I had a lovely weekend, as weekends go. On Thursday evening, Penny, Carissa and I went out for fondue and martinis and laughter to celebrate Penny’s impending nuptials. I had taken off on Friday in anticipation of The Bar That Is Badness, but Penny had too many wedding things to do and begged off, so I managed to get to sleep at a reasonable hour.
I spent my morning off refining my freelance project and then the afternoon going for one last swim in the parent’s pool before they close it down for the winter. It was out of principle. Sure, it was a blustery 70 that felt like 60 but under the water it was a tropical 93. June made us dinner and then pouted because I was having one of my meat squicks and just ate mashed potatoes, a dinner roll, and a brownie (So very nutritious!) and had to be convinced that five other people were happily eating chicken and just because I wasn’t, didn’t mean that it was inedible. I didn’t even TRY it, so it wasn’t like I was passing judgment on her chicken, but rather the fact that it WAS chicken. Gah. Parents.
After dinner, I cut out to return home where Penny stopped over for movies and libations as I painted her nails a bridal purple sparkly (it worked, seriously) and we watched a movie and allowed the Keebler Elves to show us how much they love us via fudge shortbread.
I managed to get to bed at a decent hour (wow, so much sleep this weekend! It was absolutely glorious), woke up and then went off to run wedding errands, drop off/pick up the dry cleaning, and get fresh batteries for my camera. Back at home, I attempted to catch up on some (fucking) laundry but then the dryer was making a funny clunking sound. I shrugged, figuring that I must have missed the Downy ball when transferring loads, but then when I emptied the dryer, I found that the fuschia bra I had planned to wear with my fuschia/black sweater twinset now had an angry slash through the cup, as though my left breast had gotten tired of all this constraint and fashioned a shiv of some nature and started living up to its name by busting the hell out.
And after some investigation, I determined that one of the weird ledge thingies (which make the inside of your dryer ribbed for the pleasure of your wet and naughty clothing) has partially become detached from the big round spinny thing. How’s that for technical! So I may have ripped to hell out of some of my clothing. I’m afraid to look, quite frankly. I noticed that one of the towels from a previous load is shredded too.
I explained this to Esteban and said, ‘So now I can’t do (fucking) laundry!’ and he responded blithely ‘No, now you can’t dry it! You can still hang it!’
And for that, I hated him just a little bit. Because apparently in his naivete he feels, nay believes that a six-foot length of rope strung across two rafters in a spider-infested basement with no ventilation can easily accommodate our (fucking) laundry needs. Silly Esteban. Silly na’ve hairy manchild with no clue how the world works. Some days, I direly wish I were blissfully ignorant as well.
Thus, I managed to get dressed without wearing the properly coordinated bra with my outfit, but managed to look quite spiffy just the same. And the wedding was lovely. I was happy that I had respectfully declined the invitation to sing a song at the wedding, because I was busy directing traffic or making CDs or steaming dresses or delivering a wedding cake or taking pictures or setting tables or relaying messages or making out with the maid of honor to even think about learning a Penny-approved song and finding a karaoke version of said song and then delivering something more than a breathless croak when the big moment came. And she wouldn’t let me do my fabulous rendition of The Divinyls’ ‘I Touch Myself’ for some reason.
Anyway, it was a lovely ceremony, a lovely reception, and our ‘Dancing Queen’ choreography, while still appallingly amateur, was quite a hit. And also, the hottie Marky Mark-looking bartender bought me a drink while sans Esteban. Of course, Esteban sauntered up later and drinkblocked me. That Esteban! Winning no points this weekend. Good thing that he’s a wildcat in the sack to make up for it.
Yesterday was oddly freeing with the (fucking) laundry completely out of my hands. Instead, I made great headway on my second battle of the season with the Evil Rosebush (thwarted only by the fact that there were bees guarding the one lone thistle, so I couldn’t reef on the m’lange the way I would have liked). It fought back valiantly, drawing blood no fewer than five times, including a rather impressive set of parallel scratches on my arm and two rather obstinate thorns that managed to make their way through my thick rawhide Rosebush Fightin’ gloves. I filled half of the truck bed with ex-Rosebush. There’s still a formidable thicket there, but people, I am but one woman and even I must rest and drink chilled Dasani while flipping through catalogs and watching Mean Girls. But tomorrow is another day.
I like to think that I’m a pretty rational person. When I get on a plane, I don’t worry about it crashing (sure, I might think I’m going to die on that trip, but I’m not pinning the fear directly upon a fiery plane crash. I might just as easily get a knife thrust in the gullet by a crazy homeless person or trip and somehow manage to incur swelling on the brain and then there’s always the threat of the flesh eating virus, which would probably find my luscious curvage quite alluring.) And everyone has rational fears, such as losing a loved one or a house fire or whatever. Those are pretty normal. I have several irrational fears, though, and now I’m starting to wonder how many irrational fears does it take before one can officially be considered neurotic. Let’s tally, shall we?
Basements. I really don’t like basements. We have lived in our little bungalow for almost eight years and as basements go, it’s got a nice cheery little one. With one exception’ the area behind the stairs. There’s storage back there, and I’ve got it shoved full of Christmas decorations, but even still, I’m always certain that there is a man lurking back there in the shadows, snooping in my garland and tinsel. I still take those stairs two at a time about once a month. But if the stairs were open and it were possible for a hand to snake out between the steps and possibly grab an ankle, I would run up them every damn time and perhaps be very fit and athletic because of it.
Bridges. This is only minimal, which is good because I live in a port town and there’s a big giant river that splits it in half. However, if I’m driving over a bridge, particularly one of the two tall highway bridges, I think about losing control of the car and going over the side. I judge if the guards could stop my car at 55 mph. At 65 mph. At 45 mph. I plan if I should jump or just stay in the car. I wonder if I should unbuckle my seatbelt as I go over so that it doesn’t lock and trap me underwater, or if I should keep it buckled so that I don’t slam up against the steering wheel. I wonder if the airbags would trigger. I have dreams about driving over bridges into nothing and then the taste of river water and the icy cold inside my clothes. I think I didn’t take a class during winter semester at Oshkosh because on the way there is a very long bridge with flimsy guardrails across a huge lake and it’s at least a mile and the whole thing just makes me tense. And if I’m walking over a bridge, forget it. I’m certain that I’m going to lose my purse, keys, something over the side. When I was a kid, my aunt used to take me to Pamperin Park, which had a ridiculously high slat bridge on chains, so not only could you see through the slats down to the water (and presumably fall through if you were small and maybe if the circumstances were juuuuust right) but also some jackass fifth grader (because when you’re a kid, fifth grade is the cultivation of jackasses) would be at the end, shaking the damned bridge with all they had, making the middle do a sickening tumble as though it were possible to twist and dump everything into the murky depths below. Gah. No wonder I’m traumatized.
Bats. Bats freak me out. I think I was traumatized when I was six and we lived on our horse farm in sleepy little Lena, Wisconsin. Our house was ancient and my stepfather was trying to fix the stupid things that had been done to it in the past hundred years, so the bathroom was in a state of chaos. And one brisk fall evening, while I was happily ensconced in the tub, playing with my rubber duck (seriously, I really had one. It had a flat back for holding a bar of soap, but which was also handy for crafting elaborate rescue scenarios for my menagerie of tub toys), I saw a shadow on the floor. I looked up and saw a giant fucking black bat. (In fact, it was so startling that my normally chaste and demure six-year-old brain said to itself ‘A fucking bat!’) And I am not exaggerating about the size either. It had a wingspan of at least a foot. Apparently I screamed so loudly that the neighbors half a mile up the road heard it and came running with their gun, thinking someone had just been murdered. Of course, the bats fear has now transferred to include Moths, because of their scarily similar flight patterns and also the way that moths turn into vampires.
Clowns. You knew that was coming. Who isn’t afraid of them? Thank you very much Steven Spielberg and your damned Poltergeist movie.
Cutting the back of my ankle Yup. That one came out of left field, didn’t it? I am so haphazard when shaving my legs except when I get to the back of my ankles, when I get all slow and serious. I’ve even devised a method to reduce the likelihood of cutting that fragile area’ I place the razor above the back of my ankle, run it backwards down my leg and then shave back up. It seems to work, but I still cringe every damned time. In fact, it has transferred out of the shower and sometimes I will be sitting at my desk working and then think ‘Oh no! Nicking the ankle! Ahhh!’ and that’s just not right. I know that this stems back to my senior year in high school when I managed to somehow slice a chunk out of my ankle and it wouldn’t stop bleeding for over an hour. The mark didn’t fade until sophomore year in college. That and Breaking My Teeth are the only physical injuries that really freak me out.
Feet. This isn’t really a fear. I just don’t like them. However, sometimes I worry that I’ll have to touch someone’s feet and then I get a little tense.
Popping the Can of Pillsbury Refrigerated Biscuit Dough See, here’s where it’s starting to get neurotic. I think it’s the suspense with this one. Will it pop? Will it explode? What if I have to get a Sawz-All to get it out of there? You just don’t know. It is out of your control. A seriel killer could pop out of that tube and there’s just nothing you can do about it.
So your thoughts’ am I neurotic yet? Does the Biscuit Dough Can thing put me over the edge? How about this then: Squeezing the Last Bit of Something Thick out of a Squeeze Bottle. Like, when you’re trying to get the last bit of lotion out? Or maybe some dishwasher detergent? It doesn’t just bother me’ I get tense just anticipating that sound. I tip bottles upside down long before they really need to be, just to ensure that there will be a ready supply and no need to engage the ‘Unnnnttthtp! Uuuunnnnpthtph!’ noise. I’ve tried to figure out what and the closest thing I can think of is that maybe it reminds me of painful constipated poops. Freud would just snort and remind everyone that he told us so seventy years ago and then tell me about how I wished I had a penis.
The comments section wants to know what your irrational fears are.
