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Thursday, January 01, 2004

I DO NOT MAKE RESOLUTIONS

This was one of those days when inanimate objects conspired against me. As soon as I leave a room they all huddle and whisper about what they're going to do next. Everything from my daughter's candy jar to the carburetor on my husband's truck, not to mention the BLENDER, I think blenders are the leaders of the universal inanimate objects' plot to take over the cosmos conspiracy -- they've all snickered and suppressed giggles till their little inanimate faces turned puce, watching me deal with their freak-outs in rapid succession today. I NEED A PADDED CELL. thank you.


Other than that, well, one can't really think in terms of "other than that", can one, when one's entire existence has been consumed with this huge comedy of errors, but really, in spite of that, I am surviving and actually not, well, angry, or cranky, or even afflicted with that awful ears-about-to-whistle-like-twin-teakettle-spouts stressed-out kind of feeling. Perhaps someone slipped some Prozac into my diet Coke. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that I have had more sex in the past thirty days than in any other thirty days in my life to date, except possibly during the first month of my marriage, which really shouldn't count because for crying out loud, we had NO idea what we were doing, so those three times a day were all just practice runs. Anyway. I even did not have PMS this month AT ALL. ONCE, for one teeny MINUTE. I have a theory that all the oxytocin from all the, well, you know, that that all coursed through my system enough to put me on kind of a natural high. Or at least a natural tranquilizer/analgesic kind of thing. So, if I were going to make New Year's resolutions, which I'm not, I always resist the urge to do that just like I resisted that whole NaNoWriMo peer pressure thing -- IF I were going to make New Year's resolutions, I would resolve to keep this up. I think it has also definitely had a positive effect on T -- what else explains the fact that he disassembled and reassembled a carburetor in the pouring-down rain, in the dark, and even had one of those frightening things happen where the gas that's in the carburetor exploded while he was leaning over it, and it seared off part of his beard -- that even happened, and not once did he snap at me or somehow manage to imply that this whole thing had to be my fault just as certainly as if I had been the person on the assembly line making the fuel filter which had disintegrated and caused his truck to, well, to make us stand in the pouring-down rain in the dark while he disassembled the carburetor. And, as any mechanic's wife knows, part of the job description under "mechanic's wife" (this is for the wife of a professional or a recreational mechanic, mind you) reads: "will serve as the repository for release of any and all stress inflicted on mechanic by failure of vehicles to function as required." It's in there, just look. So, if I managed to waive that by encouraging us to exercise our marital privilege a bit more frequently than is perhaps normal, hey, this is a definite plus.


Or it could be that my husband is just the kind of man who keeps getting better and better with age (in TEMPERAMENT, I mean, get your mind out of the gutter...), and by the time he's 50 he'll be so perfect in every way that supermodels will hire hit men to take me out so that they can have a crack at him. It could be that.


Ooh, the rain started again. I was afraid it had gone away. Still hoping for snow, but I'm not counting on it.


My mom and I were looking at some of her old diaries today and it got me thinking about diaries. Not like diaryland diaries, but REAL diaries. It's a shame, there's such a paradox about them: Nobody reads them, so you can totally let yourself go in one and write whatever you want. But nobody reads them, so the motivation to write in one with any regularity is virtually nil. I think everyone knows that an online diary/journal/weblog is not really a real diary. A very few people actually do use them as such, and their journals are generally either so blushingly personal or so mind-numbingly dull that I can't stand it. No, for most people, this medium is a method of noting, in a public way, things we think are interesting or funny or clever or irritating or worth discussing, but definitely in a PUBLIC way. There are a lot of areas that I don't even touch on in here, and this would be the case even if nobody I knew read these entries at all; some things I just like to keep to myself. I might like to keep a record of them, but I don't have the discipline to sit and write about them every day. I think the reason that this diary has lasted so much longer than I predicted that it would in my first entry is that, at that time, I had envisioned using it as a real diary, but I quickly learned that I was not going to do that. A real diary takes more discipline, and more of a far-seeing attitude -- you're not writing this stuff down to vent, necessarily; you're not writing it to make anyone laugh or update anyone on what's going on; you're writing it so that years later you can have a record of your thoughts, your feelings, and the mundane events in your day-to-day life that you'd completely forget otherwise, but which might be worth remembering. But I, for one, simply lack the tenacity and the foresight and the discipline to keep a real diary, even though in ten years I may wish I had.

I almost, ALMOST gave in. I DO NOT MAKE RESOLUTIONS. But I do have a blank book sitting around here somewhere, and January 1st does seem like as good a day as any to start using it...

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