I am my own Grinch.

If you can guess what this is, I will give it to you. (A hint: it is not a poo on a stick. But it is something on a stick.)

***

I am trying to figure out what happened to me today.

My mood has gone from zero to 60. Zero as in this morning I was going to walk up to the Carmelite Monastery of Cristo Rey at the corner of Fulton and Parker and sit in the pews. No joke. I was. It was misty and grey this morning but I wanted to walk there to smell the incense. I know you must think I've lost my mind. But I like churches, as places. I can't even explain it right now. (I could perhaps trace it back to watching Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story, but that would mostly be making it up.)

In the meantime, between wanting to be a pretend nun and sit in a pew, I have come down with the cold (again, WTF?!!) that I had last week and now I hate the holidays. I don't celebrate them, but I'm so over them.

And zooming to 60, as in now I feel like writing terribly sarcastic letters to tangential people I know that annoy me and am feeling very badly that I don't own a typewriter. All of a sudden, I really really want a typewriter. I want to smell the typewriter ribbons and the dust that gets inside the keys. I want onion skin paper to type on and those crappy eraser thingys with the little fan to brush the eraser crumbs off at one end. And I want a real phone. A phone with a twisty cord and a heavy receiver, the kind of receiver where you could screw off the end of it and see all the wires and shit inside of it. The kind of phone you can slam down in the cradle. I also want a Texas Instruments calculator, like the kind I had in 6th grade, where the keys made these clicky sounds and the numbers lit up in little red LEDS. I want a transistor radio so I can take off the back and look at the circuitry that looks like itsy-bitsy buildings and roads.

I'm tired of iPhones with their slick, smarmy screens.

I want buttons I can PUSH.

I think what I'm trying to say is that I want things to be real. Like they used to be.