I have naturally curly hair and yet am sitting here in hot rollers. Something is wrong with this picture. They’re all over my head — not in the normal hot roller sense of being tidily cozied up to all my hairs, but in the “I’m doing something wrong” sense of being all over the place, half falling out and hanging down at painful angles. If I opened the door to a mailman right now, even our mailman, he would run.

Also, I’m pretty sure I set off the smoke detector somehow. See, I already set it off during this “Gene’s in Boston, I’m gonna fuck up the apartment” week of hedonism, by cooking something a little too long. So I had to take it off the wall and pull the battery out to make it stop yelling. (There’s another one in the living room that’s still active, don’t worry.) But just now, sitting sort of kind of close to my roller box, it started giving these weird beeps again. With the battery out.

Anyway, to sum up, this was a terrible plan and my smoke detector may be haunted, so when next you see me I may be bald or possessed. You’ve been warned.

…is it just me?

Sometimes when I am brushing my hair too rapidly, the ends of my hair snap up and hit me in the eye. It really hurts.

Either my hair is too long or my brain is too small. But which is it?

I thought of a way to scare my neighbors for Halloween. First I carved a pumpkin, but I didn’t make it scary, I made it sweet and goofy and fun. Then I put it outside my door, in the lobby — boo! An adorable pumpkin to grin at you when you come home, neighbors!

Then I let it sit there for a week, and it grew black and white mold all inside it, and the mold crept across the eyeholes and the nose and the top slid down into itself like a toothless old mouth.

Then I took several days to notice that it was no longer so cute, and when I finally got rid of it it was so soft and gross that part of it had to be cleaned off the carpet separately.

So as my neighbor, you have to be asking yourself: What kind of housekeeper is she, in general? Is this sort of thing going on in there all the time? Is she growing deadly mold in her fridge? Should we be afraid?

BE AFRAID, NEIGHBORS.

Happy Halloween!