So there I was, all motivated to start writing at night and knocking out posts, and then Wednesday happened.

On Wednesday night, I had my book club meeting.  Remember that?

So I went to this book club meeting at this great local Indian restaurant (because sometimes I like to pretend to be all edumucated and worldly, when really the reach of my intellectual knowledge hit a brick wall in 2007 when I graduated from college, and Indian food makes me break out in a sweat-stache).

The truth is, I’m not as smart as I’d like to be.

See that?  That’s a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel in the foreground.  It was mindless.  And awful.  And didn’t even have any good sex scenes.  But I picked it up on the bookstore on a whim because I had a gift card and it looked like an easy summer read and apparently I have zero respect for the world of literature.  Please don’t show this to my book club.  Also, I haven’t read the Ron Paul book yet.  It’s my attempt at trying to become more politically astute.  But so far it’s been a very good paper weight.  Also, I have very crooked ears.  My wonky glasses don’t lie.

Where was I?

Oh, yes.  Book club meeting.  After the meeting, I followed my friend Ava to her apartment so I could pick up the Hunger Games book she’d borrowed from me and The Game of Thrones I’d intended to borrow from her.

And that’s when my would-be predictable week of takeout and Dawson’s Creek turned… not so predictable.

In her parking lot, there were lights.  And confusion.  And stunned onlookers holding kids and puppies and, if they were lucky, the other precious things they could grab as they fled.  If they weren’t, they held only the plastic grocery bags they’d carried home, only to find that home was no longer there.

Now.  I want you to imagine for a second that you live on the far side (thank God) of the 3rd floor of a building that suddenly looks, for all intents and purposes, like the shriveled ass end of a used cigarette butt — all necrotic and charred and this was its good side — the back was far worse.

I also want you to imagine that your significant other is deployed, and you have no way of reaching him save through the Red Cross who, judging by the seedy motel in a questionable side of town they offered to put you up in, may not be the most reliable avenue for getting things done.

But hey.  You’re grateful for the toothbrush.

And also, imagine for a second, that you’re pregnant.  (This is where it might start to get tricky for the guys.  But you can do it — connect with your feminine side and imagine that womb with its resident parasite, dependent on you for its very survival.  Okay, wait.  That’s even hard for me, and I’m a chick.)  But anyway, you’re pregnant.  For the first time ever.  You feel nauseated and bloated, head filled with questions about feeding and sleeping and how to raise decent little humans.

Yep, plural.  Because you’re having twins.

But wait, there’s more.

A friend of yours, whose husband is also deployed and who also is pregnant, is scheduled to arrive at the local airport in T-minus 15 minutes.  Just 15 minutes after you realize you may have just lost all of your worldly possessions.  She’d been having baby stuff shipped to your apartment for the past few months and was planning on living with you until she found a place nearby for her family.

Imagine all of that.

Now.

What’s the first thing you would do?

Ava, who had reached the scene a few minutes before I, in her state of semi-shock and baby brain and sheer exhaustion at the thought of hassles that might lie ahead, knew exactly what she wanted to do.

I was told by an officer that she’d gone inside with the Fire Chief and that I should “stand by.”

Stand by?  You took my pregnant friend inside her smoke-filled apartment?  Did you notice that unmistakable pregnancy indicator known as a belly before you let her in?  And did I mention she’s pregnant?

She came out a few minutes later, a look of relief on her face, hugging tightly to her chest not photo albums or her laptop or legal documents, but books.

Two of them.

Hunger Games, and The Game of Thrones.

“I got the books!” she yelled across the lot.

I laughed.  It’s all you can really do in a situation like this.  Thankfully, the firemen were willing to escort me back in where, with the help of an industrial sized fan and their skilled use of a flashlight, I was able to navigate the eerie haze to rescue her laptop, hard drive, some important files, and stuff my purse full of her underwear.

Hey.

It turns out you never know what you’ll deem important in life until you’re faced with the pressure of time, limited arms, and the option to choose.

The front.

The back.  (Photo by Ava)

Ava, cute firemen, and reporter butt.  What?  A girl can look…

I picked Stefanie up from the airport while Ava got examined by the paramedics and spoke with the Red Cross, and now I have displaced roommates.

Two of them.

Five, if you count the babies.

And for 2 nights, I made them all sleep in 1 bed.  But now we have another, and each our own room, and I’m actually thinking this roommate thing is kind of fun.

Loneliness, it turns out, is like sensory deprivation —

You don’t fully comprehend what you’re missing until you miss it no longer.

And for me, that’s been laughter.  And company.  Someone with whom to share a meal and discuss the weather and debate the realisticness (yep, I’m going with that word) of the show Army Wives.

Stefanie makes a mean curry soup.

And I’ll admit — sharing my house has been an adjustment, but I’m going to miss them when they find a new place to live.

Whaddya know?

Turns out I’m not as reclusive as I thought.

There’s hope for me yet.

Yesterday I got home from work and my lawn was mowed.

Obviously, I didn’t mow it.  That’s not my job.

And Justin didn’t mow it, since I’m pretty sure his superiors in Afghanistan would consider that an excessively long lunch break.

So it must have been the scrawny, bronze tanned stoner kid I hired to do it but was fairly convinced would forget, what with all of the bong-hitting hours between the time I hired him and the time he was scheduled to mow.

What he did forget, apparently, is the fact that I showed him, told him, and texted him to be careful about not cutting the dogs’ electric fence.

Yes, I electrocute my own dogs.

But it’s only because I love them.

Wouldn’t you love faces like these?

Anyway.

So I came home yesterday to fresh-cut grass and the incessant beep of the dog detainment system, indicating a cut wire.

Not surprising.

Also, I can’t find where the wire is apparently cut, since most of it is buried.

Also not surprising.

So now I feel like the helpless girl who can’t figure out how to fix a damn fence.

This is surprising.

Because normally, given enough time, I can figure things out.  I can get ‘er done.  But this time, I’m stumped.  And frustrated.  And for someone who owns canines whose progressive learning capabilities closely resemble those of the Jurassic Park velociraptors, we could be in trouble when they realize their collars no longer beep.

So.

As satisfying as it is to do things on my own, to get my hands a little dirty, to experience the stiffness and stench after a day of manual labor, I realize.

Sometimes I just want someone to do it for me.

I think I could be happy if my hands and my office always looked like this. As long as someone else is mowing my lawn.

I know they say that money can’t buy you happiness, but I think having enough money to pay people to do stuff for me would, in fact, make me very happy indeed.

At least in the sense of immediate gratification.

And there’s nothing, as far as I can tell, wrong with immediate gratification.  Like a handful of Reece’s Pieces and an angst-filled episode of Dawson’s Creek.  Or a cool glass of Riesling and a book on the back deck.  Or a morning jaunt with some literotica and my vibrator.

What?

Just seeing if you’re still paying attention.

My point is that satisfaction earned is not necessarily better than satisfaction bought.  That, in this life, some ventures are worth our time and others are not.

It’s a first-world privilege, and I’m willing to accept it.

So.

Who do I call to fix a fence?

Where’ve you been? I hear you ask.

Well.

For lack of a simple response, let’s just say I’ve been elbows-deep in plumbing fixtures, wood stain, boxed pasta meals, and the funk of my own melancholy.

I realize, as a semi-serious blogger, that I’m supposed to be meticulously recording my daily actions, organizing the resulting mixed media, and assembling it all into some witty and coherent piece of informative evidence here on this blog.

And I have been.  Recording it, that is.  It’s just that whole organizing and writing part that seems to petrify me into paralysis these days.

Instead, I distract myself by taking photos of my dogs, my wine, or my food (when it doesn’t happen to involve shell shaped pasta or processed cheese) and posting them on Facebook or Instagram in the vain attempt to gain some kind of social media validation that the way I’m living my life these days is, in fact, worth while.

Suffice to say, I haven’t exactly embraced the pseudo-single life.

Though it has, despite my best intentions, managed to embrace me.  In a crazy, cyclic carousel of ups and downs.  Motivation and melancholy.  Like the San Andreas Fault, I appear to lie dormant for a time, building up my energy, storing up my drive, and then I release it all at once in this impressive display of calamitous frenzy.

Frankly, it’s exhausting.

Both physically and emotionally.

But I do have ideas.

Lots of ideas.

They’re scattered about on yellow sticky notes and inside notebooks and on pieces of scrap paper everywhere.  The key, I’ve discovered, is going to be learning how to write at night, when I have the most time.  When I don’t have to be to work in 45 minutes.  When, unfortunately, my flow of motivational steam has been fully depressurized by the soul-sucking realities of spending my days as an almost-30-year-old assistant.

But I’ll get there.

All I ask is that you stick with me.

It’s a process, you know.

But we’ll get through it together.

In the meantime, just take a gander at how I currently spend my evenings.

I think you’ll find that a little time spent on… I don’t know… intellectual pursuits wouldn’t hurt me.

Not one little bit.

I’ll be the first to admit.

I started this first post-deployment week off with the best of intentions.  I had plans, you know.  I was going to get things done.

But then I learned that Dawson’s Creek is now available for streaming on Netflix and spent the weekend — yes, the entire weekend — drinking wine, eating cheesy pasta from a box, and realizing that my high school crush on Pacey Witter has, in fact, not diminished over the last fourteen years.

Because these are the things I had available to me without leaving the house.

Long before Bella went batshit for Edward and Jacob, teens of the 90’s were fatefully divided between Team Pacey and Team Dawson.  And even though their names were ridiculous and they had the vocabulary of tenured english professors, the adorability factor was undeniable.

And today, on my day off, my plan was to prime and paint my closet to prep for the long-awaited pipe organizer post.

But now?

Now I’m not sure.

I’m fighting demons.  And they don’t stop with Pacey fantasies.

My allergies have turned my nose into a faucet, my ears into pressure valves, and my chest into a lead weight.  Also, I smell.

And also, my neighbor invited me to a wine drinking ladies’ social event last night (or so I’d been told), but it was really a jewelry selling party where I only felt slightly out-of-place among the perfectly kept housewives to the point where I may have overindulged in the boxed wine that they swore was delicious because the box, after all, was black and fancy, but let me just go ahead and tell you that it was not.  That said, I still managed to have a nice time because, lo and behold, they were great women.  Fun, witty, and very content with their lives.  There was even a former Miss USA title winner in the bunch who kept everyone laughing with her running man talent.

Needless to say, I’m not feeling 100% this morning.

And I’m tempted — oh-so-tempted — to turn on the Dawson and sink into mindlessness.

But I won’t.

Yet.

I’m thinking the best way to battle my lethargy is to work on a reward-based system.  If I get something done, I earn an episode of Dawson’s Creek.

Primer is up?  Great!  Watch as Jen falls back into her bad girl ways.

What?  You painted that first coat?  Awesome!  Find out who Joey loses her virginity to.

You hung the organizing system, de-cluttered the garage, stained your shelves, pressure washed the house, cancelled Justin’s phone service, wrote your post for Apartment Therapy, and finished decorating your bedroom?  Congratulations, friend — you just earned yourself a full day Creek-a-thon of brainless nostalgia.

Obviously, I’m still working out the details.  But I’m thinking I’ll train myself the way I train the dogs.  With positive reinforcement.

And since my dogs are so well-behaved, I know this will work.

cough.