Someone Else's Words

The man next door cleaned his gutters yesterday. Downspouts too. He's done it before. I saw him last year. Amazing. I was forty years old before I even knew that people cleaned gutters and downspouts. And I haven't been able to get around to doing it once yet.

I live in awe of people who get those jobs done. The people who live orderly lives. The ones who always do what needs to be done and do it right. I know of people who actually balance their checkbooks each month. I know that's hardly credible, but I swear it's so.

These people also have filing cabinets (not shoe boxes) with neat, up-to-date, relevant files. They can find things around the house when they need them. There is order under their sinks, in their closets, and in the trunks of their cars. They actually change the filter on their furnace once a year. They put oil and grease on mechanical things. Their warranties runneth not out. Not only do their flashlights work, they actually know where the flashlights are!

When their car was last serviced - they know that too. The tools in their garage are on the pegboard - right where they are supposed to be. Their taxes are based on facts, not hunches and prayer. When they go to sleep at night, their list of Things to Do has a line through every item. And when they arise in the morning, their bathrobe is right there beside the bed and it is clean and new. Socks - right there in the drawer, folded into matching pairs. Yes! And as they prepare to walk out the door into a new day, they know exactly where their car keys are and are not worried about the state of the car battery or if there is enough gas to get to work.

There are such people. Ones who have it all together. Exempt from the reign of Chaos and the laws of entropy. I see them every day all around me. Calm and easy pillars of society. They are the people in your high school yearbook you wanted to be. The ones who made it.

Well. I am not one of them. Out of the frying pan, into the spilt milk is more me. Most of the time daily life is a lot like an endless chore of chasing chickens in a large pen. Life as an air-raid drill. Never mind the details.

But I have a recurring fantasy that sees me through. It is my stick-polishing fantasy. One day a committee of elders will come to my door and tell me it is time to perform the ritual of the polished stick - a rite of passage for the good-at-heart-but-chronically-disorganized.

Here's the way it works. You get selected for this deal because you are such a good person at heart, and it is time you were let off the hook. First, a week of your life is given to you free of all obligations. Your calendar is wiped clean. No committee meetings, no overdue anything - bills, correspondence, or unanswered telephone calls. You are taken to a nice place, where it is all quiet and serene and Zen. You are cared for. Fed well. And often affirmed. Your task is simply this: to spend a week polishing a stick. They give you some sandpaper and lemon oil and rags. And, of course, the stick - a nice but ordinary piece of wood. All you have to do is polish it. As well as you can. Whenever you feel like it. That's it: polish the stick.

At the end of the week the elders will return. They will gravely examine your work. They will praise you for your expertise, your sensitivity, and your spiritual insight. "No stick was ever polished quite like this!" they will exclaim. Your picture will appear on TV and in the papers. The story will say, "Man who is good at heart and well intentioned has thoroughly and completely and admirably polished his stick!" You will be escorted home in quiet triumph. Your family and neighbors will give you looks of respect. As you pass in the streets, people will smile knowingly and wave and give you a thumbs-up sign. You will have passed into another stage of being.

But more than that. From this time forward, you may ignore your gutters and downspouts. Your checkbook and files and forms and closets and drawers and taxes and even the trunk of your car will be taken care of for you. You are now exempt from these concerns. You are forever released from the bond of Things to Do. For you have polished the stick! Look at it hanging there over your mantel. Be proud, stick polisher! This is really something. And, it is enough.

Oh, don't I wish.

Robert Fulghum
All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten

Awake

It's somewhere around 5am, and I've been awake for two and a half hours. Don't know why.

I went downstairs and got a glass of milk, and came back up to play on the computer, in hopes of lulling myself back to sleep, rather than staying in bed, tossing & turning, and ruining my husband's night's rest.

Now the milk is gone and I have a sour taste in my mouth. I can't go brush my teeth because the noise would wake someone up. I'm playing Mah-Jong and doing pretty well at it - I've already beat my own best speed (twice) - and I'm starting to get shaky, but I'm not falling asleep.

I have Green Day stuck in my head (not a bad thing) and my mind is still spinning around the recent discovery that a friend of my husband's has been cheating on her husband - who is fighting in Iraq - with just about everybody in the small town where she lives. I never liked that girl much to begin with...

The alarm will go off in another hour and fifteen minutes; I don't have to work today - just some laundry and dishes to catch up with. Between doing that I can sleep.

It's nights like this, when I wake up with my thoughts racing, that I miss my days of chemical dependency. At least then I had a way to turn everything off and get back to sleep.

Eight more puzzles and I'll get a new rank. This Mah-Jong game is animated; when you match the season tiles for Winter, it snows - and it always makes my feet cold.

There Is A Fire

My husband is cool, because he knows about everything.

We've been watching this new show, Jericho, and we both really like it. In the intro, there's a snippet of Morse code - I don't know Morse, so I just accept that it sounds cool but I have no idea what it says. Well, he was an Eagle Scout, and he's been driving himself crazy trying to figure out what it says. This week he got his mom into it, and they played and replayed the most recent episode, which we had recorded via DVR, until she was able to copy down the code and then interpret it.

They figured out that the message was "There is a fire" - which was the subject of that particular episode. Now Ken's onto the game, and he wants to know if it's a different message each week. His next words were "Let's get on the computer..." and I raced up here to check my email before he totally geeks out over this, and spends the next six hours trying to find out what the code said on the three previous episodes.

This also means that every time Jericho comes on, from here on out, he's going to go buggy-eyed trying to get the code and interpret it. I just hope it doesn't cause us to miss the beginning of Criminal Minds, which comes on right afterward. (Mandy Patinkin, baby!)

I probably need to get off the computer so he can get to work contacting every other geek in the world who's a Jericho fan.

Wedding Portrait

I WANT SPINACH!!

This is getting ridiculous.

I was at Subway, getting a turkey & bacon sandwich, cause I forgot to pack a lunch (What I really wanted was a Chili's turkey sandwich, but I didn't have that much time or money to spend. Turned out the Subway sammich was much better!) Anyway, I was just thinking how much better it would be with spinach instead of lettuce - and better for me - when I saw the ever-present sign saying that they are not serving spinach due to the recent blah blah blah...

We go anyplace with a salad bar - I love spinach salad - but noooo, I have to settle for Romaine. On our honeymoon, we went to an Italian place and I ordered Eggplant Rollantini - eggplant stuffed with spinach and ricotta - and they couldn't do it.

Nothing like complete unavailability to make you crave something, eh?

I was thinking this would be just a temporary shortage, until all the iffy produce was out of circulation and they could get a new batch into the stores - a minor annoyance. But when I mentioned that to my husband he said they have to grow a whole new crop, and there probably won't be any more spinach until next year! Apparently, nobody's buying it anymore (stores, restaurants, etc.) so even the stuff that isn't suspect is being tilled under because there's no market for it right now.

Wish somebody would sell some of it to me.

It's Christmas!!

Ok, so it's not exactly Christmas...it's the first week of October. But Christmas comes very early when you work in retail, and at Pier 1 it began this week.

My husband Ken is adamant that no celebration of Christmas should take place before Thanksgiving, and that's how I've always felt too - after all, my birthday is at Thanksgiving, and I've never been willing to have my birthday skipped over in favor of the next, biggest & brightest holiday. But it's hard not to get excited when you're in the midst of preparations, early though they may be, and everything is so pretty and shiny and colorful.

I spent the afternoon hanging ornaments, and arranging pretty things by color groups. We have funny little gold-mesh Christmas trees that look like they're dancing, and Snowmen and Santa Clauses that are shaped like long, bendy teardrops, fat on the bottom, skinny on top. There are cool angels that look like they came straight out of a Bible story, with robes and scarves all draped and tied on one side, and their heads covered.

There are other things as well, that I'm not so jazzed about: I don't know about the bronze- and silver-lame teddy bears. And, as usual, the Pier's choice of Christmas colors leaves me a bit baffled. This year it's pink/red/white, turquoise/lime green/silver, and warm metallics (gold, copper, and bronze.) My Christmas tree doesn't have a color scheme, exactly, but it tends to look like it got rolled through a toy factory on its way to my living room - lots of primary colors. No pink. I like gold stars and silver snowflakes, and anything striped like a candy cane. Not a lot of that at P1 this year, but that's okay. I'm sure I'll find something to add, and I haven't even seen this year's toys - I hope they're good, cause I have lots of kids to shop for now!

43 Things

I've made a list of 43 things I want to do in my lifetime. If you look over to the left and scroll down some, it's there.

There's this really neat site that I found recently, called 43 Things, and that's its whole purpose - to allow people to list some of the things they want to accomplish. It tells you how many other people have the same goal, and sometimes you're the only one. You can also do 43 places you want to go, people you want to meet, etc.

When you've done one of your 43 things, you can check it off the list and add something new, or you look at others' lists and tell them "I've done that!" Or you can keep a mini-journal there of your progress and see how other people are doing with the same goal. You can tell it to remind you in a certain amount of time, and your future self gets an email from your past self asking how it's going.

Why 43? I don't know. My friend Angela has a similar list of "1001 Things to do in 101 Days." 43 seemed like a lot when I first started, but then I began to worry about running out of room on my list. They aren't all major life goals; some of them are simply whims that I've had for a while, or current projects that I want to be sure to finish. But it's fun to get it all in one place where you can look it over often, and to see what goals you have in common with other people.

It's gotta be a code...

Most people believe that the gentle umbrella often satiates the football team of another ocean, but they need to remember how seldom the geosynchronous light bulb takes a coffee break. If the cheese wheel sanitizes a spider, then an umbrella daydreams.

A fundraiser goes deep sea fishing with the bowling ball over a briar patch, or a roller coaster from another light bulb buries the geosynchronous. Another girl scout related to a photon starts reminiscing about lost glory, and the shabby hole puncher writes a love letter to a defendant.

If another industrial complex trades baseball cards with the federal pig pen, then the line dancer nearest a grizzly bear hesitates. Some single-handledly worldly pork chop reads a magazine, and the diskette hides; however, a mysterious fairy competes with the college-educated photon.

Furthermore, an unusually spartan light bulb gets stinking drunk, an earring pours freezing cold water on a soggy tornado, and a traffic light gives a pink slip to a dust bunny.