Hello, Blogworld!

Heidy Ho, oh ye cruisers of the Internets (those are dolphin-safe internets, right? Just checking.) So many greetings from so many people! To answer a few questions:
* I've read as many books pertaining to quantum physics and hyperspace and string theory as my brain can absorb. Which we can discuss. Or I can keep writing about poo or about how it currently feels like there's a squirrel in my uterus, eagerly digging up all the acorns he buried. Either way is fine by me (remember that song, by Randy? From the early days of MTV? Or, at least, from the early days of AL TV, that my brother and I watched repeatedly during our childhoods?)

Wait, I don't feel like answering any more questions. I'd like to pause for a moment to reflect on some other things from my childhood. FOR INSTANCE: being the good Jews that we are, we were always hoarding things instead of throwing them out. Things like the yucky candies that ended up at the bottom of the Halloween bowl (like those little yellow hard candies? Yuck. I am always on the look-out for hard candies because the act of sucking on things makes my TMJ feel better, and I tried to always have jawbreakers around. Oddly enough, jawbreakers work best when one's jaw hurts. And I was always asking people if they had anything I could suck on, but I never ate those little yellow-wrapped-in-gold-cellophane pieces of butterscotch poo. But they were always in the house, little ghosts of Halloweens past, in the back of the pantry stuck to the 12-year-old packets of onion soup that were probably purchased to be made into dip, but we never made dip) and things like weird chocolates in the shapes of bunnies and ducks that my dad's boss's wife would give us for Easter (zug?) and would live in the fridge for ever. Until they moved, my mother kept a chocolate cow from my Bat Mitzvah in the back of the vegetable crisper.

Ah, yes, the vegetable crisper ((train of thought, DERAILED! and now back on track). So every time we brought in Chinese food we would save the little packets of duck sauce and put them in the vegetable crisper. I'm not sure why -- maybe someday we were going to fill the bathtub with duck sauce and splash around, maybe we were collecting them because some kid with cancer sent us a letter asking us to hoard duck sauce, maybe we thought that if the Nazis ever came we could grab the duck sauce to sustain us while we hid in the crawl space. I guess duck sauce and the you've-been-dehydrated solution they give you intravenously can't be that different -- they're both full of sugar, right? Anyhoo. So we had a vegetable crisper full of duck sauce packets. When we redid the kitchen in the late 80s, I believe we actually transferred the duck sauce from one fridge to the next. And so, until my parents abandoned the split-level in Glen Rock for swankier digs in Watchung (here come ol' flat-top), we had over 20 years worth of duck sauce.

In fact, I saved an IM exchange with my brother about this very phenomenon:
Adam: and im sorry to tell you... the duck sauce - gone!
Bex: oh dear, i am tired.
Bex: WHAT?
Bex: no way
Bex: they threw it out?
Bex: i was there on saturday. i could have saved it.
Adam: when they moved, cleaned the fridge out
Bex: noooooooooooooo
Adam: the new fridge, no duck sauce
Bex: that's as old as you are.
Bex: I weep for the lost duck sauce.

I'm not sure if the rents' have ordered Chinese take-out at the new pad yet, but at least Christmas Eve rapidly approaching, and they're good Jews who'll do their part.

The worst part about all this is that I was cleaning out our fridge just this weekend and found, to my dismay, several packets of duck sauce in the vegetable crisper. I don't remember putting them there, but perhaps its instinctual subconscious behavior. Or maybe I do it in my sleep, digging through the garbage to retrieve unused duck sauce and stashing them away, just as that squirrel stored his acorns deep within my uterine lining. And, lo, I am ready for when the marauders come to Brooklyn, because we have ready-made handipackets of sustenance that will taste great on eggrolls. And you know what they say -- with six, you get eggroll.