Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-09-06 - 6:54 a.m.

Grief and Floss

Back to work. Back to where I look around my home at all the things I need to do and think "Oh, if I only had a day OFF, I'd..." If I only had a day off, I know what I'd really do: nothing. I'd be all, "hey, it's my day off."

It's perspective. Yesterday I got cross because I didn't have time to floss my teeth. I was brushing them and doing this whole resentment number in my head because I had to brush them too fast and you KNOW what happens if you brush your teeth too fast, don't you? You MISS, you do that thing where you ram the brush RIGHT into the gums under your front teeth. So I was resenting having to hurry and also the fact that I didn't have ten minutes to go find my Sonicare which is in a cosmetics bag somewhere and that I wasn't going to have time to floss either, what kind of a life is it when you don't even have time to take care of your own damned teeth, and then I remembered that I'd sat in bed and read all my e-mail. My whole little put-upon head rant just popped like a soap bubble. Oh well.

Don't worry: I can get another one easy.

I zipped out of bed this morning and washed last night's dishes while waiting for the coffee to finish. I really did. It wasn't because I'd had some great amount of sleep - it's a timing thing. In some parts of the sleep cycle you can just wake up, wake all the way up, and it's cool. But ten minutes after that, you can't, it's "ohhhh nooooo, it's not morning yet..." You know how sometimes you wake yourself up and you're pretty awake and it's good but you look at the clock and see you have twenty more minutes and you can't stand to waste that so you go back to sleep and then when the alarm DOES go off you're out of it again? I need the kind of alarm that has some kind of sensor that can tell where you are in the sleep cycle. I don't care so much what time I get up, I just want to be awakened in the "Good MORNING!" part of the cycle instead of the "awww shit..." part. I seem to have a very long awww shit part, since that's almost always the part the alarm actually goes off in. Just got lucky today.

I say I'm back to work, but it isn't like I wasn't working. I just have a bunch of odd jobs. In the fall I go back to the alarm-clock job, the sack-lunch job, the what-do-I-wear job. The rest of the time I work at things that haven't got schedules or dress requirements. I like those jobs too, but they don't contribute much to discipline. "I'll go later." "I'll finish tomorrow." Now I can't do that in the morning. Can't sit here and write essays, can't be discovering I forgot to put my pants in the dryer last night, oh no. Got to make those sack lunches.

I don't like making sack lunches for myself. Requires too much forethought. I'm always thinking, "A sandwich is fine, that's enough." Sandwich and a water bottle, right. Then I eat the sandwich in the car in between jobs, I'm all, "I'm HUNGRY, why did I only pack a peanut butter sandwich? Why don't I have a chicken Caesar salad or a bagel with lox and cream cheese and red onion or some sliced turkey with pesto mayonnaise and tomato?" Because who can consider pesto mayonnaise at seven-thirty in the morning? Seven-thirty is more like, "Did I put the jelly on that one or not?"

Have to eat the peanut butter, though. Packed it, gotta eat it. Because I pass thirty-four fast food places on my way to my next job, hamburger stands and coffee houses and delicatessens, and I'm less tempted when I have sandwich stuck to the roof of my mouth. And at my wages, stopping for lunch pretty much wipes out the morning of work. That would make sense if there was only me: work a few hours, get lunch. But the mortgage company doesn't get that. My kids don't get that either. My kids are addicted to school supplies, and I'm leaking money this time of year. Work all morning, eat the peanut butter, buy the staplers and the folders and the spiral notebooks.

I want to know where the Secret Scissor Warehouse is. Every year scissors are on the supply list; every year I buy them and send them. They don't come home; where do they go? I figure our elementary is raking off 500 pairs of Fiskars for Kids every year. They gotta be somewhere. Or are they in league with Fiskars? Am I buying recycled scissors every September?

Okay. Sandwich is in the sack with a water bottle, scissors are labeled and in a bag with the tissue boxes and the white glue requested by the school, it's time to leave, and I don't have time to floss my teeth again. Life is damned unfair.

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