christmas fleas

I didn’t really have a christmas last year. I was in a hostel in Wellington, NZ that I didn’t like very much with an acquaintance from my home town who I had just spent a week and a half traveling with after randomly finding out we were in the same across-the-world location at the same time. we bought a bunch of food to make… i was going to make a lamb roast and some pie but it turned out the hostel didn’t have an oven. We ended up going around to hostels and asking if we could just borrow their oven for the day. Freaking ridiculous. We finally located an oven we could use and I made an apple pie and we brought it over there and sat at the table in the dining hall and there was so much sunlight coming into that room as we waited for the pie to bake. if it had been theodore and i we certainly would have been playing a game of cards while waiting but i don’t really remember what blake and i did. maybe tried to figure out the next plan? i vaguely remember picking something up and reading it but i don’t remember what.

anyways, i also went to Te Papa, the New Zealand National Museum of awesomeness on Christmas Day. they had a giant squid that had gotten tangled in a boat’s nets preserved and laid under glass and it was at least thirty feet long and truly was a nightmarish creature. they also had a maori temple inside that looked like this:

i didn’t take this picture.

and i thought it was one of the most beautiful things i’d ever seen. it’s all carved and crazy intricate and the colors were just so stunning. the whole museum was so filled with light, too. i really appreciated the light on christmas day, i guess. perhaps because weather in wellington was always so shitty, and not to mention in the rest of new zealand, and the fact that it was so sunny and beautiful on christmas day made it better that i was so far away from friends and family and all that. i wish i could go back to that museum. blake and i were very different in our museum-viewing styles. i pretty much like to read everything and he pretty much likes to walk through whole rooms if something doesn’t catch his interest right away.

the museum also had an espresso stand so i got to have coffee and foamed milk and i remember that being really delightful.

i watched a few movies and got invited to go play football on the beach by this really obnoxious american dude and i should have gone but he was just painful to be around. but i bet football on the beach would have afforded me more interesting christmas memories than watching that one movie where cameron diaz and kate winslet switch houses for the holidays.

anyways, i definitely didn’t exchange gifts with anyone. and this year i’m not planning on exchanging gifts, either. not even with ted. i mean, we’ll be nice to each other as we go along and maybe buy gifts for each other like that but… specifically for christmas? eh.

for some reason this lack of excitement about christmas isn’t bothering me at all. i used to love christmas. i guess i still do really love christmas, but it’s something i don’t really feel like i need right now. one of my best friends took me shopping to try to buy me a christmas present and it was so sweet of her but i couldn’t find anything i needed or really even anything i wanted a little bit. i settled on some stationery with a promise that i’ll write her letters. i went to NZ with big plans about writing heaps of people letters all the time but i think i sent two? the entire time? maybe three but definitely no more than that.

anyways… i’m feeling less bah-humbug then just apathetic and bewildered about the whole christmas thing.

i think my cat has fleas. i have tiny little bites all over me and i’m not very happy about it. i gave her some flea medicine, just put it right above her little shoulder blades where she couldn’t lick it but she keeps rubbing at it with her paws and licking it off them. it makes me really nervous. is she going to poison herself? am i going to wake up to a dead kitty? that’s one of the most awful things i can imagine.

here’s a picture of me in my new sunglasses holding my new camera in my dirty bathroom mirror for you to enjoy:

<3clea