We Can't Have Anything Nice

I am a Spongebob fanatic. I guess “fanatic” is a bit of an overstatement, since I don’t have antannae, satellite, cable, or any other means to capture the signal that would allow me to watch the actual television cartoon, and since I haven’t even seen the movie.

In a brilliant stroke of foreshadowing, my grandmother, Elsa, told me the story of how she came to collect miniature statues of mice the first time I ever visited her home in Hawa’ii. It seems that one of her children brought her a miniature mouse statue home once, and someone got it in their mind that she liked little statues of mice. So he or she (she either really couldn't remember or just didn't want to stigmatize the culprit) just kept giving them to her. And as these manias run in families, the misconception spread to others and the rest joined in on the gifting. Year after year, holiday after holiday, she was the beneficiary of some mistaken family myth about what she liked.

She, of course, did not tell the story thusly. She was very kind and loving and generous notwithstanding having received hundreds of statues of mice to dust through the course of her adulthood.

And of course, my Spongebob situation is not nearly as bleak or overwhelming as the decades-long accumulation of little mice. I like Spongebob. He is cerebral but goofy, willing to learn from his boneheaded mistakes and call others on theirs, generally good-natured and occasionally intense. Not that I can even begin to compare with the ceramic mouse collection, but I do have Spongebob underwear, t-shirts, slinkies, interchangeable dolls, notecubes (three of these, actually), address books, pool toys, towels, shower curtains, and the list goes on. . .

Having put all this thought into the why’s of my Spongebob affectation, you can imagine how horrified I was to come upon this in my living room this morning:


Until some time last week, I had a soft-sided Spongebob lunch pail. His body was the “pail” part, and he had these now disembodied and disemboweled plastic arms sticking off the side, and pants and legs stuck onto the bottom. I had contemplated using duct tape to perform cosmetic repairs and just have my Spongebob be the amputee Spongebob, but decided that others may not take it in the spirit it was intended.

The dogs choose the most random and unpredictable things to pick off of the high parts of the countertop and destroy. All I can say is that it’s a good thing I still have my “Charlie’s Angels” lunch pail or I would have been seriously ticked.

We just can’t have anything nice, now can we?!?!?