I am cranky because this morning Paul left for a business trip and he left stuff for me to do just EVERYWHERE. Like, when I go away for a couple of days, I make a deliberate effort NOT to leave things behind for someone else to do: I wash my breakfast pan and I put my dishes in the dishwasher, I clear any dishes from my desk, I move any of my stuff/projects out of the main areas other people might want to use. I don’t want to look as if I’m blithely taking advantage of my absence to get out of cleaning up after myself: “Ooo, sorry, I WOULD have cleaned that up but I have to go now sorry byyeeeeeeeee!!”

Paul seems to have no such concern. If anything, his usual morning habit of leaving his frying pan and breakfast dishes for the cleaning fairies (he WOULD have taken care of them when he got HOME, clearly) seems to multiply exponentially. This morning there was the frying pan and dishes, but also a large dirty cutting board, a pill bottle, his packing list, pajamas on the floor near the laundry basket, his work thermos with the leftovers of Friday’s coffee-with-cream still in it, an empty carry-on bag he apparently decided not to take, the ice cube tray he usually uses with his work thermos, a pile of stuff he took out of his work bag so he could use it as a carry-on, and more. All the Easter stuff from yesterday was still spread out everywhere, including the scissors and ribbon and tape he got out for the egg hunt and then just left on the counter as if that’s where it lives now. And this is the day the cleaning people were coming, so I had to deal with it all first thing.

I hate stuff like this. I hate stuff where one person is like “Ug, what is the BIG DEAL??” and the other person is like “THIS IS SYMBOLIC OF EVERYTHING WRONG WITH THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE.” I remember one of many times I complained to Paul about this sort of behavior (i.e., leaving things undone and then skying off to work, but then acting as if it’s my choice to handle them or not), he was like “FINE, if it’s SO HARD, I’ll do it!!”—and I was like, “GOOD, YES, DO IT THEN,” but also: it is not that it’s “so hard” (and thank you for that stupid tone of voice), it’s that it’s NOT so hard and yet you LEAVE IT FOR ME TO DO ALL THE TIME AS IF I AM YOUR PERSONAL SERVANT. Like, one of us just sails along, confidently leaving detritus for someone else to deal with, and THE OTHER OF US DOES NOT. Over the years, that accumulates into something that is very hard to deal with indeed.

And, when I object/complain/explain, nothing changes. You know that famous “He’s not a MIND-READER!” argument, used almost exclusively to defend men-people? Like, people (usually women-people) are standing around the internet complaining about their spouses, and there is always someone who has to say in a coaching, overly-patient tone of voice, “Have you TALKED to him about it? He can’t know how much it bothers you unless you TELL him”—as if this approach would be BRAND-NEW INFORMATION to literally anyone, let alone people married for decades. “Oh, TELL HIM I don’t like something?? That never occurred to me, an adult person!! Thank you, thank you!! With all your natural talents, have you considered getting into the rewarding field of ANYTHING OTHER THAN THIS??”

And, like, first of all, I find I don’t generally need to be specifically told that the irritating, inconsiderate things that cause work/inconvenience for the people I live with will bother them, so I’m not sure why Paul can’t figure most of it out himself in the same way I did, like by being a person who exists in the world. Obviously we’ll each occasionally need to be told when it’s something we don’t yet know (like if I didn’t realize it bothers him when I have a dozen sample bottles on the bathroom counter, or if he didn’t know that my sweater can’t go in the dryer, or if I didn’t know his work thermos needs a special washing technique)—but I’m just saying there’s a lot of GENERAL knowledge easily available without specific, personal instruction. I’m not a mind-reader either, but Paul doesn’t have to give me a careful, detailed, multi-step explanation for why I shouldn’t put piles of folded laundry all over our bed and then leave for the weekend. NO ONE is hoping to choose between finishing someone else’s chore or else sleeping on the couch. NO ONE is hoping to choose between washing someone else’s frying pan or else having it in the way all day / not being able to use it. NO ONE wants to pick someone else’s pajamas and underwear up off the floor and move them three feet over to the laundry basket. NO ONE’S thermos improves by sitting out for a week with leftover coffee-with-cream in it. I don’t feel it’s my Personal Life’s Duty and Honor to give Paul a continuous stream of detailed, personal instructions Just For Him about the things NO ONE likes/wants. There is nothing remotely similar in life that Paul has to do for me.

And, second of all, the “Just TELL him!” approach makes it seem as if the only thing standing between me and relief is using my words—and, even more irritatingly, that if I don’t speak up, it’s my fault if unjustifiable behavior continues (HOW ELSE COULD HE POSSIBLY KNOW WITHOUT BEING PERSONALLY INSTRUCTED). So then especially when I HAVE used my words, when I have clearly and calmly explained what I don’t like, why I don’t like it, and what should be done instead, and then NOTHING CHANGES, it is hard to know what the next step is. Repeating the process? But no, that doesn’t seem to work either—and also, it has the added charm of being labeled “nagging” or “always complaining.” So THEN what? Screaming? Spritz bottles? Marital duplexes? Abolishing the institution of marriage entirely? Sending certain people (I’m not saying certain men-people but I’m not NOT saying it) to specialized training camps so that their spouses don’t have to spend decade after decade parenting them through basic human behavior?

I have been having dreams about babies again, after a long time of no dreams about babies. Generally the baby is just sort of THERE, pleasantly: I’m neither responsible for the baby nor not-responsible for it. Sometimes I carry it around with me for awhile or help it out with something. The baby is not in any distress or trouble, and it’s not a stressful dream element, and I wake up with happy residual dream-feelings. (I am glad to note I no longer wake up feeling sad that the baby isn’t real/mine.) I am interested to know if you dream about babies.

I am so tired of waking up about an hour before I have to get up, needing to pee badly enough that I can’t be comfortable (but SOMETIMES can get back to sleep anyway), but knowing that if I get up and go to the bathroom I won’t then be able to get back to sleep. I’m so tired of it! This morning I woke up an hour before I had to get up, and then I lay there for 45 minutes thinking stressful thoughts one after another before finally just getting up for the day. It happens often enough that I have considered setting an alarm for, say, 2:00 in the morning, and getting up to go to the bathroom then. But I’m worried that then I would be awake from 2:00 onward. I’ve tried drinking less in the evenings but it seems almost unconnected: there was one evening recently I had nothing to drink after dinnertime, and then woke up THREE TIMES in the night to pee. Or sometimes it’s BETTER to have a nice big drink of water in the evening, because then I wake up at 1:30 to pee and then sleep the rest of the night! Sorry for saying “pee” so much.

In “there is no pleasing me” news, this weekend I was so sad and sulky about a college-visiting road trip formerly planned for later this week but rescheduled for the end of the month. I said to Paul, “I want to be going on a road trip THIS WEEK, not in two weeks! I want to be getting ready for a road trip RIGHT NOW.” There was heavy sighing, and a feeling that life was insufficiently fun. Then the road trip got rescheduled again, so that it IS later this week. And am I happy now, now that I got exactly what I wanted? No. I’m anxious about the rescheduling, and feeling like I DID want to go on a road trip but got over it and now I don’t want to and won’t enjoy it and it’ll be wasted and afterward I’ll be sorry I didn’t appreciate it more. UGGGG WHY.

Similarly: I bought this folding bookshelf recently, mainly because it was the only one I could find that would fit under the deep 36-inch-high windowsill of my personal sunporch room:

(image from Amazon.com)

I’m really happy with it, even though the top shelf is weirdly too short for any books to stand upright, and the other two shelves are taller than they need to be and so it seems as if this could have been designed more practically. STILL. I love the color (I got the cherry), I love the look of it, and it fits so perfectly in the room it almost looks like a built-in. There’s room for a second set of shelves if I want it, and I’ve been dithering: the shelves were $100, which is a lot of money if I’m not SURE I want them. Then they dropped to $88. Still I did not buy them. Then suddenly they were no longer available (I didn’t see any warnings like “Only 3 left in stock”—they were just “no longer available”) and I was kicking myself. Why didn’t I buy them?? They were only $88! They were the only shelves that fit under that sill! Now I’ll never be able to get them and I will be sorry forever! Then they came back into stock and I have not bought them because I’m not sure I need a second set and just because they’ve gone down in price doesn’t mean they’re not still kind of expensive for something I’m not sure I want.

Oh, there is a ladybug crawling across my desk! That seems good! On the other hand, yesterday I was putting things in the car and I saw a medium-sized spider skitter under the seat. So that’s in my future at some surprising moment.

I used to work in a plant nursery, and I’m reminded of it when I see things for sale that I used to help with: pansies and tulips in early spring, geraniums near Mother’s Day, etc. To sell tulips for bouquets, we cut the tulip bulbs right in half along the stem: florists/retailers valued the extra small amount of stem you could get that way, and they must have been willing to pay more for it than it would cost the nursery to buy all new bulbs. (Some workers took home the cut bulbs and planted them.)

One of the early spring projects involved making cute little planters. I don’t remember everything that went into them, but it was, like, two pansies, an ivy, and some other green thing in a pretty wooden basket-shaped planter, things like that. We were supposed to choose whatever pansy color combinations we personally liked: the idea was that the dozen of us workers with our varied tastes/opinions were probably a pretty good representation of the tastes/opinions of the buying public. So if one of us liked red and purple together (even if others winced), probably approximately 1/12th of the population would too. If one of us liked both pansies to be the same color (even if others found that boring), probably approximately 1/12th of the population would too.

I was trying to put something together here where I’d say that this was like parenting. We all make parenting choices based on our own inclinations and the things that come naturally (if you’re a hiker, you probably take your kids hiking; if you like crafts, you probably do crafts with them), and most of us feel like our parenting methods mean our kids are missing out on a bunch of other stuff (if you hate the outdoors, you probably feel bad that you’re not taking the kids outside as much as you feel you should; if you hate crafts, you probably feel bad that you’re not doing art projects with the kids as much as you feel you should). Maybe you feel strongly that kids should learn to cook, but you don’t care so much about manners and thank-you notes and firm handshakes; maybe any time you try to teach cooking someone ends up crying and/or yelling, but you have endless patience for the art of the thank-you note. Whatever your parenting strengths, you’re probably doing those naturally/easily; whatever your parenting weaknesses, you’re probably feeling bad/nervous about those gaps.

And here’s where I’d make the leap to the pansies: if each of us teaches/models what what can and what we like, we end up putting together a nice selection of people for society. Each kid doesn’t have to do allllll the things as a child. It’s okay if one kid grows up doing a bunch of outdoor stuff and not much in the way of crafts/reading, and another kid grows up doing a ton of indoor stuff and not much in the way of hiking/boating, and another kid grows up doing all the hiking/boating/crafting/reading but didn’t go to plays/concerts/movies. When kids grow up, they can fill in anything their parents missed, and that’s one of the fun parts of being an adult: if your parents never let you take karate lessons, you can do them now; if your parents didn’t teach you to cook, you can learn now; if your parents were indoorsy types, you can go hiking/boating now; if your parents didn’t take you to plays/concerts/movies, you can go now; if your parents always boiled vegetables into mush, you can eat them steamed/raw now; etc. Another of the fun parts of early adult life was getting to know people with different sets of life skills/experiences, and swapping/sharing: it feels like the whole world is opening up. Doing things with your peers > doing things with your mom and dad.

The analogy doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped, and it doesn’t take into account parents who are naturally inclined to teach/model, say, racism and violence, and it doesn’t cover the category of stuff parents might not enjoy doing/teaching but they force themselves to do it anyway. But I still like the feeling of the idea. I remember standing at the worktable stressing about which colors would sell well, and then the relief of being told to just choose what I liked: that if we each chose what we personally liked, we’d end up with a nice mix.

Well! We listed our old house for sale, had thirty-five showings plus an open house the realtor described as “slammed,” got seven offers (five of which were above asking price), and accepted one of the offers—all within three-and-a-half days. We are feeling pretty satisfied with our realtor’s “Do nothing to fix it up, underprice it, and sell it fast” plan.

Now we are in the part where it’s too early to celebrate because it could still fall through between now and closing, but we are tentatively feeling good—and if the sale DOES fall through, it’s nice to know there were so many other people interested and we could probably get another offer.

I am a little sad about one offer we didn’t take. It was lower than the offer we accepted, but it was a family with four little kids and two dogs (I snooped them on Facebook), and my fervent wish has been that the house would go to a family with lots of kids, perhaps a family that was priced out of the current housing market but COULD afford our underpriced house and was not too fussed about the cosmetic issues. (That was the very thing that happened when WE bought that house: it was the only way we could afford a house at all.) But they were going to get an FHA loan, and our realtor told us our house would not be approved for that loan unless we fixed it up more, and we really did not want to fix it up more. And then as it turned out the offer we accepted went even higher, widening the gap between the two offers to the point where even “but a FAMILY!!” wouldn’t have made it justifiable. So there is no reason to still be feeling a little regretful, but I am.

On the happy side, the house is going to someone who wants to live there herself, and perhaps she will soon add children and dogs. She specifically mentioned the great backyard in her offer, which seems promising. I’d feared we would only get offers from developers/flippers—not that that would be terrible, especially if it was a GOOD flipper who did nice work, but I was worried the house would be bulldozed. We did get one offer from someone planning to tear it down, but it was a low bid, much lower than asking. Again, nice to know that offer EXISTS, in case inspection shows something impossible that means the house NEEDS to be torn down (this is very unlikely, but that doesn’t stop me from fretting about it, apparently)—but happier to me that it went to someone who plans to live there herself. I hope she is feeling happy and excited right now, rather than wondering what she’s gotten herself into, and I hope she will love the house, and I am fantasizing that she is handy and will gradually go through the house fixing it up, whistling happily and maybe being more decisive/adventurous than I was with paint colors.

One problem with a blog is that it makes it so historically, documentedly, provably clear to others if someone is a person who gets all in a tizz over relatively insignificant things, and then later barely remembers it. The upside is that this does partly help the person in question to think more sensibly about whatever the current tizz is, if only to avoid embarrassment later on.

The current situation: William has three college acceptances. He is able to attend two of the Accepted Student Days, but not the third. The one he can’t go to is, unfortunately, one of the two frontrunners. We have been to the Accepted Student Day for the other frontrunner, and I found it extremely helpful, and it changed my opinion about the schools and how I’d rank them, and William said he was glad we’d gone. I keep getting stuck trying to mentally solve the puzzle of “How can he attend all three?,” when the solution to the puzzle is that he cannot.

The Tizz: THIS AFFECTS HIS ENTIRE FUTURE LIFE. THREE FATES AWAIT HIM, AND TWO WILL GET AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE. OR POSSIBLY DISADVANTAGE, I DON’T EVEN KNOW!!

The Sensible: Rob didn’t go to ANY Accepted Student Days. He didn’t even visit all the schools in the first place.

The Tizz: AND MAYBE AS A RESULT HE CHOSE THE WRONG SCHOOL!

The Sensible: You just said you don’t know if it’s even BETTER or WORSE to attend an Accepted Student Day.

The Tizz: So it should at least be fairrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

The Sensible: Is it possible you are concentrating all the parental stress of this decision and of Your Baby Going To College into an inflated view of the importance of this one event which is, let’s look it in the face, a sales pitch?

The Tizz: *incoherent wailing*

The Sensible: Do you even really care which of the two frontrunners he attends?

The Tizz: BUT HE CAN’T GO TO BOTH ACCEPTED STUDENT DAYS AND THREE PATHS OF FATE DIVERGING AND WHAT IF IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE AND HE CHOOSES THE WRONG SCHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

The Sensible: You like all three schools and so does he, and there is literally no way to see the future and know which is the best decision, so what does this even matter?

The Tizz: *tries again to make it possible to be simultaneously in two places at once*

I am finally watching Schitt’s Creek. I was glad I’d heard that the first season was a little patchy, quality-wise; I’d also heard just the right amount of hype about the rest of it: enough to motivate me to watch, but not enough to be impossible for it to live up to. I have finished the first season and like it enough to make me enthusiastic to watch more. I loved Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara already, and now I also love Daniel Levy and Emily Hampshire and Annie Murphy and a whole bunch of other people.

William has gotten back acceptances/rejections from all but one of the colleges he applied to, so we are nearly in the stage where we have to look the finalists over and make a decision. He seems very cranky and tense lately, and I don’t know how much of it is about this, and how much of it is about being 18 and staying up too late and then oversleeping and having to rush around in the morning in a huge panic and then blaming his younger siblings for being in his way by existing. He sure seems a lot more comfortable swearing in front of parents than I was as a high school student. Or even than I am now.

Do you remember last year, my desperate quest to find Brach’s Marshmallow Eggs? I still have more than a full bag of those left from last year; it turns out I wanted to eat about three eggs total and then I was done, possibly permanently. However, during that quest I impulsively acquired a bag of Brach’s Jellybean Nougats, and those were a much bigger success: I ate them all and looked forward to getting more this year. (I’m not saying they’re not kind of gross, I am only saying I ate them all and looked forward to getting more.) AND THEN I COULD NOT FIND THEM. I went to the same Walgreens where I found them last year, and they did not have them. I used the product finder on the Brach’s site, and it said they were not available anywhere near me. (I did find them on Amazon, but with very mixed reviews.) But then my friend Morgan, who has a knack for finding things other people are looking for, found them at a different Walgreens, so I am going over there today to buy half a dozen bags—or maybe in light of the Marshmallow Egg Situation it would be more sensible to buy one bag and see how it goes.

I bought these wee little flower spoons and I love them:

(image from Amazon.com)

They are VERY SMALL. I knew from the reviews that they would be small, and I’d looked at a ruler to make sure I knew how small, but if I had not done both of those things I think I would have been quite surprised by how small. They are the right size for putting like half a teaspoon of sugar into a teacup, but they are pretty short if you wanted to stir sugar into a coffee mug—and they are kind of shallow for transporting even a small amount of sugar without spilling. Really they are not at all practical. Here is one of the wee little flower spoons in a line-up with a measuring teaspoon, a toddler spoon, a regular flatware spoon, and a flatware soup spoon:

I use them every day, because one of the kids needs a daily dose of a medicine that gets stirred into a small cup of juice; he loves these spoons, and is picky about whether the medicine is fully stirred-in or not, so I leave the spoon in the cup for him to appreciate and use.

I woke up this morning and hopped cheerfully out of bed, in a really good mood already because of the good thing / good news. By the time I was getting into the shower, it was getting perplexing that I couldn’t remember exactly/specifically what the good thing/news was, or even what category of thing it was (something fun happening today? someone getting married or having a baby? the satisfying resolution of something stressful? did William get good college news? am I leaving on a road trip? is there cake?), but I knew it would come to me soon, and then I’d feel so silly for temporarily forgetting! Now that I am up and I’ve had my coffee, it seems as if the good thing/news must have been part of a dream.

But I was so SURE, when I woke up, that there was something happy and energizing going on! It didn’t FEEL like part of a dream; it felt like “Oh good, I’m awake, and now there is the happy thing to contend with!” And I was so relieved and glad to be waking up happy, because the last few days have been enormously stressful and sad: we finally listed our old house, and I am not coping well, and there is a fair amount of crying by someone, and I am wishing that I could go somewhere that would put me in a medically-induced sleep until it was over, and every morning I have woken up and been immediately slammed with adrenaline and stress as soon as I remember. So THIS morning was such a nice break! Except now I am more concerned about the state of my mind! Because that was really strange! There was nothing good to leap out of bed for, but I hallucinated something!

I’m glad to be getting coffee with a friend later this morning, because that is a good way to hit the mental reset button. And this particular friend is a sensible, confident person, married to a man who is more like me, fretful and anxious, so she is accustomed to dealing with little spin-outs. Plus, sitting in a coffee/pastry shop for a couple of hours makes me smell DELICIOUS.

I recently took two fun road trips, one to pick up Rob from college for spring break, and one to return him to college afterward. It’s the perfect length for a drive: about 8 hours each way including stops. That’s far enough to justify staying in a motel in between, and I love staying in motels.

Except this time I did not. I felt weird and paranoid and unsettled, starting during dinner and lasting throughout the evening, and when I was supposed to be sleeping I was instead having distressing irrational thoughts such as “What if William slipped and fell on his way home from work, and Paul went to bed early without noticing that he never came home, and he’s out in the dark freezing to death right now???” Fortunately I have a prescription to use for things like this, so I took half a tablet as prescribed, and it did nothing. I took the other half, and it did nothing. For a couple of hours I tried various things to avoid lying in the dark imagining how I’d get everyone out of the house if there were a fire: I put the TV on a soothing channel; I turned the room fan to various temperatures/settings; I put on soothing music; I played Candy Crush while lying down; I counted backwards from 10,000 by threes. Finally I did fall asleep, but it was so disappointing to have wasted a motel room like that.

Because of a complication that is too boring to explain, I also stayed in a motel the next night. This time I was prepared, and took Benadryl awhile before bedtime (Benadryl always knocks me out), and was careful not to eat too many snacks too late in the evening, and I thought it would help that I’d slept poorly the night before—but I STILL had the weird/paranoid/irrational thing happen, and had a lot of trouble sleeping.

I wonder if it’s that I have plenty of time on my own now. When I used to fantasize about motel rooms, it was at least in part because I had children with me ALL THE TIME: the constant noise! the constant touching! the constant needs! the constant mess! A motel room seemed like an oasis of quiet and clean and alone. But now everyone’s in school during the day and I have large daily doses of alone time. That may have shifted the whole motel thing around, so that now being alone/quiet doesn’t feel so exhilarating. Maybe now what I need is a party cruise or something.

When I brought Rob back at the end of the week, I asked Elizabeth if she wanted to go with us, and she did. That changed the WHOLE DYNAMIC. After we dropped Rob off, she and I went to Target to get more Pringles for the drive home (we were perilously low), and then we went out to dinner. We got back to the motel room at about 6:30, decided it was too early to be back at the motel, and went out to a couple of stores where we bought a mouse-shaped planter (Elizabeth), a pretty green cocktail glass (me), and more junk food (both). We returned to the hotel between 8:00 and 8:30, changed into our pjs, and each made a nest of snacks and phones and pillows on our respective queen-sized beds. We watched Trading Spaces, which I hadn’t seen in years and Elizabeth had never seen (Elizabeth: “That is a BAD PLAN.” “WHY WOULD THEY DO THAT.” “Who ARE these people??”) and then we were channel-flipping and found the 2016 Ghostbusters movie and watched the middle section of that while playing games on our phones and eating snacks.

We had a great time. Plus, this meant I had someone to play “Pop Song or CHRISTIAN Pop Song?” with in the car on the way there AND on the way back: I can play that game alone, but I’m so good at it and prefer to have someone along to be impressed. At home I have all my radio stations pre-set so I never end up accidentally listening to a Christian station, but road trips are FULL of such misunderstandings. “Whenever I am in doubt…” the singer sings, and I say “It’s Christian,” and the child says, “What? Why?,” and I shrug humbly. I know I am right, before we even get to the part where they sing something more obvious like “…the glory of your kingdom…” or “…give my heart to you, O Lord,” or make some reference to pastures/shepherds/sacrifices/sins/purifying.

The best ones are when we really can’t tell, and then it takes a twist that would be horrifying in a pop song and so it is abruptly and startlingly clear it is a Christian song. Like, the song goes “No one has ever loved me like you do,” and that’s nice, and then it goes “You have all my love,” and that’s nice and you hope this nice couple will have a happy life together, and then it goes to “I am washed clean in your blood” and !!!!! And the children have not grown up with this kind of talk as I did, so it sounds even more thrillingly shocking to them.

I have told this story to three family members so far, and all three of them found it boring. But the situation was so temporarily MYSTIFYING, I cannot suppress the desire to continue to tell the story.

First you need backstory about my socks. (Hang in there.) In winter, I wear a pair of regular socks, and then a pair of thin wool socks over the regular socks. Then shoes. I put them on in this order: one regular sock, one wool sock, one shoe; other regular sock, other wool sock, other shoe. (“I like to take care of one foot at a time!”)

Because the wool socks aren’t against my skin, and because I have only two pairs of them, I usually re-wear them several times before putting them in the laundry, changing only the regular socks. I don’t usually wear the wool socks at night, though I occasionally do. When I take the wool socks off, I put them into the bin of shoes at the foot of my bed. (I am sorry that the foot of a bed is involved in this story; it seems unnecessarily confusing with all the other foot/feet references.)

Also, you should know that my regular socks are mostly different. That is, I have a pair of purple socks, a pair of brown-and-cream-striped socks, a pair of navy blue socks, a pair of grey socks with yellow toes and a yellow stripe, etc. There are some duplicates (I really like the grey ones with yellow toes/stripe so I bought another pair the next time I was at the store; the brown-and-cream-stripe ones were on a good clearance so I bought a couple of pairs), but mostly it’s a variety. I pick whatever pair looks best with that day’s shirt/sweater.

Okay, you did a good job listening to all that. Here is what happened: Yesterday I put on a regular sock, a wool sock, a shoe; then I put on the second regular sock, reached for the second wool sock—and found a regular sock that matched the other two regular socks.

First I assumed I must have put two wool socks on the first foot. But I checked, and no: I had one regular sock and one wool sock. Then I thought I must have put a wool sock on my second foot instead of a regular sock. But I checked, and no: I had a regular sock on. I looked again at the spare regular sock. Really, it felt to me like the beginning of a movie where there is some sort of glitch in reality. Like next the time travelers would come bursting through a wall.

This is the part where Paul said I had built up enough mystification and I could get to the part where I told him the solution, but I declined to skip anything, just as I decline to skip anything now. Because there was MORE CHECKING, and I feel that is relevant to the story. I checked my first foot again, in case I had had a mental lapse and not seen the socks correctly, but no: regular sock plus wool sock. I checked my second foot again: regular sock. I checked the remaining sock again: regular sock. I PINCHED each sock with my fingers to MAKE SURE each one was the material I thought it was. It COULD NOT BE that I had three regular socks and one wool sock, and yet that was what I had.

I thought perhaps I had somehow ended up with a third regular sock but ALSO had two wool socks. If I found the second wool sock, I could believe a reality where I had a third regular sock: perhaps it fell out of the laundry basket while I was doing laundry, for example. I checked the shoe bin: no wool sock. I checked the bed around me: no wool sock. I stood up to check under where I was sitting: no wool sock. I checked the floor all around the foot of the bed and shoe bin: no wool sock.

The part of this story that remains interesting to ME is how thoroughly derailing this was. I couldn’t think of a solution to this mystery, and it made me feel like something was wrong with my brain. Reality was clearly broken in some way, either externally or internally. It’s not that the socks were so important (it isn’t as if I woke up in a house I didn’t recognize, or discovered I was married to a different person), but a wool sock apparently turning into a regular sock still seemed QUITE IMPORTANT.

Well, I will tell you the solution now, because of course there was one. This was one of those situations where there were TWO things that went wrong, which is why it was so hard to solve—like when the checkbook won’t balance and it’s because there’s a missing item AND you accidentally wrote $101.34 instead of $101.43, so the two errors combine to make something almost impossible to figure out with the usual little checkbook-balancing tricks such as looking for an amount that matches (or doubles, or halves) the difference between the two end amounts. Anyway: (1) I’d worn the wool socks to bed the night before, which was unusual. (2) AND that morning I coincidentally chose a pair of regular socks that was a duplicate of the regular socks I’d worn the previous day, which was unlikely.

When I got out of bed, I intended to take off my doubled socks and put the regular ones in the laundry and the wool ones in my shoe bin; instead I put one regular sock and one wool sock into the laundry, and one regular sock and one wool sock into my shoe bin. Then I took a shower. Then, when I was getting dressed, I chose a pair of regular socks that were the same as the previous day’s socks. And I took the two socks out of my shoe bin without looking at them carefully. So then I had (1) one regular sock from the previous day, (2) one wool sock from the previous day, (3) two regular socks from the current day, which coincidentally matched the regular sock from the previous day. If I’d chosen a DIFFERENT pair of socks, and so had had two brown regular socks and one purple regular sock, I think I would have figured things out sooner. OR if my wool socks weren’t a brown similar to the regular socks, I might have noticed when I took the two socks out of the shoe bin.

Until this morning, I had not shaved my legs in over three months. Closer to four months. This was the first time I’d ever stopped shaving my legs: I started shaving at around age 12, the day a cute boy swam underwater at the pool and grabbed my ankle, and there have been only brief pauses since. Like, I would go a week, sure. But I never Stopped Shaving until around November of last year when the stresses involved in moving from one house to another, combined with feeling as if I could not handle even one more unnecessary chore, combined with spending the last few years being particularly pissed about the patriarchy, combined with resenting my own personal white male husband for feeling free to make this move despite my misery, combined with being freezing all the time in the new house—all of these things led to a shaving cessation that was at first accidental and then became increasingly deliberate.

Like, at first I just had skipped shaving for a few days because I was busy and stressed. Then it had been a couple of weeks because I was feeling sad and was looking for all the small ways to Do Less. I’m not sure when it switched to being more of a stance/experiment/THING. There was a longish prickly stage, but at a certain point all the leg hair had grown out, and it was surprising to me how soft/unnoticeable it was in FEEL. I could certainly SEE it, and my legs looked unfamiliar to me, and I didn’t like the look—but the hair was very soft and fairly straight, and my legs didn’t FEEL hairy or coarse like guys’ legs do. And I did think it might actually make me warmer, since that is what body hair is FOR.

And also: I was feeling a fair amount of rage on the topic of MEN AND THEIR OPINIONS ABOUT WOMEN’S BODIES, so that was motivating. I should say here that Paul has never said a single word about women’s body hair, nor has he indicated with so much as a glance that he even HAS an opinion, nor did he comment on the leg hair experiment and I’m not sure he even noticed. BUT MEN IN GENERAL.

Then it got to the point where I felt almost like I couldn’t start shaving again, even if I wanted to: it was like when you grow your head-hair long and then you get tired of it and/or remember all the reasons you don’t wear your hair long, but now it feels like you can’t cut it or you’ll lose all that time/progress. Or like when you grow out bangs: there’s a hurdle to get over, and once you’ve suffered through that hurdle, it feels wrong to reset the situation. On the other hand, I didn’t like the way my legs looked, and I DID want to start shaving again before warmer weather, so it was only a matter of choosing WHEN. I picked up a razor now and then, but each time put it back down.

The last week or so I’ve been feeling more as if the only thing stopping me was the feeling of Investment: I didn’t want the leg hair anymore, and wasn’t having fun with the experiment anymore. I gave it time (we still have more winter to shiver through) but this morning I’d had enough and I picked up the razor and I’m back to patriarchy legs. They really do feel chillier.