Today Is a Tough Day

Today is not a good day. Today is a tough day. Today is the type of day where I find it incredibly difficult to remain upright and out of bed. Today is the type of day where all I want to do is draw the curtains, put in a CD by The Band, and drink Absolut Peach from the bottle with a long straw.

Did I have these kinds of days when I moved to Minnesota? It's tough to say. A move is so busy, and down-time that isn't devoted to cleaning or rearranging or unpacking is hard to come by, so my diary from the time after my move to the Midwest is kind of sketchy. Most of it revolves around me thinking one of the older TAs was cute, cute, oh so cute. There are a few days when I wrote a snippet about it being hard, about it being a little tough, and about being worried I might not make friends, but those kinds of entries weren't around for long.

This time I feel sort of wrecked. I feel exhausted and wrung-out, like there's very little left to me that hasn't evaporated into the coastal air. I miss my family, I miss my friends, and I miss my boyfriend, who was good enough to come spend the first week in Maine with me. That might have made it harder, watching him go, watching him get on an airplane, then having to turn around and drive back to the new place alone. For real this time.

Everything here is beautiful. The weather, the flowers, the sky. I recognize that, but all I want is a dark room and my not-yet-hooked-up-to-cable TV showing fuzzy network channels and their midday soap operas.

Moving is an awful, awful thing.

But school starts soon. Tomorrow we start department meetings, so I'll have people to talk to then. I'll have social interaction and sound. I've been missing sound. It's been so quiet here in between phone calls. But there will be sound again soon, and this weekend my father rolls into town with his fiancee and a load of things that didn't fit in my car. There will be lobster then, I hope, and a trip to the coast where I will stand on some craggy rocks and breathe in the salt and wind and remember one of the reasons I wanted this so badly in the first place.

No Moose Yet...

But I have seen these things:

Ready to See Some Moose

Well, this is it. I have packed, I have loaded the car, I have bruised myself in every way possible while packing and loading. I guess that means I'm ready to go.

Today will be a whirlwind. I'm going to bake some cupcakes, attend a family reunion, go to a soccer game, say goodbye to the girls and Josh, and then I'm going to take some Tylenol PM and attempt to fall asleep early because the Boy From Work and I have to be on the road by 4:30 AM just so we get into town tomorrow in time to sign my lease and get my key.

The next week will be filled with furniture-shopping and apartment-decorating. There will be updates, of course, and there is a new blog on the horizon. I just think this blog and my year back in Buffalo should stand on its own, should remain in its own place, just like the original Where's My Sponge Candy blog that recorded my three years of graduate school. I'd like this year and all its ups and downs to stay right here, right in its own nook, looping like it was some song about drinking and hockey and love gone wrong written by The Lowest of the Low.

And for now, here I go.

Foul Boy, Bad Liar

Last night was another going away party for me, this one hosted by my mother. She had pizza and spinach bread and a bucket of fifty wings. She had my aunt and uncle and grandfather and his girlfriend and some cousins and my friends and the BFW and, and, and, of course, my brother.

Adam left the party early. He had an agenda. He had a party. He had to get there fast.

Still, as my party was breaking up, my brother strolled back in the door. We were all standing in a group near the door, so when he walked in we asked him what he was doing home when there he could be drinking, snacking, and making out with vaguely skanky underage girls.

"Well," he said, brushing past us, "I forgot something."

"What did you forget?" I asked. It would have to be something really important to make him leave a party where there was free beer.

My mother's boyfriend mumbled something under his breath. "Condoms," he coughed out. "Condoms!"

That started a chain reaction of exclamations: Eeew! Gross! Foul! Blecch! that only stopped when my brother reappeared in the room.

"So," we asked again, "what DID you forget?"

My brother raised his left hand. In it was clutched the belt clip for his phone. "My cell phone holster," he said. He kind of just stood there. We stared at him. "Well," he said, "I guess I should go."

When the door swung shut, the guys started laughing. "Cell phone holster," they said. "Yeah, sure. Right, kid."

I had to admit--the boy hadn't planned that excuse very well. He hadn't given the lie enough thought, enough time to breathe and seem realistic. To come home from a party with thumping music and hoochies and bottles of cheap tequila just waiting to be guzzled--to come home from that for a cell phone holster seemed not only improbable but really, really stupid. But, of course, forgetting to take condoms to a situation like that was also really, really stupid. Not running to the corner gas station for a three-pack and instead opting to come home where you knew your annoying relatives would be clustered nearby, just ready to grill you about your suspicious arrival home was also really, really stupid. But that's my brother.

We walked people out to their cars then, and that's when we found out my brother hadn't yet left. His car was up a ways, obscured by a pine tree, but we could hear him talking. We thought he was on the phone. We thought maybe he was orchestrating some general sluttiness, a hookup with a girl, the getting-it-on with some little blond whippet.

We ignored Adam and said our goodbyes. Some of the family started packing up the trucks and Becky went off to her car, which was parked up somewhere near Adam's, and we thought that was it for the night.

Oh, but it wasn't. When I got back inside, I realized my phone was ringing. It was Becky.

I answered. "What's up?" I asked.

"Just so you know," she said, "your brother isn't alone in that car. He's got a girl in there."

"Oh my God," I said. "I may vomit."

Of course I got off the phone right then and there and told the rest of my family that not only had he sneaked back home to get his condoms so he would be prepared for whatever the night would bring, but he also brought the girl along with him. If I were that girl, I'd be wondering why he was driving all the way home to get his condoms and why he wasn't just popping into the closest Kwik Fill, why he was dragging me along and telling me please, for the love of God, just stay in the car so I wouldn't run into any of the people who were at the house at that moment. If I were that girl, I probably would've handed him a ten dollar bill and told him to go to the Rite Aid and stop being a big lame cheapo.

The Words "Grandma" and "Twat" Should Never Go Together

Last night my father had a going-away party for me. There was pot roast and corn, several bottles of wine from my favorite winery. My father's fiancee came over, and so did her extremely hot son and his very skinny, very tan, very perky girlfriend. My grandmother came, and her husband--the farmer she married after my grandfather died--came late because he'd been delivering bales of hay all day.

We ate, we passed out dessert and coffee, we chatted. Then my grandmother announced she wanted a copy of my book about Russia. I went to dig one up in my room, which, because of my scattered way of packing, looks like a tornado or some other weather disaster whipped through it. I found a copy, but when I brought it out, my father was showing off his copy and--to my dismay--a literary magazine that one of my stories recently appeared in. The story in this particular literary magazine is one of the Wily Republican stories. It's the one that features the cardboard cut-out of the George W. Bush that lived in the Wily's room. It's the one that required me to use one of my least favorite words--twat (eew)--in a list two of the characters were making. There's two sex scenes in the story, there's all sorts of swearing, there's all sorts of stuff that a grandmother does not need to read.

Not too long ago I wrote a post in which I appeared all brave and ready for my family members to read my work. My logic was if I could survive my mother's reading of my thesis--including a story which was loosely based on our relationship post-my parents' divorce--then I could survive anything. Back when I wrote that post I was working on a story that was inspired by Christmas parties at my grandmother's house, and I said I wouldn't even mind if she read it. I was ready. Bring it on! I thought. I was sure I could handle it.

I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I am a pussy.

If I cringed when my father forked over a story that used the word twat and had sex scenes that featured the ever-popular hoist method, I'm pretty sure that means I won't be ready for grandma to read a story that features a grandmother and three close-in-age granddaughters who might resemble my own grandmother and her three close-in-age granddaughters.

I don't know what happened to me in that moment when my father slid the magazine toward my grandmother. I lost it. I froze. My entire insides turned cold. In my head, I saw the word TWAT!!! in giant letters on the page. I couldn't get over the fact that my grandmother was sitting across from me and undergoing a revelation that I am a foul, sicko pervert who cusses like a sailor. Then I remembered the rest of the story: the sex, the expletives, the blatant mocking of a political party that my grandmother and her husband no doubt associate with.

I glared at my father. I tried to send him a Look. I tried to say, Rip that from her hands! I tried to say, Are you crazy? I tried to say, Do you want to be written out of the will because the fruit of your loins writes pornography?

He finally got the hint. "I think," he said, "Jess might be nervous about what you're reading."

Yeah, that helped.

I stood up. "I'm going to go into my room for a second and try not to throw up," I said.

My father followed me into my bedroom. "What?" he said. "Come on. Who are you kidding? Your grandmother loves this."

I wanted to tell him no, my grandmother wouldn't love that. I'd put money on the fact that she'd love me to write little stories that could someday be made into Hallmark Channel movies. I'd bet a lot of my savings that she wouldn't be psyched that her granddaughter was writing lines about it feeling pretty good to be slammed up against a wall during sex. I was pretty sure my father wouldn't like it either, but he hasn't really finished anything I've written. He tries hard, sure, but he is easily distracted and often has to put the book down before he's made it to the real offensive stuff. He's been trying to read the Wily-based story since last August when I came home.

"Dad!" I said. "I use the word twat in that story! TWAT! And there's sex in it!"

"Your grandmother is a woman," he said, as if that made it somehow okay.

"She's seventy-eight!" I said. In my experience, seventy-eight year olds are fans of the Chicken Soup books or Anne Geddes, not the f-bomb and out-of-wedlock lovemaking.

Eventually I went back out to the kitchen, and my grandmother was still there, busily reading my story. She was even laughing. I wasn't exactly sure what she might be laughing at, so I wracked my brain to think if there were non-disgusting funny parts in that story. But I didn't have to think about it long because my grandmother explained what she was laughing at.

"This is funny," she said. She giggled. "She puts her bra on the cardboard cut-out of the president. Ha!"

"Oh," I said, "yeah. The main character certainly does do that, doesn't she?"

Well, really, the main character puts her underthings on the cardboard George W. whenever she is having sex with her boyfriend--she doesn't like the way George's eyes follow her if left uncovered.

And my grandmother read that. It made me want to poke my eyes out with a stick. Of course, she thought it was funny, and funny enough to mention out loud, and funny enough to make her giggle as she was sitting next to her almost-deaf, hay-baling husband who would punctuate the silence every few minutes by talking about corn, manure, or the air conditioning unit in his tractor.

So maybe it wasn't quite the disaster it could have been, and maybe I was being overly sensitive while I worried over my grandmother's reading of that story, but I think I've learned a very important lesson: I'm not exactly ready for some stories to make the family rounds. A nonfiction book about Russia is one thing. I'll gladly autograph it, and I'll gladly discuss reading and sifting through the research so I could write that book, but I don't think I'm quite ready to sit in front of my family members as they leaf through my collection of stories and come across dirty words and dirty scenes. I'll get on a stage and read those things out loud to strangers--hey, that's no problem--but I don't want to sit in a very small kitchen and watch my grandmother's eyes scan the page, drinking it all in. There wasn't enough wine in the room to prepare me for that. Not even close.

Here's What I'll Remember About My Last Day: That Table of Seventeen and the Pea-Hating Lady with the Mustache

Last night was my last night at the restaurant. The Boy From Work had scheduled me to work my last day with my favorite people: my favorite waitress, my favorite dish people, my favorite ice cream people. The only person missing was my favorite cook, the girl who was good spirited enough to host a going away party for one of the ice cream boys, a party where the departing ice cream boy vomited everywhere and the boys had to tie plastic bags on their feet just to get into the bathroom and try to get him in the shower so he could puke into the current of moving water. Later, my favorite cook would spend hours scouring the ice cream boy's puke out of her carpet and off her toilet. Later, she would be the one to get the ice cream boy in the shower. She would stay up with him all night, and she would take care of him the next morning. If that's not a good hostess, then I don't know what is.

Anyway, last night was my last night. At first it seemed like it was going to be just another Wednesday night at the restaurant, but things took a turn around six o'clock. I already had some decent tips in my pocket, and I was feeling pretty good about my last day. I'd had a group of four sit at the counter and tell me I was a great little server, that the food and service was wonderful. They left me eight dollars on a bill that definitely did not call for an eight dollar tip. I thought, What a way to make an exit. It seemed the best kind of last night to have: a complimentary, well monied night.

But a little after six o'clock several cars pulled into the parking lot. The car doors swung open and out poured people, people, people. They walked the entire length of the restaurant's large front window. There was no end to them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven...

"Oh my God," my favorite waitress said. "This is yours. I want nothing to do with it."

The people kept coming. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen...

"Gee, they could have called ahead," she said, and then she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me with the large table.

The fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth person finally filtered into the restaurant, and we arranged the entire back section for them.

I've never been the type of waitress to delight in big tables. The girls at my last waitressing gig salivated and fought over big tables. I always bowed out. I just wasn't a fan. There's so much potential for disaster when waiting on a large group. So many things can go wrong. Drink orders can go awry, food can come out on the wrong plates, the people themselves can be snobby and rude. I prefer to deal with people in small doses. I like a table of two, three, four, five. I feel like I can give better service when I don't have to raise my voice to Teaching Composition octave just to announce that I'm taking only drink orders and that I'll come back for the food orders after the drinks have been filled.

But these people, my goodness, they were dolls.

The table was comprised mostly of kids and teens (and the gayest twelve year old boy I'd ever met), so I'd dreaded my first approach to the table. Kids can be awful, they can be pains, they can make you want to strangle them. But these kids were heaven-sent, polite, super sweet. They said please and thank you. They complimented the food and service. They joked around with me. They turned on the jukebox and danced. They made the other customers smile.

I loved them.

When they left, the table of seventeen left me a big, fat tip. At this point I was definitely thinking, Okay, alright, great. This is my kind of last night.

Then 8:20 rolled around. That's when a family of four sauntered through the door and sat themselves at the first booth. At first they--a father, a mother, two girls--seemed mostly normal. They were the usual clientele: worn-looking rural-types, the man with a gristly beard, the mother with her own budding mustache. The girls were little and cute, but you could tell a few years later, when they were in the big school district next door to the one I attended, they would become girls so similar to many of the girls I worked with: cute girls with horrific grammar, girls whose main passion it was to stir up drama, girls who thought nothing of sleeping with other girls' boyfriends and then laughing about it over a burger and a shake.

But for now those little girls were fine and sweet and nice. They wanted chicken fingers, and they wanted them hot and with extra bleu cheese. Their mother and father wanted the daily special--the chicken and biscuits, which I had been coveting all night. The mother requested that the mashed potatoes that came with the special also be covered with gravy, but that was as much direction as they gave me.

Well, it turned out that they should have given me a whole bunch of directions. For starters, someone should have directed me to the fact that the mother was unstable, weepy, and vaguely crazy.

After I'd delivered their food I gave them a few minutes before popping back in to see how they were doing. When I arrived at their table, the father and the girls were eating like normal humans. The mother, however, was not. She had her face cradled in her hands and she was sniffling. No one was paying her any mind.

I didn't know what to do. "Uhm, how is everything over here?" I asked.

One of the girls waved her fork at her mother. "Could you get that plate out of her way?" she asked. "She doesn't like peas."

The woman was crying because the chicken and biscuits came with vegetables in it--quite standard, actually--and the inclusion of peas had wracked her to the core.

I blinked and blinked but picked up the plate and whisked it away. As I walked away from the table I was bombarded with thoughts. First, was the woman not a grownup? Could she not handle asking me to take her food away like an adult? Did she really need her children--who couldn't be more than twelve years old--to translate her sobs for her?

Second, if someone doesn't like peas so much and would be reduced to tears at their mere presence in a dish at a restaurant, wouldn't you think it wise for that person to perhaps clue the waitress and cooks in on the aversion?

This whole mess reminded me of a memorable Monday night--all you can eat pasta night--I was waitressing at the old joint. A woman placed an order for the spaghetti with meatballs and never said a single word about having an allergy that might flare up depending on what was in the spaghetti or sauce. When I brought out her plate, which was garnished with Parmesan and parsley, she shrank back in her seat. She was appalled. "What is that?" she asked, wagging her finger at the Parmesan.

I told her it was Parmesan cheese, just a garnish.

"I," she said, her voice horrified, "am allergic to Parmesan cheese! You need to get it away from me!"

Yes, lady, right. Because you would never in a million years guess that Parmesan cheese might come with or on or even in the sauce of spaghetti.

The lady with the peas reminded me of that lady. Except as far as I could tell, she wasn't allergic to peas, just terribly disturbed by their presence.

But I went over to that table with a menu in my hand and gave the pea lady a few more minutes to dry her eyes, to dry the moisture that had accumulated in the prickly stubble of her upper lip, and then I took her order for the fried chicken dinner. I went over several more times after that to make sure that this time things were okay, that she was happy, that she was satisfied now that any and all peas had been taken from the proximity.

I wondered what was going to happen when the bill came. I wondered if they were going to be angry that I charged them for her dinner. I didn't feel as though it was right to take off the price of her dinner when we hadn't done anything wrong, when she had just neglected to tell me she had a serious problem with peas. I even wondered if maybe this were some sting operation, the kind of which I'd heard about before--a family going into a restaurant, one of them raising a fuss and claiming the food was bad or wrong, then trying to get worked into such a lather over it that the manager or person in charge was forced to placate them by making the check disappear.

These people were going to be the last people I waited on at the diner, and these were the people I was going to remember for a long time. I prepared for the worst--screaming, fit-pitching, more crying--but nothing happened. In fact, they even left me a good tip. And then they left and we were able to sweep the floors, mop the floors, put up the stools at the counter, roll the next day's silverware, put away the pitchers of iced tea and lemonade, wipe down the ice cream counters, and that was it, it, it. I walked out of that restaurant with a thick wad of money in my pocket and shoulders that felt lighter.

It's been an interesting summer. I went into the whole summer job thing, the whole return to waitressing, with a big swallow of dread caught in the back of my throat. I felt above it, like I shouldn't have to go back now that I'd gone through graduate school, now that I'd spent a few years teaching college level writing. I whined. I even cried. After I got the job at the diner, I drove home thinking oh God oh God oh God oh God. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to do it. I thought no one would like me, that I'd be too old, that they'd think I was no fun, that the whole experience would be awful.

All of that worrying was for nothing. The summer was fun, and I liked almost everyone I worked with, and I'm pretty sure they liked me back. (Some, of course, more than others.) It was a hectic time, and I wrote almost nothing, which completely violated all my summer goals, but now that I've had my last day I feel like my head's on straight again, that I'm not going to be so caught up in the drama of the place, that I'll finally be able to get some things done--things like gutting this room I've been living in for the last year, my old room, my room decorated with the suns and moons I was so crazy over in high school. I'm starting to pack today, starting to sift things into boxes, starting to put things in piles to be packed into cars for my big move that's going to happen in a week's time. I've got an awful lot of work ahead of me...

Crossing That One off My Life's To-Do List

This weekend I slept in my car. I slept in my car like a bum, a crazy person, an aspiring actress who packs her things and heads to Hollywood to get a job at In and Out Burger while praying that she'll make it big someday, oh, someday.

I didn't sleep in the car alone. I slept in the car with my mother. We were in Maine, in a parking lot of a hotel that attracts truckers, and we were there because of an online reservation that went awry.

We went to look at apartments this weekend. It was going to be an easy enough trip--start out on Friday, get there late, sleep, do a whirlwind apartment-viewing on Saturday and possibly Sunday morning, then drive home and be done with it. My mother made the hotel reservation because she lives in a place that has fast internet, unlike out here in the country where we connect to the internet at a maddening 24k.

When we arrived in our hotel in Maine the man behind the counter looked at us strangely. "I don't have any record of your reservation," he said.

My mother told me to go out to the car and get her receipt, which she'd printed off and brought with her.

And I did. On my way back inside, I unfolded the piece of paper and saw that my mother had accidentally made the reservation for next weekend, not this one.

It was 11:45 PM. We'd just spent the last ten hours driving, and two of those hours were marred by us screaming Pussies! Pussies! PUSSIES! at the people of Massachusetts who turned on their blinkers and would not go above 45 mph during a thunderstorm that was terrific, yes, but did not warrant that kind of emergency driving. That had made us tired. Reading that my mother had botched the reservations made me even more tired. And so I trudged back inside and handed over the piece of paper.

My mother was not pleased with herself, but, like a logical person, she figured everything would be okay. All we needed to do was make a reservation in the here and now, get ourselves a room, and pass out.

The man behind the counter informed us he had no rooms. In fact, no one in town had rooms. He'd called around and everything was booked. And not just for tonight. Tomorrow, too.

"Sorry," he said. He shrugged and went back to shuffling papers so he could avoid a potential scene.

However, my mother and I are not scene makers. We merely went back outside and sat in the car. On my way out, I'd nabbed a few maps, and I started calling 411 for hotel information in cities that were close. Everything was booked, though, and one of the girls I got on the phone told me the unfortunate news: everything-everything was booked.

"I've been on the phone trying to find people rooms all night," she said. "There's nothing out there. All the hotels in the state are full. Actually, everything from Portsmouth, New Hampshire up to Bangor is full. I'm so sorry. There's nothing we can do."

Apparently we had picked a very popular weekend to come to Maine. Apparently half of America had decided to plop itself on the coast for those two days I needed to find an apartment.

"What are we going to do?" my mother asked. She's not one for these types of gray areas. She gets nerved up about traveling, about having things go wrong.

I didn't know what we were going to do. What was there to do? I had a sudden vision of my mother and I sitting at a corner booth in Denny's until 9 AM when we were meeting the real estate girl. We would drink an awful lot of coffee. We would eat an awful lot of pie. We would show up for our appointment looking grizzled and smelling of late-night fried food.

I didn't know what we were going to do about sleep that night, but I did know that we needed something for the next night. I pulled out of the hotel parking lot and drove to another hotel parking lot, one that was likely to have some kind of wireless internet I could filch.

And that's exactly what I did. I stole some WiFi and hooked up to Orbitz, found that there were only two available rooms left in the entire town, and those were at the EconoLodge, which my mother and I scoffed at when making our original reservations. But now it was a different story. I wanted to kiss the owners of the EconoLodge for somehow having a room that I could reserve for the next night so I wouldn't have to spend two nights without a bed.

But after we made that reservation it became very clear that we had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and absolutely no options.

"We're going to have to sleep in the car," my mother said. "We're vagrants!"

And that's exactly what we did, and that's exactly what we were.

I pulled into another hotel parking lot, one that was home to several big rigs that had parked for the night. We drove around several times, trying to find a spot that was nearish the lights (to discourage any and all shanking that might occur by crazed murderers who were roving the Maine streets at night) and simultaneously away from the lights (so we could attempt to sleep like normal people). After we found a spot, my mother and I rearranged the luggage so we could recline our seats all the way back (thank you for that small mercy, Honda Civic). I struggled into my pajama bottoms and wadded up a t-shirt for a pillow. I used a hoodie for a blanket. I stretched out as best I could but found that--because I am so tall--my feet dangled at an awkward position, and I could never get them comfortable. This would be what kept me up most of the night. My mother, however, had brought herself a sleeping pill because she knew that her drinking caffeine to stay awake for the drive would screw with her attempt to fall asleep after the drive was over. She took that sleeping pill and was down for the count within the first hour. It took me much, much longer.

The next morning we were faced with the biggest challenge: somehow making ourselves look presentable to the people who had the power to rent me an apartment, and do this despite having spent the night in the car and despite having not showered.

That was when we went to Denny's. We stuffed clothes and makeup and hair things into a bag and sneaked into the bathroom as quickly as we could. My mother had serious qualms about what the other Denny's customers would think about two ladies who went into the bathroom with a bag full of things and came out with new clothes on a few minutes later. "They're going to think we're homeless," she said.

"We're going to buy breakfast," I told her. "Homeless people can't afford to buy breakfast. No one will think anything of it."

I did, however, feel pretty skeevy and gross and guilty as I washed my face in the Denny's bathroom sink.

No one really noticed us, though, and we did get big breakfasts (with extra bacon for our troubles). And the rest of the time in Maine was pretty decent. I toured several apartments I liked but found one I fell in love with and got quite giddy over as soon as I stepped inside. We're just waiting for the credit and background checks to go through before I am approved and before I can load up some cars and make the big move.

And I feel a little less stressed now, a little less on edge now that things have been put in motion. And I'm starting to compile a list of things I really like about Maine, and that list makes me feel a little less stressed, too. On top of that list is, of course, the proximity to the ocean and the fact that grocery stores in Maine have full-blown liquor aisles and full-blown wine aisles. That's right--grocery stores in Maine sell bottles of Absolut Peach alongside produce, deli meats, and cheese. Thank you, Maine. Thank you.

A Conversation with the Boy From Work While He Sleepwalks, 12:30 AM

Because the Boy from Work is passed out on the very uncomfortable sectional couch in the living room, I shake him to see if he wants to go to sleep in my bed.

Me: Hey. Hey, do you want to go to bed?

Boy from Work: {Grumbling}

Me: Was that a yes?

BFW: {Grumbling}

Me: Don't you want to sleep somewhere more comfortable?

--At this point the BFW scissors up in a shockingly agile way. He stares at me.--

BFW: (angrily) Just do it like you always do it, okay?

Me: Huh?

BFW: Why can't you just do it like you always do it?

Me: I'm asking if you want to go to bed in my room and not out here in the living room, BFW. What are you talking about?

BFW: The taco shell! The taco shell! Just put it on top, upside-down, like you normally do. Okay? Geez.

Me: Oh my God. Are you sleep walking?!

--And then as fast as he was up, the BFW is down again, and he lands with his face planted in a pillow. I can't convince him to move for another half an hour. When he wakes up, he remembers talking to me about the taco shell, but he has no idea why. I think maybe the stress of owning a restaurant is catching up with him.--