-hymn praising Jews, cats, and lesbians written by Cervantes in the sixteenth century and translated into English during World War II by an English composer who doesn't exist, unless there really was a Michael Holiwell who was openly gay and very carefully hidden from the internet. (Couldn't find him when I woke up. It's a shame, because one of his operas was The Tyrannicides.) It was going to be part of a protest; it didn't come off because only about half a dozen people who had been sent the sheet music showed up and, at the point where I woke up, were still on a bus in the middle of Belmont arguing over the appropriateness of reclaiming a piece that had been written as a satire, not an actual endorsement. That was frustrating. It was also not great that there were two people of my first name on the bus and the other one was automatically mistaken for me, because she introduced herself first, after which the friend-of-friends who had been told to look for me enthusiastically addressed herself to the other person at all times and generally tuned me out, despite my saying patiently that, actually, I was the godmother of strange_selkie's child. "You and the other Sonya," she kept saying to the person who doesn't exist. I think I'd have felt a lot better if we'd actually gotten to sing the piece.

On the bright side, I realized while typing this out that I don't have that dream where you're naked. I mean, I was naked for most of this dream. I caught the bus wearing boots and a backpack. (It must have been summer.) I took a long T-shirt out of my backpack once I was on the bus and put it on so as not to make other commuters uncomfortable, also, bus seats are terrifying. But at no point was it associated with unwanted exposure or people suddenly all staring at me. It just reminded me it was a dream because, when I ran to catch the bus, my breasts didn't hurt so much it was impossible.