Too Tightly Wound

I am having a day in which everything feels too tightly wound around me. The sheets were too suffocatingly sausaged-wrapped around me this morning. The trash in my car - because I forget to bring the trash receptacle into the vehicle everyday after I Lysoled it on Sunday - is forming its own landfill in the front seat. The car ride was good, I held a private concert with the Dixie Chicks as my accompaniment and sang loudly, with bravado, during the songs "I'll Take Care of You" and "There's Your Trouble." But then I arrived at my destination and I felt as though the concert had been cut short all too soon, as in the event of a wardrobe malfunction. The walls are closing in on me and you would think that would cause me to focus even more on Important Tasks Du Jour, but my thoughts are all paranoia. I am paranoid about encroaching hemorrhoids, whether or not a piece of Laffy Taffy will set me just over the edge that I am a new candidate for gestational diabetes, whether or not my friends today will still be my friends when I have nothing to offer about What's New other than news of baby's hangnails and how I bought a Hooter Hider for cheap on e-bay. If I'm really honest with myself, I have to admit that I'm just maintaining these days. I'm just staying afloat. I'm not sick, I'm just hormo-tional, and am trying to cultivate the most gentle part of myself so that the patch of gentleness will bloom and grow and leave the weeds in the shadows so that they die. The weeds are wrapped too tightly around me now, though, and I have no idea what Virginia Woolf wanted in a room of her own. I want a big expansive beach and a beach chair with an umbrella and I want the big raging ocean that lulls all other sounds, other than those of the cawing seagulls, and I want it all, all to myself.

Not So Far Off

Like every girl I know, my sister and I played a great deal of office and school when we were younger, particularly on days off from school or during summer vacation because we couldn't get enough of that work-a-day setting. Most of the material we used was from the previous school year's religious text, since we were Catholic schoolies and got to keep our "This is Our Faith" workbooks. We would play school and office for hours, usually until my sister, who was one of my students or employees, would plead that she hadn't learned this kind of multiplication yet and therefore could not be graded fairly/perform the necessary duties.

Sometimes we decided that the teacher/pupil setting was too restrictive and we changed venues. Inspired by the show "A Different World" which portrayed the fictitious Historically Black College "Hillmon," we constructed a dorm life setting which we thought was possibly the coolest thing that ever came to be in our basement. One thing I have divulged to other friends - much to my chagrin - is that the main component of playing College Life was the use of our Trapper Keeper. There was only one for the two of us, one purple striped extra large soft binder with a picture of a neon magenta heart on both sides which TP and I used interchangeably for our homework, for our sticker album, for inserting all of the fake papers that we were given at fake school or fake work. The Trapper Keeper symbolized for us what we thought College must be like. Living life in purple and neon magenta, cramming everything good into one big soft binder. What more did one need? We would play College for hours, usually until TP would hoard the Trapper Keeper too long, taking notes in her lecture halls and all, and then I would manipulate her to give it to me so that I could organize all of my stickers within the Trapper Keeper, because, let's be honest, that is what happened on a typical day in college.

I should also mention that I was playing school with my friend Micky well up until 8th grade, and it is possible that our prized pupils included Cabbage Patch Dolls and Magic Eat n' Poop Baby. We were very age appropriate.

But besides the totally 80s school supplies and the inclusion of mute pupils with pacifiers, I have reason to believe, nay, proof that we were not so far off. Our notions of what a workplace was like and what a setting where school and life are blended were not so far-fetched. There have been plenty of moments in my own education and work in which I felt as though I had not yet learned this fancy multiplication table, and therefore, I was irreparably useless that day, since there was no going back. I would simply have to plead I never learned that and hope that my ignorance would cloak me with innocence for a day. The set-up that we used to play office, with the IN and OUT trays - that totally exists in just about every workplace. Only the "Super Job!" stickers that TP and I would brand all of our work assignments are disappointingly not used in day to day operations. There was also no time in college where my mom called me upstairs for a grilled cheese sandwich, nor where I could decide in the middle of a workday to go take a nap on the couch.

Sometimes I still wish I had that Trapper Keeper, though. I could fill it with all of my work papers and top them off with a Super Job! sticker and no one would ever know.

Preponderances that could occupy a full post if I were more focused and less consumed by thoughts of goat cheese...

Preponderance #1 - I am enjoying pregnancy, except for when I fill three full barf bags on the airplane, and when I pass the Chevre or the sushi with salmon bits at Whole Paycheck and sigh as I hear the faint echoes of YUM emanating from the ghost of my Pre-Preg Life.

Preponderance #2 - I'm still considering what the best course of action is when you arrive at the Whole Paycheck register, and discover that you are not only sans sushi and goat cheese, but also sans wallet. My course of action today was to apologize without offering to put the groceries away, and run out of the store like a woman who is going to be sick, or who has just gotten the call from her agent that she is going to be on Hollywood Squares and there was just no time to think about food at all because Hollywood Squares!! OMG!! I'm going to sit in a Brady Bunch cube and make quips that will totally date me!! Somehow I do not think that is the right course of action.

Preponderance #3 - I was walking in the neighborhood of my girlhood this past weekend. All of the homes of my friends growing up are now occupied by wiffle ball bat-toting tots. So this is what it feels like to have your own "Wonder Years" narrative running in your head. I remember the Mitchell's and the Johnson's and the Guilford's homes. I remember what photos aligned the walls of their staircases. I remember whose house had the best junk food. I remember that neighborhood and in my mind's eye, those people, those pictures, those Ding Dongs will never change....

Preponderance #4 - Thich Nhat Nanh has a lot of sage advice for married people, considering he has been a (celibate) Buddhist monk refugee person who probably did not have much time to undergo marriage counseling just for the heck of it.

Preponderance #5 - Why do they not make maternity clothes in petite sizes. Has there never been a woman who got all up in a family way whose legs and arms did not grow like an aspect ratio with her stomach?

Preponderance #6 - Is it possible that I'll be able to visit Iran someday, even with a US Passport?

Preponderance #7 - How can I expect myself to contribute more positively to the universe if I cannot even remember to use a coupon?