Send therapists

It seemed a good idea at the time.

If you look down to the floor (not to close, I didn't vacuum) you'll see a wooden wedge which has slipped out from under the bookcases. This is an oldish building and the wedge was intended to make up for an uneven floor that tilts the bookcases forward in a precarious sort of way.

I washed the curtains this weekend, and because you can't actually get into the corner on the left without dismantling the room, I've worked out a system whereby I thread them onto the curtain rod, stand on a chair by the balcony door and then fling the curtained rod in the direction of the hook on the far left. Mostly this works. All I have to do then is move the rickety kitchen chair to the left corner, lean over about three feet while stretching to the ceiling & make sure the rod in actually in it's hook.

But I noticed after (carefully) limping off the chair that the left side curtains looked wrong. Oh joy, the middle panel had tabs hanging limply off the rod. I'd sort of forgotten about the tilt, so I cleared the plants and flowers, the bowls of stones and (carefully) climbed up to stand on the top of the bookcase. It was at this point that I had a religious experience. The bookcase began to sway a little and I began to pray, fervently as I threaded curtain tabs and wobbled on my bad ankle. "Oh Lord, just don't let the bookcase break or fall over and I will never ever do this again, Amen."

Evidently there is a God.

I went back to beading, because the worst that can happen with that is a foul temper and finger pricks.

Later, the Scorpio phoned. He called because a lady was hit by a car at a crosswalk near my house and, he said, he wanted to make sure it wasn't me. I was so touched by his concern that I made extravagant promises of a sexual nature, only to realize later that while he is worried about my well-being, he also has been calling me Gerald Ford (Google it, those under 40) lately and is mightily entertained by my propensity towards falling off my own shoes.

I didn't say anything about the curtains, just in case.

I am a corporation.

You're not the boss of me.

Here in Chez Spryfield, the problem is that no one is the boss of me, which leaves me as my own supervisor. Around the time of the divorce, I used to imagine that when I became supervisor, executive director and president of myself and my free time, I would write the Great Canadian Literary Non-fiction masterpiece or at least publish a few magazine articles or perhaps Do Good Works. I imagined that I would cook healthy meals without wads of dead flesh in them and go to the gym regularly. Things, things would always be exactly where I left them. No one would cut electrical wire with my good sewing scissors. I would keep a journal in which I wrote brilliant insights (as opposed to perpetually whining.)

I have approximately seven years of proof that none of this is will ever happen.

First of all (although this is very old news now) I cried for three months. I did (on the up side, if you can call it that) lose about 25 pounds, 10 of which were necessary to actually sustain life. I began to talk to plants. I lived on a diet of coffee, wine and cigarettes. I wrote volumes - of email to a long-suffering friend, who did his best, from a couple thousand miles away, to keep the sinking ship of my sanity from going to the bottom and me from walking off into a snowstorm and having a sleepover in the woods with a bottle of wine for company. Other than that, I developed a writer's block the size of the western hemisphere. But I looked great in my jeans.

Because no one is the boss of me, I've developed the different voices that exist in everyones heads (do NOT tell me you don't have them) and I've made sock puppets out of them. It's a regular puppet festival at my house. One of the puppets is my supervisor and is in charge of phrases like "you should," "you have to," and "when are you going to..." get off eBay, stop watching your bid on a Pietersite cabochon, start drinking water instead of coffee, get the laundry done, catch up on correspondence, do some writing, develop some for-gawd-sake ambition, wash the floor and so forth.

Another one, The Hanging Judge, comments on my life. It inquires as to when I'm getting one. It remarks that it is Saturday night and I am not on a date. It ruminates about the notion that everyone on the entire planet has a close and loving family and/or a mate, except me. It sighs and expresses the thought that I might have had talent but I'm too lazy and addled to use it and besides, it's too late now. It advises me, unnecessarily, that my place of employ is in the financial toilet and that morale is already on its way to the sewage treatment plant. It opines that my ankle will probably never heal and I will have to wear sensible lace-up shoes until I die. And support hose.

There's the child, who wishes everyone would shut up and let her watch the sky in peace and eat cake for breakfast.

The Piss-ant I picture as a belligerent 11 year old with scabby knees, curses and swears and leaves flies in the drinks of grownups, is in charge of answering the above characters. Her favorite lines are:
"Am not," "Fuck you," "Bullshit," and "You can't make me."

Lately, another voice has joined the crowd. This one is an actual adult, calmer, quieter. She listens a little to the Supervisor and gets some of the work done. She lets the kid watch the sky for a while. And she mostly dismisses the Hanging Judge.

She's saying, right now, that it doesn't matter that some rat-bastard just outbid us for a world-class piece of Pietersite for a lousy two buck difference. The rest of us are just plain pissed off about it. Except for the kid, who wants to watch a movie.

If you feel that you could coordinate in any kind of helpful way, kindly leave a resume. We are in dire need of a corporate takeover.

Hobbies that can kill you

Saturday, as we approached what is in most of the civilized world, spring, my alpha rhythms went delta. All of them. Outside, it blew fat wet snowclods, which changed to sleet and freezing rain and finally to rain. The streets were as sloppy and grey as my state of mind.

I'm not one to sit and conduct a pity party for any more than a few days or weeks, so I decided to cheer myself up by taking an online IQ test. The results (the ones you didn't have to actually pay for) declared me to be stunningly average. (As Weedy says, "Remember that part in American Beauty when the girl wails 'I am not ordinary'?" Matter of fact, yes. Matter of fact, I was howling something just like that to my walls.)

And it seems, from the scant information they deigned to provide free of charge at the conclusion of the test, that it is visual pattern recognition that lowers my score. You know: the part of the test where they show you four objects that look like squared off, tortured drain pipes, and ask which one doesn't fit? I flunk those.

Once, during the Christmas season in Toronto, when I was working in my business partner's store and ripping yet another folding box, my partner exclaimed merrily to the customer, "Can you believe she can work with all those teeny little beads and she can't fold a gift box?" So, I ask you, how am I going to manage the twisty drainpipe problem?

And I've taken that round peg/round hole test too. And the psychologist, in an amazingly unprofessional display (I thought) remarked, "I'm surprised. You're such a bright girl," as I attempted to squish a triangle into a square hole.

Just thank the gods I didn't take up driving - or architecture.

I do splendidly on general knowledge and communication. I can easily figure out what number comes next in a sequence. But there's another area that drags my score down, too...

If four trucks with six wheels each are travelling down a highway carrying eighteen bicycles and it is snowing in Japan, what direction are they going and when will they get to Memphis?
I'm not kidding. This is precisely how these questions look to me. And then, instead of trying to figure it out, I stare at the screen and say (usually aloud because I live alone) "Who the fuck cares? Are you serious? Who needs to know this kind of shite?" My brain grinds into reverse. I can almost feel my brain hurting. Don't tell me about having no pain centers in the brain. The brain knows when it's being asked to imitate a seal balancing a ball on its nose. And then I guess.
Eight o'clock p.m. Why not? Who cares? Personally, I'm wishing flat tires on them all and urging the drivers to stop and have a nap.

Afterwards, I turn my average talents to thinking up solutions to the intricate problems of world peace. Stay tuned.