just look at the face: it's vacant, with a hint of sadness

So it was a few days ago. My mom and I are in our p.j.'s, waiting for my dad to come so we can start watching our Miss Marple movie. But my dad is all, "Just kidding, I have to make a phone call." SIGH. So we wait, and my dad picks up the phone, but before he can start dialing he notices that there is no dial tone.

"Somebody hang up the phone!" he says. "A phone is off the hook. I need to make a call."

There are like 50 phones in my house. We check all of them, but none are off the hook. The lady on the phone my dad has in his hand is saying impatiently, muffled, "Please hang up and try your call again." My dad hangs up, and tries his call again, but it is all for naught. Somewhere, there is a phone that is not resting in its place.

Suddenly, I have a thought. "Dad," I say. "Dad. What about the phone in the sunroom?"

If you've never been to my house, you will not understand why the utterance of this sentence filled me with doom. In my house are two floors. The bottom floor has this room that is made of mostly windows, so it gets stinking hot in the day and is superbly creepy at night. At night you can sit in that room and stare out the windows at black emptiness until you start imagining eyes staring back at you, and did that tree just move in an odd fashion foreign to trees that AREN'T possessed by evil spirits? Those are the things you start to think.

Since the room is uninhabitable for 99% of the day, nobody goes in there. So why would the PHONE be off the HOOK. (I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't the cats. The door is kept closed specifically to keep the cats out.)

"Okay, go - "

"I'm not going down there," I interrupt my father, clutching at my neck in a maneuver I learned from a friend.

"Why?" he asks.

"Zombies," I say.

There is a pause. If my life were a t.v. show, the cameras would cut to the aforementioned room. The phone is lying on the floor. Slow pan along the carpet, past the drying racks filled with damp clothes, past the treadmill, until you can't take it any more and it shows you what you knew was there all along. ZOMBIES.

My dad doesn't respond to my comment; neither does he say there are NOT zombies; nor does he go down to the sunroom. Probably because he is afraid of what's down there. I sit on the couch in my pajamas, as he tries to fix the phone, my mind filled with images of what the zombies are doing downstairs. When will they start to ascend the stairs? Are they slow zombies or fast zombies? How much time will we have to escape once we start hearing the slow or possibly fast thud of rotting footsteps? After I've grabbed my dog, will there be space in my arms for the filing cabinet I just bought for $30?

The attempts to fix the phone are abandoned, and my dad is waiting now to talk to someone from Telus to see what they can do. Obviously they can do nothing about the real problem downstairs.

"Dad," I say. "I really think it's the sunroom."

Humouring me, but not enough to bring a weapon such as a poker for the fire, he goes downstairs. I wait upstairs. There is no sound of a scuffle, but I'm not exactly sure what a scuffle with a zombie sounds like because I always plug my ears during those parts of the movies.

After several minutes, he comes back upstairs. He doesn't mention a word about zombies, and apparently the phone is fixed. We all carry on with our evenings, and I wonder how in the world I survived living a whole year by myself with my imagination.

set a fire in a blackberry field

I am so cranky right now. I was completely fine this morning, and then I was going to plan my outfit for tomorrow and realized that I couldn't find my black skirt, so I looked on all my hangers to see if I had stuck it underneath another shirt or something to save hangers, and then I pulled all my clothes out of my closet and wardrobe and STILL couldn't find it, and now all my clothes are in a pile on the floor and I am too angry to clean them up. Having a messy room also makes me angry, so every time I look in my room I get angrier. I ended up going to the store to buy a new skirt, because even if I left it at home I was excited about wearing it TOMORROW, and if I have to wait until I go back home to get it nothing I wear will feel good because I wanted to wear a specific thing. Then I have only had one favourite pair of socks my whole life, and today I had to throw them away because they spontaneously erupted in holes. Then I wanted to watch an episode of The Office with my second cup of coffee, but the DVD kept freezing and it wouldn't let me fast forward past the freezing, and it didn't fix after I tried the old pull it out and blow on it trick. I was going to take the DVD out and break it in half in righteous anger, but then realized that DVD's can't feel pain so it would only make me more upset and the DVD wouldn't understand or be hurt by it. Now I have to go to school and meet all the parents in the entire school, because it's the dedication service.

I think this probably stems from staying up last night being worried about zombies.

it slithers in the wild

One of my fears about living on my own is that I have a stupid imagination, and imagine all sorts of terrible things while I am lying in bed trying to sleep. It's less scary when there is someone else in the house, but when I am on my own who is there to protect me from the monsters? Case in point: yesterday, for some reason, I watched a promo on the internet for this show about zombies. There was one scene where zombie fingers were trying to pry open a door, and another with a creepy gliding zombie child, and another where a man had a picture of his wife beside his window, and a rifle aimed outside at the zombies coming towards him, and he wiped tears off his face, and they didn't show it but I KNEW one of the zombies he'd have to shoot was his wife and that part wasn't scary, it just broke my heart. I hope that if I get married, my husband never turns into a zombie and I never have to shoot him because I don't think I could ever be emotionally ready for that.

Anyway, so lying in my bed last night with my screen-less window partially open for fresh air and earplugs in to block out the stupid music that keeps going throughout the night, I imagined all sorts of zombie things happening in my room. I had my eyes squeezed shut and kept thinking to myself that I am such an idiot, why did I watch that promo? It's not like it was SURPRISE ZOMBIES! The show is called The Walking Dead or something like that, so it was pretty obvious that there was going to be zombies. I don't even believe in zombies, but in the middle of the night the logical part of my brain is not exactly the most active.

Basically what I am saying is that I would like one of you to come and visit me, and bring a rifle so you can protect me from the zombies.