Reason Number 57: I have no idea.

In March, it's always excruciating to dig down and seek out life reasons, vital, exciting prospects that make me want to skip around East Harlem in broad daylight while wearing spandex. Winter has stopped being cozy. Summer is far. My bangs are overgrown. I have split ends. My skin looks waxy, my eyelids sag. My hair is always greasy, in spite of being washed every day. No matter how many times I floss/gargle/SoniCare, deep down I ooze perma-halitosis. I've exhausted my butternut squash excitement, my lust for burnished dying plants, rekindled each fall. Hot chocolate! Tea! Flavorless to me. My mittens are fucking pilling and and I'm ready to throw them away, and I'm ready to yank each of my teeth out with my crusty, nibbled fingers. I'm ready to dry-clean my eggplant sleeping bag coat and shove it into a deep, underbed dusty hole.

I have always hated March, practically since the day my mother forced me out of her vagina in Baltimore in 1983. Though growing up in Georgia, mid-March equals dogwoods and bluebirds and maybe even the daring to wear your sandals and eat ice cream, if only for a warm afternoon. Here, however, not. Although for some reason, I've been hearing the Mr. Softy truck round the block. What brave/stubborn manchild is ordering ice cream outdoors? Who forced Mr. Softy to drive his truck? Did he do it of his own volition? Was he so desperate to share his snowy cream with Upper Manhattan that he's braving real snow? Seriously.

I, for one, am still wearing my stupid ugly cumstain reservoir tip smurf hat that everyone on the street says looks like "Where's Waldo" but is so warm I can't bear to give it up.

This morning, a kitten pranced up to me as I bent down to pick up a carton of milk at my corner bodega. (After having already poured myself a bowl of cereal and wrongly anticipating the tiny amount of milk we had, it was a soggy, sloppy mess by the time I came home with the new milk, but I couldn't put it to waste because cereal is expensive, so I ate every gelatinous bite. And that sentence is so garbled not even I, the maker, can make true sense of it. I have truly lost my touch.)

At any rate, the kitten nuzzled me and my 1% (the perfect % for taste and texture and calcium absorption), attempted to ascend my arm, but I declined, exhausted by its cuteness as is. We are creepy, cats and I. It followed me to the register and stared at me as I walked into the dribbling rain to eat my unsatisfactory breakfast with my bitey handicat, who promptly scolded me for not having fed her earlier.