maintaining

[dragonlady7]

I am really trying to maintain this whole Am A Real Adult charade, and do the dishes daily. But it's hard. And I'm trying to lead by example without explicitly asking Z to chip in, because my mother was a terrible nag and I don't want to be a nag, but Z gets super-pissed when I won't directly ask him to do something, but he also gets defensive sometimes when I do ask him to do things, so, I sort of hope my general feeling of well-being and responsibility stays in effect so that I don't mind doing 3/4 or more of the dishes. Also the fact that I am the only person to whom it ever occurs to empty the food scraps out of the sink drain's strainer basket should not bother me, even when the accumulated garbage means the sink has standing water in it, because I asked him directly to please empty them when he finishes doing dishes, and thus asking again would be nagging. Is that logical? I don't know. I need a system. Maybe once I'm an Organized Grown-Up (and I know how faintly ludicrous all this is at my age, but hush) I'll be able to come up with some sort of system to make all this seem less like a constant catastrophe which no one in the history of the world has ever dealt with and with which there is no known way of coping. Nurr, I've always been a little slow. Hush.


At any rate, I hauled myself out of bed before 8 am and did a load of dishes, made coffee, and packed Z a lunch. This is sort of how I would like to be, but it is not really the sort of person I actually am. Moreover I am psyching myself up to (gasp!) run an errand before work. This is a very hard thing for me to do. It is very hard for me to leave my house. I don't know why, but it has always been this way. I am very reluctant to go anywhere-- as if it were some major undertaking to drive the 1.2 miles to the post office, from which I may not be able to return with my train of thought-- or perhaps my person-- intact. I never can guage how long something will take, and I hate to think that I'll get so involved in an errand that I wind up being late to work, but I also hate the thought that I'll overestimate how long something takes, and will end up with one of those infuriating n-minute stretches, where n*2 is the amount of time it takes to do anything useful, and n/2 is the amount of time I can contentedly occupy myself doing nothing. (This is made worse, of course, by the fact that I have such trouble with time management that I can never think how long it takes to do anything useful, and thus am reluctant to begin something, and so I fritter away far too much of my life in the spaces between hateful commitments. This is also how, when unemployed, I managed to go weeks at a time without leaving the apartment.)

Shit, it's almost people's lunch hour, so I'd better go. Brief humorous story: I got a package from Land's End yesterday, and confusedly opened it: I recently returned something to L.L. Bean for a more suitable size, but I am pretty sure the two companies are different, and I'm also pretty sure I made my return to the right one. (How embarrassing would that be?) Inside the box was a bright orange jacket, and the bill had my mother's name on it. Now, we live 300 miles apart, and our addresses are quite distinctly different, as are our names.
So I took out this jacket and looked it over. It fit me, but it was... well, it was bright orange. Not really my style. It was very comfortable, though. But I have a new jacket, and my mother knows that, and also she never mentioned anything about a late Christmas present.
So I emailed her, and went about my way.
Turns out my father had ordered the jacket for himself and somehow had chosen me as the shipping address. Mom has had stuff shipped to me before, so I suppose it was already there in the list of possible addresses.
So that's why I'm trying to get to the post office and yet can't quite nerve myself up to do so.