Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2004-11-12 - 8:18 a.m.

Near Breakdown at the Safeway, or Never Try to Revamp Your Life When You Have a Sinus Infection

I had a crap day yesterday. Crap! I can't even TELL you. Okay, I could tell you, but I won't; it'd be boring if you weren't there, and painful to re-live if you WERE there, which I was. Enough to say that a day that winds you up at seven p.m. in the wrong town in a grocery store parking lot in the rain, weeping because you CAN'T, is a crap day.

Bad enough that I had to think about it afterwards to see what I could've done differently. No, bad enough - this is serious bad - that when I got up this morning, there was a clean coffee cup with a spoon balanced across it sitting in front of the coffee maker, and the sugar bowl had been carefully placed next to it; one of the kids (the younger one, I'm guessing) was trying to do something extra-nice for me, bless her heart. That bad.

Here's what I think. This isn't new information, this is something I've been aware of for a long time, but just have not ever figured out how to accommodate: I'm not a long-term high-gear person. I don't survive long with the first-we-go-here and then-we-go-there after running-by-here-to-pick-this-up scheduling. The entire days that are scheduled down in fifteen-minute increments, going from one activity or obligation to something completely different requiring a whole other mindset and a whole other set of clothing/equipment/players to contend with.

For a long time, I have wanted the Perfect Organizer. You know the one - it has the perfect combination of day and week style calendars, and just the right spaces for to-do lists and notes, and affordable refills. It feels just right in your hand, and most importantly, it fixes your entire life so that you never end up in the wrong town at the wrong time with the wrong stuff. You carry that sucker, you're invincible. You're exactly where you need to be with just what you need, every time, and when you leave people stare after you in amazement. "She's so...so...dynamic!" they exclaim. That one. They don't seem to carry it at Wal-Mart. I've been through a bunch of them.

Now I'm thinking it just doesn't matter; I could hire a full-time secretary and carry HIM around with me, and I'd still eventually end up wailing in parking lots if I let my life complexify (hey, shut up, it is too a word) too much. I just haven't the constitution for it. My best friend revels in that stuff - she's always up to her eyeballs in this and that and go-heres and dinner-in-ten-minutes-or-we'll-be-lates, and she flourishes even when she gets cross over it all; I know plenty of people like that, and damn, they're dynamic. I suppose I'm not dynamic. I wanted to be svelte, too, and only succeeded in occasionally hitting skinny; I wanted to be urbane and got as far as goofy, or maybe offbeat. If people stare after me at all, it must be to say, "Damn, she's going to be so late!" or, "What was that stuck in her hair?"

When I was young and lived by myself and had to be at work at eight-thirty, I got up before six. I always did. Why? Because I needed to stare at the wall. I needed to drink coffee and stare into space. I'd tell you I was thinking, but I don't know that it was really thinking. It wasn't really daydreaming, either. It was a kind of a combination, rolling through what I had to do, and what I might do, and what I had done. Musing. It was musing. I need that.

I can muse while driving, or while drinking coffee, or while reading, or writing. I can't muse when going billy-hell across two lanes of tight traffic to squeeze into the commute lane so I can try to rescue the two minutes I lost looking for my car keys. I can't muse while careening a grocery cart around corners collecting groceries that I won't even be able to deliver to my mother because I will get out to the car and discover that I haven't brought the phone number I need to make a crucial phone call at six-thirty and that I now have to take the groceries which I haven't got room in MY freezer for back down the freeway to my house to make the stupid phone call.

And when I have no muse time, no time to sit by myself in mental quiet and let my mind roam, I get more and more fragmented and stressed and snappish, and less capable of doing anything well. When I try to THINK, just THINK, all that comes to mind is the mountain of things I haven't done, the wave of zombie tasks, the UnDone, coming over the hill with their arms outstretched and their bandages flapping.

Woh. That scared even ME.

So anyway. I've joked before about thinking I belonged in a halfway house making potholders and having my name on an Assigned Weekly Chores list, but that may not really be all that far off the mark. I am not so much one of those people who needs a vacation, like two weeks off in the sun to suck down drinks that have parasols in them. I'm one of those people (I am assuming that there are more than one of us) that needs her vacation in small increments, daily, for sanity. Down time. Slack. Space. Room to breathe in, and out again. Room to muse.

I don't need a new DayRunner. I need a DayWalker, or perhaps a DayAmbler or a DayStroller. I need to put on the indicator and move back into the slow lane, even if it means having to watch other people whizz by and give me the finger, and having friends say (as they do) "No, that's all right, I'll drive," because I make them crazy. I don't know quite how to get there, but I think it is better to honor my own capabilities than to try to live some dynamic stranger's life. Besides, I have to go get the gum out of my hair now.

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