Sometimes you can form the days of your life from the outside, like making pears grow into little Buddhas; you clamp a mold around Tuesday and Wednesday, and an outline for a time travel screenplay, amazingly, pops out. I wonder what the failure rate is for Buddha-shaped pears, though. There must be some runty pears that never fill out into full-figured Buddhas, and others that overflow into Jabba The Hut pears. Because life sure isn't a bowl of serenely smiling pears. Well. Possibly the reason for this is that life is nothing like a pear. But pretend that it is! Pretend that it's just like trying to grow Buddha-shaped pears, and sometimes the pears don't turn out. Because that's how my life is. Because inside, the pear has its own instructions. Sometimes you can stop telling the pear what to do, and take instructions from the pear for a change.
So Tuesday night, it was very important to go to Broken Cherry and buy a WCR onesie for Baby Ameneh and a patch for my backpack. And then to make asparagus and black bean pasta salad alla zombea, but with half as much pasta and twice as much beans. Then to catch up from the weekend: make the bed, sort the laundry, sweep the floors. Then to wash my face, important! Oh skin, I am sorry that I've been so busy and falling into bed exhausted without washing my face, please heal up these two horrible blemishes and I promise that I will wash and exfoliate with baking soda day and night, and get the ultra-calming moisturizer with sunscreen again, and the crazy expensive revitalift night cream for a just few more years with no wrinkles, please and thank you. Then to pay bills for the month, and then I couldn't go to bed without sewing on my new patch. Though I was so sleepy I sewed shut the pocket that I was sewing the patch on & had to do it over.
Wednesday night, the pear walked me to Nina to look at bootie patterns and baby yarn. But my brain just folded trying to read knit 1, make 1, knit 14, make 1, knit 1, make 1, knit 14, make 1, knit 1... I mean, I can knit. I know I could sit down and figure it out; but something's got to give, like Monday night I had no idea, none, where I had parked the car, it wasn't in its usual place across from Pulaski Park and I retraced my steps grimly telling myself that if I didn't find the car by the time I had walked back to the apartment, I wasn't going to Orbit that night; but it was across the street from the apartment.
Then home to talk morosely with pit crew in the dark about losing my mind:
"So can I tell you something crazy? Like I have two jobs to do over the weekend, which are really four jobs that I paired up to seem like two jobs: Laundry & Cleaning, and Grocery & Cooking. And I know, I haven't actually done the laundry for a year now." You know who does the laundry, I am a lucky duck. "I just can't stop sorting the laundry, which you don't need me to do. I just ...like sorting laundry." And this is not, like, sorting laundry into two piles of lights and darks, this is me making little piles of all socks and all underwear and all leggings and all t-shirts all around the kitchen floor, because everybody knows that the laundry has to be organized before it gets mixed up in the washing machine. "And I'm so busy, I actually haven't been sorting the laundry & it's not hurting the laundry, and I almost could let it go just now. But I can't, because I can't have one job be Cleaning and the other job be Grocery & Cooking."
"Can you have three jobs called Cleaning, Grocery, and Cooking?"
"NO. I can either do 'Laundry & Cleaning' and 'Grocery & Cooking' or 'Cleaning' and 'Cooking'."
Pit crew thinks about taking a bus back to New Jersey.
"And I also know, I haven't actually done the grocery shopping for a year now. I just make the grocery list. Which maybe you need me to do?"
"I think I can handle the grocery list."
"I can show you where it is on my computer."
"Email it to me. I'm going to change it."
The pear frowns a frowny pear frown. "How are you going to change it?"
"I'm going to make it into a database."
Not just the frown, the whole pear turns upside down. Squee.
So I get up and make vaguely mexican beans, then go back out to drop off my t-shirt form and money at the practice space. Back home to eat vaguely beans, process and post yesterday's salutations photo, and it's already eleven and I wanted to write this evening. Email the grocery list to pit crew. Write this post falling asleep in bed, which how the pear got all up in this—
