Someone Else

Holy moley, everyone. You've heard me whining about them for years, and I think I've finally discovered the root of the problem: my children seem to believe that they are union employees.

Let that sink in a minute. Let it marinate. They believe they are union employees. 

I recall working in a lab at one point where a lightbulb had burned out. The replacement lightbulb was in the room with us, but could we just... replace the bulb ourselves? No. No we could not. What we could do was fill in a requisition form; schlep it down to the maintenance office; and work in the dark for five days until someone whose job description specifically and explicitly included the screwing-in of lightbulbs had time to screw in our particular lightbulb.

And my children believe our household operates on a similar system - for themselves, at least. 

From this perspective, anything that has not been specifically and explicitly spelled out in their collective agreement in watertight legalese is Not Their Job. Following this logic, it must therefore be Someone Else's Job. Who is this mysterious Someone Else, you might ask? Why that, my friends, is absolutely none of their unionized fucking concern. I suppose if forced to consider the question they might shrug and say, "I dunno. Some contract staff or something?"

When unionized, I've observed that not only are things Not Your Job and therefore may be summarily ignored, you can also blithely announce the need for "downtime" or "me time" or simply "I'm on spring break" and lie in bed staring at a screen for literal days on end with nary a care while Someone Else magicks your cushy lifestyle into existence outside of - below, even - your notice. 

Downtime? Downtime?! FROM. FUCKING. WHAT.

Like, pardon my French, but honestly. These are real true questions, asked in 100% sincerity as the lowly contract staff-slash-magic household entropy reduction elf who is genuinely trying to comprehend the privileged lives led by the union employees of the home: What is it, exactly, that you need downtime from? Is it the hard work of half-assing everything and leaving the fallout from said half-assery for Someone Else to deal with? Is that what you find so wearying? Was it really that hard for you to walk away from the food you dumped in the cupboard around the compost bin in your hasty pursuit of pressing the start button on the dishwasher after eating the supper that Someone Else cooked? Golly, I hope you were able to recover from all that. Please, allow me to do some more work on your behalf that you actually directly caused me to have to do, while you grab a little me time - no need to thank me.  

Y'know, I used to believe lightbulb guy just plodded along from ticket to ticket all day, but now I wonder if he didn't go have a bit of a lie down after each one instead. Probably drove his mom insane. Speaking of, this rant has been downright exhausting - I think I'll take my glass of wine and go have a little downtime myself. If anyone deserves it around here, it's this Someone Else person I keep hearing about.

 

Forbidden Fruit

I often hear people talk about how nice it is to be curled up indoors, warm and cozy, while it rains outside. But no one talks about the utter state of transcendent bliss that is being outdoors in your top-of-the-line, recommended-by-all-the-hottest-archaeologists, wildly expensive but oh-so worth it rain gear, warm and dry while it pours around you. 

That you're eventually going to get soaked through may be inevitable, but like so many things in life, the fragility of this perfect state of being is part of its charm. For a brief window in time you are an impenetrable fortress of coziness, smashing through the forest with impunity thanks to your thick, rubbery shell. You cast your consciousness into each dry and toasty part of your body in turn, celebrating all the choices in your life that led to being able to savour this particular slice of heaven on earth. 

Wait a minute - are you getting paid for this?! You pinch yourself just to be sure you didn't roll your truck on the drive to site and are actually experiencing some sort of outdoorswoman's fantasy afterlife. Hm, seems real enough, but you check your pockets anyway and find... ah. Beef jerky and a sad apple. The food would be way better in your fantasy afterlife so you're pretty sure you're still alive.

At some point, regular old earth-on-earth will yank you back to reality, perhaps by way of a cold, creeping dampness in your sleeve cuffs, or sweating through your base layers so thoroughly that you're just as soaked as if you hadn't worn rain gear at all. You try to cling to that prior, blissful state, but it is spoiled by the knowledge that it's only a matter of time before your feet start to squidge inside your boots and you'll have to eat that fucking apple and you'll start to wonder, Am I getting paid enough for this?

So you let the feeling go - for now. Perhaps you'll experience it again tomorrow, or maybe not until next season, but you know you'll experience it again sometime. You smile a wistful smile, send a small prayer of gratitude to your archaeologist pals for their excellent rain gear recommendations, and continue trudging through the forest. Damply.

Endearingly Sassy

You've probably heard of Occam's Razor: (in brief) Of two competing theories, the simpler explanation is to be preferred.

You've probably heard of Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

But I'll bet a shiny nickel you've never heard of Folden's Razor - on account of I made it up. 

Folden's Razor is something along the lines of: Welp, I'm sure they're doing their best. 

That's it. Super simple. Except you actually believe it, and not just in a thinly-veiled Hanlon's Razor sort of way. Like, you roll your eyes while saying Folden's Razor? Still Hanlon's Razor. "I'm sURe They'Re DoiNg tHEiR bEsT" - Hanlon 100%, obv. Say it in genuine sincerity yet mentally punctuate it with a /s so quiet that it wouldn't even wake the precious baby jeebus? Yeah, sorry to break it to you - still Hanlon.

Since I'm the one writing this it may seem like I'm gatekeeping, but honestly it's not me, it's Folden. And she would happily let you in on it, but it's simply a level of goodness and decency I suspect most people just can't ever hope for in themselves. At the end of the day you're the one with the Hanlon problem and there's nothing you can do about it - trust me, I've tried.

I have found that, with practice, you can damp your Hanlon down to a barely noticeable tinge around the edges of your otherwise pure and generous soul. At least some of the time, anyway. When people aren't being dicks about stuff too much.

In typical fashion, though, Folden assumes you're doing your best and finds you endearingly sassy rather than in possession of a generally poor attitude. And really, what else can a person do with that kind of grace but keep trying to live up to it?

When people aren't being dicks about stuff too much, anyway.

Fully Fledged

Medium Fry has been moved out for less than two weeks, and she already claims to miss our cooking.

Naturally, I took that to mean our delicious cooking, because I am a sucker for flattery and this dovetailed neatly with my idea of myself being a good cook. But when I woke up this morning I discovered an alternate interpretation had crept into my mind overnight: she misses our cooking, in the gerund sense. Implicit in that sense of it are also our planning the menu; our buying, transporting and organising the groceries; our doing the cooking... and her dining well every day for the low, low cost of occasionally washing some dishes.

Hmm.

I expect she does genuinely miss "our cooking," but it also wouldn't take long - perhaps less than two weeks, even - to start to get an inkling of how much work actually goes in to "our cooking." Knowing she was going to move out soon, I've been trying to back-lead her into some ideas by forcing DH to engage in fun dinner table discussions like, "What did you cook for yourself back when you were a student on a budget? No, really, I am suddenly extremely interested in this topic and we should discuss it in great detail. Right now. I insist."

Also: "Wow, this simple, healthy dinner with plenty of leftovers only cost seven dollars to make! That's less than a dollar per serving - what an amazing meal idea it could be for a student on a budget!"

Also: "Beans sure are an economical yet nutritious choice, for instance for a student on a budget!"

To which Medium Fry would smile politely yet vacantly, as if my mouth sounds were washing pleasantly over her but were in no way consequential to her life. And thus died my educational campaign on the merits of meal planning and beans. 

On the bright side, DH and I ended up having quite a bit of fun talking about what we used to cook for ourselves back in the day. 89¢ Swanson meat pies featured heavily - but that was before, when they were way better, and did we mention eighty-nine cents?

Ugh. I'd tune us out, too. We sound like Reader's Digest and Woman's World had a profoundly stupid love child.

Anyway, I sent her off with a little rolly-cart to tote her groceries home in and nearly 21 years of exposure to my organisational mastery, so now she gets to figure it all out however she likes. Maybe one day we'll get to try her cooking and find that she has moved past the "+ side salad" days of yore without any back-leading needed on my part at all. I can hardly wait to wash those dishes up afterward.

  

Gardening Gods

I rarely feel the need to shoot anything. It's just not my jam. But there is nothing to put me in a murderous rage quite like squirrels digging in my flower pots. I have waited eight months for some greenery to reappear in this garbage climate, and those little a-holes killing my precious flower babies to bury their stupid peanuts - why, it's enough to make me fantasize about cutting a hole in my kitchen window screen and spending my days obsessively shooting them with a BB gun, just like my Dad used to do* with the magpies that ate the cat food** at the farm***.  

* After the divorce. (Or possibly contributing to it? Timeline unclear.)

** Barn cats. Also raccoons.

*** I've come a long way, baby.

In my imaginings I then roast the squirrels over a bonfire and gnaw their stupid peanut-digging bones while making prolonged crazy person eye contact with my stupid peanut-feeding neighbours. Broad daylight. Gunfight slide whistle sounds float on the breeze. Squirrel grease (?) drips down my chin and I don't even wipe it away.

In my mind's eye, it is beautiful, although my mind's eye does occasionally move on to wondering what my life will be like once dementia begins to strip away the civilised veneer I've so carefully crafted in the years since I last shot a magpie through a kitchen window.

Anyway, instead of all that, what I actually do is this: Head to the "global" aisle of the grocery store (or whatever questionable term they've decided to roll with at your local store) and buy the biggest, reddest, hottest-looking sack of ground chilies I can find, which I sprinkle liberally over the soil in my planters. And then I pray to the gods of angiosperms and vengeance that the squirrels be plagued by the spicy shits of a thousand burritos if they ever dare to enter my flower pots again. 

Reapply after heavy rains, and feel free to alter your prayer to suit whichever gods you prefer for these sorts of applications. Works real good, at least as far as the squirrel problem goes. I'll let you know when I figure out how to get the peanut-feeding neighbours to lay off.

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Pantry Paradox

Years ago, when Small Fry was a baby, a visiting friend of mine complained that my kitchen cupboards had "no food, only ingredients!" I LOL'd then, and I still have a good chuckle over it now and again. Sometimes, however, I have a bit of a grumble instead, usually when I'm feeling snacky and all there is in the pantry are containers of quinoa and flour and so forth - ingredients but not food, you might even say. As paradoxical as it may seem, my friend's assessment was hilariously accurate.

Here's a secret, or maybe a not-so-secret since I say it all the time: if [delicious item] is around, I am liable to eat it. You can put whatever tasty treat you want in those brackets and it probably still holds true, so my solution is basically to not keep snacks or treats around and trust that laziness usually wins out over snackiness. (Usually.) Speaking of, please remind me to delete the Skip the Dishes app from my phone when I'm done writing this.

That same friend calls it Skip the Bitches, by the way. She really is a master of the apt observation. Maybe I'll keep it around after all - there is simply no way to predict when you might need to defuse a bitchy day with a food delivery. *checks period tracker app* Like maybe Thursday this week, for instance. Who can guess.

Small Fry opened the pantry the other day then promptly slammed it shut again, with an exasperated, "Oh my gawd, our snack cupboard sucks!" Despite never having lived in a house with this feature and having been told roughly every single day of his life to eat a piece of fruit if he's hungry, he has somehow come to believe that a snack cupboard is a thing that we have - it's just that the one we have really sucks. (Unless you're super into dried beans, in which case you are well and truly covered for snacks at my house.) I corrected his misconception and pointed him yet again toward the fruit bowl, much to his disapproval.

Small Fry leads a charmed life. So charmed, in fact, that our shitty/nonexistent snack cupboard may well be The Thing. You know what I mean: THE Thing. The Thing that he has to go to therapy for and pins everything wrong in his life upon. The Thing his parents did to him that made it so he, I dunno, can never trust people fully and fears commitment. Or, y'know, whatever, just a totally random example there.

Every parent worries about The Thing, right? By this age he's surely already experienced The First Memory so that ship has sailed for me, fingers crossed it was a good one, or at the very least fairly benign, or at the very very least not one of the three to five potentially traumatic moments I have in mind. But I might still be able to control The Thing. I just really don't know when The Thing is solidified for a kid, so I've been walking on eggshells here for years. Will it be that all we ever had for snacks was g-d fruit in a fricking bowl and not even a cupboard like civilised folk? The cruel Halloween tax I charge every year, payable in tiny, hard-won KitKats? That I am The Boss of Christmas so the tree gets decorated the way I want? That time I found the stick person porn he had drawn?

... Ooooohhhh.

Yeah.

That was probably The Thing.

Okay, never mind. Seems unlikely I'll be able to do anything that outshines that little vignette in his mind. Parenting spiral over, carry on.

And if you're hungry, I have zero guilt about saying this: just eat an orange, dammit.