Being the grownup

I was talking to a friend tonight about moving back to Korea. Maybe it’s the money. Being an English teacher, maybe even being treated like crap sometimes, can really beat the pants off of minimum-wage jobs in Fogtown (seriously. There’s a St. John’s fog meme).

Maybe the kimchi just got into my blood.

Maybe teaching English and writing are the two coolest things anyone can do, in my humble opinion.

Maybe I don’t like having to pay rent.

I told my friend this – one of several friends who lives in Korea. I thought he’d tell me to come back, to drink with him, to eat barbecued meat and dance until dawn. I was waiting for all those feelings of being twenty-two and dumb on the dance floor to rush back into me, a quick drug for when St. John’s feels too small and too damp.

I waited for him to tell me.

And he didn’t.

“Korea is nice…but it’s Neverland,” he said. ” You’re all grown up, Wendy.”

And he’s right, in a way. Unless you find a career there, or go to school there, teaching English in a foreign country can become a permanent escape. I’ve met jaded, silly people who lived in Seoul for ten years and couldn’t speak a word of Korean, who had a vague-yet-specific hatred of Koreans and Korean culture, and yet, couldn’t go home. For whatever reason.

Now, I know lots of people who go back every now and again to rediscover it, to fund other travels, to train more as a teacher, to catch up with old friends. Like me, it gets in their blood. I think some of them will become very good teachers, and spend the rest of their lives doing stuff like this. They at least dabble in the languages of the countries they visit. They respect the customs.

But.

The Wendy in me wonders if I can ever go back. Or should. If I can’t go back, because I won’t be twenty-two and that dumb again (god, I hope not), can I go forward to a similarly cool place?

How do we find these cool places? Do we grow into them as we grow older? Do we cross our fingers and hope for the best until the high-paying job comes around?

Do we just make the cool places?

What makes an experience worth trying to relive, and when is it just scratching at a past that you’ve outgrown?

13: Or, why Stephen King is a master of horror.* Or, loneliness. Or, why I drank a lot of whiskey and scared the crap out of myself**

Note:

*The author of this blog shall not be held responsible for spoilers. Ergo, you, the Reader, shall have seen the movie 1408 before reading this blog post. In addition, you will have most certainly read the short story 1408 by Stephen King before reading this blog post.

**It came out five years ago. Seven years ago? Whiskey happened. I am not responsible for spoilers. Only for ‘splainin’ the horror genre a little bit.

 

Alright. Here’s what happened. The lovely roommates and I drank a large bottle of Spicebox brand Spiced Whiskey (if the owners of Spicebox would like to send me a bottle, or case, of said whiskey, I, the writer of this blog, would not be averse to that. You guys make a damn fine whiskey).

Then we watched a movie, and of course by now, you know that movie was 1408. You also know that this movie came out years ago, starred John Cusak (who, as far as I’m concerned, should win every acting and awesomeness award that hasn’t already been given to Steve Buscemi or Judy Dench), and has been largely forgotten, except by the good people at Netflix.

This isn’t a critique or review. It’s just that I was hopped up on whiskey and saw it for the second time and needed to TALK about this. Good lord.

A couple of weeks ago, I got myself a library card (and if you don’t have one, you need to ask yourself why you don’t – Answer: No good reason. Go now). I took out a copy of Room, by Emma Donaghue, and proceeded to scare the ever living shit out of myself.

What it did, this book, was make me realize how people live in solitary confinement. Particularly, women who are abducted off of the street and then locked in a room. For. years.

Mama didn’t raise no fool. I am aware of this shit, regardless of how often it does or doesn’t happen. And it made me more aware of small spaces and what it can do of the brain. But this post isn’t about real life dangers. Although, if a strange man asks you to come and take a look at a sick dog, kindly decline and send him to a vet. I never have trusted strangers. Sesame Street taught me well.

My point is that it’s put me in a bit of a freak-out mode, being afraid of lonesome horrors. I suppose I’ve always felt that with a terrific family (two huge brothers and a protective father, possibly a tougher and more protective mother), and an amazing partner, I’m pretty safe. We like to feel safe, don’t we? We like to feel so damn safe. And surrounding yourself with people who know what’s going on in your life are a pretty good start.

I read the story 1408 five or six years ago. Honestly, Everything’s Eventual, the whole book of short stories by Stephen King, wigged me out. 1408 wigged me out the most (along with a fabulous tale called “The Man in Black,” except the room in that story is the woods, in broad daylight, near a river).

Lonesome horror. It takes something terrifying that could happen (as in real life, as in Room. Scary stuff, to be locked away, only kilometres from your actual life, no on aware you’re still alive. I don’t want to do this story injustice by mentioning it in a horror genre post, only mention that it has scared me in recent weeks), and intensifies it – supernaturally. The things none of us are afraid of with our safety nets.

My partner, a filmmaker, watched the movie with me and would cut in occasionally.

“This is Stephen King’s dialogue to the audience. He is terrified of hotel rooms.”

This got me thinking. King has written myriad stories about hotel rooms (okay, at least three I can think of). They are all creepy, even when nothing supernatural happens. They are creepy because when you’re alone in a hotel room, you don’t really exist. You walk into a hotel, give them your name, and get in the elevator. And when you do, you effectively cease to exist. You’re in a strange city, a strange building, a very strange room (don’t turn on the blacklight. Seriously). Whatever happens in this room now, no one is going to rush in to save you…or even call to check up on you, provided we’re talking about pre-iPhone times.

You’re sleeping in strange sheets, where hundreds of bodies have slept before, hundreds of lives have paused. At least some of those lives have ended since. The sounds are creepy, the smells are unfamiliar, and if the phone does ring, it shatters a silence and somehow makes you more aware of it, makes the silence creepier.

And you hang up the phone, and you’re more alone.

The whole thing is just weird. You’re in self-imposed isolation, yet as soon as the door closes, it’s not self-imposed. It’s a trap.

You’re not leaving…Are you?

Nope.

Isolation. It terrifies human beings because we’re creatures of contact. We lust, we love,  we touch and kiss and hug. We hit and slap and beat the living shit out of each other. It’s contact, whatever way you look at it.

When you are alone, truly alone, even your worst enemy cannot (even if he/she would) show up to help you fight that battle.

Ergo, John Cusack in a hotel room…is pretty much f*cked. No one is coming to save him. And as the eerie lady on the phone says to him, even if you leave 1408, you can never leave 1408.

Horror is isolation.

In the real world and in supernatural fiction, our biggest fear isn’t loneliness, or anything so simple. It’s being truly and really alone.

So stay wary of strangers. Don’t trust them. And if Samuel L. Jackson tells you to stay out of a room, stay the eff out.

Sleep well.

Spring, in a manner of speaking

I did it again, didn’t I? 

I went away, and you were all, “Where the hell did she go? She said she was going out for a carton of milk, and never came back.”

I am the deadbeat dad of the blogosphere.

Oh, who am I kidding, I’m the kid with attention-span problems. See, when I wrote the pie story back in November, things were on a steady decline work-wise. I’ve been spending the winter doing mostly retail work, very little journalism of any kind, almost no writing, and spending so many hours watching Netflix that it could be described as an Olympian effort.

I watch movies like some people train for decathlons.

Now, I’m not saying St. John’s is a foggy abyss into which I get emotionally sucked into in the winter, or anything like that.

I’m just saying that sometimes, when life isn’t going the way I want it to, instead of fighting back I sort of..give in. Do you do that? Or are you one of those hard-asses who grabs life by the scruff of the neck and goes, “Oh, no ya don’t! You get over here and give me what I want or I’m going to slap you silly!”

I’ll bet you do the latter, don’t you? Ruffian.

I’m working on being that person. I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, I’m taking small steps by finding more work in my field, even if that means moving somewhere else. If you’re from a smallish town, you can probably relate.

Step one is to stop watching so much Netflix. Because Netflix, you see, is the movie junkie’s version of really good, really cheap crack-cocaine, and you can just start freebasing at nine in the morning if you want to.

Do I want to watch eight seasons of Family Guy? I SURE DO! *huffhuff*

Do I want to have friends over and gather around the glowing light of the magic box in my living room and watch that Portuguese zombie flick?
*HUFFHUFFHUFFGASP* YES.

Except here’s the rub. I want to make documentaries at some point. But am I totally absorbed in Blue Planet and environmental docs and docs about money and finance and food?

No. I grudgingly watched a couple, and then went back to the sweet stuff, the dumbest movies I could find. For the record, Reality Bites is not a very good movie, and I’d watch it again in a heartbeat. It’s comfort food.

That’s the other thing that happens in Winter Hiatus. I don’t want anything useful. I get trapped in a hideous, dumbass limbo.

So new rules are: I am allowed to watch docs. AND I got myself another library card. So, hurray for reading.

I don’t have anything poignant to say today. Just letting y’all know I’m not dead.  

The pie story

Because one person wrote a hilarious story about their crafty screw-up (only one? Jeez. Where did all my trusty commentators go? Did you fall asleep?), I will now tell you the pie story.

It was last weekend, when it was getting quite cold outside but still hadn’t snowed. I was feeling the unemployed blues again, so I decided to bake a pie. Because what else are you going to do on a Friday night after the least productive week ever? Mull over that last failed job interview? (No, we’re not talking about that one. We’re not. I’m saving my job interview rant for another day.)

I went to the grocery store with a blueberry pie in mind. I’d looked up the recipe. I figured I could handle it.  I also wanted warm winter tights, so I went to the clothing section to get me some (relatively) low-priced tights. While I did that, my darling boyfriend, who gets a little impatient whenever I stop to look at clothes, began ferrying ingredients back and forth to me for the fifteen minutes I was decided on which pattern of tights to get.

I knew I wanted a pre-made crust for my first attempt, and he came back with a box of Tenderflake pie crusts. He looked excited.

“Check this out,” he said. “It comes with two crusts. So you can have a top crust on your pie.” We marvelled under the fluorescent lights of the grocery store at this miracle of pie-loving humanity.

“What else do you need?” he asked.

“I need berries. Just one little bag. Mixed berry preferably, but blueberry would be nice.”

“Okay!” He was enthusiastic about not looking at tights with me. I went back to wondering why no matter what my size is at any given moment, it’s always the most popular size in a store and therefore the hardest to find.

He returned a few minutes later with a giant bag of blueberries. It was the size and weight of what you’d expect a sack of doorknobs to be.

“I got these. I figured you could use the rest to make another pie later.”

“Well,” I said, a little hesitantly at first, “I guess that could work. I really only wanted the little bag, but if we get the big bag I’ll need extra butter. That way for the second pie, I can learn to make my own pie crust.”

“Sounds good!” He took the pie crust, which he had previously left with me, into his new basket and tucked it neatly next to the giant bag of blueberries. A few minutes later,  as I was making my final decision on tights, he came back with a pound of butter. We were ready to go.

On the way to the cash, I was having pre-buyer’s guilt about the tights. They were going to add up to sixteen dollars plus tax, and then the pie ingredients could mean thirty dollars. I almost put the tights back. But then I thought.

“Baby, did you check the price on those berries?”

“No, I didn’t.” It’s not in Andrew’s nature to forget about price checking. He had an almost surprised look on his face, so we turned around and went back to the frozen fruit. The blueberries were almost fifteen bucks. But the strawberries were only ten.

Instead of getting the small bag of blueberries, we both seemed pretty committed to me making two pies. So I plucked the giant bag of strawberries from the freezer, and we skipped off to the cash (still costing me just over thirty bucks but no I do not regret those tights thank you very much) and then home.

Back in the kitchen, I was hunting around on the old Google machine, trying to figure out if I should use frozen berries or thawed berries. It looked like thawed, but some of the brainy people on Yahoo Answers from four years ago said frozen would be fine, too.

I decided to thaw the strawberries.

Now, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the size difference between your average grocery store blueberries and strawberries, but the latter take a very long time to thaw. Finally, I took the half-thawed berries from the bowl in the sink, dumped out some of the water, but not all of it (I didn’t want to lose the flavour from the juices), and began to make my pie filling.

To thicken it, you can use flour or corn starch. I used both. I was taking no chances with these half-frozen berries, except that they were half-frozen.

The filling seemed…moist. Moist and thick. And weirdly pink.

I put the filling in the pie crust. It seemed like a lot, but no matter. LALALALA I’m making pie!

The instructions said to put something under the pie in case a little filling dripped out. But what’s a little filling, I thought? Nothing to write home about. I sealed up my pie crust and popped the pie in the preheated oven.

It started to smell good.

It started to smell really good.

I peeked in the oven. A little filling was dripping down the sides, but nothing to write home about. That sweet strawberry pie scent started to fill my kitchen, and I was damn pleased with myself.

But then, a short while later, I poked my nose into the oven again. There was a giant puddle of strawberry filling burning onto the bottom of the oven.

“Andrew! Come quick! The pie filling! It’s getting away!” Andrew skidded into the kitchen and we coordinated a successful effort to get the pie-volcano onto a cookie sheet.

He gave me a look.

“It’s fiiiiiine,” I said. “I’ll clean it up later.”

Finally, the pie was finished. It had taken so much longer than I’d expected. So. Much. Longer. The cookie sheet was covered in what looked like jam. The pie had filling running down the edges. But sweet baby Jesus, it was finished.

We waited for the pie to cool. Finally, I called my friends into the kitchen. It was Friday night, we were watching movies, there would be pie, and I was starting to feel better about my lack of employment.

I cut the pie open.

It looked like special effects from a horror movie.

Pink oozy strawberry chunks slid out. As I removed each slice, extra filling from the rest of the pie would squelch out into the tinfoil dish.

The oven smelled like burnt for a week, and every time we put something in it the kitchen would get smoky (of course I never cleaned it out. Have you met me? I knew the oven would just burn it away).

And somehow, that pie was a success. That poor, sad little pie with too much filling was a giant hit in my house.

Merry Christmas, pastry lovers.

Big dreams and cramped fingers

Well, that was just lovely!

The comments I got from that last post were spectacular. Journalists and artists and humanitarians and world-travellers all!

And Ian Foster, high five for your comment about realism. This is why you’re working on a successful music career, and I spent the day knitting.

Ian’s the kind of person who takes everything he wants to do in his life and makes it into a reality. Now, that takes some dedication, but it’s very inspiring to those of us who spend a lot of time staring at the wall.

Speaking of which, I’m trying to throw a little bit of that attitude into everything I do lately. My hand has been healing so rapidly that the writing team that lives at my kitchen table (Andrew and Sharon, courtesy of Nanowrimo) think I may be a superhero with super healing powers.

I can neither confirm nor deny this.

Since my hand is mostly just pink and scabby now, I’ve taken up knitting. Yeah. Did you read that up there at the top of the page? Did you get that? Yeah you did.

I’m knitting a gray scarf. I’ve started it and unravelled it fifteen times, but now I’m on the right track with it. Knock on wood.

And I made a pie!

Still working on the journalism thing. But that scarf is gray and the pie is strawberry, and it hasn’t snowed much yet.

I really liked your comments, and they meant a lot to me. It’s nice to see that everyone has their own big dreams they’re working toward. So I’m going to post another question. BECAUSE I’M A GREEDY JERK FOR FEEDBACK!

Tell me about a time you took up a craft and failed hilariously.

Do it.

Do it and I’ll tell you the story about the pie.

 

Occupations I have thought about this week

1. Professor of Media and Pop Culture

2. Baker

3. Recording stories of the elderly for their loved ones so they’ll have their voices/ stories on tape when they pass away.

I don’t think there’s a job title for this last one, but I read a magazine article last spring about a woman who started such a business, somewhere in the States or maybe Canada.

Consider me awed.

The freelance lifestyle (frunemployed?) has been good to me the last few weeks. I have been getting zero paid work, but my summer/ fall radio work had a pay delay. Hence, delicious paycheques keep coming.

It’s been giving me lots of time to do the things I like to do, and also daydream about things I’d like to do. The hand is healing up nicely, so there will be more spray painting of furniture this week, some serious attempts at pie-baking, and – what the hey – maybe I’ll even do some photography for you guys.

Those of you with forty-hour work weeks, I salute you. And can I borrow five bucks?

Kidding, kidding.

A steady paycheque is a beautiful thing. But time to do all the crafty stuff I love and think about when I’m at work is also really rewarding.

So I have two questions for the lovely readers of this blog (all ten of you?):

1. What is your dream job?

2. What would you do with your life if you didn’t need a job?

Post a comment. I’d like to know.

Love,

L.

More ow

I love you. I want you to know that. Despite my inherent lameness (telling you I’ll post more regularly and then just not doing that because I don’t feel like it), I love you and think about you all the time.
Now I’m here, typing with one mittened hand.

Not mittened, exactly. The nurses at St. Clair’s would say “dressed.”

I deserved it.

Here’s what happened:

It was Saturday night. There was going to be a potluck. And at someone else’s house. What luck! Nary a toilet for me to scrub! Nary a dish to do! Because I was heading out to someone else’s house, and all I had to do was bring food! Sexy.

It’s been a rough go this past month. Relate to me, if you will: The work has dried up. I have to do freelance reporting now, and I’m a bit of a sheepish, quiet person when I have to play the reporter. Most reporters I talk to love reporting, because they can ask anything. It opens doors for you that polite society locks shut. You nag until you get the details. They are much more outgoing as reporters.

I am not.

I am Wonder Lacy outside the office. I rely on people liking me – loving me, even – because I polish my personality to a sparkle, until you can see your FACE in that thing, like a diamond. Non-reporter Lacy solely relies on this. So when Reporter Lacy has to come out to ask the tough questions…I choke. Oh god, what if they don’t like me for asking this? What if they don’t like me? 

I haven’t had any ideas for stories in the last month either, save for one I’ve been dabbling at, quietly waiting for sources to call. I don’t want to pressure them!

So it’s been a rough month. I sit at home a lot. I dream big dreams of becoming a professional storyteller.  I sit in my blue pajama pants with the cartoon reindeer heads and the sparkly pink drawstring.

I dyed my hair because I felt I couldn’t keep up the façade of being a blonde anymore (also, it’s a fortune and not having a paycheque really affects my hair). Seriously. I tried it for two months.  The wrongness of it ate at my insides.

I read and write little snippets of things, and watch my bank account like a hawk with a penchant for colourful eyeshadows on sale at the drug store.

So by Saturday, I felt drained. I felt gross and unattractive and like a societal non-contributor. So I bought some frozen berries to make a berry crisp. I found a stripey dress on sale for twenty dollars and some dark brown hair dye.

The hair dye came out black over my honey-gold-Aveda-salon-dollar-sign hair. Good enough.

I made the berry crisp, measured the ingredients, took out the stick of butter (which was supposed to be margarine, because my good friend Sharon has this thing about dairy – it makes her puke a lot).

“Baby, how much is a stick of butter?” I asked Andrew. “The recipe calls for a stick.”

“”Let me check.” typetypetype. “Ooo. I found a butter converter. A stick is half a cup.”

The butter wrapper has measurements on it, and all wrappers are different. Some show you what’s left. Others have a little graph that measures the amount. All I can say is that three times the amount of butter went into that crisp, and I didn’t notice until Andrew started asking why I’d used almost an entire block of real butter in a recipe that only had a cup of oats and a half cup of brown sugar. And the crisp was already in the oven.

After scooping out melted butter and doubling the crumble part of the recipe, mushing it into the half-cooked buttery soup that sat atop the berries, I took a breather.

Everything was going to be fine. Andrew promised that the crisp would be fine, and set about making Thai spring rolls. He makes the most amazing spring rolls. He had pork for these ones. I did a few dishes and grated some carrots to help him out, and went to get ready.

Striped dress, check. Crazy eye-makeup job, complete with black liquid eyeliner and turquoise shadow, check. I clipped a pink daisy from the bunch on the table and put it behind my ear. Andrew was frying the spring rolls in a wok.

I walked up next to him, feeling good. I felt like I had my shit together. I felt like come Monday morning, I’d take on the world. I felt like my old self. He told me I looked great, and I put my hands out to strike a little pose before giving him a kiss.

So, the wok, it turns out, is not that stable. And, despite aaaaaall home safety commercials sponsored by the Canadian government in the ’90s reminding kids to be safe, Andrew had left the handle of the wok hanging off the stove.

Worst. Pose. Ever.

The wok flipped up, and despite my best efforts to move out of the way, my left hand was completely soaked in hot cooking oil. Not boiling, thank Kelvin, but hot enough for me to grab my hand and say really fast, “Ohgodohgodohgod!”

“Stop touching it!” said Andrew.

Reagan ran into the kitchen. I’m sure she said something, but I can’t imagine what.

“Can I run it under water?” I asked?

“No, it’s oil!” Later, we both found out that this is so wrong. Cool, but not cold water, is TOTALLY recommended for oil burns.

“And keep your fingers apart!” He didn’t say it until later, but I had an idea why.

“Can I wrap it in something?” I was still standing in the kitchen, half looking at my hand and half looking at the wok and the oil on the floor, wondering if we shouldn’t maybe clean up this mess.

“God no!”

“What do we do?”

“Hospital!”

Andrew pulled my boots on and Reagan grabbed her car keys. My hands were both dripping in oil, one hot, one just oily. I yanked the flower out of my hair on the way out the door, because man, did I feel stupid.

Luckily, we live around the corner from a hospital. Luckily, Canadian hospitals are all free ‘n’ shit.

Reagan dropped us at the door and went to park the car. We ran in, expecting to find a receptionist. Alas, there wasn’t one. We started running up and down corridors, too panicked to look at signs. The hospital is undergoing some construction.

Eventually, a guy getting off of his shift led us toward the emergency doors. This all probably took two minutes, but when all the nerve-endings and all the joints on your hand are on fire, this all feels a lot longer. Remember, we hadn’t put water on my hand. My skin was cooking like a Christmas turkey. Seriously. There’s a chunk of grey meat under the bandages, along with some gnarly blisters.

So after they looked up my MCP number and poured some cooling stuff over my hand, after the screaming and crying and then the shot of Demerol (and me telling Andrew that someday we should have a September wedding and have a maple tree as a flower girl, and him eventually telling me he was glad I kept my fingers apart so they didn’t melt together – why anyone would say the word “melt” in reference to skin to a burn victim I have no idea), and many, many bandages from a nice nurse named Jonathon, I got to go home.

Andrew went to the potluck to drop off my crisp and the offending spring rolls. He brought me back some meatballs and a pasta salad, plus the gas station turkey sandwich and Doritos I asked for ( you put the Doritos between the bread. I call it a Turkrito sandwich). Reagan watched episodes of Community with me while I nodded off. Our friend Mike came over with paper flowers, I munched out, and we all watched A Muppet Family Christmas while I complained Miss Piggy and Kermit had an unhealthy relationship.

Andrew tucked me and my bandaged hand in bed by eleven o’clock.

So, two lessons learned from all this: 1. Hot oil simmering into your hand while you’re screaming at the hospital really puts life into perspective. If I can get through that and type with a bandaged hand, I can probably go do some freelance journalism to pay the rent. Hell, I’ll probably really enjoy it.  Life doesn’t seem so hard after the Demerol kicks in. Clearly, I’m stronger than I thought I was.

2. Don’t preen by the stove. That’s just stupid. And tell the chefs in your life, if you’re lucky to have any, to turn their pot handles in and to use the stable wok that’s on top of the cupboard, just up there. See that? That’s the expensive one that wouldn’t have flipped over.

Oh, there’s a 3.

3. I put my reindeer pajama pants in the laundry.

Yesterday’s Groupon…

…was thirty dollars for a pair of weight loss hot pants.

Just chew on that for a while.

Baby got back (pain)

Note: I wrote this last week and had a lot of other stuff going on. But now it’s posted. Shiny!

 

I kept saying I’d tell you later.

It’s later.

It’s Saturday night, and I’m not out living it up tonight. I’m trying to rest up for work tomorrow (I could have sworn someone told me grownups don’t have to work on Sundays, but I must have misunderstood that).

But anyway.

Now I know, officially, what it’s going to feel like getting older. I said this to my roommate the other day, trying to cut a bagel in half but not having the pain tolerance to do it. My shoulder had this stabbing pain, and I’d just returned from an unplanned trip to the chiropractor. My second trip of the week.

Andrew’s burnt toast was laying on the counter from that morning. He had burned one piece, then threw another slice of bread into the toaster oven, cursing that he was going to be late for work. It was garbage day, and the other (aforementioned) roommate, Reagan, had taken the garbage out. There was no garbage bag in the can.

I stared at the piece of burnt toast. I couldn’t throw it out because I couldn’t put a new bag in the garbage can – because I had pulled a muscle in my back/neck/shoulder (you know, that important place where all three meet? Yeah. Take care of that part of your body).

Then, sheepishly, I asked Reagan to cut my bagel. “This is what happens when you get old,” I said. “You sit there, looking at your effing burnt toast, and you can’t change the garbage, and you cry because you’re alone.”

Well, something to that effect. My point was I couldn’t move. And I had been alone that morning, when I was trying to gently stretch out my injured shoulder (you know how when you wake up and you just need to get the blood flowing? I did it wrong). I pulled an already injured muscle, and tottered, alone, down to the chiropractor’s office, and asked her to help me turn my head.

“What have you done to yourself?” my doctor asked me.
“I stretched.”

She’s been quite good about this whole thing.

Anyway, I went back home, alone, stared at the burnt toast and the empty garbage can, and generally just felt in pain and lonely and unable to do anything. And I wondered – is this what my life will be like if I live to be ninety?

Because guys, I don’t know about you, but I think about mortality WAY too often.

Wait.

Not mortality. But the part just before mortality comes. I imagine myself, probably on a twice-weekly basis, getting old and not being able to pick up newspapers (for accuracy’s sake, I should say that I’m between 80 and 120 years old in all these morbid fantasies).

I remember Andrew’s grandmother last year, in her mid-nineties, struggling to sit in a chair. It took a few slow, steady minutes. After the whole ordeal was over and she was seated, she breathed a sigh, looked straight at me, and said, “I hate being old.”

I can feel myself trying to turn back the clock and I’m not even twenty-seven yet! I wear makeup more often. Party dresses on Saturday nights instead of jeans. I’ve been a dark-haired girl all my life, and a few weeks ago I bleached it blonde in some vague and expensive attempt to reinvent my youth.

My back didn’t get the memo.

And here’s the really sad part: I don’t feel old because I hurt myself. I feel old because of HOW I hurt myself.

I didn’t do it skiing. I didn’t do it hiking. I didn’t do it by exercising. Dancing too much on a bender? Nope. Weird sexual position? Hell no. Building something? Uhhhhh…No.

It turns out, I’ve been sleeping the wrong way for years.

Yep. I sleep wrong. And I have crappy posture. Really? REALLY?! Who does this? Who is so lame that they give themselves a debilitating back problem through BEING UNCONSCIOUS?

So back to the kitchen. I had pulled a muscle a few days ago by sleeping the wrong way, and according to the doctor it was bound to happen eventually. I made it worse that morning by stretching too much. And I stared at that burnt piece of toast on the counter, and the bagel my roommate had just cut.

And we both started laughing.

It’s probably just going to get worse from here on in. I may as well keep bleaching my hair and laughing through the pain, right?

Escape from receipt mountain

My to do list today:

Laundry

Dishes

Blog

Email

Writing practice

Ice my shoulder (more on that later, and yes, I padded my to do list with it because I’m like that)

Clean bathroom

Make bread ?

Sort receipts/ Finish October budget (seven days into October)

Work on making my own podcast

Things I have done today instead of write:

Updated facebook three times.

Checked twitter.

Checked facebook (this is a separate activity from updating)

All housework on To Do list.

Combed conditioner through hair for what some might think an unnecessary length of time.

Looked at slicked-back, conditioned hair and Youtubed that scene in True Lies where Jamie Lee Curtis tears the ruffles off of her dress and slicks back her hair with water in a flower pot (By the way, I can’t find this part anywhere. The sexy dance scene is ALL OVER the internet, but that really sexy/awkward part where she’s tearing up her own dress just ain’t nowhere to be found).

As always, all the creative stuff on my list gets left until very last. I love writing. I love radio. But I am so afraid of investing that much energy into something. It’s frustrating, maddening, so very rewarding, but you need to be ready to hit that creative stride. So I just lurk around the house, doing dishes, which my chiropractor kiiiiinda told me to be careful about.

Again, more on that later.

But you may have noticed one other thing on my To Do list that I’m still putting off. That, kids, is the PILE of receipts taking up space on my futon. It’s a damned paper mountain. David Suzuki would be so disappointed in me. I kept all these receipts for September. I was going to have a budget, save for a trip to Cuba in the spring, and check where every dollar went.

I didn’t do any of these things, except keep the bloody receipts.

I went shopping for fall clothes (on my credit card. Ouch). I ate in half the restaurants in this fair city. I have receipts for taxis, makeup, knick-knacks, booze (so much wine!), and ten-dollar earrings.

Jesus. I have this bookish exterior, but if people really knew..

My boyfriend knows. Andrew looked at me, confounded by this pile of receipts. It looks like I’ve made ten purchases a day, every day, for a month. He knows why I’m keeping them, too. I’m keeping them because he bought shelves and stuff for our apartment when we moved in. I owe him money for those. But if I pay for other things, we both know it deducts from what I owe him. Relationships are nice like that. I’ve paid for lots of groceries (and wine. I’m not drinking alone, you know), household stuff, and the difference between what we’ve spent on the house is getting smaller.

Except I have to go through all these receipts and do the math for what I’ve spent on us.

And I. Hate. Numbers.

I want to love numbers. I want to be one of those hot physicists who wears cool glasses and riddles off formulas and doesn’t do her taxes only once every four years, and even then by bribing a friend with brunch to do them for her. But I can’t be one of those people. Because I’m already one of those people devoted to the arts. Completely, and utterly devoted to putting off writing. I can’t be everything, people.

In first grade we had math right after lunch. You could hear the fluorescent lights humming in math class – everyone was drowsy, full of kraft cheese slices and juice boxes, and then we had to look at numbers.

My desk was right next to a little bookshelf. I would casually lean back, grab a book, put it in my lap, and read.

I thought I was so discreet.

Mrs. Williams must have noticed. Maybe she didn’t care. Maybe I really WAS pulling a Mission Impossible level of unnoticeable.

Again, maybe the teacher just didn’t care.

I then spent twelve straight years not really paying attention in math, and not really learning, and failing things related to numbers, and developing an unhealthy fear of things related to numbers, like budgeting and taxes (do NOT even get me started on my Sudoku-related anxiety).

I read everything I could get my hands on.

And this is why now, even with my recent obsession with ‘Til Debt Do Us Part (which is the only reality tv I’ve ever liked, and Gail Vaz-Oxlade can stay at my house any time – you hear that Gail? It’s because of you I’m storing cash in beer cups), and being a grownup, and paying off my student loans, I cannot bring myself to sift through that pile of receipts.

And now, if you can excuse me. I have art to make.