HTML Giant Secret Santa and other mail

I got my gift last week at the height of my blue period, right when I needed it the most. It has a nice shape and weight. I'm pretty sure it's a book. I decided not to open it until Christmas. I don't think I've ever denied myself anything before. It's pretty fun. Pictured is the present in its present condition.

Thank you to my Santa for getting my present to me at the present time. I'm hoping my person got my thing by now. I think I'm just going to send my person stuff from time to time. "It's Christmas in April! -Santa" I'm going to take my person under my wing. I have extra wrapping paper.

Thank you Ryan Call for putting the whole program together. Brilliant.

I received my December MLP books yesterday. I read Sam Pink's play, Be Nice to Everyone. It's so disfunctional. I'm glad he writes these plays. Sam Pink has a knack for writing good tricks. The woman asks for lipstick and the man passes her a shard of glass. At the end the man leaves, but the build up to this is such that I expected the direction to cut off before he makes that decision, or to go all Godot:

Didi: Shall we go?
Gogo: Yes, let's go.
[they do not move]

, so the crucial value of the play is in the man's exit. This, especially, considering the Sartrean, No Exit affinities of the story. I'm at work and I don't have Pink's text to provide an example, but the similarity is keenly immanent. How about this; I remember: the woman threatens the man, saying, "You will never be alone;" the take-home from No Exit is that mysteriously un-bumperstickered chestnut, "Hell is other people."

Be Nice to Everyone is sexier than these French plays, though. It opens in the shower. The woman wrings the soap from her hair, stops the water, steps out. The man in malaise or anxiety watches the water drain. Finally he steps out. Here's a great detail: they share a towel. They stand naked with each other. Then they stand in their underwear. I still think all women's underwear is sexy. And the tension runs through this. They are trying politely to kill each other. As he hands her the shard of glass instead of lipstick, he tells her he loves her. (Later he tells her he hates her.) She gives him a stick of gum so he can get rid of the taste of her kiss, and she confesses that she poisoned it -- but with just a small amount of poison. "You would have been okay, ultimately," she tells him.

It's this word, ultimately, that hangs the center of the play. I initially thought it was the wrong choice and even read "eventually" in its place. I think it was "eventually" that I expected. I did not expect "ultimately" because it is too much of a pronouncement. But I like that. I'm tempted to indulge the word and its context, and to deduce that it would be through her poison that the man would be ultimately, and for good, saved. What these characters need: hobbies.

Seriously, they need hobbies or something. I wish the play gave them something to reflect their angst aside from conversation, but Pink at least gives them routines. In Happy Days, poor Winnie didn't even have that:


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Also yesterday I received Hitler's Mustache, which is more overwhelming than the other Peter Davis ditties I read online. I writhe in fear. I quake. I was so eager to receive this book, thinking about it at work and stuff, and then so daunted by it once I got the wrapping off, that I put it down for War and Peace. That's actually true. For all the welcome of Davis's gauzy voice, I'm pretty sure that reading his poems will be more difficult than reading an 1100 page novel.

Gauzy isn't right, but I don't want to say "breezy." I want to say, "like mousse."