First, an update on yesterday's socks and underpants mystery. Only able to find those I was wearing, I decided to do the rest of my laundry to at least clear the floor some. And guess what came out of the dryer when I was done: all of my socks and underpants! I don't know how they got in there because they certainly were not there when I started. All I can imagine is that they were trapped in some other dimension, the dimension between lost and found, clean and dirty, fact and fiction.

Second, I wrote an entire entry a few days ago that I posted, I swear I posted, and yet it wasn't there when I just looked, published or unpublished. I'm reposting it below. Has anyone seen this before? I think my brain may have run away with the spoon.

THE LOST ENTRY:

Content Challenge is over, and I won. OK, nobody “won,” because it was one of those things you were supposed to do just to feel good about yourself and also avoid eternal scorn. However, like Cleopatra after Actium, I shall sail into Alexandria wearing the colors of victory before hunkering down in the palace against the advancing legions of Octavian.

I mean, um. Well, who knows.

On Bearthday, Rob and I and two other friends went to see a play on Broadway. It was called Top Girls, and I had never heard of it, but it was quite breathtaking. Marisa Tomei, the Meryl Streep of our generation, was one of the stars, along with Martha Plimpton and some other peple. This is a play about how there is nothing new under the sun and how if anyone takes away your baby you should just suck it up. The first act was very static but static in a way that is like your laundry crackling with electricity just before you touch it: little movement but much going on just under the surface. Things sort of go a little haywire after that, as the play moves into the literal from the figurative, but not haywire in a bad way, just in that there’s a lot to keep track of, including how the themes of the first act overlay the action of the next two. Breathtaking.

In other news, while I was waiting for the crosstown bus on 86th Street, a guy dressed all in black with longish red hair began staring at me in an exaggerated fashion. His eyes first hovered at my face then darted down toward my waistline with something like alarm, then back up. He circled me several times making that whatever direction I happened to be looking in, he was in my line of sight. At first I cursed the stars because I was certain I had either been singled out by a vindictive mime or had done something hideously embarrassing such as forget to put on pants, but then I realized that I was dealing with autistic person trying to convey that he did not care for people to keep their hands in their pockets. When I removed them he was so visibly relieved that I almost felt sorry for him when I jammed them back in as far as they would go just as the bus pulled up. I gave him the stink eye as I got on the bus to disabuse him of any idea that he was going to sit next to me, but I think he was so stricken by my volley in our sartorial warfare that he moved as far away from me as he could.

And that, folks, is how you handle people.