Dumb Girl Hates Babysitting

There's just no explaining it.  What possible reason could there be for my now longstanding distaste for this cushy job?  I mean, it'd be one thing if I didn't like kids, right?  There are plenty of people who don't like babysitting.  Those people also wouldn't like, I don't know, say, hanging out with kids who hate reading trying to figure out how to get them to like it.  You see where I'm going with this? 

I have felt this way about babysitting for as long as I can remember, and "as long as I can remember" dates back to when I was about 12 and began my now very long babysitting career. (Though I will say this about career length: The "long" refers in this case as it does to my lackluster grocery-bagging career which is to measure not the quantity of work but rather the time elapsed between the first incidence and the most recent.  In the case of the grocery-bagging, the career lasted seventeen days, four of which I actually reported for duty. The babysitting career began 22 years ago, but I started resisting pretty much immediately, so I haven't actually done it that much.  Just to give you a little perspective.)

[I feel I'd be remiss at this point if I weren't to apologize for the sentence structure in my last paragraph, if you could call it a paragraph.  I used to do battle almost daily with my 11th grade American literature teacher so exasperated was I by the carryings on of Henry James.  Only recently has it occurred to me that perhaps H. James inspired such volatility in my 15 year-old self not because I was irritated by how all we ever got to talk about when we read him was sex but rather because I thought it wasn't fair that he could write a sentence as long as he ever pleased and I didn't get such license. OK, actually it was probably both.  In any case, though, I may be taking it out on you, patient reader.]

In the beginning, it was the scary creaky old New England houses that turned me off to the occupation.  I'd tuck children into their little rooms under the eaves and creep reluctantly downstairs, trying not to look out the windows for fear there'd be something lurking, find the room with the most curtains and the couch against the wall, and make myself as small as I could for the long hours ahead.  Of course, I wasn't blessed with the kind of inner peace that might have allowed me to assume that unless I had reason to believe otherwise, things were OK with my upstairs charges, so every so often I'd gather up the courage to make the trip back up to make sure they were still a) there, b) in one piece, and c) breathing, if they happened to be of the age at which I had to worry about that.  Because I assure you, worry I did.

But what about later, once I was no longer terrified of everything that moved in the dark?  Why can't I be like my friends who not only love children but also love the downright racket of spending an hour or two with a child, playing and reading and singing and watching them make a mess you aren't really responsible for cleaning up, putting said child to bed, and then having a few more PAID hours to just hang out and watch TV or read or do NOTHING without the chores and other distracting responsibilities of home?  It's like free freaking money!

I've been reading in the past day or two about the potential physical, spiritual, and emotional costs of forcing yourself to do things that suck the life out of you, which I suppose is why I'm carrying on so about this.  It's just that it doesn't baffle me so when I find that I hate things like going to bars, sitting in cubicles without windows, or, I don't know, cooking.  It's just this one that doesn't seem to make sense, given the way I enthusiastically spend the rest of my time.  

But still, you're probably wondering.  Why bother to even think about it?  There are plenty of babysitters out there who'd love to take advantage of the opportunity.  Well, the thing is, we've got this new family member, my cousin's daughter, and in just a few months, 8 or 10 I'm told, they'll be moving very very very far away, and I don't want to miss her while she's here.  So here I am, on a Thursday night, having survived the mere 60 minutes of kid time that felt more like 4 hours, getting paid to sit here by myself at the computer, which we all know is one of my favorite places to be, and resenting the hell out of it.  What on earth is WRONG with me?

The Meeting, Part Two

Oddly enough, I don't know that I have much to say about the meeting itself, other than that I went, and that I had the unusual experience of being interested in helping, even though I could see that participation would likely be something other than fun for much of the time. For one thing, I'm not patient, and food co-ops tend to take years to launch. No instant or even foreseeable gratification, really. For another, I'm not that good with being behind the scenes with things. I like lots of attention. And I don't like to do much work. Those can truly a tricky combo make.

The thing was, I quickly got the sense that this start-up effort had an unusual kind of spirit to it - the kind that could not only readily inspire the people around it, but also figure out how to make use of those people in a way that really sang with who they all were. In other words, I could be the cranky lazy pessimistic exhausted resigned person I am and this movement, these people, would find a way to coax contribution out of me without even really having to ask.

Or maybe it was just that they had the good sense to have a facilitator for the meeting. Either way, I trudged myself over to the meeting, and when we get back from my grandfather's memorial service this weekend, I'll spend Sunday evening at the Portland Food Co-op steering committee meeting. It won't be my first choice of pastimes - we've got several more episodes' worth of Prison Break to get through, and I'm just about to figure out the trick to the Sudoku puzzles with the level five difficulty rating - but I'll be there. And it'll be right where I belong.

The Meeting, Part One

On Friday the Portland Wild Oats is closing. I don't know whether all of the Wild Oatses are closing on the same day, but that's when it's happening here. The most careful of the shop-local-and-independenters probably never had anything to do with Wild Oats, but those of us who used the farmers' market and other local food sellers a lot but not exclusively will miss it. In spite of its corporate self, it's been small enough for us to recognize employees, friendly enough for us to like them, and designed in such a way that grocery shopping can be enjoyed, even by the cranky likes of me.

We went for the last time two Saturdays ago, when they'd just announced the closing and everything was 20% off. We decided halfway down the meat aisle that it would be our last visit, when the empty meat case actually made me cry. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I'm just not good with change. And the chicken apple sausage at Whole Foods bites. It tastes just like chicken. If I wanted chicken, I'd eat chicken.

So we made our way through the aisles just that last time, stocking up on sweet rice, oats, and other things we know to be even more overpriced at Whole Foods and not always available at other places. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure they have sweet rice in bulk at Whole Foods. Bulk at the Portland Whole Foods means, for the most part, nuts in plastic. Anyway. We had to go back to Wild Oats for a dozen eggs and some polenta the following week, but I wasn't allowed in for fear of further tears.

But I digress. The point is that it reminded us enough of how much we need a good place to buy food around here, a place that is willing to figure out how to make a profit and still support small local organic farmers. So when I got an email from a fellow writers group member inviting me to a forum about the formation of a food co-op in town, I was ripe for the picking, as they say. I don't normally like to help with things, frankly. I would, pretty much as a rule, prefer staying home to... well, most anything that requires going out.

And on a Tuesday night. Tuesday night is bachelor night at our house, when I get the whole evening to do with what I please, which usually consists of writing irrelevant blog postings, watching reruns of Dharma and Greg, and getting way ahead in the Sudoku calendar. It was going to be a lot to sacrifice, especially given how much I hate meetings, which is a lot, because there are usually people at them, and whenever and wherever there are people, there are things to be annoyed about. And at this kind of meeting, I can also count on the mother of all annoyances: the stark relief into which my own general apathy and laziness is brought, as soon as I hear people talking about something they care about and have been working hard at. So you understand it was going to be something of a stretch for me to get myself there. Plus it was going to be like a two block walk.

Floor Mats (Don't Say I Didn't Warn You)

Truth in advertising is the reason for the title of this post. I spent today immersed in the following activities: attempting to locate a funeral home in a town in which I do not live, virtually without directions, or sense of direction, for that matter; attempting to coax an 8 year-old child to sit still for the sake of sounding shit out (reading) at 1:00 on Friday afternoon following indoor recess; attempting to be a good sport about how the only place to stop and get organic lettuce on the way home around here anymore is the Whole Foods which I swear has become even more difficult to find stuff in since the Wild Oats closed and therefore the former became my only "option"; dealing with the car mats. You can see why I chose the car mats on which to post. Lucky for you, I warned you, and so we can hope that you had the good sense to go read something else instead. In the spirit of Jonathan's recent cautionary tales about various things, I bring you Why It's Better to Go Ahead and Pay the Extra 96 Dollars So That Your Car Comes With Floor Mats in the First Place, You Cheapass.

You're probably thinking I should be careful about calling my friends cheap, but I shouldn't, because I'm the only ones among my friends who's that cheap.

So for the first 2 or 3 years I had my trusty little Civic, the carpets were protected by a bunch of pink lemonade colored carpet chunks that someone in my Belmont neighborhood left on the sidewalk one week. I was awfully proud of them, and how I'd saved 96 bucks. (I just typed Buicks by accident. I also saved those, come to think of it, or at least, saved myself of them.) But fairly quickly they became well, disgusting, and they shed EVerywhere, so at some point (I'm sure it was Meg's idea) I decided that I was probably making enough to make it OK to spring for the factory-issue floor mats. What I didn't know was that they actually require installation. I took one look at the little plastic peg set and diagram for how to take the utility knife to the expensive fabric and decided something along the lines of Maybe Some Other Time. The mats would still work, they just wouldn't so much stay in place.

So every couple of days I reach down below the driver's seat and give the floor mat a good yank to extract it from beneath the accelerator such that it doesn't cause any, I don't know, accidents. It works fine. I can even take the thing out and shake it from time to time when it starts to seem more like a beach than a floor.

But lately, with all this snow and ice and melt, it's been smelling like wet dog in my car, thanks, I figure, to the fact that the floor mat, which is a lot like a dog and is always wet, what with the virtually zero circulation situation. It's been sunny and balmy (see previous post) for days, so I had this brilliant idea yesterday. Why don't I just take it OUT of the car and give it some AIR? The driveway's not wet anymore, thanks to all this sun, so my feet won't get the carpet dirty for the rest of the day and tomorrow morning until I get the floor mat re"installed", and then it'll be fresh and dry in the cabin until it snows and melts and carries on again!

But I got cocky, and left it out overnight, and overnight was when it decided we'd had enough of dry and sunny and 50 degrees, so now the floor mat is a sopping mess slung over the deck railing and the carpet of my car is caked with the mud and dirt and pebbles that became lodged in my shoes as I got in and out of the car trying to find the funeral home, dash in and out of the school, and pick up the lettuce. Lovely.

54 Degrees and Sunny, note date

Well, it doesn't get much uglier than this. Most of the snow has melted, which leaves only that which is encrusted with dirt and other junk the plows were able to gather up. There aren't any leaves on the trees, except for the ones that kept waiting in vain for the end of autumn and then froze to their tree limbs when suddenly it was below zero. Those are brown, of course. And then there's the driveway markers, strewn about like a giant game of pick up sticks gone terribly wrong. Plus it's trash day which means that the front yard is littered with building neighbor trash cans, and the back yard is littered with the trash the next door neighbors can't be bothered to set out, in favor of waiting until it looks like an actual dump out there and they can justify calling in an actual dump truck to cart it all away. With the sun to illuminate it all and temperatures that make you want to go out in it. It's cruel, really. Among other things.

Please Participate

...in the blog name-choosing game. I'm leaning toward something that found its origins in Jonathan's recent suggestion that the contents of my head are odd. I didn't think there'd be any better way to commit than that, because while I'm likely to shift, change, transform, quit, recommit, evolve, etc., there is absolutely no chance that my head will stop being odd. So the only question now, really, is whether it should be one word or two. That is, Odd Head, or the current frontrunner (given that I'm in favor of it), Oddhead.

But scratch that. I just tossed Oddhead in the Google search window, and there's already an oddhead blog, so that won't do. I don't like sharing. No matter that it's about gambling and such. Hmmm...

More to come.

Fair Enough

Jonathan seems to think (see comments on previous post) that I need to come up with a name that last longer than a month. Indeed. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything yet, and for some reason when I type on blogger from the office, the cursor has trouble keeping up with my typing. This, you can probably imagine, is enough to drive even the likes of me to drink. So I'll stop here, and if anyone's got any suggestions, feel free to toss them out.