I'll have the usual

Oh my gosh, what has happened to me?  Do you know what I did yesterday?  I bought scented pinecones (scented pinecones!) and a scented grapevine wreath.  And then I went to Michael's and bought a shitload of scrapbooking supplies.

Well, no, I didn't.  Not the scrapbooking stuff, anyway, because come on.  But I did buy the wreath and the pinecones.  Scented.  Orange/clove/cinnamon scented, to be exact. So now I have a bowl full of pinecones on my dining room table, and a rustic pile of tree branches nailed to my kitchen wall.  Bonus irony points: I can't even smell them anymore. What the hell?

*****

I almost never abandon a book once I start to read it, but I made an exception this week.  I started reading another book of ostensibly hilarious life observations by another funny blogger, and I gave up on it almost immediately. I can only take a limited number of jokes about menopause and spandex and the various physical infirmities and indignities of middle-age before I lose my patience.  And that limited number is apparently zero, because I didn't even finish page 2.

I'm reading Ship of Fools instead.  I've read Ship of Fools at least a dozen times, and it holds up very well after 50 or so years (not 50 years of me reading it because that would have made me quite the prodigy, but 50+ years since its publication.)  If you happen to be feeling a little too warmhearted and optimistic about humanity, then just read a few chapters of Ship of Fools; you'll get over it pretty quickly.  Katherine Anne Porter is just like Jane Austen; that is, if Jane Austen had hated everyone and everything.  But oddly enough, a few pages of Ship of Fools puts me in a much better frame of mind, because I don't know anyone as awful as the passengers of the Vera.

*****
If you'd prefer to get your jaundiced view of mankind in a movie theater, rather than a book, then consider seeing The Girl on the Train.  I'd complain about the way the movie portrays women (crazy/desperate/pathetic OR manipulative/sneaky/promiscuous) but the men come off so much worse (controlling/violent/predatory) that it's almost a feminist manifesto on film.   Anyway, it was very entertaining, and because I never (and I mean NEVER) watch or read psychological thrillers, I didn't really see the ending coming, although I suppose it should have been obvious even to an idiot.  Emily Blunt is such a marvelous actress that she makes even a sort of predictable (for smarter people than me) suspense thriller a great movie experience.

*****

So I never buy things like scented pinecones and grapevine wreaths, and I never go to mystery/thriller movies, and I never stop reading a book until I finish it, and I never vote early.  Except in this very unusual and extraordinary November, when I apparently do all of the above.  Who knows what I'll do next.  Maybe I'll join Pinterest.  Maybe I'll go to Disney World every year, and post a "days 'til my next Disney trip" countdown on Facebook.  Maybe I'll run a marathon.  Apparently, anything is possible.