Approved

Yesterday I put in a bid on a townhouse that costs approximately one hillion jillion dollars. You truly don't know yourself until you sign your name to a document which promises a lot of people with a lot of lawyers that you are going to give them a lot of money.

Guiding Josh The Pilot and me in this process was our mortgage lending specialist, Jared. I was very frightened of Jared, as he was the man who was going to tell a freelance writer and a deeply in-debt pilot whether or not we could buy the hillion jillion dollar townhouse, and so I considered going to meet him in full Professor Clothes, but, as they were compressed in a small, pre-Big Bang, wrinkle-intensive ball, I had to make do with khakis.

I could have made done with the Space Bags, because as it happens, Jared is twelve. He is younger than me; he is younger than Josh. He is younger than every glass of wine I have ever raised to my lips.

To set us at ease about his age, he told us a story about his name. "Actually, Jared is my middle name," he said. "My first name starts with an 'R'. But, I guess, the year I was born, there was some kind of TV show? Named Dallas? And it was really popular or something? Oh, wow, really, you've heard of it? Well, who's this J.R. guy my mother didn't want to name me after?"

But he was a kind child. I think he understood that we were nervous, as my current annual income is pretty much Jared's age in cents and Josh has a credit rating of negative one thousand and five. We needed help from his youngest brother for any mortgage company to even look at us without sponataneously entering financial collapse from all the underwriters it would take to figure the astronomical interest rate.

"Your application was very organized," Jared said as we sat in big leatherette chairs and he climbed into his booster seat. "The highlighted sections were really helpful." I closed my eyes; this is exactly the type of thing I say to students who turn in papers with paragraphs that last four pages and who use "pimp" as an adjective. "Well, you seem to have stapled the essay without incident!" I will say to these students.

Jared said we were approved, though, and I opened my eyes and gave him a lollipop. He said thank you very nicely.

788 at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Welcome MSNBC.com Readers

Georgia Rules.

Or... mostly not.

Disconnect

I was gazing at a parting gift from my apartment--a burn scar from the oven as I attempted to extract lunch last week, and mentioned to Josh The Pilot that the human body is an amazing, autodiagnosing specimen of self-repair.

"That's the problem with some modern medicine," he said. "We depend too much on artificial means to extend our lives."

I regarded him with horror for several seconds. "You're going to pull my plug, aren't you."

"What?!"

"The plug! You're going to pull it! When we're eighty-two, and old, and you have to choose whether or not to put me on artificial life support. You're going to pull the plug and leave me to die and hook up with the anesthesiologist!"

He said that he expected me to pull the plug for him, and I reaffirmed my desire to, in the words of Sophia Petrillo, have eight to ten doctors jumping up and down on my chest if it ever came to that. Who knows what the state of my soul will be. Who knows what the state of my underwear will be.

And so, dear The Readers: Should you ever see a pixelated picture of me flash up next to Nancy Grace as she interviews a stunned, grown Jim The Currently Small Child Nephew who affirms that I was an excellent aunt who fed him Peeps when his mother's back was turned, please know, while the protesters gather outside the hospital with signs, Fox News, and Jesse Jackson, that I want to be plugged in and trussed up like the National Christmas Tree. I'm counting on you.

sleeping without pillows at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Suction

The Millennium Bridemobile was packed in a panic at two in the morning, and looks like it. Now I have the joy of digging through boxes containing anything from abused underwear to pointy wall sconces to exercise weights to a box of Fudge Rounds (sadly, no longer with us.)

No way was I fitting ten pounds of life in a five-pound Corolla, so what I needed to do was kick out all unnecessary oxygen molecules. Hence, a closing time panic-hurtle to the strip mall in my semipacked car for a set of vacuum powered Space Bags. It was the one time in my life I really, absolutely needed something I saw on TV to work.

The way a Space Bag operates is, you cram all your crap in a four-dollar Ziplock bag, hook a vacuum cleaner up to a valve, and rather satisfyingly collapse all the soft goods you own into a solid mass of cotton and regret.

It went pretty well, once I figured out how to hook the vacuum up to the hose attachment. The Bissell's owner manual contained such highly highly detailed instructions as: "1) You can use your POWERFORCE BAGLESS UPRIGHT VACUUM'S hose attachment as a crevice tool. 2) Be sure to redirect the POWERFORCE BAGLESS UPRIGHT VACUUM air flow when you are done."

Once I got suctioning, though, at an hour considerably advanced, there was no stopping the Space Bagging. For one thing, it was far more enjoyable than what I had been doing for the past forty-eight hours:

You see my Army of Cleanliness and Bleach in disarray here, badly defeated by the previous tenant's persistent refusal to flush.

The kitchen, though, wound up in far better condition than it ever was when I attempted to prepare food in it:

But that's my kitchen, all right.

By the time I accomplished all this, however, it was two-thirty in the morning, and at two-thirty in the morning, you start to wonder what your stuffed animals would look like in a Space Bagged state.


Seabiscuit, NOOOO!

As I finished loading in the early morning light, my below-stairs neighbor called something unintelligible to me as she started her car. I walked closer; she rolled down the window.

"I said, 'Do you vacuum at night?' Because I kept hearing a vacuum cleaner at about two in the morning."

I kicked away the Space Bag I had been holding. "I cannot imagine why I would need to vacuum my carpet at night," I said in utter truthfulness.

"Well, I kept hearing this loud roar real late last night. It woke me up."

"Huh."

"Yeah, but you know what, it kept running for a short time, and then stopping. A person who was vacuuming wouldn't be making that kind of noise."

"No, she would not."

"I bet it's the air conditioner."

"It is a very loud air conditioner."

"I'll go talk to the leasing office people right away."

"Give them my best."

She drove away. I shoved the last of the special occasion, worn-once bras under the spare tire and locked my apartment with a conscience as clean as the drip pans. I don't live here anymore.

there are Space Bag travel models too at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Points

Today I tried on a wedding ring and applied for a mortgage.

More when I can blink again.

Recovery

This week I am in floating in the middle of my fifth move in five years. By July, it will be six. The man I am making the last two moves for has just endured a full blown, three-part fight with me over the following things:

1) the physical placement of the Route 10 bypass
2) whether or not I should be making copies of my bank statements
3) The King of Queens

I'm tired, is all.