time warp
I too, have been wondering where I’ve been for the past two weeks. In home construction hell, painting and building and cleaning and painting and cleaning (yes really, that much) and trying to find room for three different sports and their various and sundry equipment in my 917 square foot palace. Now, it’s good to own, so don’t take this as me whining about actually owning real estate in the San Francisco bay area. But I don’t think it’s illegal for a single gal who lives alone to dream about hiring a battalion of contractors, painters, gardeners, and manicurists so she can have her nails done while lying back on the couch and deciding between swatches of Burnt Sienna and Fire Brick as uniformed men wait attentively with paintbrushes in her dining room. No, dreaming’s always free and never cost me a dime, unless you count getting busted at work a few times in the middle of meetings for having your head out the window and somewhere across the San Mateo bridge during a UI exit review.
I’m not working on the house tonight. I stomp my foot and flatly refuse. The cans of paint, the stepladder, the boxes and styrofoam bits, the paper littered all over the office floor — that’s just going to stay the way it is. I’m going on strike, and although I don’t think it’s going to sway anyone much, I’m still picketing from the safety of my corduroy sofa.
In one of those weeks that should fly by, I’m stuck in a temporal mire, slogging my way towards Sunday with low visibility and poor traction. It’s one of those situations where you have a very attractive oasis on the horizon, but some deity in the sky thinks it would be funny if you had to cross the seven-mile desert with no shoes and crows pecking at your head the entire way. In fact, in the distance there’s women in bikinis, well-oiled men fanning them with palm leaves, tropical drinks, and cabana music that you can hear from your rocky encampment, but you’ve spent the majority of your time swatting at flying scavengers and trying to hitch rides from frightened motorists who do everything they can to avoid you. I think eventually, the beach party will feel sorry for me and just trudge out to where I am on the rocks. It’s inevitable, and I’ll have to accept the fact that my little luau is far from set up.
In the spirit of too many projects, I went with B and her counterpart to the bike swap last week and picked up a shiny new road bike that I have yet to fall off of, into a ditch, by the side of Foothill Expressway, with no one to find me for three hours. Don’t think that this won’t happen, because whenever B and I embark on an adventure together, someone mysteriously gets hurt. It’s not always one of us, and in light of this, I make sure we take her man along as much as possible so at least the bad karma will have more than two choices when it decides to strike. Even in her recent bad mood, B has decided that we are going to ride a 60+ mile bike tour in April. Come to think of it, I do believe she only decided this as a direct result of her state of foul humor, which she and I are destined to regret, probably sometime in April up a very long, unforgiving hill. And of course, now that I’ve spilled this little secret of ours, I guess we actually have to go through with it. Check back frequently for Jess the bicycle paparazzi and B, my “Get that camera out of my face before I break it” celebrity.
