Sirs,
This morning as my clock radio clicked on, I was delighted to hear that Mr. Fergus O'Byrne was about to give a live performance over the airwaves in honour of St. Patrick's Day. Imagine my dismay, however, when his first song was one that has been the bane of my existence lo these many years. It got my Irish up, let me tell you. First of all, gentlemen, let me assure you that I am not an alcoholic beverage. Even if I were, it isn't me who has been pouring it down your gob all this time. If you can't pass a whiskey sour without a pang, that's on you. Secondly, I never made you any promises. I did not deceive you, jilt you, or make any marital decisions solely based upon the amount of gold in your pockets. And finally, Jack, I have heard the wife's haunting monologue, a companion piece to Mr. Jim Payne's Wave Over Wave, and if you think I'd marry a sailor for less than 20,000 GBP per annum, free healthcare, and the provision of affordable childcare assistance, you're an idiot.
Sincerely,
Nancy
P.S. I'm wearing the green today but my sneakers are orange in protest
Friday, March 17, 2017
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
beware the ides of march
Last month, my mother and I were looking at some old photos and we came across a couple of black and white shots that I didn't remember seeing before, or if I had seen them before I hadn't realized what I was looking at. Two English degrees have made me something of an expert on the significance of togas and raised daggers so I am now able to make a definite identification of the subject matter.
Apparently, my father had been in a student production of Julius Caesar at Prince of Wales Collegiate and I had never known about it.
I can't get over these photographs. I love them so much I just have to share them with the world.
 |
| Ray Simmons (3rd from right) in a PWC production of Julius Caesar. Daily News photo, c. 1946 |
"That Shakespeare really knew how to throw shade," I thought to myself, or words to that effect. I was 13 or 14 at the time so I'm sure I knew all the current slang.
The photos had the copyright owner on the back - The Daily News - but since I have also learned a thing or two about copyright, I knew they had to be public domain since the production could be no later than 1946 which is when my dad graduated (I think, still waiting for confirmation of that but my math skills tell me that it's earlier than 1948 so I'm safe).
But there was no indication of what role my father was playing. Was he a block or a stone? A lowly messenger doomed to read his missives and exit, stage left? I formed a great hope that he was Mark Antony because Antony has a really cool speech; my dad was really cool too but I could find no proof in the picture.
The crime scene photographs showed he was at the Senate during the assassination but offered no other clues about his part in the plot.
My first thought was to ask my Aunt Ruth since he was her big brother and she might remember. So I sent a message to my Cousin Debbie to ask her to ask her mother if this rang any bells.
Cousin Debbie, who is a professional actress, replied that she had no need to ask her mother because my father's theatrical exploits were legendary in her household already. My aunt so loved the production that she still owned the very sandals that my father wore.
And if that wasn't astounding enough, my aunt, a retired elementary school teacher in Milwaukee, had put on a Grade 6 production of the play every year in my dad's honour.
 | |
| Ray Simmons crouching on the far left, waiting for his chance to strike. Daily News photo, c. 1946. |
He played the guy who struck the final blow upon his best friend. His victim's dying words are still quoted to this day even though they're in a dead language and many people don't know who they are quoting.
My dad was "Et tu, Bruté?".
Sadly I didn't think to check for the reviews in the local media until this morning. If I find such a thing I will share it here.
If the Doctor ever shows up and offers me a ride in his Tardis to anywhere in time or space, I now know where I would want to go.
Saturday, March 11, 2017
ain't nobody got no time for that
Once upon a time there were three pieces of furniture in the no plot family dining room who were very, very sad. They longed to be the kind of dining room that received visitors on occasion but they had fallen in with a bad crowd (the no plot family) and hadn't had any callers in quite some time.
Because the no plots were constantly being inundated with the detritus of life, e.g. bills, flyers, miscellaneous tools, report cards, mystery crap that no one could identify, school photos, a multitude of artworks created by a child prodigy whose genius defied her age, and many other implements of tree destruction, the no plot dining room often fell into long periods of disuse other than as a repository for the items listed above.
I forgot to take a before picture but I found a picture on the interweb which will give you an idea:
How this guy got into my house I'll never know.
One day, the no plots decided to host a family dinner but had just returned from a trip and had little time or energy for the agonizingly slow process of clearing off the dining room table and finding homes for all the displaced refugees residing there. (The sideboard was sometimes cleared for company but the side table was always shit out of luck.)
Then I had an idea. A wonderful, awful idea.
What if I just crammed all this crap into a cardboard box, hid the box, and figured out where the crap should go later?!?!
So that's what I did, with some exceptions (why would anyone leave Liquid Wrench on an eating surface?).
The boxes (plural) were spirited away and the dining room became a (mostly) guilt free zone; the dining table went back to serving dinner and the top of the sideboard went back to displaying whimsical tchotchkes as God intended. The side table was still shit out of luck but was eventually shown some love at a later date.
Now view the amazing transformation:
Here are the boxes which I can assure you are now almost absolutely sorted:
Not pictured is the dining room table which had a bit of a relapse.
By Mkey (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Okay, the dining room has reluctantly agreed to have its shame paraded on the web for your amusement:
This final picture added to emphasize that beauty can often be found amongst the clutter of life:
And the dining room furniture and the no plots lived happily ever after.
(Also not pictured is the computer room which is the new mail room and is a work in progress).
Because the no plots were constantly being inundated with the detritus of life, e.g. bills, flyers, miscellaneous tools, report cards, mystery crap that no one could identify, school photos, a multitude of artworks created by a child prodigy whose genius defied her age, and many other implements of tree destruction, the no plot dining room often fell into long periods of disuse other than as a repository for the items listed above.
I forgot to take a before picture but I found a picture on the interweb which will give you an idea:
How this guy got into my house I'll never know.
One day, the no plots decided to host a family dinner but had just returned from a trip and had little time or energy for the agonizingly slow process of clearing off the dining room table and finding homes for all the displaced refugees residing there. (The sideboard was sometimes cleared for company but the side table was always shit out of luck.)
Then I had an idea. A wonderful, awful idea.
What if I just crammed all this crap into a cardboard box, hid the box, and figured out where the crap should go later?!?!
So that's what I did, with some exceptions (why would anyone leave Liquid Wrench on an eating surface?).
The boxes (plural) were spirited away and the dining room became a (mostly) guilt free zone; the dining table went back to serving dinner and the top of the sideboard went back to displaying whimsical tchotchkes as God intended. The side table was still shit out of luck but was eventually shown some love at a later date.
Now view the amazing transformation:
Here are the boxes which I can assure you are now almost absolutely sorted:
Not pictured is the dining room table which had a bit of a relapse.
Okay, the dining room has reluctantly agreed to have its shame paraded on the web for your amusement:
This final picture added to emphasize that beauty can often be found amongst the clutter of life:
And the dining room furniture and the no plots lived happily ever after.
(Also not pictured is the computer room which is the new mail room and is a work in progress).
Wednesday, February 15, 2017
expletive deleted
A friend of mine expressed some concern yesterday that I have been secretly judging her and the other member of our Stitch and Bitch group for the past 30 years because their language has always been a little more nautically inclined than my own.
This morning I went back and updated my previous post to ensure that future generations don't make the same mistake. So you don't have to go back and read the whole damn thing again, my definition of constant swearing is basically every other word. If you can find 3 or 4 good ones to fit in between the bad, I will withhold judgment (I'm not a complete dick).
If any of you are fellow fans of Deadwood, you would have realized that that is not a hard and fast rule. If you took all the profanity out of that show all you'd have left is some definite and indefinite articles and a few action verbs.
One of the stories I had considered including in yesterday's piece concerned a lady who had a cabin next to my S&B friend, 30-odd years ago. This lady's husband had been a commander in the army or reserves (something military anyway). I don't recall how the topic came up, but I remember her complaining about how all the contemporary movies about the military were completely inaccurate because of all the blue language flying about. We couldn't convince her that no military man would ever swear in front of the commander's wife upon fear of court martial or flogging or death or something.
She apparently had never read Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead which is famous for revealing the sordid truth that combat soldiers swear all the time and infamous for insisting that the only bad word they use is "fug." Publishing codes at the time would not allow the revelation of the naked truth.
The divine Tallulah Bankhead is said to have approached Mailer at a party and commented, "So you're the man who can't spell 'fuck'."
I can't say I blame the commander's wife for not reading that book though. Once you stop being amused by the fuggery, it's a tough read for anyone who thinks human beings have at least some redeeming characteristics.
A more cheery read is For Whom the Bell Tolls (and by cheery I mean not everyone is a complete asshole). In that book I learned that Spanish is full of delightful swear words that I will never know because Hemingway decided to replace all the obscene words with the word "obscenity." Until I take Spanish lessons (or Google it) I will be forced to wonder what the hell anyone meant by "I obscenity in the milk."
If you would care to do further research into what type of swearing I find acceptable, check out the following resources: Bull Durham (also contains some steamy sex if you are so inclined); Slap Shot (I don't know if it has aged well but I include it here for historical accuracy, full disclosure, and the Paul Newman reference); and the eminently quotable but not in front of your mom Pulp Fiction.
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
there are no bad words only bad spelling
It will no doubt come as a surprise to people who know me in real life and not just as a cloud of disembodied electrons that I used to be a smoker.
It is perhaps equally astonishing that I started smoking at the tender age of 11 when I was invited to join my Almost-Twin Sister and Jenny from Up the Street behind the Jones's house one summer's evening when the Jones family must have been away.
Jenny from Up the Street was a couple of years older than me and I didn't really know her well other than as a tough girl who'd been around the block. Since our block was in quiet suburban West End St. John's in the middle of what used to be a farmer's field, this did not really mean much. At the time, I considered her exotic, cool, and a little bit dangerous which was probably only because she was from a slightly lower socio-economic class* and didn't go to my school because she was Catholic.
Plus her tendency to lure younger children behind dark houses to introduce them to the demon weed.
What I saw that night behind the Jones's house was quite shocking, let me tell you. There was my 9-almost-10-year-old Almost-Twin Sister smoking like a tilt and, to add to my abhorrence, cursing like a sailor (this was not her first trip behind the Jones's house apparently). Filthy words were spewing from her mouth joining the noxious cloud of smoke in a whirling dance about our heads. I didn't even know what a lot of those words meant but I instinctively knew they were bad.
It was then I formed the deeply held conviction that smoking caused swearing.
Despite (or perhaps because of) my horror at this scene, I decided to continue with my own descent into juvenile delinquency and tried to light a cigarette. I put it in my mouth, Jenny lit the end; I inhaled deeply and promptly began to choke and gag and struggle for air.
I dropped the cigarette and refused to try it again. But I did stick around while they continued to smoke, me lighting matches for the rest of the evening like a total badass.
Thus ended my career as a smoker and I became an insufferably self-righteous prig about it forever after like most reformed smokers.
What didn't end at that moment was my fascination with the demon word.
While a lot of kids associated smoking with adulthood, I became more interested in profanity as the true sign of maturity (the irony of that only just occurring to me). I was practically bursting with pride and adulthood when my parents took me to see The Sting, my first grown-up movie, when I was about 12. When Paul Newman told Robert Shaw he (RS) played poker with his head up his ass, I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard. I fell in love with Paul Newman and his filthy mouth after that movie - I still can't bring myself to throw out his poster which is currently rolled up and stored with the Christmas wrap.
I also fell in love with seeing movies in the theatre where my beloved swear words could be heard in all their glory and the jokes were never ruined by the poorly dubbed non-sequiturs you heard on TV. Growing up in the '70s during the golden age of Serious Movies that had finally broken the dirty language barrier, I thought it was stupid to censor those words because if the movie was good, they had an artistic purpose, and if the movie was lazy, the bad words made it more entertaining. Connoisseurs of the ridiculous might enjoy the extreme lengths TV censors had to go through to cover the ears of the easily outraged but I just wanted to hear the gosh-darn, melon-farming cuss words.
But despite my advanced internal maturity and appreciation of the art form, I was still very self-conscious about actually swearing myself. As my mother has said on at least one occasion, I wouldn't say shit if my mouth was full of it.
I don't remember hearing my parents swearing very much but when they did it was pretty low level stuff. I never heard either of them say the f-word. The worst thing I ever remember my mother saying was the s-word which I think shows remarkable forbearance for a woman who had five children in seven years and had to change diapers full of the s-word for 10 years straight.
When I was in grade six, my best friend's two-year-old baby brother was a prodigiously entertaining cusser thanks to his nine-year old boy cousin but other than that, I don't think many of my friends swore either.
Peer pressure finally broke my own personal Hays Code in a rather backwards way when my Almost-Twin Sister and I started hanging out with our older brother's friends in the graveyard behind the houses across the street from us.
The language was pretty R-rated among those teenage boys (feel free to clutch your pearls now) and it was pretty contagious. My Almost-Twin fit in right away. But when I finally dropped my first tentative f-bombs they were met with such amusement that I swore I would outdo all those fuckers. My conversation became so chockablock with bad words, I could hardly contain them when my parents were around.
This phase was probably so short-lived that I'm not sure anyone other than me remembers it. I eventually realized that constant cursing lost it's appeal since the shock value wore off if you did it too much and often it just revealed a lack of vocabularial imagination. (By constant cursing I mean every other word. If you can find 3 or 4 good ones to stick in between the bad, you're doing fine.)
I went back to being a G-rated conversationalist while reserving the right to say anything I darn well please as appropriate. I am a big fan of inappropriate words being used appropriately.
After all, when you stub your toe on the coffee table, there is no more appropriate word choice than FUCK! Or maybe fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck! It feels a hell of lot better too if you keep that word and its derivatives in reserve for just such an occasion.
Which finally brings me around to my point (and I do have one). My last blog post probably surprised a lot of people since I am not known for my salty language.** But I've been hanging around on the internet with loose companions and I watched the first season of Deadwood, a filthy masterpiece of profanity used in epic proportions, so my self-censor has gone all to shit.
That post was about depression as well as dishwashing and those topics deserve to be described in the filthiest terms possible because they both suck dead sheep sideways.
I have also stuck my name on this formerly anonymous blog because I am really trying to write something worthwhile here and I'm trying to find my way back to being a writer like my dad who used to regale complete strangers with (mostly) true tales of our family's adventures disguised as an outdoors column published for the whole freaking world to see in The Daily News.
Depression robbed me of my words 20 years ago. Since then, while I still took the time to write entertaining emails and a few blog posts when I started this thing a few years ago, it is only lately that I have been feeling a really strong urge to write again.
So now that the floodgates of language seem to have been opened in my brain in more ways than one, I hope you won't mind if I continue writing this little blog using whatever words I fucking like.
*I don't actually know if this was a fact. It was just my impression at the time and I'm pretty sure I was a teeny tiny bit snobbish about it back then without having a clue why. If Jenny from Up the Street ever reads this, I hope she won't mind a bit of tweaking about a stupid thing she did when she was a kid.
**I also have trouble with rude hand gestures. One time I got so mad at a driver who cut me off I really wanted to give him the finger but my inner-Canadian made me feel so guilty about the impulse that it turned into a thumbs up.
It is perhaps equally astonishing that I started smoking at the tender age of 11 when I was invited to join my Almost-Twin Sister and Jenny from Up the Street behind the Jones's house one summer's evening when the Jones family must have been away.
Jenny from Up the Street was a couple of years older than me and I didn't really know her well other than as a tough girl who'd been around the block. Since our block was in quiet suburban West End St. John's in the middle of what used to be a farmer's field, this did not really mean much. At the time, I considered her exotic, cool, and a little bit dangerous which was probably only because she was from a slightly lower socio-economic class* and didn't go to my school because she was Catholic.
Plus her tendency to lure younger children behind dark houses to introduce them to the demon weed.
What I saw that night behind the Jones's house was quite shocking, let me tell you. There was my 9-almost-10-year-old Almost-Twin Sister smoking like a tilt and, to add to my abhorrence, cursing like a sailor (this was not her first trip behind the Jones's house apparently). Filthy words were spewing from her mouth joining the noxious cloud of smoke in a whirling dance about our heads. I didn't even know what a lot of those words meant but I instinctively knew they were bad.
It was then I formed the deeply held conviction that smoking caused swearing.
Despite (or perhaps because of) my horror at this scene, I decided to continue with my own descent into juvenile delinquency and tried to light a cigarette. I put it in my mouth, Jenny lit the end; I inhaled deeply and promptly began to choke and gag and struggle for air.
I dropped the cigarette and refused to try it again. But I did stick around while they continued to smoke, me lighting matches for the rest of the evening like a total badass.
Thus ended my career as a smoker and I became an insufferably self-righteous prig about it forever after like most reformed smokers.
What didn't end at that moment was my fascination with the demon word.
While a lot of kids associated smoking with adulthood, I became more interested in profanity as the true sign of maturity (the irony of that only just occurring to me). I was practically bursting with pride and adulthood when my parents took me to see The Sting, my first grown-up movie, when I was about 12. When Paul Newman told Robert Shaw he (RS) played poker with his head up his ass, I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever heard. I fell in love with Paul Newman and his filthy mouth after that movie - I still can't bring myself to throw out his poster which is currently rolled up and stored with the Christmas wrap.
I also fell in love with seeing movies in the theatre where my beloved swear words could be heard in all their glory and the jokes were never ruined by the poorly dubbed non-sequiturs you heard on TV. Growing up in the '70s during the golden age of Serious Movies that had finally broken the dirty language barrier, I thought it was stupid to censor those words because if the movie was good, they had an artistic purpose, and if the movie was lazy, the bad words made it more entertaining. Connoisseurs of the ridiculous might enjoy the extreme lengths TV censors had to go through to cover the ears of the easily outraged but I just wanted to hear the gosh-darn, melon-farming cuss words.
But despite my advanced internal maturity and appreciation of the art form, I was still very self-conscious about actually swearing myself. As my mother has said on at least one occasion, I wouldn't say shit if my mouth was full of it.
I don't remember hearing my parents swearing very much but when they did it was pretty low level stuff. I never heard either of them say the f-word. The worst thing I ever remember my mother saying was the s-word which I think shows remarkable forbearance for a woman who had five children in seven years and had to change diapers full of the s-word for 10 years straight.
When I was in grade six, my best friend's two-year-old baby brother was a prodigiously entertaining cusser thanks to his nine-year old boy cousin but other than that, I don't think many of my friends swore either.
Peer pressure finally broke my own personal Hays Code in a rather backwards way when my Almost-Twin Sister and I started hanging out with our older brother's friends in the graveyard behind the houses across the street from us.
The language was pretty R-rated among those teenage boys (feel free to clutch your pearls now) and it was pretty contagious. My Almost-Twin fit in right away. But when I finally dropped my first tentative f-bombs they were met with such amusement that I swore I would outdo all those fuckers. My conversation became so chockablock with bad words, I could hardly contain them when my parents were around.
This phase was probably so short-lived that I'm not sure anyone other than me remembers it. I eventually realized that constant cursing lost it's appeal since the shock value wore off if you did it too much and often it just revealed a lack of vocabularial imagination. (By constant cursing I mean every other word. If you can find 3 or 4 good ones to stick in between the bad, you're doing fine.)
I went back to being a G-rated conversationalist while reserving the right to say anything I darn well please as appropriate. I am a big fan of inappropriate words being used appropriately.
After all, when you stub your toe on the coffee table, there is no more appropriate word choice than FUCK! Or maybe fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck! It feels a hell of lot better too if you keep that word and its derivatives in reserve for just such an occasion.
Which finally brings me around to my point (and I do have one). My last blog post probably surprised a lot of people since I am not known for my salty language.** But I've been hanging around on the internet with loose companions and I watched the first season of Deadwood, a filthy masterpiece of profanity used in epic proportions, so my self-censor has gone all to shit.
That post was about depression as well as dishwashing and those topics deserve to be described in the filthiest terms possible because they both suck dead sheep sideways.
I have also stuck my name on this formerly anonymous blog because I am really trying to write something worthwhile here and I'm trying to find my way back to being a writer like my dad who used to regale complete strangers with (mostly) true tales of our family's adventures disguised as an outdoors column published for the whole freaking world to see in The Daily News.
Depression robbed me of my words 20 years ago. Since then, while I still took the time to write entertaining emails and a few blog posts when I started this thing a few years ago, it is only lately that I have been feeling a really strong urge to write again.
So now that the floodgates of language seem to have been opened in my brain in more ways than one, I hope you won't mind if I continue writing this little blog using whatever words I fucking like.
*I don't actually know if this was a fact. It was just my impression at the time and I'm pretty sure I was a teeny tiny bit snobbish about it back then without having a clue why. If Jenny from Up the Street ever reads this, I hope she won't mind a bit of tweaking about a stupid thing she did when she was a kid.
**I also have trouble with rude hand gestures. One time I got so mad at a driver who cut me off I really wanted to give him the finger but my inner-Canadian made me feel so guilty about the impulse that it turned into a thumbs up.
Saturday, December 31, 2016
i made a list
All my life I have hated washing dishes. With a sink full of dirty dishes staring me down, I feel like Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill staring at that motherfucking boulder every morning and hating his fucked up life.
Because dishes are the never ending torment, the liver that keeps growing back so the carrion crows can feast on my entrails yet again (different myth).
All this mixed mythological hyperbole* may seem a little excessive but so is my hatred of dishwashing and its dirty little accomplice, cooking.
Cooking, baking, frying, broiling - all those bastards turning the kitchen into a wasteland of goo and gunk and gore. Every fucking day.
I love a clean kitchen. Particularly one uncontaminated by the byproducts of the reason for its existence. When I finally wash the motherfucking dishes, you can be sure the counters and stove will end up gleaming too, or at least crumb-free and relieved of sticky stains and the threat of salmonella.
I generally draw the line at sweeping the floor because I have dogs, socks, and bi-weekly cleaners for that.
I stand there for a moment and admire the godliness of it all (it helps if you neatly stack the empty peanut jars waiting to be cleaned and recycled) and pretend I don't see that the ground beneath the boulder is looking a bit dodgy.
All this beauty and it only took me an hour and a half to get here.
If that seems like a ridiculous amount of time to spend on dishes when I have a functioning dishwasher sitting right there, it is. But the dishwasher gets pretty full pretty fast and those pots and pans don't fit in very well once the plates are in there and some don't fit at all - I'm looking at you, broiling pan covered in congealed fat and glued on meat crud.
Every night my husband comes home and cooks us a nice meal and I am supposed to clean up afterwards because that's the deal we made. I actually insist on it because he does not clean to my exacting standards (not really exacting, see above) and I will just end up redoing the bits that bug me the most.
But every night as we finish our meal I feel the weight of the boulder settling onto my shoulders and I struggle to get started up that hill.
I think the reason it is such a struggle is because I am plagued with three debilitating conditions: depression, perfectionism, and procrastinitis. Or maybe it's one condition with 3 intertwined parts. Oh, and a tendency to overthink things (see above and below) That's four. There's probably something else too. Amongst the weapons at my disposal for making my life more complicated than it needs to be are...
Fortunately I have had only one deep depression, relatively short lived (several months) but also the most interminably long and horrifying episode of my life. That was 20 years ago. I lost two babies since that time, endured terrible mourning for their loss, and I still describe my depression like that.
Even though I found my way back to life, the experience of a full blown depression made me aware of a persistent low level of energy that has always permeated my life. I am not sad all the time, far from it, but I can be thrown into the foulest of moods over my inability to do things I should be doing.
Once I got past the general fuckery of adolescence and started to care about the state of my surroundings, I discovered there were many household chores I wanted done. I just didn't want to do them.
Sadly, I often don't care enough about them until they have turned into mega projects that will take far more time and energy than I am currently blessed with, which of course means the project only increases in size while I'm waiting for that one magical day when I feel up to the challenge.
And once I start a project I need it to be done right so that cleaning out the spare room becomes tidying the hall closet to make storage space becomes sorting out piles of papers to see what needs throwing out becomes where's the fucking glue so I can fix this goddamned thing once and for all. That shit is exhausting so I usually run out of steam long before the job is done and have to find some half-assed way to finish up so that the hallway is passable again.
So instead of celebrating what I have accomplished, I'm just tired and a little depressed that I'm going to have to do this project again sometime after it has had time to restock.
Most of the time the memory of slogging through these projects discourages me from starting them at all. If I play enough Candy Crush,** it is likely I won't have time to even begin before it's time to drive my kid somewhere. If I time this all correctly I will avoid all projects and simply have to deal with the guilt of having accomplished absolutely nothing all weekend long.
Sadly this tactic also has a tendency to eat up the prime book-reading/tv-watching time that I used to use to avoid housework during my misspent youth. At least then I was improving my vocabulary.
Getting back to the dishes (I can't avoid those mother-effing dishes), I see the same scenario play out on a daily basis. Sometimes I just wash them right after dinner, give myself a gold star, and go merrily on with my life. Other times, I have to rush out somewhere (see driving kid, op. cit.) or dinner was delayed or somebody pooped in the laundry room (just the dogs, not the kid) any of which conspire against the washing up. Sometimes I just can't stop playing Candy Crush.***
Once the dishes from tonight start piling up on top of the dishes of the previous night (and the night before that) it gets harder and harder to face them, and easier and easier to play another game.****
Before I know it, it's time to walk the dogs or even time to sit down and watch our shows (9:30 pm, aka home free) and I can pretend there aren't dishes taking up every surface in my kitchen just waiting to bitch slap me the next time I walk in.
This would all be a lot funnier if the spectre of my failure to suck it up like a big girl and just do it already wasn't filling me with a tiny bit of self-disgust (or a lot).
When I finally start the plate scraping and the sink filling and the food storing and the counter cleaning and the soaking of old pots and the disposition of fat (congealed or unconcealed) and the scrubbing of stove stains and the tossing of packaging that should have been dealt with by the chef, it still kind of sucks but at least I've got some music playing, I'm singing, and my dog is lying there giving me emotional support. The singing and my iPod are essential coping tools. The dog isn't doing much but it makes me smile when I see him there.
I wash and I wash and the drain is getting full and my back and/or knees are starting to ache and the worst pots are still waiting and they'll need a fresh sink full of water. Doing the task becomes just as depressing as avoiding it.
But I press on like a martyr until finally it is done.
This hateful task seems to me a microcosm of all the frustrating, boring, never-ending day-to-day tasks that seem impossible to attempt let alone complete when you are in a depressed state. When you feel like your world is a mess and it's your fault because you can't even do the most basic things, it's easy to fall into a pattern of self pity and self blame - the kind of thinking you need to avoid if you don't want to go down that path to self-immolation. I'm always afraid that when I start thinking like this I may already be on that path and I never want to go down there again.
I don't like that I am like this. Twenty years ago I hated myself for being like this.
Lately I have been trying out a new coping tool that I kept meaning to get to but kept putting off. For 20 years.
I made a list.
Every time I think of some task I would like to do I put it on a list on my iPad - this has the advantage of helping me remember what I want done and keeps it handier than a paper list since my iPad seems to be permanently attached to my hand. The list will never be empty because I keep adding new things but after a task is done I check it off and it will disappear until I feel the need to admire all my accomplishments by viewing completed tasks.
Instead of big, overwhelming projects, I put on smaller tasks that will take varying amounts of time. I don't list "clean the spare room" but the components of that job. I reorganized the gift wrapping stuff this Christmas, for example. The under-the-bed storage container that used to store all that crap needs a little more cleaning so I can repurpose it but that's a task for another day.
When I have a little time I do one thing. I do others if I have the time and the energy but I don't kick myself if one is all I can do. Or even part of one.
As for the fucking dishes, I have tried to let myself give up partway if there is just too much for one session, I'm feeling pain, or there's no more room in the drain. Then I finished the job the next night. It seemed to help.
So at the tender age of 54, I am finally taking some simple advice I heard many years ago and it really seems to be making a difference. I truly am getting more done bit by tiny bit and my energy for all the mundane tasks of life seems to be increasing as long as I know when it's time to stop.
And to my frustrated husband who just needs a little room to cook in every night for lord's sake (he would never use that expression), I hope this long meandering tale will explain why I can't always make that space as big as he deserves.
Because doing dishes really does suck.
*The Ancient Greeks really understood the existential horror of a sink full of dirty dishes.
**I'm using Candy Crush metaphorically here because that effing app hasn't worked in weeks. I'm actually playing Minion Rush, Best Fiends, and Cookie Jam in an endless loop but you've probably never even heard of them.
***Seriously, that stupid game boots me out before I even get to spin the bonus wheel.
****I deleted it from my iPad today because the shagging thing was just taking up space. See ** above.
Because dishes are the never ending torment, the liver that keeps growing back so the carrion crows can feast on my entrails yet again (different myth).
All this mixed mythological hyperbole* may seem a little excessive but so is my hatred of dishwashing and its dirty little accomplice, cooking.
Cooking, baking, frying, broiling - all those bastards turning the kitchen into a wasteland of goo and gunk and gore. Every fucking day.
I love a clean kitchen. Particularly one uncontaminated by the byproducts of the reason for its existence. When I finally wash the motherfucking dishes, you can be sure the counters and stove will end up gleaming too, or at least crumb-free and relieved of sticky stains and the threat of salmonella.
I generally draw the line at sweeping the floor because I have dogs, socks, and bi-weekly cleaners for that.
I stand there for a moment and admire the godliness of it all (it helps if you neatly stack the empty peanut jars waiting to be cleaned and recycled) and pretend I don't see that the ground beneath the boulder is looking a bit dodgy.
All this beauty and it only took me an hour and a half to get here.
If that seems like a ridiculous amount of time to spend on dishes when I have a functioning dishwasher sitting right there, it is. But the dishwasher gets pretty full pretty fast and those pots and pans don't fit in very well once the plates are in there and some don't fit at all - I'm looking at you, broiling pan covered in congealed fat and glued on meat crud.
Every night my husband comes home and cooks us a nice meal and I am supposed to clean up afterwards because that's the deal we made. I actually insist on it because he does not clean to my exacting standards (not really exacting, see above) and I will just end up redoing the bits that bug me the most.
But every night as we finish our meal I feel the weight of the boulder settling onto my shoulders and I struggle to get started up that hill.
I think the reason it is such a struggle is because I am plagued with three debilitating conditions: depression, perfectionism, and procrastinitis. Or maybe it's one condition with 3 intertwined parts. Oh, and a tendency to overthink things (see above and below) That's four. There's probably something else too. Amongst the weapons at my disposal for making my life more complicated than it needs to be are...
Fortunately I have had only one deep depression, relatively short lived (several months) but also the most interminably long and horrifying episode of my life. That was 20 years ago. I lost two babies since that time, endured terrible mourning for their loss, and I still describe my depression like that.
Even though I found my way back to life, the experience of a full blown depression made me aware of a persistent low level of energy that has always permeated my life. I am not sad all the time, far from it, but I can be thrown into the foulest of moods over my inability to do things I should be doing.
Once I got past the general fuckery of adolescence and started to care about the state of my surroundings, I discovered there were many household chores I wanted done. I just didn't want to do them.
Sadly, I often don't care enough about them until they have turned into mega projects that will take far more time and energy than I am currently blessed with, which of course means the project only increases in size while I'm waiting for that one magical day when I feel up to the challenge.
And once I start a project I need it to be done right so that cleaning out the spare room becomes tidying the hall closet to make storage space becomes sorting out piles of papers to see what needs throwing out becomes where's the fucking glue so I can fix this goddamned thing once and for all. That shit is exhausting so I usually run out of steam long before the job is done and have to find some half-assed way to finish up so that the hallway is passable again.
So instead of celebrating what I have accomplished, I'm just tired and a little depressed that I'm going to have to do this project again sometime after it has had time to restock.
Most of the time the memory of slogging through these projects discourages me from starting them at all. If I play enough Candy Crush,** it is likely I won't have time to even begin before it's time to drive my kid somewhere. If I time this all correctly I will avoid all projects and simply have to deal with the guilt of having accomplished absolutely nothing all weekend long.
Sadly this tactic also has a tendency to eat up the prime book-reading/tv-watching time that I used to use to avoid housework during my misspent youth. At least then I was improving my vocabulary.
Getting back to the dishes (I can't avoid those mother-effing dishes), I see the same scenario play out on a daily basis. Sometimes I just wash them right after dinner, give myself a gold star, and go merrily on with my life. Other times, I have to rush out somewhere (see driving kid, op. cit.) or dinner was delayed or somebody pooped in the laundry room (just the dogs, not the kid) any of which conspire against the washing up. Sometimes I just can't stop playing Candy Crush.***
Once the dishes from tonight start piling up on top of the dishes of the previous night (and the night before that) it gets harder and harder to face them, and easier and easier to play another game.****
Before I know it, it's time to walk the dogs or even time to sit down and watch our shows (9:30 pm, aka home free) and I can pretend there aren't dishes taking up every surface in my kitchen just waiting to bitch slap me the next time I walk in.
This would all be a lot funnier if the spectre of my failure to suck it up like a big girl and just do it already wasn't filling me with a tiny bit of self-disgust (or a lot).
When I finally start the plate scraping and the sink filling and the food storing and the counter cleaning and the soaking of old pots and the disposition of fat (congealed or unconcealed) and the scrubbing of stove stains and the tossing of packaging that should have been dealt with by the chef, it still kind of sucks but at least I've got some music playing, I'm singing, and my dog is lying there giving me emotional support. The singing and my iPod are essential coping tools. The dog isn't doing much but it makes me smile when I see him there.
I wash and I wash and the drain is getting full and my back and/or knees are starting to ache and the worst pots are still waiting and they'll need a fresh sink full of water. Doing the task becomes just as depressing as avoiding it.
But I press on like a martyr until finally it is done.
This hateful task seems to me a microcosm of all the frustrating, boring, never-ending day-to-day tasks that seem impossible to attempt let alone complete when you are in a depressed state. When you feel like your world is a mess and it's your fault because you can't even do the most basic things, it's easy to fall into a pattern of self pity and self blame - the kind of thinking you need to avoid if you don't want to go down that path to self-immolation. I'm always afraid that when I start thinking like this I may already be on that path and I never want to go down there again.
I don't like that I am like this. Twenty years ago I hated myself for being like this.
Lately I have been trying out a new coping tool that I kept meaning to get to but kept putting off. For 20 years.
I made a list.
Every time I think of some task I would like to do I put it on a list on my iPad - this has the advantage of helping me remember what I want done and keeps it handier than a paper list since my iPad seems to be permanently attached to my hand. The list will never be empty because I keep adding new things but after a task is done I check it off and it will disappear until I feel the need to admire all my accomplishments by viewing completed tasks.
Instead of big, overwhelming projects, I put on smaller tasks that will take varying amounts of time. I don't list "clean the spare room" but the components of that job. I reorganized the gift wrapping stuff this Christmas, for example. The under-the-bed storage container that used to store all that crap needs a little more cleaning so I can repurpose it but that's a task for another day.
When I have a little time I do one thing. I do others if I have the time and the energy but I don't kick myself if one is all I can do. Or even part of one.
As for the fucking dishes, I have tried to let myself give up partway if there is just too much for one session, I'm feeling pain, or there's no more room in the drain. Then I finished the job the next night. It seemed to help.
So at the tender age of 54, I am finally taking some simple advice I heard many years ago and it really seems to be making a difference. I truly am getting more done bit by tiny bit and my energy for all the mundane tasks of life seems to be increasing as long as I know when it's time to stop.
And to my frustrated husband who just needs a little room to cook in every night for lord's sake (he would never use that expression), I hope this long meandering tale will explain why I can't always make that space as big as he deserves.
Because doing dishes really does suck.
*The Ancient Greeks really understood the existential horror of a sink full of dirty dishes.
**I'm using Candy Crush metaphorically here because that effing app hasn't worked in weeks. I'm actually playing Minion Rush, Best Fiends, and Cookie Jam in an endless loop but you've probably never even heard of them.
***Seriously, that stupid game boots me out before I even get to spin the bonus wheel.
****I deleted it from my iPad today because the shagging thing was just taking up space. See ** above.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
she who does not obey
A while back, She Who Does Not Obey expressed a wish that her pseudonym be changed, offended by its accurate description no doubt. I started to consider it, despite my fondness for the name, but in the meantime a friend of mine had read about her on my blog and commented "she's my kind of girl."
I met this particular friend while working on my English degree at university so I immediately knew what she meant.
The Obedient Female is a literary figure that has annoyed and frustrated me for quite some time. The ideal woman in the White Male dominated world of English lit was an angelic figure who did what she was told, passing meekly and compliantly from father to husband. When blessed with decent parents, or at least one parent of that variety, obedience can work out reasonably well for a heroine. But when she is cursed with a greedy, selfish and capricious family, she becomes a doormat, a vulnerable creature in need of assistance and rescue.
I certainly don't want to raise She Who Marries the Jerk Her Family Foisted Upon Her or She Who Forsakes Her True Love Because Her Family Does Not Approve.
And definitely not She Who Sat in the Cinders because she never had the ovaries to demand the respect she deserved and reclaim her rightful place in her own family. If we all waited for some twit to show up with an uncomfortable piece of footwear, where would we be?
Clarissa who has drawn my scorn on this blog before was very much the obedient ideal, passively acquiescing to every demand of her despicable brother except in one thing - she refuses to marry the Jerk Her Family Foists Upon Her. She also refuses to marry the guy who rescues her from her family and then rapes her, even though that would restore her good name. If she hadn't been so insufferable about it all, I could actually admire her.
One day while I was driving SWDNO to school, she saw a woman wearing a burka for the first time in her life. I tried to explain it in as neutral a way as I could, despite my discomfort with the practice, to say it was a cultural thing and that a woman can choose to wear a burka if she wants.
"That's unfair," she said.
At that point I was forced to agree. I have read finely worded arguments from highly educated Muslim women arguing for their right to wear a head scarf or a burka if they choose, but I can't help wondering how much choice is involved when a woman is subject to a strongly patriarchal society and accepts that a man should have the final say over what she does and how she dresses. Works great as long as you don't end up with a crappy family or a violent husband. Or if you should happen to disagree with the person who has power over you.
Meanwhile, my own culture can hardly be highly praised when there are still so many obstacles for the uppity woman to face. She is still apparently doing most of the housework and the childcare even when she is not a stay-at-home mom. She is still not paid as much as a man. She is still subject to misogyny and violence both in abusive homes and in society at large.
She has never been the President of the United States and has only managed to be Prime Minister of Canada for 30 seconds or so.
I want my girl to grow up to be a strong, independent young woman who will make a way for herself in this world whether she finds her handsome prince or not.
Philosophically, I am as anti-obedience as the rest of my oppressed sisters, but as a mother I can't help wishing from time to time that my little proto-feminist would just once put her damn shoes on the first time I ask.
But she knows how to say "No!" and mean it. That is progress.
I met this particular friend while working on my English degree at university so I immediately knew what she meant.
The Obedient Female is a literary figure that has annoyed and frustrated me for quite some time. The ideal woman in the White Male dominated world of English lit was an angelic figure who did what she was told, passing meekly and compliantly from father to husband. When blessed with decent parents, or at least one parent of that variety, obedience can work out reasonably well for a heroine. But when she is cursed with a greedy, selfish and capricious family, she becomes a doormat, a vulnerable creature in need of assistance and rescue.
I certainly don't want to raise She Who Marries the Jerk Her Family Foisted Upon Her or She Who Forsakes Her True Love Because Her Family Does Not Approve.
And definitely not She Who Sat in the Cinders because she never had the ovaries to demand the respect she deserved and reclaim her rightful place in her own family. If we all waited for some twit to show up with an uncomfortable piece of footwear, where would we be?
Clarissa who has drawn my scorn on this blog before was very much the obedient ideal, passively acquiescing to every demand of her despicable brother except in one thing - she refuses to marry the Jerk Her Family Foists Upon Her. She also refuses to marry the guy who rescues her from her family and then rapes her, even though that would restore her good name. If she hadn't been so insufferable about it all, I could actually admire her.
One day while I was driving SWDNO to school, she saw a woman wearing a burka for the first time in her life. I tried to explain it in as neutral a way as I could, despite my discomfort with the practice, to say it was a cultural thing and that a woman can choose to wear a burka if she wants.
"That's unfair," she said.
At that point I was forced to agree. I have read finely worded arguments from highly educated Muslim women arguing for their right to wear a head scarf or a burka if they choose, but I can't help wondering how much choice is involved when a woman is subject to a strongly patriarchal society and accepts that a man should have the final say over what she does and how she dresses. Works great as long as you don't end up with a crappy family or a violent husband. Or if you should happen to disagree with the person who has power over you.
Meanwhile, my own culture can hardly be highly praised when there are still so many obstacles for the uppity woman to face. She is still apparently doing most of the housework and the childcare even when she is not a stay-at-home mom. She is still not paid as much as a man. She is still subject to misogyny and violence both in abusive homes and in society at large.
She has never been the President of the United States and has only managed to be Prime Minister of Canada for 30 seconds or so.
I want my girl to grow up to be a strong, independent young woman who will make a way for herself in this world whether she finds her handsome prince or not.
Philosophically, I am as anti-obedience as the rest of my oppressed sisters, but as a mother I can't help wishing from time to time that my little proto-feminist would just once put her damn shoes on the first time I ask.
But she knows how to say "No!" and mean it. That is progress.
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