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On needing more people, fighting with pensioners, and pink wine

It's the usual plight of adulthood: not enough time in the day to be good at each thing you want to be really good at. Working. Parenting. Making things. You cut yourself slack and carve minutes out of the weekends and get on with things. When the nebulous feeling of discontent starts getting pointy edges on it, you grind them off by laughing over sausages and beer with friends.

Only sometimes you don't have any friends, because you moved and bought a new house and had babies and you suddenly look around and realize there isn't anyone to hand a sausage to. Kurt Vonnegut, in a quote emailed to you five years ago by a distant friend, recognizes his cue and starts shouting in your ear while you're trying to type order lists at work.


"OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything. What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to. A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.

When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!”

This happened some time around last Friday. "I need more people!" I complained to my mother. "Come over and drink pink wine!" she said. "No, I can't, I have to buy shelf brackets," I replied, because I am really bad at self care and that is why I am in this predicament in the first place. In the end I realized this and we met at a Scottish dance party, sitting with plastic cups of screw-top chardonnay (which I hate but drink anyway because I enjoy being in a social wine-sipping setting), and we nodded at each other like happy little nodding things, surrounded by people we have known for 25 years. 

And then I got in a fight with one of them over facebook messenger and ended up with one less person because I unfriended and blocked him (RON YOU BASTARD IF YOU ARE READING THIS, well, we should go drink some pink wine, probably). And this is the kind of thing that happens when you have lots of people, which is exactly why I didn't mind leaving them all to live like a hermit up on the mountain, but hey. We are alive for just a few speedy, terrifying minutes, and I always say you have to hang on to the people who are gripping your hand as you hurtle toward the abyss - although it makes it difficult if they are using the other hand to hit you in the face with shitty propaganda leaflets.

So of course, after wrenching my hand away, I went and complained to my mother again. "I wanted more people and now I have lost one! I am doing this wrong and I am upset because I care about this infuriating person!" "Oh dear. Hang on," she texted back, and then after a long pause she said, "There, I have bought opera tickets. You are coming with me in two weeks to see La Boheme, so find a dress. Your aunt is coming, too, and she will drive you. There will be booze." Have I said lately that I love my mother? My mother is the best mother. We get in arguments when we are jammed up in close quarters for long periods of time, because we are similar enough that it becomes a cat-fighting-with-its-own-reflection scenario, but adulthood is working well for us. I take all her orphaned chickens, she makes sure I get my ass out of the house before I have a breakdown. 

So expect some fussing from me when the dress situation gets going, because I don't wear them often and there is a lot in the way of structural garments required these days.

CONSTRUCTION HAPPENING HERE. Still. Forever.

So while I was busy having an existential crisis and fighting with veterans and taking it out on the house by bringing in armloads of potted plants and painting hippie stencils around all the window frames, the husband-person has still been working on the outdoor shower.

Let me remind everyone what our back yard looks like:

The house was built by a Japanese mason. On one side is a garden wall with a Japanese-mason-sized doorway in it, on the other side is a giant lychee tree with low spreading branches, and in the middle is a massive crumbling concrete fish pond. There is no place to move a 6-foot shower wall from one side of the yard into the garden except through that little doorway, I am saying. So when the man started building a 6-foot shower wall on the patio, I stood eating a banana and watching him from the window, wondering what his plan would be when he realized there was no way to get it into the garden. I am resolved not to badger him about this project, since he's excited about it and it's making him happy and I'm about as handy as a... very unhandy thing. A librarian eating a banana, maybe. I'm just staying out of the way and tossing bandaids and cold beer outside when needed.

"It's time to move the wall into the garden!" he finally called. "Help me lift it?"

"Okay." I went out and stood at the ready. "How are we doing this?"

He looked from the wall to the doorway. The wall. The tree. The wall. The fish pond. The wall. His face did something complicated and eloquent as the realizations fell into place. He suddenly lunged for the drill, and I went back to stenciling window frames while he disassembled the thing. This is a man who's first piano recitation was Bartok. When he saw me knitting and wanted to try, he made a cabled afghan. When he saw me learning to use the sewing machine, he free-motion quilted a baby blanket. A shower is well within his abilities for a first woodworking project. He came home yesterday with an industrial blow torch so he can learn to weld copper pipes for plumbing. I bought another potted plant and pretended not to envision his arm going up in flames.

Anyway, the walls are in the garden now, and nobody had to go to the hospital, so that's all going well. 

PICTURE TIME.

Actually, I thought I had pictures of the shower wall on my phone, but it appears I don't, so I'll just post whatever is on here.

My inability to manage bra straps is the reason I wear three layers to work every day.

I feel self-conscious about my smile wrinkles and so I am posting these anyway because, well, THAT IS LIFE and I'm glad to be living.

Audition time

Cheaper than therapy. Also, a yoga-topped tie-dyed skirt is not a dress, so it doesn't count.

Much stenciling. I went all around the other window after that one.

Pan's white armpits

Cousins playing D&D outside the Scottish dance party 

which I did not take pictures of

So. A dress. QUEST ACCEPTED.