the front door and returned to the couch, where I had spent the entire morning. The television was still on and I sank back into position on the couch, flat on my back except for my head, which I propped up on a throw pillow. I picked up the remote and started flipping channels.
Saturday television is an abomination. The one day of the week when most people don’t feel guilty about sitting in front of the boob tube and letting their brain melt for hours on end, and what do they put on?
Overboard,
that totally pointless, totally humorless 1980s Goldie Hawn flick that they’ve shown at least fourteen hundred times. I practically have the thing memorized from watching it throughout my childhood when there was nothing else on. My other choices were a
Law & Order
marathon, some reality TV crap where they show weddings from beginning to end, infomercials, cooking shows, and, of course, college football. Who the hell cares about college football, anyway? A bunch of talentless scrubs running around the field and doing fifteen-minute-long celebration dances after sacking a guy who didn’t even
try
to get out of the way? It’s like, get drafted, make a
real
team, then we’ll talk.
My thumb was on autopilot. I was hitting the up button over and over and over again, as if scrolling through the channels for the fourth time was going to somehow change what was on. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and I had yet to change out of my pajamas—a Dave Matthews Band tour T-shirt, a pair of sweatpants, and my plaid flannel robe. (My dresser, being on the hallway side of my room, had miraculously survived. Thus I still had half my clothes and the box of practical joke paraphernalia I’d been hoarding since sleep-away camp, stuffed in the back of my underwear drawer.) My cereal bowl from that morning was on the floor next to me, along with a half-eaten box of doughnuts and four empty cans of Vanilla Coke. Considering my sugar intake for the day, I should have been running sprints around the living room, but just walking up the stairs with the guys had taken all the energy out of me. Somehow I felt like I couldn’t move a single muscle in my body. Except, of course, for that thumb.
Oh, if Sarah could see me now. She was such a neat freak she’d almost fainted when she saw my bedroom. She’d spent half an hour organizing my CD collection while she decided which ones she wanted me to burn for her. It was so cute. Of course, the next day those CDs had been completely disorganized again. Maybe if I weren’t such a slob, she wouldn’t have broken up with me.
“Okay, that’s it,” I said to myself, tossing the remote on the glass-topped coffee table.
Aside from the squirrel in my closet, there wasn’t another living thing in the house. Mom had left for work at the crack of dawn and the guys had only been here for two minutes. Other than that, I’d had no human contact.
I was acting pathetic, really. So Sarah had broken up with me. So she was dating some lame-o loser. So my room was a smoked-out haven for bushy-tailed rodents. So my father was in the hospital. So there was no conceivable way I was ever going to get my Jeep now. (A realization I’d come to in the middle of the night that had finally squeezed a couple of self-flagellating tears out of me.) That was no reason to sit around all day and feel sorry for myself. It was still Christmas, right? It was still, as the song goes, the most wonderful time of the year. And there was one thing that could always knock me out of any and all bad mood swings.
I pushed myself off the couch, prompting the head rush of the century, and staggered, half blind, over to the entertainment center. I braced my hands on top of the cabinet for a second and waited for the fog in my brain to clear, then dropped down and opened the deep drawer under the flat-screen TV. Inside were a couple of rows of videos that my parents had collected over the years. My mom’s favorites:
Grease, Xanadu,
Gone
Saturday television is an abomination. The one day of the week when most people don’t feel guilty about sitting in front of the boob tube and letting their brain melt for hours on end, and what do they put on?
Overboard,
that totally pointless, totally humorless 1980s Goldie Hawn flick that they’ve shown at least fourteen hundred times. I practically have the thing memorized from watching it throughout my childhood when there was nothing else on. My other choices were a
Law & Order
marathon, some reality TV crap where they show weddings from beginning to end, infomercials, cooking shows, and, of course, college football. Who the hell cares about college football, anyway? A bunch of talentless scrubs running around the field and doing fifteen-minute-long celebration dances after sacking a guy who didn’t even
try
to get out of the way? It’s like, get drafted, make a
real
team, then we’ll talk.
My thumb was on autopilot. I was hitting the up button over and over and over again, as if scrolling through the channels for the fourth time was going to somehow change what was on. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and I had yet to change out of my pajamas—a Dave Matthews Band tour T-shirt, a pair of sweatpants, and my plaid flannel robe. (My dresser, being on the hallway side of my room, had miraculously survived. Thus I still had half my clothes and the box of practical joke paraphernalia I’d been hoarding since sleep-away camp, stuffed in the back of my underwear drawer.) My cereal bowl from that morning was on the floor next to me, along with a half-eaten box of doughnuts and four empty cans of Vanilla Coke. Considering my sugar intake for the day, I should have been running sprints around the living room, but just walking up the stairs with the guys had taken all the energy out of me. Somehow I felt like I couldn’t move a single muscle in my body. Except, of course, for that thumb.
Oh, if Sarah could see me now. She was such a neat freak she’d almost fainted when she saw my bedroom. She’d spent half an hour organizing my CD collection while she decided which ones she wanted me to burn for her. It was so cute. Of course, the next day those CDs had been completely disorganized again. Maybe if I weren’t such a slob, she wouldn’t have broken up with me.
“Okay, that’s it,” I said to myself, tossing the remote on the glass-topped coffee table.
Aside from the squirrel in my closet, there wasn’t another living thing in the house. Mom had left for work at the crack of dawn and the guys had only been here for two minutes. Other than that, I’d had no human contact.
I was acting pathetic, really. So Sarah had broken up with me. So she was dating some lame-o loser. So my room was a smoked-out haven for bushy-tailed rodents. So my father was in the hospital. So there was no conceivable way I was ever going to get my Jeep now. (A realization I’d come to in the middle of the night that had finally squeezed a couple of self-flagellating tears out of me.) That was no reason to sit around all day and feel sorry for myself. It was still Christmas, right? It was still, as the song goes, the most wonderful time of the year. And there was one thing that could always knock me out of any and all bad mood swings.
I pushed myself off the couch, prompting the head rush of the century, and staggered, half blind, over to the entertainment center. I braced my hands on top of the cabinet for a second and waited for the fog in my brain to clear, then dropped down and opened the deep drawer under the flat-screen TV. Inside were a couple of rows of videos that my parents had collected over the years. My mom’s favorites:
Grease, Xanadu,
Gone
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