Monday, July 14, 2003

Life is Just a Bowl of Chaos

We have painters at home. They're very polite, they seem to work quickly and thoroughly, and they came highly recommended by our neighbors. They're not hot, which I think a shame, but we never do seem to get hot men working on our house... not that it matters, since I'm not home to watch them, what with having to go to work and all.



At any rate, no matter how polite and thorough, painters equal chaos. On Friday, they came by and moved everything away from the house (like the plants on the porch and the garbage cans and all that), scraped all the wood and power-hosed the walls, and left notes as to what would need to be moved during the rest of the job. Today they came and started spackling the cracks, and decided that they need to have more room in the driveway in order to reach the front windows... ergo, I had to move Miss Marjorie.



This is easier said than done, of course... mid-80s Volvo sedans are rather weighty objects, and without a working engine it wasn't going anywhere. But I had the three painters to help me, so I figured we could push her out into the street, and beside the curb in front of the house.



Well, we got her out into the street, with a great deal of effort, but she wasn't going to go uphill, no matter what. We tried pushing with the painting van, but the bumper was too high; we tried pushing with one of the painters' cars, but it didn't have enough power and just burned rubber. So we simply abandoned Miss Marjorie there in the street. She's less than eighteen inches from the curb, and isn't obstructing traffic, but she's facing the wrong way and blocking the driveway (both of which are techincally illegal), so she simply can't stay there.



On the plus side, though, this tenuous situation got me off my keister about donating Miss Marjorie to a worthy cause. I decided on the Alzheimer's Association after a certain amount of struggle over my approval of the Salvation Army's work in rehabilitating alcoholics and addicts and my disapproval of their Christian mission. And there are all sorts of other organizations that could benefit from my car, but I didn't have a lot of time to do the research... or rather, I did have a lot of time, but didn't use it well, and the time ran out.



I also assign my California tax refund (when I get one) to the Alzheimer's Association. That particular disease has occurred frequently in my family, and though I don't know whether it's hereditary or not, it is a major concern of mine. I only hope that they are looking into other avenues besides stem cells as a treatment for Alzheimer's. I have a strong dislike of using human tissue of any kind in this manner, even tissue that is otherwise going to be thrown away.



I remember doing my first-ever college research paper on the topic of tissue and organ transplantation, and I had never really thought about it before then... I even signed an organ-donor card with my first California ID. But after doing that research, I found it difficult to stomach as an idea... the practical purposes are of course unquestionably good, but the moral questions it raises make me very uncomfortable. I am still an organ donor, they can have whatever's left that I haven't ruined before I'm cremated, but I feel this niggling disapproval of using tissue from a dead person to keep another person alive. I would not consent to having an organ or tissue transplanted into myself under any circumstances... I don't think I could even be comfortable about transfused blood.



Or maybe I would, if Death were really staring me in the face. It's easy to be brave or squeamish and take the moral high ground when you're perfectly healthy.



Speaking of chaos... I start talking about moving my old car, and then get started talking about organ and tissue recycling. In the meantime I also had to go look up the word keister to make sure I'd spelled it right (I hadn't), made a number of phone calls to the answering machines of our executive body, ate my lunch (chicken salad, no dressing), had confusing conversations with several other people on the phone, and less-confusing coversations with Caroline and Shiloh, and discussed the week's itinerary with the Boss; I have also discovered that it is very hot outside, which simply isn't fair since the Bay Area has already had its four days of heat.



That's the way my mind is working today. It's just a big old allergenic hodgepodge of miscellaneous trivia.



Speaking of miscellaneous hodgepodges, I finally gave in to The Krisy Kreme Temptation yesterday. For the last week I have been weathering Krispy Kreme temptations... driving past the San Francisco store one afternoon, that divinely sinful smell wafting across the street into my open windows (but there was nowhere to pull over), and then someone very generously donated twelve large assorted boxes to the Conference and they were laid out in the Mezzanine lounge just as I was leaving my workshop, and it took every ounce of willpower I had not to eat one (or ten), and then someone brought one of those boxes right into the dressing room while I was getting ready for the final performance of the Musical, and then someone brought a box to my AA meeting on Tuesday. I passed all of these tests, though it cost an eviscerating pang of longing and an internal struggle of gargantuan proportions.



Anyway, at the Musical cast party yesterday, there was another box of Krispy Kremes sitting there, and I crumbled. The way I figured it, I had to eat a piece of the (incredibly sweet) show-logo cake, it's just traditional; and I also had to taste the cookies that Erik made (because I have a crush on him), and the pasta salad Roxy made (because it would be rude not to), and the latkes with sour cream and apricot sauce that Deena brought (because... well, just because I love latkes with sour cream and apricot sauce) — and so, after all that starch and sugar aready destroying my diet, there was really no reason not to slide a Krispy Kreme onto my plate. So I chose one that looked like a flying saucer, bit into it, and discovered that it was filled with whipped cream. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.



Of course, when I was laying awake at one-thirty this morning, unspeakably exhausted but still flying on all that sugar, I thought I'd died and gone to hell.



So anyway, today after work and gym, I have to go home and clean out Miss Marjorie, have dinner with Shiloh, and keep on cleaning my room. The painters won't need to get into my room until Wednesday, but I won't have time tomorrow to do much. I am not going to make as much room for them as I did for the window men (you remember), as all they need to do is paint the window frames rather than completely rebuild them. They could, in all practicality, simply paint the windows from the outside, and needn't come into my room at all... the only real reason I even care about moving the bed away from the window is because I don't want them to get paint on it.



Besides, I need to have a clean room someday soon. I can't live this disorganized life any more. It's too tiring. I have so many things to do all the time, and I can't keep track of them. Perhaps it's just a silly superstition, but I sometimes feel that if I could only get one part of my life organized, the other parts would become organized in a process of momentum... that a tidy room is contagious and will result in a tidy life, the way that a messy room is contagious and can make the rest of life messy.



And let me tell you, honey, my life is even messier than my room right now. For example, I have let my finances get into a terrible mess... so bad that I had to borrow money from Grandmother today so that my electronically debited student loan payment wouldn't bounce. I might have made it if I hadn't paid $36 last Wednesday for Elizabeth Taylor's My Love Affair With Jewelry at Barnes & Noble for 60% off (totally worth it, it's such a fabulous book, but the timing is wrong). I have tips from Saturday's drag show to cover my incidental expenses, like lunch and bridge-tolls, until I get paid on Thursday, but my gas tank is almost empty and I can't even use my credit card because I forgot to make the minimum payment last month and so it's been frozen (besides which, true to my worst fears, I have almost maxed it out after three months of having the damned thing). Oy!



And then, there's the matter of my new car, whose repair-job hasn't even gotten to the appraisal stage yet because I haven't had time to get to the auto-body shop. And even when I do get to that stage, I won't be able to afford to have them get started on just the most necessary repair (getting the right sideview mirror replaced or fixed so it doesn't have to be held on with duct tape, as it is now) for a while, since I have to pay down my credit card as soon as I can before the interest starts accruing.



And then there's the issue of my nails... I broke my right index nail on Saturday, it looks perfectly ghastly; I was supposed to go in last week to get a fill and shaping, which would have prevented the breakage, but I was just so busy and tired last week... and now I can't afford to get it repaired until after Thursday.



And then, and then, and then... I'm broke and indebted and tired and allergy-ravaged and horny and frustrated and the whole thing is just such a big old chaotic mess.



Oh, well... at least it gives me something to write about.



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