Yesterday I got home from work and my lawn was mowed.
Obviously, I didn’t mow it. That’s not my job.
And Justin didn’t mow it, since I’m pretty sure his superiors in Afghanistan would consider that an excessively long lunch break.
So it must have been the scrawny, bronze tanned stoner kid I hired to do it but was fairly convinced would forget, what with all of the bong-hitting hours between the time I hired him and the time he was scheduled to mow.
What he did forget, apparently, is the fact that I showed him, told him, and texted him to be careful about not cutting the dogs’ electric fence.
Yes, I electrocute my own dogs.
But it’s only because I love them.
Wouldn’t you love faces like these?
Anyway.
So I came home yesterday to fresh-cut grass and the incessant beep of the dog detainment system, indicating a cut wire.
Not surprising.
Also, I can’t find where the wire is apparently cut, since most of it is buried.
Also not surprising.
So now I feel like the helpless girl who can’t figure out how to fix a damn fence.
This is surprising.
Because normally, given enough time, I can figure things out. I can get ‘er done. But this time, I’m stumped. And frustrated. And for someone who owns canines whose progressive learning capabilities closely resemble those of the Jurassic Park velociraptors, we could be in trouble when they realize their collars no longer beep.
So.
As satisfying as it is to do things on my own, to get my hands a little dirty, to experience the stiffness and stench after a day of manual labor, I realize.
Sometimes I just want someone to do it for me.
I think I could be happy if my hands and my office always looked like this. As long as someone else is mowing my lawn.
I know they say that money can’t buy you happiness, but I think having enough money to pay people to do stuff for me would, in fact, make me very happy indeed.
At least in the sense of immediate gratification.
And there’s nothing, as far as I can tell, wrong with immediate gratification. Like a handful of Reece’s Pieces and an angst-filled episode of Dawson’s Creek. Or a cool glass of Riesling and a book on the back deck. Or a morning jaunt with some literotica and my vibrator.
What?
Just seeing if you’re still paying attention.
My point is that satisfaction earned is not necessarily better than satisfaction bought. That, in this life, some ventures are worth our time and others are not.
It’s a first-world privilege, and I’m willing to accept it.
For lack of a simple response, let’s just say I’ve been elbows-deep in plumbing fixtures, wood stain, boxed pasta meals, and the funk of my own melancholy.
I realize, as a semi-serious blogger, that I’m supposed to be meticulously recording my daily actions, organizing the resulting mixed media, and assembling it all into some witty and coherent piece of informative evidence here on this blog.
And I have been. Recording it, that is. It’s just that whole organizing and writing part that seems to petrify me into paralysis these days.
Instead, I distract myself by taking photos of my dogs, my wine, or my food (when it doesn’t happen to involve shell shaped pasta or processed cheese) and posting them on Facebook or Instagram in the vain attempt to gain some kind of social media validation that the way I’m living my life these days is, in fact, worth while.
Suffice to say, I haven’t exactly embraced the pseudo-single life.
Though it has, despite my best intentions, managed to embrace me. In a crazy, cyclic carousel of ups and downs. Motivation and melancholy. Like the San Andreas Fault, I appear to lie dormant for a time, building up my energy, storing up my drive, and then I release it all at once in this impressive display of calamitous frenzy.
Frankly, it’s exhausting.
Both physically and emotionally.
But I do have ideas.
Lots of ideas.
They’re scattered about on yellow sticky notes and inside notebooks and on pieces of scrap paper everywhere. The key, I’ve discovered, is going to be learning how to write at night, when I have the most time. When I don’t have to be to work in 45 minutes. When, unfortunately, my flow of motivational steam has been fully depressurized by the soul-sucking realities of spending my days as an almost-30-year-old assistant.
But I’ll get there.
All I ask is that you stick with me.
It’s a process, you know.
But we’ll get through it together.
In the meantime, just take a gander at how I currently spend my evenings.
I think you’ll find that a little time spent on… I don’t know… intellectual pursuits wouldn’t hurt me.
I started this first post-deployment week off with the best of intentions. I had plans, you know. I was going to get things done.
But then I learned that Dawson’s Creek is now available for streaming on Netflix and spent the weekend — yes, the entire weekend — drinking wine, eating cheesy pasta from a box, and realizing that my high school crush on Pacey Witter has, in fact, not diminished over the last fourteen years.
Because these are the things I had available to me without leaving the house.
Long before Bella went batshit for Edward and Jacob, teens of the 90’s were fatefully divided between Team Pacey and Team Dawson. And even though their names were ridiculous and they had the vocabulary of tenured english professors, the adorability factor was undeniable.
I’m fighting demons. And they don’t stop with Pacey fantasies.
My allergies have turned my nose into a faucet, my ears into pressure valves, and my chest into a lead weight. Also, I smell.
And also, my neighbor invited me to a wine drinking ladies’ social event last night (or so I’d been told), but it was really a jewelry selling party where I only felt slightly out-of-place among the perfectly kept housewives to the point where I may have overindulged in the boxed wine that they swore was delicious because the box, after all, was black and fancy, but let me just go ahead and tell you that it was not. That said, I still managed to have a nice time because, lo and behold, they were great women. Fun, witty, and very content with their lives. There was even a former Miss USA title winner in the bunch who kept everyone laughing with her running man talent.
Needless to say, I’m not feeling 100% this morning.
And I’m tempted — oh-so-tempted — to turn on the Dawson and sink into mindlessness.
But I won’t.
Yet.
I’m thinking the best way to battle my lethargy is to work on a reward-based system. If I get something done, I earn an episode of Dawson’s Creek.
Primer is up? Great! Watch as Jen falls back into her bad girl ways.
What? You painted that first coat? Awesome! Find out who Joey loses her virginity to.
You hung the organizing system, de-cluttered the garage, stained your shelves, pressure washed the house, cancelled Justin’s phone service, wrote your post for Apartment Therapy, and finished decorating your bedroom? Congratulations, friend — you just earned yourself a full day Creek-a-thon of brainless nostalgia.
Obviously, I’m still working out the details. But I’m thinking I’ll train myself the way I train the dogs. With positive reinforcement.
And since my dogs are so well-behaved, I know this will work.
Storm clouds were rolling in fast, and every so often a bright streak of lightning left me wondering if inside a metal box with metal wheels on metal tracks was the safest place to be sitting.
My mom fretted over the fact that we’d left Lexie outside, while Ed reassured her that the huge porch roof and open sun room left plenty of places for the small pup to take shelter.
Get there get there get there, I thought.
Justin squeezed my leg.
Outside, the rail yards looked gloomy and foreboding. Like the set of a scary movie. I heard warning bells and saw an intersection quickly approaching — protective red-and-white striped arms lowering to block passage. My heart raced as we didn’t slow down — we’re going to zoom right through!
Oh, wait.
We are the train.
Of course we wouldn’t stop for the train warning.
I laughed out loud, and the other three looked at me quizzically.
“It’s nothing –” I stammered. “I just panicked for a second when I thought we weren’t stopping for the train.”
Blank stares.
“But then I realized… you know… that we’re on the train.”
I heard the lady who’d been sitting with her husband and young child across the aisle snicker.
They laughed. Banter ensued. Somehow, as seems to be usual for conversations with my mother these days, the talk turned to kids. When are you having some? I want to be a grandmother. You’re not getting any younger, you know.
Yes. I know.
“I just don’t know if I can handle it! Especially while Justin’s in the military. Having kids takes work. And brains. And I’m sorry, but it just seems like the longer I’m married, the dumber I get.”
Justin laughed.
“It’s true!” I said. “I don’t need to think as much, now that I’m married. Stuff just gets done. Why would I want to screw all that up with a kid?”
The woman across the aisle actually gave me a knowing nod and a wink.
And yes, while the whole idea seems ludicrous to say out loud, there’s some merit here.
You see, it has been over 85 hours since Justin has vacated the premises, and already I’ve had to get my man on no less than 3 times.
No, that’s not as inappropriate as it sounds.
What I mean is that I’ve had to do tasks that are deemed “man territory” in most heterosexual relationships — tasks that men (and single and/or apparently more self-sufficient women) manage to handle with the ease that comes with long-term established expertise but that I, through some glitchy wire that has progressively made me less self-sufficient since the moment I said, “I do,” never bothered to learn.
Take, for example, the vacuum cleaner.
While the task of vacuuming has usually befallen to me via some unspoken marital code, (the same code that keeps Justin up to his elbows in soggy gutter leaves, moldy refrigerator leftovers, and drain hair goo), Justin is usually the one who cleans the vacuum itself. Dog dander, carpet fuzz, and dead skin cells just aren’t my thang, so I never bothered with it.
That is, after all, why we get married, isn’t it?
So we can legally bind ourselves to someone who will do the tasks we like the least?
Okay, and maybe for love and commitment and stanky morning breath and all that jazz too.
But an unspoken bonus is the division of labor. And while a couple may never actually sit down to discuss how said labor gets divided, it is my understanding that the roles generally evolve over time. Which is how I’ve become the vacuumer, but Justin is the vacuumer of the vacuum.
You dig?
So when I set about my task of vacuuming yesterday, I reached an impasse upon completion. I could, as usual, put the vacuum back in the closet where it magically gets emptied and cleaned before its next use, or I could clean it myself. I was pretty sure the more desirable of the 2 options — the one where I do no work at all — wouldn’t be effective this time since the vacuum fairy is currently wielding military camouflage in some far off land, so I was stuck with Option 2. Figure it out myself.
Damn.
I emptied the bin with no trouble at all (I already knew how to do that — I just didn’t have to do that since it fell on the other side of the Division of Labor line). But then I noticed an unhealthy buildup of lint and who-knows-what-else around this grid suction thingie inside the bin.
And I couldn’t get to it.
So I tried this latch thing, and that didn’t work.
Then I tried this other latch thing, and that didn’t work.
Then I tried a combination of latch things and, you guessed it, I still could not penetrate the plastic force field of frustration.
I thought about pulling out the screwdriver set or just banging it on the ground, but then I remembered how well that solution didn’t work out when I used it on my printer, so I dusted off the one tool I haven’t had to use in the past 6 years — the reason I’ve gotten progressively dumber since my nuptials — which is the other half of my noggin.
Enter Google.
And YouTube.
And a bottle of beer. (I may or may not have had to use a jar-opening tool to unscrew the cap.)
And all of the modern-day research tools I have at my disposal to solve a problem.
And there was my solution. It was painfully simple. I should have felt incredibly stupid. But I didn’t. Instead, I felt a bit of that swelling pride that comes when you figure something out on your own. When you get your hands dirty. When you can’t just call for the vacuum fairy to come do it for you.
I will be the first to admit that marriage, in a way, has made me lazy. It’s made it far too easy for me to whine for help when I can’t figure something out in less than 12 seconds. Which, it turns out, is an excellent way to regress.
And that’s not really what this whole living thing is all about.
It’s easy to become dependent on another person — especially when you happen to live with that person, and especially when you happen to sleep with that person. And, while it’s always nice to have a crutch on-hand if you really need one, isn’t it better to strengthen your legs and learn how to walk on your own?
In the clarity that comes when calling your significant other is no longer an option — that, aside from helpful friends and neighbors who love you but not enough to come over and remove the spider from your bathroom at 3 a.m. — I’m learning that eliminating the need in a relationship does not eliminate romance. In fact, clearing away all that mucky dependency leaves room for something much more interesting — true intimacy. Encouragement. Maybe even admiration.
So.
Maybe you’re the type who already does everything on your own, and now you have a headache from rolling your eyes throughout the duration of reading this post.
But maybe you’re not.
Maybe you’re like me. You have a short attention span. You ask for help before even thinking about whether the task at hand is something you can achieve on your own.
If so, I want you to try something. Try not asking for help. At least not until you really need it.
I’m home, Justin’s home, the pups are home, and finally, besides the fact that it feels like I’m waking up at 5 when I’m really waking up at 7, all feels right with the world.
I have a lot to catch you up on, I know, but I have less than 48 hours of quality time left with that guy who stuck a ring on my finger back when I was like 9 (which, incidentally, makes me only 16 years old, which is all kinds of awesome) before he leaves for Afghanistan, so I figure I should spend it not on the computer.
I will have plenty of time for this, and you, in the coming months.
And trust me — I have a lot to share.
So for now, lets just start with the biggest news:
Yep.
I took a fashion hint from this dog and decided to get bangs.
Probably right about the time Hollywood’s fashionistas have once again declared them unfashionable.
Not because I’m the type who likes to roll against the grain, but because I’m the type who takes so long to make a decision that trends are over before I have a chance to jump on the wagon. Either that, or I’ve been on the wagon for so damn long that trends come back in style before I knew they were obsolete.
It’s a national holiday — a day off from work, when we buy exorbitant amounts of ground beef and encased meats and charcoal and propane. We light fires and start motors burn fuel like it’s free and we’ll never run out. We consume large quantities of fermented beverages and potato chips and baked beans. The sun crisps our faces to a nice, lobster red — raccoon rings around our eyes from our UV protective sunglasses prove we still have some standards when it comes to caring about our health and our bodies. Our feet stay bare, and, if we’re lucky, we dip our toes into the pool or the lake or the ocean. We create a day of brilliant indolence. We drink in life.
We also wave flags and remember those we’ve lost. Those who likely wore uniforms on the day they died and whose empty boots, vertical rifle, protective round helmet — now jobless and forlorn — form the battle cross of the fallen soldier. Unaffiliated with religion or dogma or faith. Just respect.
A way to honor the place where a soul has vacated the premises.
Photo by Dusan Vranic, Associated Press.
Whether we agree with how they died is irrelevant.
On what we should all agree is that we are grateful. Grateful we’re here to enjoy the day. To sunburn our bodies. To fill our bellies. To laugh and sometimes cry but mostly, if we’re smart, to smile.
I hope I never have to spend this holiday like many other spouses in this country —
On my knees, in the grass, at a stone.
So. For those who mourn, and for those who don’t: It’s important to enjoy the day. Bask in the company of our family and friends. Wear sunscreen. And take, if you will, at least one moment of sobriety to remember the point.
But you probably already think I’m odd and you’re still here, so really, that makes you kind of odd.
Which is probably why we get along so well.
Anyway.
It has to do with how much I dread a regular check-up like appointment I have to make with a certain specialist where I sit in an exam room so he/she can stare into certain orifices and pull skin to the side and poke around. It’s the most uncomfortable thing in the world. Like an invasion of my entire being. I don’t know this person. She doesn’t know me. Yet here she is, looking inside, inwardly (if not outwardly) judging my hygienic practices and probably how I wear my makeup.
Yep. I’m scared of the Eye Doctor.
What?
You thought I was going to say something you thought was uncomfortable like Gynecologist or Dentist, didn’t you?
Well. I have news. Those folks have nothing on Eye Doctors.
I’ve had the same Vag Guy for the past 5 years. I’m comfortable with him. My vag is comfortable with him. We know what to expect and how long it will take. There’s no guesswork involved — just some mild groping and a tissue sample. The entire yearly appointment takes all of 5 minutes for him to get in and get out. Wham, bam, ThankYouMa’am.
And the Dentist? Them’s small potatoes. You see the Dentist for all of 30 seconds at the end of an appointment, and he/she is always super nice in a desperate attempt to make up for the fact that everybody hates them. It’s the hygienists you have to bond with. Until recently, I had the same hygienist the entire time we lived here. Every 6 months, Penny was my buddy. She taught me how to floss properly, introduced me to Reach Gum Care woven floss, used water — not scrapers — to clean my teeth, and basically renewed my entire faith in the dental industry.
I think I’d rather get a pap smear by Sponge Bob than go to the eye doctor.
Okay. That’s not true at all. We all know how I feel about him.
(Seriously, I was going to try to find a funny Sponge Bob photo to put here, and I couldn’t do it. It was just too scary. You’ll have to use your imagination.)
Not to belittle the undoubtedly interesting and challenging field that is optometry, but I have to say — it seems a lot less exact than the previous fields mentioned, which involve things like lab tests and visual verification to determine when something’s out of whack.
Unfortunately for them, Optometrists have to depend on the patient for much of their diagnosis. And I’m sorry, but I’m just not a good patient.
When you shine a light in my eye and then 2 seconds later stick a steampunk machine in front of my face ask me to stare at a lit chart on the wall and ask me what I can read, I feel like laughing because it seems like you must be joking.
You just directed a light into my eyeball and now you want me to stare across the room and read?
I stare at a fuzzy ball, 2 or 3 lines down from the top of the chart, and make a guess.
You grunt, flip a switch, and ask me if the fuzzy ball is now better or worse.
Better or worse than what?
It’s still fuzzy.
You’re asking me to decipher the difference between fuzzy and fuzzy.
I get frustrated.
You get frustrated.
I feel like an idiot.
You probably feel like an idiot.
But hey — at least you’re getting paid for this.
And so it goes. Four appointments, 3 trial lenses, and hundreds of dollars worth of prescription drops and cleaning fluids later, I have to miss a half day of work today to pay you a surprise visit because I was up all night with an intense headache behind one eye. Because, I realize, my new prescription is much, much stronger than my old one. And I can’t see. And I want to cry. And I don’t want to see you, and you most certainly don’t want to see me, yet still here we are.
A different doctor every year.
So I know the problem must be me, which makes it even worse.
The checkout lady at the grocery store thought I was a teacher.
She scanned the glue stick I’d purchased in order to assemble approximately 587 open house invitations for work (okay, maybe it was 120) later that evening, and then asked the question.
“Are you a teacher?” Big smile.
I looked at the artichoke, thick hickory smoked bacon, 2 bars of salted chocolate, green onions, cauliflower, and four bottles of wine that followed the little orange stick down the moving assembly line counter, like good little students on their way to lunch.
My friend Katie (yes, another Katie), who actually is a teacher, suggested that it must have been the wine — not the glue stick — that tipped her off.
And I have to agree.
Sometimes I think maybe I’d like to be a teacher. Only not the glue stick-wielding, double line-arranging, hand-holding kind because things like craft projects and untied shoe laces and stalactite boogers make me uncomfortable.
And I have very little patience.
And I wouldn’t have nearly a big enough wine budget.
But sometimes I think I’d like to be the Dr.-preceeding, university-working, wall-to-wall office bookshelf-having kind.
I’m not sure what I’d teach, but I would teach it well. I’d find a way to reach into the minds of impressionable young people — people who actually want to learn — and mold their pliable little brains into whatever strong-yet-imperfect sculpture I think future generations should uphold.
Okay.
Like my friend Dennis would attest, though he’d somehow manage to avoid the cliché, that’s easier said than done.
Which is probably why I’m not a teacher.
But here’s the thing.
Each and every one of us has the opportunity to teach something every day — whether it’s part of our actual job or not.
From the way we speak to the lady behind the grocery store checkout counter who somehow mistakes us for someone who might choose to hang out with 30 children all day to the way we react when our spouses tell us they dropped and cracked the iPhones they refused to adorn with heavy-duty cases because they didn’t like the bulk, we always have the choice to handle encounters with grace and finesse over short tempers and rudeness.
With the exception of jackass drivers on the roads, I’m rarely rude to a stranger. Where I could stand to improve is the way I am with the ones I love.
Because, whether we realize it or not, we’re always being watched.
Minds — both young and old — are always being affected by the choices we make every day.
We have the ability and choice to make someone’s day better, or to make it worse. It’s as simple as that.
And I think, in my obviously thoughtful and optimistic state of mind this morning, that I’m going to focus on making days better.
And maybe the wall-to-wall office bookshelves will come with time.
How about you? What do you tend to choose?
P.S. I lied before when I told you that I imported all of my previous subscribers. I was wrong. This did not happen. And now I’m sad. So please re-subscribe by typing your email address into the “Subscribe to this blog via email” section in the top-right corner of the page, just below the header. I MISS you!
I thought I should let you know that I actually managed to move all of you lovely email subscribers myself. Apparently I was not very diligent with my research after 11 hours of headaches during yesterday’s transfer, but today I’ve managed to fix some issues with a clear head. So, if you were actually nice enough to already re-subscribe, hopefully this won’t cause you to get double emails. Let me know if you do, and I will fix it.
The people who will no longer get updates, apparently, are my lovely followers from WordPress.com. (You know who you are.) So, if you want to continue getting updates for my site, please subscribe via the email subscriber in the top right corner of my page.
Okay. So I’m currently in the process of trying to self-host this site. It’s slow. It’s frustrating. It’s going to require many, many glasses of wine.
Also, I just realized that if you’ve subscribed via email, you may no longer get emails after this post. You will have to re-subscribe.
In fact, you might not even get notice of this post, because I have no idea how all of this technical stuff works.
Anyway.
I’m doing this for various reasons — reasons I will explain in good time. In the meantime, I hope you will take the time to re-subscribe to receive emails when the site officially switches over, assuming I can even figure out how to set up that capability.
Because you’re like my security blanket, my self-esteem boosters, and my therapists, all rolled into one supportive virtual care package. Even when you say nothing, it still helps to know you’re there.
So please don’t leave me.
And bear with me while I figure all of this out.
And umm… I’ll get over this whole needy girlfriend phase once I’m back up and running. Because nothing brings out neediness more than technology problems. And of those, I currently have many.
I’ll catch you on the flip side!
(I hope.)
UPDATE: The new site seems to be up and running. Please go to the window in the top-right corner, just below the header, where it says, “Subscribe to Blog Via Email.” Fill it out to update your subscription so you can still receive email notifications when I post. I won’t spam you. I promise. I’m sorry for the inconvenience!
UPDATE UPDATE: So I’ve actually managed to move all of you lovely email subscribers myself. The people who will no longer get updates, apparently, are my lovely followers from WordPress.com. (You know who you are.) So, if you want to continue getting updates for my site, please subscribe via the email subscriber in the top right corner of my page. That is all. For now. Thank you for your time.)
