The post is late this weekend because Atlanta literally got buried this weekend. In my neck of the woods, it was almost a foot of snow, which in Atlanta is basically the equivalent of encasing the entire city in Amber to be fished out and mined for DNA by overzealous scientists in hopes of making dinosaurs many millenia in the future.
I know, I know. Much like the “blizzard” of three years ago which sealed the city in an icy tomb from which it didn’t emerge for five days, the rest of the country is laughing at us. The south can’t handle snow. We get it. This time is legit, though. Below is a horrible-quality picture (thanks smartphones for not knowing how to handle flash settings and low light) of me standing by our fence. Notice that it’s literally deep enough to cover my entire head, were I to stand on my head, which is a thing I might be likely to do, given that I’m a southerner and do not know what snow is for. (You can cook with it, right?)
(No, those are not my wife’s pajama pants. They are mine. And they are most comfortable.)
Snow would continue to fall for twelve more hours. I’d have more pictures of the coverage, but a) do a little google image search for “Atlanta snow” and you’ll come across scads of pictures better than anything I could take (and funnier jokes, too!) and b) my kids ruined the pristine blanket immediately, because that’s what kids get paid to do.
More to the point, though, the heavy snowfall was bringing down branches and trees like Mueller is bringing down Trump associates, leaving us (and hundreds of thousands of our closest relatives and neighbors across the state) without power all night and most of the day on Saturday. And there just isn’t enough liquor in the county to deal with problems like that. So we did what any red-blooded, 21st-century humans would do: saddled up the kids, loaded up the minivan, and drove to Grandma’s house to charge our phones spend some time with family.
Luckily, aside from a bunch of power outages, a healthy share of downed trees, and a truly maddening array of pictures of people on their back porches sticking measuring tapes and rulers into the snow (rest assured, I have my own pictures, but I won’t cross that particular line of insufferability), there does not seem to have been much loss of life or injury caused by this little winter surprise. Which is to say that, after a second straight day of sun in the wake of the storm, life will quickly return to normal. As life is wont to do.
Which means that when I’m late with the Saturday post next week, I’ll have to make a much more pedestrian excuse. (Which may or may not involve actual pedestrians. Stay tuned!)
Did you know that it is possible not to take an ill-tempered child to a crowded movie theater on a Friday night?
It’s true!
Yes, it’s a little bit unfair that having a kid cramps your style a bit. You want to continue doing the things you’ve always done. Having the fun you’ve always had. And you can, but you have to give a little bit of consideration to the squalling anchors tethered to your nethers before you do so.
Consider:
A movie theater is a great environment for adults! It’s dark and comfortable and conducive to naps if you so choose. There’s only one thing to focus on, which is great news for our aging, overwhelmed brains! (In point of fact, instead of staying home last night stressing about the tax bill that was just passed, or getting my blood in a good boil over the latest news in the Mueller investigation, I headed to the movie theater to block all that out for a few hours and relax. Best choice of my week!)
A movie theater is also a great environment for teens! It’s dark and private and a great opportunity to suck face with your selected face-sucker without the possibility of your parents barging in. And with all those hormones raging through your system, you can easily ignore the loud sounds and bright lights of the film. Win-win!
But a movie theater is not a great environment for young kids! It’s dark — which deprives them of the stimulation they so very much crave! There’s nothing to do but sit there and watch the movie — which deprives them of the stimulation they so very much crave! You can distract them with food, but your popcorn tub and extra-large drink are only so deep — they will run out of things to stuff in their face before long, and then you’re back to the first two problems, except now they’re full of sugar and caffeine! And don’t forget, a five-year-old probably can’t follow the thread of the film without help, which means he will be bombarding you with questions for as long as he is paying attention (to say nothing of the two-year-old you also brought with you for some reason).
Your kids, in short, are likely to make going to the movies an unpleasant experience for you — their parent, who has a biological imperative to love and not murder them — to say nothing of the unsuspecting members of your community upon whom you are about to inflict this pain. And you’re paying to bring your kids with you — you pay more for the experience of going to the movie and pissing everybody off than we paid to come to the movie to have a nice time not thinking about our country circling the drain. Put another way — we put in nice, sensible bids to have a delightful little evening, and you outbid us to pee all over our nice little thing. (Incidentally, you might make an excellent Republican senator!)
Lastly, and not for nothing, not every movie is appropriate for children — let alone children whose ages can be counted on one hand! When the movie contains four of the seven words you can’t say on television, numerous references to sex and orgies, and a literal orgy of violence and terrifying imagery, you might be doing your child a favor to not bring them along for the ride.
It’s just a thought!
You have options:
Accept that, as a parent, the life you knew is over. Stay home from the movie theater and check out your movies on Redbox or Netflix like a reasonable sleep-deprived adult. Watch them after the kids go to bed. You’ll fall asleep halfway through, sure, but that’s part of the fun.
Find a sitter. Yes, this is inconvenient, and depending on your arrangements, possibly expensive. But weigh it against, if not the displeasure of everybody you’ll be in the movie theater with, your own annoyance at sitting through the movie with your toddler-anchors talking and crying and whining and kicking the seat in front of them and generally doing all the things toddlers do. You may find that the investment is worth it!
Go to the movie anyway. It’s not illegal, but everybody will hate you, and if you have a soul, you just might hate yourself.
Finally, if you do find yourself in a movie that’s inappropriate for children with your little bundles of joy, and they start acting exactly the way you would expect a child to act in such a situation, it’s okay to leave. You don’t get bonus points for staying and prolonging the pain for everybody. It’s really okay. Just take the kid (who doesn’t want to be there anyway), your spouse (who also no longer wants to be there), and your self (who should now be fully dead inside), and go.
We won’t hate you for it. On the contrary, we’ll love you.
This has been a public service announcement.
In other news, we saw Thor: Ragnarok last night. It was pretty good, I think. I can’t be entirely sure, because we were distracted by something totally unrelated.
I do know that Chris Hemsworth’s abs may have single-handedly given me an eating disorder.
Metaphor Monday is back on Monday — the planets must be in alignment!
Our washing machine crapped out this weekend.
Well, it seemed like it had crapped out.
One way or another, it looked like it had crapped out, and it gave us a scare for a good hour or so.
It was Sunday, and Sundays are laundry days in our house. So, after the morning shopping run was done and the kids were down for quiet time (they don’t take naps anymore, but we’ve convinced them — mostly — that quiet time is a thing, and thank goodness for it), we took some laundry downstairs, cranked up the machine, and sat back to relax for an episode of Stranger Things. (Sidenote: Now that Stranger Things is over again, what do I do with my life??)
About an hour later, I realized that the washer was still running. Not only was it still running, but there was still water running through the supply lines. You know, that low rush in the walls that’s completely inaudible until it happens when it shouldn’t? Having experienced three pipe blow-outs in our old house, this is a sound that immediately gives me the cold sweats.
So the water is hissing away in the walls, and in the quiet after the episode, suddenly, I hear it. Sweat breaks out all over. I run downstairs expecting to find the entire basement under a couple inches of standing water — but, no. Weird, but welcome. I look at the washer. The dial hasn’t advanced from where I started it an hour ago. Weird. I open the lid. Water is pouring into the machine. Weirder still. I turn off the machine. Water stops. Turn it back on. Water pours. At this rate, it should have flooded long ago, but it hasn’t. I turn the dial to the end of the cycle. The machine spins up, leaves the clothes damp as expected, and all is still.
I start the machine again. It’s an older unit and has some gremlins (occasionally shuts off for no discernible reason, and every few months, like a 99% trained housecat, will leave a gross little puddle in the laundry room), so maybe it just needed a good solid reboot. No dice. The water runs and runs and the cycle won’t advance.
What I’ve learned in my near-decade (help!) of home ownership is that when appliances or plumbing break down, the solution is either really simple or really expensive with not much middle ground, with a decided tendency towards really expensive. So the cold sweat breaks out again. (I was still sweaty. You’re welcome.) I do what any savvy, 21st-century thirty-something homeowner would do and fire up youtube. Within minutes I have twenty browser tabs open describing how to open up my washing machine, how to rewire it, how to drain it, how to rebuild it out of toothpicks, and a third round of cold sweat is starting up (by now I should really have changed my shirt, which wouldn’t be a problem, except that my shirts are in the laundry that is not getting washed). It’s all very involved, very detailed, very time-consuming, and very daunting.
I dive in anyway, take the cover off the machine and expose a nest of wires and motors and dials and tubes. Not much of it looks like what I saw in the videos or the diagrams, which isn’t that big a deal but it starts the panic. I was looking at the wrong video; maybe I’ve got the wrong problem. Maybe this is way out of my league. Maybe I’m making things worse by even tinkering with the machine.
The Howler Monkey of Doubt starts in. You don’t know what you’re doing. Give up. Suck it up and get ready to pay a repair technician. Also, forget about getting laundry done tonight, and start panicking over what your kids are going to wear to school tomorrow. And what you’re going to wear, for that matter. How many days can you last? How much is it gonna cost to get it fixed? Do you even have a single pair of clean underwear right now? All I want to do is lay down in bed, pull the covers up over my eyelids, and sleep until the problem fixes itself, which is to say, for EVER.
How I envision every plumbing project I ever undertake
I sit for ten minutes, doing nothing. Then I return to the problem. I refine my google searches. I think about what the real problem is. I search some more. Within about five more minutes, I’ve got a likely solution that doesn’t even require any tools. The cold sweat is back. It can’t be this simple, can it?
Actually, it can.
I lift the drain hose from its pipe. There’s a wicked gurgling, whooshing sound — I half expect water to explode out of the walls and realize my nightmares — but that’s it. The drain hose was a bit too deep in the pipe, the water level got a titch too high, and a siphon was created — whenever water was poured into the machine, the siphon pulled it right out through the drain. The machine could never get to the proper amount of water, so it could never start its cycle. But there was nothing mechanically wrong with it, so it didn’t shut itself down. Likewise, the drain was functioning properly, so it never overflowed. The very next minute, I restart the machine, watch it fill up with water — and then kick over to the wash cycle.
Problem solved.
Phew. That was a lot to tell. So what’s the metaphor?
There are two, actually. One for me and one for the machine.
Let’s start with the machine. There was nothing mechanically wrong with it, as I pointed out before — just a simple user error that caused it to tall into an actually rather interesting physics loop (it’s called “siphoning,” and it works exactly like extracting gas from your car’s tank). Thing is, the user error that caused the physics problem happened several months ago and the problem never happened until now. Which means that I laid the groundwork for this little headache months ago and spent the intervening time dancing on the edge of disaster, never even knowing what might happen. Like an aneurysm in the brain, the drain pipe in the wall was just hanging there, waiting to form a seal and blow up my Sunday. Maybe the machine getting jostled as I loaded the clothes into it caused it to make that seal; maybe the spin cycle on the machine’s last run knocked it over the edge. There’s no telling, except that whatever it was could have gone wrong at any time.
If that ain’t a perfect metaphor for life, I don’t know what is. Everything, all the time, is hanging by a thread, and everybody is running around with multiple pairs of scissors in their hands. Eventually, one way or another, that thread is gonna get cut, and your washing machine is gonna run for a few hours and (at best) run up your water bill or (at worst) flood your basement.
Which brings me to the human element. What I really wanted to do when the washer broke down was hide from the problem. Think about literally anything else. Hope it would work itself out, or (when that didn’t work) just hire somebody to come in and deal with it. But after taking a few minutes to get my head together and assess the problem like a person who has a brain, I was able to not only discern that the problem wasn’t all that bad, but to fix it myself with almost no strain.
Which is to say that sometimes our problems are not all we make them out to be. Sometimes that crippling writer’s block you’re suffering isn’t the end of your writing career, but just a sign that you need to not focus on that particular character in that particular chapter right this second. Just like my particular appliance issue called for a little less soldering iron and voltmeter, a little more flashlight and paper towel, sometimes the writing life is a little less throw-the-laptop-and-all-you’ve-ever-created-into-the-dumpster-and-set-it-ablaze and a little more maybe-just-go-write-a-vignette-with-talking-cats-holding-office-jobs.
In other words, just go work on something else for a while and let it open your brain up.
Now excuse me while I go draft a scene for my new series. It’s basically Milo & Otis meets The Office.
The new house has these great wood floors in it. They’re lovely — dark and smooth and soothing. A real upgrade over the carpet we had in the old house, if you like that sort of thing — and, as it turns out, we do.
There’s a problem with them, though. If you have similar floors in your house, probably you already know what I’m about to say: they are a bear to keep clean. With the little kids and the pets running around, our floors get (and pretty much stay) filthy.
It’s all manner of stuff. Crumbs. Dust. Pet dander. Hair. Little pieces of paper. Tiny gobs of this slime stuff the kids are playing with lately (god I hate toy manufacturers). Cat claws. Grass clippings and dirt from the yard. Dried-out bits of Play-Doh (god I hate toy manufacturers). Toenail clippings. Laundry lint. Scraps of candy wrappers. More crumbs.
Yesterday, I swear, we opened the back door and the little breeze stirred up a tiny cyclone of detritus. A tumbleweed rolled through the kitchen. And I’m thinking to myself: “I just swept yesterday!”
Turns out that, though we love the look of the wood over the comfort of the carpet, the carpet was comforting in other ways too: it hid the disgustingness of our existence from us. But now, if we don’t clean it up every day or two, that dust is gonna show out, and there’s no hiding it from anybody.
But here’s the rub: in the old house, with the carpets, sure — we could go a week or so without vacuuming. Most likely, nobody would notice — sometimes, not even we would notice. (“When’s the last time we vacuumed?” “I dunno, March?”) But that doesn’t mean that the gross stuff wasn’t there. It was just disguised. Camouflaged. Trapped in the fibers underfoot. Out of sight and out of mind.
Which seems like where you want it — out of sight — until you consider that the longer it lurks there, the more it piles up. And every step kicks that stuff up into the air, into every room in the house, into your lungs. Where it lurks and festers and crystallizes and congeals into gunk that’s got you coughing and sneezing and feeling cruddy year-round and you don’t even know why.
Not so good after all.
When it’s out on the hardwood, we can see it, so we can clean it — as unpleasant and tedious as that may be — before it has the chance to pile up and do damage. So the floors might look dirtier than ever, but on balance, I know that in reality, they’re cleaner than we’ve had in years.
So I wonder:
How much crap is hiding in the carpet in my headspace?
Well, a lot. Probably an unconquerable mountain of it, if I’m honest. These are troubling times we live in, and unfortunately, a lot of the feelings and thoughts and shock and awe and disgust and sorrow and anger and regret … all of that stuff gets swept under the carpet. Mass shootings. Bigotry out in the open. Injustice and indifference to the common man (and woman). Death and destruction and general bad behavior everywhere you look. (And that’s just the past weekend in Trump’s America.) To say nothing of the everyday stuff in my own neighborhood. Work. Parenting. Neverending effing yard work.
All of it piles up, and unfortunately, it’s got nowhere to go. So it just gets pushed around. Pushed out of sight and … well, in this case, decidedly NOT out of mind. It just sits there, grinding itself deeper into the fibers, suffocating the productive thoughts I want to have and making the air unpalatable for the new thoughts I haven’t had yet. Which probably explains the drought I’m in — have been in — during this terrible, awful, no good, very bad year.
And while I usually like to take a positive tack here in these posts, I’m not sure where it is in this instance. I don’t know how to rip up the carpet inside my own head.
It sure does seem like I could use some hardwood up there. Even if it’s a pain in the butt.
We were away from the homestead for a few days on a much-needed vacation. Missed a metaphor Monday and a couple of other posts I might have made in the meantime. So instead of a deep-dive on a topic, here’s a rapid-fire scatter-shot swipe at a few things I think I’m thinking about the week.
The Orange One continues to have his own personal version of the Midas Touch, which is the same as the fabled king who turned everything he touched into gold, except in the case of the DT, he turns everything he touches to poop. This week he’s poopifying the NFL, getting his poopy little fingers into all its nooks and crannies and ensuring that we can’t even watch a brainless game for a few hours on Sunday without having conversation hijacked and steered into the mountainside that is the poop-in-chief. I’ll leave it to you to figure out that while DT claims he’s having a hissy fit about the flag and by extension the military, it’s interesting that he’s doing so by disparaging a league wherein something like 3/4 of the players are black. Let’s not forget that the taking-a-knee thing started out because of race issues and had to do with visibility, not the flag or the military. You might argue that the national anthem isn’t the place for such protests, and maybe it isn’t, but the point of protest isn’t to make things as comfortable and unobtrusive for bystanders as possible, now, is it? Oh, there was also that kerfuffle with the Golden State Warriors and Steph Curry. (Also mostly black.)
Whatever, the Daily Show and Samantha Bee and other venues have handled this better than I can; if you haven’t watched their clips, you should.
And while I’m on the subject of the DT (sorry, it’s been a while and he’s on a roll — a sharknado-rolls-downhill kind of roll), he’s intimating that our aid efforts to Puerto Rico are in some way concerned with the island’s debt. Never mind that Puerto Ricans are citizens, so it’s kind of like a few major cities are crippled, starving, and barely in communication. They’re people. And he’s worried about their debt in the same breath as talking about their literal survival. If you’re not enraged, you’re not paying attention.
In other eff-you-I’ve-got-mine news, I was sitting beachside with my kids, watching them do their best sandpiper imitations — chasing the waves and foam around, cackling and basically being adorable — and a pair of old ladies comes strolling up the beach. One of them slows down as she nears us. This isn’t totally unusual — grandparents tend to love watching little kids play, and as far as little kids go, mine are particularly adorable — but I glance at her and notice not the usual smile of watching the younger generation at play, but the sneer of the put-upon. Turns out, we were right in her walk path, which I guess I should have known, given that there was only an entire beach around us in literally half of all the available directions. She huffs a little and detours around us as closely as possible, even going so far as to step on my little finger as she resumes her path.
I feel like this may have been her little way of making the beaches great again, but I can’t be totally sure of her political leanings after such a tiny interaction.
While walking to a restaurant to pick up dinner one night, I saw a group of kids (and man, that sentiment crossing my fingers onto the page made me take a good, hard look at myself, because they were certainly college-aged) sitting at a sidewalk table in front of an ice cream shop. Six or seven of them, clearly all there together. In total silence. Not a word being said. Their attention, instead, entirely engrossed in their cell phones. I stopped. I stared. They didn’t notice me. (I’d have taken a picture, but I left my phone charging in the hotel room — it was dead from playing video games while my kids splashed in the pool all afternoon.) I continued to stare, and they continued not to notice, until a full thirty seconds had passed and I became uncomfortable.
I know, I know. It’s nothing new, these youths and their cell phones. But it shook me. I mean, Panama City Beach (aka the Redneck Riviera) is a haven for college kids having a good time, and here they sat, passively shoveling ice cream into their beaks, staring blankly at their little hypno-boxes. Creepy.
Vacation is great, but it’s terrible for eating. I figure my diet was roughly 60% grease-based, 35% straight-up fried, and maybe 5% green — and that green was only in the form of guacamole smeared on something else deep-fried. I don’t know that I’ve ever been happier to see my own kitchen and my cast-iron murder skillet (come on, that thing is a home-defense system as much as it’s a dream for searing a steak).
And on the six-hour drive back from the beach, I was amused to be barraged with example after example that my theory about the rampant-yet-undiagnosed road disorder, PBV syndrome, is a real thing. Give me a minivan doing 75, and I’ll show you a beat-up old chevy that was doing 65 a minute ago now driving 80. Maybe I’ll mock-up a pamphlet and plant a few of them in doctors’ offices around town.
That feels like a heck of a lot of negativity. Here to right that ship is the sunset from our last night. I’m pretty sure there are at least a hundred shades of crimson in the sky, and I’m almost certain that the blue of the ocean here is described as “cobalt conundrum.”
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Accidentally Inspired 