Category Archives: the real world hates me

occupied

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occupied_toilet

 

My office is on the second floor of an old converted farmhouse. There are a couple other tenants with spaces on the second floor as well – some guy that I’m pretty sure is a mad Internet scientist (he’s the one with the dog), and a lady who teaches Pilates classes.

Obviously, because the Pilates lady is teaching classes, there’s a fair amount of traffic up and down the stairs and in our little hallway some mornings and afternoons. For the most part the people that come for the Pilates classes are no big deal, although for a while there was one that would always wear so much perfume that it would throw me into a migraine or an asthma attack whenever she showed up.

There was also The Groaner – a guy who would make the most hilariously awful sounds during his sessions on the Pilates Reformer machine thing. It seriously sounded like he was making geriatric Pilates porn in there. Which, don’t Google that…just assume it exists and move on with your life untainted.

Anyway.

So, there’s one  bathroom on the second floor. It’s a little half-bath like you’d find in a home, not an industrial multi-stall deal. Normally that’s perfectly adequate, as when it’s just the people from my company working up there, we number only four. Sometimes somebody from our downstairs office will sneak up and use our bathroom if they know they’re going to lay a particularly stinky egg, but whatever. Still adequate for the number of employees, and we seldom experience any kind of toilet traffic drama.

At least, until the Pilates people show up.

There are the ones that use our bathroom as their changing room, the ones that just need a quick pee before or after class…and then there’s Doorknob Jiggler.

First of all, I don’t know if DJ is always on the verge of pissing herself or what, but she never even slows down long enough to notice that the bathroom door is closed and the fan is running. She just always makes a beeline straight from the doorway of the Pilates room to the bathroom (which is like three steps) and bodily throws herself at the bathroom door. Maybe her bathroom door at home is made of solid mahogany and is really heavy so she’s just used to having to heave her whole weight against it to move it? All I know is that it’s terrifying to be sitting there on the toilet when she gets out of class because you’d swear it was a fucking battering ram coming through that door.

Second of all, if DJ encounters a close and locked door, rather than saying to herself “oh there’s someone in there, I’ll hang out in the hall and wait my turn”, she will, in fact, start jiggling the doorknob. Further, if she jiggles the doorknob and you don’t immediately say something to let her know you’re in there, she will assume that the door is somehow mistakenly jammed shut (again, the fan and light are both on if someone is in there. You can see the light around the edges of the door and you can hear the fan halfway down the hall), and will start turning the knob and start battering the door bodily again.

This afternoon was one such situation. There I was, spending some quality time with my Instagram feed while enjoying the tranquil confines of the bathroom, when suddenly I heard someone coming. I didn’t think much of it until the first loud BANG as she heaved against the door.

“Shit“, I thought…”it’s DJ and she sounds like she means business“.

Apparently the split second I took in self-dialog was too long for her liking because the doorknob jiggling started almost immediately.

“Occupied” I said, trying to sound friendly but, you know…busy. I put my phone down on the counter, wiped, stood up, and jumped as she banged into the door AGAIN!

“Be right out” I said, not trying for anything less than terse this time. I washed my hands, dried them, put my phone in my pocket, reached for the slide-latch on the door to unlatch it…and found that DJ had in fact bashed into the door so aggressively that it had jammed the motherfucking latch. She started jiggling the doorknob again just about then and I was done with her shit.

“HOLD ON. The latch is jammed.”

I could hear her muttering on the other side of the door but I took the high road and ignored it – mostly due to the fact that I was dealing with mounting panic over being permanently stuck in the bathroom, I’ll be completely honest.

After a couple of tries, I finally got the slide-latch thingy to unlock and the door swung open. DJ stood there in the hallway with an accusatory glare on her face and basically SHOVED past me into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

I silently wished in that moment that she would sit down on the toilet and discover she had pin worms. Or some other kind of anal-itch-causing malady. Basically, I really wanted her to feel like she needed to drag her ass across a nice rough carpet. Preferably with a bunch of people watching and trying to get her to hurry up because they wanted to use the carpet themselves. Although who would want to use a carpet after someone butt-dragged on it, I don’t know. But still. You get my point.

 

 

 

professional harsher of mellows

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My dog can harsh anyone’s mellow.

Seriously. The Dalai fucking Lama could roll up in here, my dog would lose his shit because, OMG stranger danger, and the Dalai Lama would be like, “Shit, dog…you’re SHRILL”. And after five whole minutes of the drama that is Junior’s carrying the fuck on, the Dalai Lama would be like, “I can just sit with a lot of annoying things and be at peace with them but your dog is way too much. I gotta go.”

Or …who’s more laid back than the Dalai Lama?

OMG, I HAVE IT.

Matthew fucking McConaughey! My dog could harsh stoned-ass Mr. “Alright Alright Alriiiiight” Matthew McConaughey’s mellow, I swear to you.

matthew-mcconaughey-300

Nice, uhh…belt buckle.

Sidenote: Mr. McConaughey, if you’re reading this and you want to test the theory, please do feel free to stop by. I make excellent brownies and I’m definitely a fan. A big…BIG fan.

Ahem.

Anyway, WTF was I talking about before I got distracted by Matthew McConaughey?

Oh, right. My dog being a shit.

So, I’m laying on my back starfish-style in the middle of the living room floor this evening (I TOLD you things get weird when my husband isn’t home), attempting to meditate. It didn’t actually start out as attempted meditation, by the way.  It started out as attempted yoga to try and coax the GIANT KNOT OF EVIL out of my back. Which, that sort of worked but sort of didn’t because the original giant knot of evil kind of eased off but then two other places started to seize up on me while I was laying on the floor. Which was why I was laying starfish-style on the living room floor to begin with – because basically, I couldn’t get up.

SO, while I was stuck down there, I figured I might as well close my eyes and try to meditate for a little bit. Or more to the point, “sit with the pain”, as they say. Those fucking sadists.

So, again, laying on the floor on my back, arms and legs akimbo. Eyes closed, taking nice deep breaths. Calming breaths. Quiet breaths. So quiet. So calm. Everything is smoothing out, things are coming down a few notches all by themselves. Things are OK. I’m whole, I’m at peace, I am a denizen of the motherfucking light…

…and then the shit hits the fan.

“AAAAAAA-RRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!”

The dog was three inches from my head when he let out with this full-throat war cry of doom. Also, keep in mind that he’s a tiny dog – he weighs like 10lbs and is smaller than most house cats – so it’s not like a regular sized dog’s howl. It’s as if someone took the tiniest miniature wolf imaginable, gave it several hits of helium…and then stepped on its tail. (Side note: if you like puppies, do yourself a favor and search “tiny howl” on YouTube when you’ve got like an hour or three to spare. I assure you, you will not be disappointed. Case in point. Also, that video is not at ALL what my dog’s howl sounds like, unfortunately.)

“AAAAAAA-RRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! ARRRR ARRRRR ARRRR-OOOO!”

Three. Inches. From my head. After ten whole minutes of blissful silence and falling deeper and deeper into a concentrated state of mellow (which, as I’m sure you’re aware, does not come easily to those with teh ADHD and anxiety). It was like someone dumping a bucket of ice water on a sleeping person. Much spluttering and swearing ensued.

What set him off? WHO FUCKING KNOWS. It certainly wasn’t a knock at the door or a car in the driveway or any other even remotely reasonable thing. Maybe a mouse farted three houses over. Maybe the wind blew in the scent of the Dreaded Neighbor Cats. Maybe it was the exact moment when Mercury hit the 7th house of Libra with Pluto ascendant. This is legit how capricious my dog is. There doesn’t even HAVE to be a reason for him to sound the alarm. It’s like he’ll sit there and think to himself, “You know, I haven’t scared the shit out of the humans with my sudden blood-curdling howls lately. Maybe I’ll let one rip right…NOW”, and he’s off.

So, suffice to say, my mellow was harshed quite suddenly and thoroughly.

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“Not a single one of the six people that read this blog are going to believe you, Mahm. I have stolen all their souls through the Internet and turned them all against you.” -Junior T. Armitage

 

home alone 3: the sandwiching

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Oh, hey. Remember when I used to write shit here a long time ago? I should probably do that again. Right now seems like a good time since it’s a gorgeous day out, I told like three different people I’d visit them today, AND I have a list of Chores I Wanted To Get Done. So obviously, the best course of action is to procrastinate like a motherfucker.

Anyway.

The last couple weeks have been weird. My husband has been having to work later shifts than normal so I’ve been home alone for dinner like 3-4 nights a week lately. On the one hand, that means less dishes to wash and not having to watch Judge Judy while we eat (don’t ask). On the other hand, I get weird when I’m home alone.

I mean, I’m definitely weird anyway, but Home Alone me is…weirder. More weird? Whatever. You wouldn’t think it would affect me much, considering I was an only child who was alone a lot growing up and then I lived by myself for like seven years before I got married. But, yeah. Home Alone me is an odd duck.

Basically, I forget how to feed myself when I’m home alone. Not in the sense that I run around smearing pureed squash on the dog instead of eating it (the squash I mean, not the dog. He’s kind of an ‘it’ because he’s neutered, but I definitely wouldn’t eat him. Wait, what? Jesus, reel it in Shelby. Gahd.), but more in the “let’s eat three bites each of several disparate foodstuffs, or just a generally inappropriate amount of any one thing and call that dinner” sense. One night last week it was smoked cheese, maple creme cookies and chicken soup. Not all together, but like…a few bites here, a few bites there. One other night I had like four pieces of bread and butter, and a beer. NOT AN APPROPRIATE DINNER ON ANY LEVEL.

It’s not just dinner. Pretty much any meal where I don’t have to feed another human being other than myself, I end up eating strangely. This afternoon, for example, Mark is out doing a thing and I’ve managed to eat: four dates, a handful of salt-and-vinegar almonds, and a “sandwich” for “lunch” (picture me air-quoting those). The “sandwich” consisted of a piece of steak left over from last night’s dinner, stuck between two pieces of the Cheddar Parmesan sourdough bread I made yesterday. No dressing, no veggies, no accoutrements of any kind. I didn’t even fucking slice the steak or warm it up first!

You think I’m kidding but I’m not:

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Seems legit.

 

I guess throwing a steak between two pieces of bread and calling it a sandwich isn’t THAT weird in the grand scheme of things, but still. For someone who actually really likes to cook, you’d think I could have come up with something a little more ambitious to gnaw on.

 

 

the lost art of changing the roll

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How long does it take to change the roll of toilet paper, really? I’ve never timed myself, but I’d guesstimate that it typically takes about 5-10 seconds. Maybe double that if you have to like, walk across the bathroom to get a replacement roll of toilet paper and walk it back to the holder (in which case, you need to maybe rethink the layout of your bathroom).

Given that it takes so little time and energy to change out an empty roll for a full one, why is it that so many people just leave the empty roll for someone else to replace? It’s not like it’s costing you any money. You don’t even have to elevate your heart rate. You’re not touching anything gross. You aren’t going to miss an important phone call or miss out on a big business deal by lingering in the bathroom an extra ten seconds.

Basically the only thing you’re achieving by NOT changing the toilet paper roll is making someone else’s day just a tiny bit worse, whether it’s at home or at work.  If you could choose between making someone’s day suck slightly more or making it suck slightly less, why wouldn’t you choose to make it suck less? I’m the nihilistic misanthrope here, and even I can manage to muster up enough give-a-shit for my fellow man to bother to change the fucking toilet roll when I empty it.

tp

The shreds hanging from it are just an extra dose of fuck you. Don’t be this guy.

 

 

klutz life

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slip-and-fall

I didn’t choose the klutz life, the klutz life chose me.

I’ve always been a klutz. In addition to being a fat-ass (it’s ok, I’m at peace with it. Plus, it’s literally true), I’m also fairly tall at 5’10”. I have long legs and big feet, and both seem to like to get tangled up in things.

I hadn’t done anything particularly klutzy in quite a while before today. I had mostly managed to remain upright at the appropriate times and kept all my body parts largely intact. The worst I could come up with were a few burns from a particularly hate-filled cookie sheet last week. No biggie, comparatively speaking.

But, all good things must come to an end, as they say.

This afternoon as I was walking back to my apartment from the car, I stepped up onto the concrete slab of the breezeway that separates our place from the neighbor’s, and promptly careened forward in violent fashion.

Here seems a good place to note that one of the downsides of being tall is that it seems like it takes longer to hit the ground when you’re falling, so you have more time to consider your impending doom. You also have slightly more time to try and enact mid-course corrections, but let’s be honest, those very rarely pan out once rapid descent has begun.

This was one of those times where I was sort of slow-motion falling, so my brain was trying to compensate for the misstep and help me catch my footing again…but it was way too late. As a result, I took what amounted to three giant beyond-full-stride steps across the breezeway in ever-increasingly out of balance fashion, and then went down like a ton of shit three inches from the front door of the apartment across from ours.

First of all, THANK FUCK the tenant in that apartment had recently moved out and so wasn’t around to see my slow-motion descent into pain and suffering; or worse, the subsequent peeling of myself up off the cold concrete slab while swearing a blue streak and trying not to cry. Second of all, thank fuck AGAIN for the fact that I fell where I did because if I had been just a few inches closer to the door I’d be at the ER having broken glass picked out of my previously-cute face right now.

Once I got myself up off the concrete (with no small amount of Bambi-on-ice-type machinations), I turned to look back and see what it was I had tripped on. The only thing I could find was a small stone, about a half inch long and quarter inch thick, sitting innocently enough near the edge of the step.

Whether it was that bastarding little thing that sent me into my very painful sprawl, I have no way of knowing…but I think I’m going to blame it, just out of spite.

fuck Kokomo

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When I was in elementary school, music class was basically my everything. Some kids live for recess…I LIVED for music class.

We went through a few music teachers during my years in school (which, after a brief stint of thinking I wanted to be a music teacher myself and spending a very small amount of time in a classroom with a bunch of howling banshees…I mean, children…I can totally understand why). My favorite by far was an exotic (for late ’80’s rural Vermont, anyway) Latina woman named Maricel.

I’m not sure how old Maricel was when she was teaching us, but looking back on some of the songs she taught us, I have to figure she was probably fairly young. She taught us some traditional Spanish-language songs, but her main thing was pop music. For instance, for the spring concert circa 1989 or 1990, she had the 8th grade class learn and sing Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. I was a lowly 4th grader at that point and I was so impressed because geez, that song was like, EDGY. To a ten year old, anyway.

Maricel’s song selection for MY class that year was “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys. I was kind of obsessed with the Beach Boys at the time (mostly their older catalog – I was snob even back then), so “Kokomo” was right up my alley.

Or so I thought.

Part of the problem was that even as a young kid, I had a good ear for music. I could usually sing a melody back accurately after hearing it just once or twice. If you’ve ever heard “Kokomo”, you know it’s a very simple melody with a ton of repetition. So basically, I learned to sing “Kokomo” in one 45-minute class period.

Enter the second part of the problem: I was (and still am) very, VERY impatient. I didn’t understand why we had to keep beating the “Kokomo” horse after the third or fourth class because it was very clearly dead to me at that point. The horse, I mean. I are phrase good.

Anyway – you can probably guess how it went. Because we were performing the song at the big spring concert, it had to be PERFECT, so we rehearsed it SUPER EXTRA A LOT TIMES A MILLIONTY…and I got really fucking bored, really fucking quickly.

A bored Shelby is not generally a disruptive Shelby – I wasn’t the kid who would start singing a different song or take off running around the room or something. I’d just kind of slip off into la-la land and do my own thing inside my head until something more shiny and interesting came along. The thing about daydreaming though, is that you often absorb bits of what’s going on around you in real life even though you’re essentially off with the fairies. So the whole time I was standing there going through the motions in class while secretly planning out my unicorn ranch, my brain was still being subjected to the song “Kokomo” being repeated over and over…and over…

…and over…

…and 25(ish) years later? I CANNOT FUCKING STAND THAT SONG. It annoys me to an irrational degree. All I have to hear is that first breathy phrase, “Aaaa-ruba, Jamaica…”, and I’m scrambling to switch the station. Gah, it made me twitch even just hearing it in my head when I typed it just then!

By the way, did I mention that my co-worker listens exclusively to the Margaritaville XM Radio station at work? EXCLUSIVELY. Not on headphones, either. Margaritaville refers, of course, to the Jimmy Buffett song of the same name, and the station’s playlist is comprised of similar beachy, laid-back, Caribbean-feeling tunes.

Like, for instance, “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys…

minion

#Iwokeuplikethis

cacked up

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Today I’m supposed to tell you about the last thing I fixed or built.

The last thing I fixed was our bastard-ass bathroom faucet, like I do EVERY bloody day lately.

A couple weeks ago there was a notice in the paper that the town would be flushing the water mains and that water might “be temporarily brown in appearance” while this was going on, but not to worry, it would clear up quickly.  Fine, no problem.  Flush away, good sirs!

Two or three days after the water main flushing started, we had a catastrophic loss of water pressure.  I’m talking like, couldn’t shower, couldn’t do laundry, couldn’t wash dishes.  About the only thing we COULD do was flush the toilet (thankfully).  The landlord couldn’t figure it out, so he had the handyman come look at it.  It took the handyman almost 40 minutes of hemming and hawing before he finally grabbed a wrench and unscrewed the filter thingy on the end of the kitchen faucet.

“Oooh, look at THAT”, he said.

I peered over his shoulder curiously.  Lo and behold, the filter was full of sand and cack.  ‘Cack’ is our household technically term for unidentified gross stuff.

The handyman went around to the other faucets and the washing machine, which all have similar screens, and were all filled with similar sand and cack.  He rinsed them all out and everything worked beautifully again so I thought our problems were solved.

Thinking my problems are solved is usually where things take a down-turn, at least in my experience, and this time was no different.  The day after the handyman fixed everything, the shower suddenly went right back down to a trickle again.  Shortly after I stomped to the hardware store at 7:30am to buy a new shower head, knowing full well the old one was probably clogged up with additional sand and cack that I couldn’t get to in order to clean out (because it doesn’t come apart, it just unscrews from the pipe itself), the kitchen and bathroom faucets both seized up the very same way as before as well.

Being somewhat mechanically inclined myself, and being the type who doesn’t like to bother other people to do things that I know damn well I can do myself, I went around to the faucets with my wrench and I did the same thing the handyman had done – unscrewed the screens, found a bunch of cack, rinsed it out, re-attached the screens, et voila – happy flowing water, hooray!  Warm fuzzies and general smugness all around.

However, the warm fuzzies and general smugness have worn off now, because I have had to (literally!) rinse and repeat this process every day for the last week and a half now.  And my brand new $25 shower head that worked so wonderfully that first morning?  Has a markedly lower pressure output the last few days.  I’m giving it until Sunday, which will make two weeks of this bullshit, before I start calling the town office and asking when my taps are going to stop filling up with sand.

I probably won’t ask them about the cack though, because they’ll likely hang up on me.

sunday not so funday

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We haven’t had water since Friday night.

Well, that’s not entirely true. We have a LITTLE water…it’s basically just a sad little trickle coming out of the taps. The toilet still flushes, which is a definite plus, and showers are possible if you’re really patient and also don’t mind not actually feeling all that clean afterward (ugh), but doing laundry and running the dishwasher are both on the no-go list currently.

Have I mentioned before that I usually save all the laundry, heavy-duty cooking and resultant heavy-duty dish-washing for weekends? Well…I do. And now I can’t do the mountain of laundry that has piled up, or do any serious cooking because trying to wash greasy dishes by hand with no water pressure is not my idea of a good time.

I also can’t leave to go get my grocery shopping done (which is my Sunday-morning ritual. The week’s sale flyer goes into effect on Sunday so the store hasn’t had a chance to run out of stuff yet. Plus, if I go early enough I don’t have to deal with very may other people, which is A++ awesome and worth getting up early for), because the landlord told me the maintenance guy would be here “first thing” this morning, quoting me a time of 8am. It’s now 8:30 and there’s no sign of the maintenance guy (who lives like five minutes up the road).

So basically, my whole weekend routine has been shot to shit. This probably wouldn’t phase most people but it makes me twitchy and anxious. I get all messed up and switched into “well I can’t do X, Y and Z like I want, so I might as well not do ANYTHING productive” mode, which is neither helpful nor easy for me to break out of once I’m there. I’m fighting that mode at the moment by writing this, by making my grocery list, by going around picking up laundry and sorting it so that when the water is (oh god please) fixed later I can start right in on washing.

Oh good, the maintenance guy just pulled in. There’s hope yet for my sanity…

sock-mergency

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The weather app on my phone lied to me again this morning.

It claimed that the temperature was supposed to be around 55 degrees and there was supposed to be sunshine.

Currently, it’s 46 degrees, overcast, and gusting wind.  Which, to be fair, is a lot more common weather for Vermont this time of year than the whole “55 and sunny” scenario.

Unfortunately, rather than listening to my realist brain this morning, I listened to the weather app, and dressed for 55 and sunny.

And now I’m fucking freezing.

Now granted, I do work in an office so it’s not like I’m not sheltered from the elements, but my office is in a very old farmhouse so the term “sheltered” is used…somewhat conditionally.  There are, for instance, 3/4″ gaps between the window casings and the frames of the crappy old removable plate-glass windows.  You can see a sizable strip of daylight between the two, and wind certainly has no problem gusting right in as well.  More than a couple times in the past eight years I’ve actually seen rain or snow driven through these gaps when the wind has wheeled in just the right direction.

I do have a small cache of knitted goods in my office for exactly this reason.  There’s a pair of finger-less mitts and a big fuzzy stole / scarf / lap-blanket thing currently, and supplemental scarves will be added as winter grinds on.

What I do NOT have, which I clearly need if today is any indication, is a pair of emergency socks for the days when my idiot self listens to the weather app.

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Hi, I’m Shelby and I like to torture myself.