I wake up on Easter Sunday with a headache — is it Jesus pounding away inside? Yaaaaawnstretch! Woo, what a night I had, you wouldn’t believe, and I’m feebly trying to re-tranquilize him with two Advil (funny that Whitehall Robins was able to establish “Advil” as being both singular and plural, funny because why bother and also because it’s got to be difficult to create words from scratch like that and then indirectly teach the American public how they work).

Dinner in Beverly, MA, with Alexis’s (her sister mentioning the difficulty of pronouncing that particular possessive, especially when combined with Josh’s) family, wondering about how colors come to be associated with certain holidays, though I reckon the gutwrenching pastels of this weekend are supposed to symbolize the peaceful, tamed nature of Spring, but why red/green? Why black/orange? Why the distinctive periwinkle/taupe of Labor Day?

I’ll admit it, I played dollies with one of the nieces, but I didn’t give my dolly (a gymnast) a grating falsetto, choosing instead to pitch my voice even deeper than usual, hinting at steroid abuse. “I’m going to count to five and you better be ready for school,” Mackenzie said, shaking the Mom doll along with each syllable. “You can count all morning, Mother,” the gymnast replied huskily. “I’m not going.”

Last time I was there I got excited because they had a kava-infused tea and so there I was, sipping it out of the girliest teacup imaginable while everyone else drank strong, black coffee like normal Americans. So I went with the coffee today and it was disgusting as usual. I wanted to dunk the birthday cake in there to cut the flavor, or perhaps pour it slowly and carefully on the white carpet to show my disdain. Another thing I do when I’m supposed to be paying attention to what people are saying: Imagine doing something completely unacceptable and predicting the response. Recurring themes: Incest, feces.

Something about ham being the Official Meat of Easter. Something about it that just seems to say fuck kosher. And Sophie’s Choice playing on the television in the background.

“What kind of baby were you, do you remember?”

“Flawless. Changed my own diaper.”