I thought I liked her, thought we were getting along well enough, but it was just Stockholm Syndrome; I am livid with displeasure at the egregious behavior of my bellicose, belligerent houseguest. How a grown young woman with a nearly-fulltime job in legal services can be without a place to live is beyond me. I'm a straight shooter, but her words are like bullets, and I'm getting caught in the crossfire. She calls me the trash compactor and says I only exist to finish her leftovers. She tells me the same stories over and over and I can't say anything about it, lest I provoke her, but if I even start to touch on a subject I've brought up before, it's all, "YOU ALREADY TOLD ME THAT!! Do we HAVE to talk about this again?!" And don't even get her started on politics...but there's no need, because she's already talking about them, going on and on about "Barry" and how freakin' great "Barry" is doing. She had a revelation recently, after a long night of dissociative-induced visions; Mitt Romney appeared to her in the shape of a goat and apparently scared her straight, straight Democrat ticket this election cycle. How does such a tender, delicate flower unfurl to become an invasive weed? The answer eludes me.

Dear diary,
 I hate Gracy. More on this later.

She walks the halls for money, she don't care if it's wrong or if it's right.

 This morning, Gracy set a frying pan handle on fire while trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich. The smell of burning plastic filled the room, rotten and sharp like a vampire in the sun.

Why does my pillow smell like Cheetos???

My co-worker, Gracy, is highly proficient in what the French call "le tirade." She rants at you, artfully and at length. A frequent target of her ire is president Obama; she calls him Barack O'Vomit and pretends he's of Irish parentage, which never fails to enrage me. How quickly some people forget what the alternative was, what a vote for Obama was a vote against...the prospective post-apocalyptic wasteland of a Sarah Palin vice-presidency. It still gives me the willies, just thinking about it...whatever the president's shortcomings, he's not vice-president Palin, and that still means a lot to me.

The winter solstice: longest night of the year. An amazing coincidence, as I've been sitting here all evening trying to work out a gift for Gracy, and it just won't end; I'm completely in the dark. Something practical? Something sentimental? Something aloof and/or oozing nonchalance? I can't make any headway on the issue. Maybe there's a book I could get her, "How not to be a Ho"...that'd make a good Christmas gift. It's festive, and seasonally appropriate; "ho ho ho" and the cuckolding of Joseph all that. Or maybe something to help with the drinking...God only knows where she's sleeping it off tonight, if being blacked-out is the same as sleeping. Probably not; she seems to cause a lot of "mayhem" while "blacked-out" and the worst thing she does when she's sleeping is shove me around a bit, with some coarse language thrown in for emphasis.

I can't rest till I get this sorted out; once it's done there's no going back. Dear, sweet, wayward Gracy: I apologize in advance for any misunderstandings.