"We're so pretty, oh so pretty -- vacant!"

Dirk made me a CD this fall called "So Farewell to Nova Gothic" (hence, of course, the title of Monday's entry). According to him, the CD is filled with "songs that we've danced to, songs we should dance to, and songs I need to have." I am enjoying it oh-so-much...

Mom & Dad are here. This visit is going way way better than the last one -- maybe because I let them buy me a big-ticket item right away & we got their 'better living through material goods' issues out of the way at the start. Except that that sentence is really fucking mean and unfair; my dad has some lingering issues that come from growing up in a big poor immigrant family and I have no right to shit all over the fact that often his love is expressed through the purchase of small gifts. It's not like we don't connect on any other level because we do.

Digression: When I was growing up I used to what it was like for my cousin who was my age & growing up with a father who was getting old (my cousin was the last of four children & he came along more than a decade after the third child) and spoke Italian far better than he spoke English. I wondered how you could get along in a house where even basic communication involved some measure of incomprehension on both sides. I wondered how you could feel loved.

(I think this is why Nino Ricci's books hit me so hard when I read A Glass House in university. It was like he opened a depressing window into my family, one I had always wondered about but had never been able to see through.)

Anyhoo. We got a new mattress for the futon yesterday, an 8" replacement to the tired 6" that myself, the Boy and designated alternates have been sleeping on constantly for 3 years. I have to admit, I had been feeling the slats in my back of late, but we can't afford to eat out more than twice a month, so what are you going to do? This, of course, is a semantically invalid question to my parents. Since they had to put up with thin old Matty (as the Boy has taken to calling it) while they stayed here, they saw no reason why they couldn't buy us a comfortable mattress right away. And you know, I don't really have a problem with this proposition.

In only 3 days, I'll get to sleep in it for the first time. I'm very excited.