Friday, May 25, 2007

Jessie and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Night

On my way into the studio yesterday after dropping off film at the lab, I found a crisp $5 bill just outside the South Station T entrance. Lunch money! It was a good sign that this week is on the incline.

It didn't start out so bad, at first, even in spite of the soggy, freezing weather. There was the getting locked out of my apartment Sunday morning and having to break in, which was easy, which was good - until it occurred to me that it's alarmingly easy to break into my apartment. There was the working at the studio til 11:30pm trying to do all the impossible things my job demands. There was a nice interlude of having a beer with Matt at the bar in the basement of our new building, but then there was the losing of his keys upon reaching his house at 12:30am. We were quite the pair, that day, with the key losing.

I was still in decent spirits, but it didn't end there. We tried the back staircase, and for better or worse Matt's apartment that night was pretty secure, so we called the roommates. Straight to voicemail, both of them. We cringingly rang the bell and waited, then rang again - no one home. Shit.

I should have just called a friend in Cambridge then and crashed on their couch; I'd given up my bed because Kim's family was in town for the night, a stopover after a weekend wedding somewhere. But I called and woke her, and told her we were coming, and she of course said no problem - we could stay on the sofa bed in the living room, and her family would all be up and out by 7:15am, anyway (great). So we hopped in a cab.

Which got a flat tire on the Mass Ave bridge.

By this point I was amused. The driver, although he didn't feel it necessary to interrupt his phone conversation to inform us of anything going on, finally got us another cab, which delivered us penniless to my apartment, where we snuck in like little mice and crawled, exhausted, into the sofa bed, no sheets or anything.

...Did I say little mice? Well, one little actual mouse decided to pull a wild all-nighter in our kitchen (which, I should illustrate, is for all intensive purposes IN the living room), streaking from one side of the room to the other, crunching on some stuff, doing some mouse aerobics. We reset the friendly traps and squeezed pillows to our ears, trying to drown it out.

You'd think it was over, right? Mm-mm... it was a really bad night.

Once we'd tuned out the energetic mouse, Kim got a stomach bug, something that had been going around at the wedding she attended. So every half hour or so she'd creep around our bed and into the bathroom on the opposite side of the wall to do her thing.

No fun was had by anyone. Kim, additionally, had to report for jury duty at 8am.

Anyone else have a rough time with the Sunday/Monday transition? Rachel did, and I know of a couple others. I'm wondering if the cosmos had a flat cosmic tire or something. I should point out that we caught the mouse in the wee hours, and it proceeded to throw its body against the walls of the Hav-a-Heart until we gave it a lift outside.

But like I said: things are on the upswing. I found some money, work is going well, I have interns, I hung out with my photographer friend Judy and her boyfriend and a friend of theirs in Southie last night, it's Friday and I don't have a shoot tomorrow, the weather's nice, the list goes on. I feel any karmic slight I must have made has been forgiven.

I'm still walking with one eye cast over my shoulder, though. You can't be too careful when the universe is in a pissy mood.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Stupid little mouse! This post was funny even after already hearing this story.

This morning I awoke from a dream where Jesse and I were in some kind of shuttle bus, traveling someplace, and he was like, Rachel, it's SO HOT in this bus--we have to get out and walk right now. And I was like, I dunno, but it was really, really hot, and also the bus was making this crazy broken sound, so I was struggling to get out when I woke up.

And I was buried under all of my covers on this 90 degree morning, and someone was jackhammering just outside my window. Thanks, dream. And then when Laura called the city to complain about the jackhammer, the noise woman (?) told her that 7AM is the start time for noise, Monday-SATURDAY!