Uniqlo tee

I went out to Queens last night, and walked in to find my father and sister looking through my father's ADT papers. His ADT alarm was malfunctioning, so every few minutes, it was emitting a tooth-grinding shriek. But the only person who knew the security code to turn off the alarm was Miss Webster, his former home health aide, who recently moved back to St. Kitts! They forced me to get on the phone with ADT, and ADT walked me through the steps of disabling the alarm - I felt like Macgyver with a screwdriver in my hand, disabling an alarm - it felt like I was disabling a bomb. Why doesn't my father - an accomplished man with a strange fear that bands of roving maladroits are rampant in Queens, lurking about and waiting for the opportunity to kidnap 90-year-old men with incontinence issues - know the code to his house's security system?

Afterwards, my nerves still on edge from the shrieking of the alarm, my father sat me down and told me that my real father's estate may have finally been settled, and that there may be "some money there waiting for me." Ha! That estate has been in a mysterious limbo for 30-plus years, and I don't believe it will ever truly be settled. But that's between you and me. My father told me to call my cousin Ann in Antigua, who is the lawyer for the estate. What an awkward conversation that will be - especially since Ann's daughter Joy herself was kidnapped a couple of weeks ago (it turned out okay) and I haven't called Ann yet to see how she's doing. My slowness in showing my concern for my relatives has cost me dearly in the past, and that trend continues, it seems.

After that weird talk with my father, I went into the kitchen and saw a roach! Gaaaa! Maxine wanted to spray it, but I refused to use the spray, instead choosing to kill it with my bare hands. People are far too squeamish about using their hands to kill roaches, I feel - it's the most environmentally friendly method, and you get to kill a living being with your bare hands! (If you sometimes feel powerless, killing is one way to take your power back. Over the years - especially my childhood years - I have clapped mosquitoes between my palms, squeezed beetles, de-winged moths - and now, in my adulthood, I feel a strange sense of power, which sometimes manifests itself as a paralyzing anxiety). After I killed the roach, my sister smiled weakly and said "eEeEeEeE." I cracked up. Then I went downstairs into my childhood bathroom and took this picture. I'm wearing a recent purchase, a dark grey tee from Uniqlo. There were many options of colors in this particular tee shirt model, but I chose this color and a purple one, too - because those reminded me of tee shirts of mine from the past. To someone who is powerful, though, ahem, "between inheritances," with a seemingly never-ending gig providing technical support to a surprisingly helpless father and sister, wearing a familiar tee is perhaps the only self-comfort available at times. That, and Paxil.