truth in the thunder, love in the lightning, and isn't it exciting?

In my car, there are Pepsi cans, old class notes, neon index cards, three ugly shirts, a stained pair of khaki pants that don't fit, sheets of black matboard, the remains of a cardboard artist's portfolio, cheap paint, origami paper, at least one stray sock, four coffee mugs, a package of pads, two textbooks from last semester, a hairbrush, scrap fabric, tattered shreds of paper, and my undying shame that all of this junk had to be relocated to the back seat under the sardonic eye of my dear friend in search of the battery compartment for my mysteriously-dead car.

(If I ever desperately need to have every single person in screaming distance stare at me, I'll call a tow truck and ask them to back into a parking garage. The cacophonous backup alert noise echoes nicely and I'm told the look of fearful apprehension my face as I watch the driver maneuver backwards around the clearance bar is a sight to behold.)

I've been meaning to clean out my beloved, beleaguered Prius for well over a year now, but in the past I've been stymied by embarrassment, distraction, and laziness. Well, that is going to change today. It needs to get taken to the dealership to get properly recharged anyway and I hate to contemplate what they'd think of my poor cluttered baby. I do love my Spaceship, I just don't like cleaning it. It would be easier if I didn't have to park on the street in a neighborhood of nice but conservative and compulsively tidy older people. Every time I walk out the door in a short, short skirt or carry an armload of trash from car to garbage bin, I feel judged.

Plan of attack for car cleanup: back to the street, headphones on, a trash bin in one hand and a box to bring in stuff of mine in the other, all the while drowning out the silent, imagined chorus of young lady you are such a hot mess it's shameful with The Black Keys. And after that, with any luck, today's going to be my second day volunteering for an animal rescue organization. Should be fun.

So, a few days back, my great-aunt sends my grandparents these two ugly pots of overpriced 'mixed kitchen herbs'. Must've been forty bucks each for these monstrosities, with their rose-patterned biodegradable pots and awful decorative moss and weird 'rustic' not-trellis of sticks randomly tied together like the meat-drying rack of a band of tiny evil wood elves.

I'm moderately affronted by their sharing the kitchen sink window with my burgeoning jade plant, which I brought with me when I moved. Not only am I deeply attached to my jade, thus far it is the only plant in the house that has ever lived for more than two weeks. But this house is a bare suburban cave and it's literally the only place in the house with enough sunlight, so whatever.

My jade's been growing like gangbusters this summer, though. It needs repotting anyway, so I put it in a bigger pot out on the back patio, and leave some cuttings in a jar to be replanted in a week or two. These cuttings rested innocently between the two ugly pots for two days.

Then I'm at the sink, looking at the mess these ugly pots and their fucking moss have scattered, when I notice that some of the mess is moving. My great-grandma's plant has some kind of black aphid infestation and it is not only investigating the kitchen but it has settled on my jade cuttings, which to me is a declaration of war.

I relocated the offending herbs to the back patio, spent half an hour cleaning that entire half of the kitchen bare of bugs, and then spent another ten or fifteen minutes washing and inspecting my poor baby cuttings and then checking over my big jade on the back patio. Now they're both fine (the cuttings could be washed easily, and the big jade was thankfully unmolested); however, the herbal ingrates have since been sentenced to the garbage can.

Since I moved, I don't have a whole lot of stuff anymore. I don't have the space for ornaments of sentimental value, and my grandparents won't get a pet. The nearest thing I've got to a dog right now is my jades. Do not mess with them. The only reason they haven't got names is because I would be too emotionally destroyed if my grandparents accidentally killed them.