Unwritten

I have to admit that I sometimes fail to write about the things that really interest me. That’s usually because I think they’re too embarassing or trivial or weird. Here are three things that interested (obsessed?) me in the past week, but that I couldn’t bring myself to blog about. Till now.

--There’s this enormously fat man I often encounter on my daily walks to the post office. He bounces up and down while he waddles down the sidewalk. He has red hair, a serene expression, and is usually smoking a pipe. (You don’t see too many guys smoking pipes these days.) We never make eye contact as we pass. I wonder what he’s thinking about. I’m thinking about Humpty Dumpty.

--A strip of chrome fell off the back end of my car—or some vandal pulled it off—and is now lost forever. A spare parts dealer quoted me a price of $217 to replace it (the entire taillight assembly would have to be replaced, as they don’t sell the chrome strip separately). The car looks strange to me without it, but I’m not going to pay that! I’m wondering if I should just get a jar of chrome paint and paint the dark plastic strip underneath the place where the chrome strip once was. For some reason, I keep debating this with myself late at night.

--What is it about actress Julie Newmar? My son likes to watch the 1960s Batman show on TV Land, and sometimes I watch with him. Newmar played Catwoman, and she was very, very sexy in her skin-tight cat suit—and very, very kooky. She played this feline “special guest villainess” (as she was credited) as someone who might just as well end up in a mental hospital as a prison. She was evil but also extremely funny. I can’t quite capture in words the daffy-yet-confident persona she projected.