I’m one of those lucky people who has someone who has my back.
It’s easy, when you have it, to take it for granted. But I have it. And I’m not trying to rub it in, but I think you should know. It’s kind of important if you want to know me.
I’m not going to lie and say we always understand each other.
I’m not going to lie and say we’re always on the same page or even, sometimes, in the same book.
But I’m also not going to lie and say he’s not one of the good ones — the kind who calls when he says he’ll call. The kind who stays sober so you have a safe ride home. The kind who cooks you dinner and rubs your back and somehow manages to turn you into a hugger when hugging used to make you feel all awkward and gangly and boob-pressy.
Sometimes I think I don’t know who he really is, and that scares me.
But it also keeps things interesting.
He’s my rock and my hard place.
Infuriating sometimes, because he can’t read my mind and I don’t know why.
All I do know is that 31 years ago, the world was graced with this:
(This side isn’t so bad, either):
And those of us who get to experience him, no matter how brief or how long, should consider ourselves pretty damn lucky, indeed.
You know that feeling you get when things just work out?
Like when friends come over to visit and they all want wine and you happen to have exactly the right number of unbroken wine glasses so no one’s forced to drink cab from a highball.
Like when you suddenly crave “Shit on a Shingle” for dinner and you just happen to have enough milk in your fridge and dried beef in your pantry to make it.
Like when you finally decide to wash your pillowcase and you’re so careful to set your pillow in a precise location so you can keep track of that special soft spot where your head always fits perfectly and then some reckless person (most likely yourself) thoughtlessly moves your pillow to another location and now usually there is no way to detect that spot until you actually lie on the pillow in every configuration imaginable and you know you’re in for a long night, except — wait! There it is. Your spot. And you got it perfect the first time.
It’s that feeling.
That feeling that comes when you think you’re in for an ordeal, but instead the process is relatively effortless and surprisingly stress-free.
And that is exactly what happened when I emailed my boss to decline is offer of a full-time position.
I thought he might be upset. Or worse, disappointed. But instead, his reaction was one of relief. See, as a small start-up business owner, he wanted to do what it took to keep a decent employee (one who actually shows up and does her work) on board. In my case, he thought that required offering me a full-time position. Even though, it turns out, he had the minor problem of not knowing whether he’d be able to afford me. So he was actually relieved when I declined, and he may have let slip a note of envy.
See, when I explained to him that a full-time position is no longer my primary goal because I’ve realized now I have more time to do some other things that I’m passionate about, he replied that one day he hopes to be in the same position.
Now.
Does anyone sense the irony here?
My boss is a self-made African-American male with a wife and 2 very young sons who runs a very successful small business, and he happens to be 2 years younger than me. And yet, for some reason, he thinks I’m the one in the position to which he should aspire.
Okay, not entirely.
He drives a very nice car. I drive a 12-year-old Tracker.
He wears very nice clothes. I still wear things I owned in high school.
He owns his own business. I work for an hourly rate.
He has 2 happy, healthy, and dare-I-say adorable kids. I have 2 dogs who once swallowed an entire bag of chicken bones and I had to feed them cotton balls to ease the sharp passage of shrapnel through their intestines. True story.
I’m sure he doesn’t go home at night and wish that he was me. But. There’s something here. An affirmation of sorts, that tells me I made the right decision. That tells me when I cut out the shoulds, good things can happen.
So this is good news, right? I celebrated by hanging item numbers 3, 4 and 5 on my walls.
I think it has something to do with my fear of commitment.
So, in light of my goals for the new year, I hung some stuff.
Three things, as a matter-of-fact.
I hung them in the guest bathroom. Approximately 6 feet away from the one other thing hanging in my house, and yet where I spend a significantly longer amount of time.
(Please ignore my unpainted trim. That’s still on the 2012 task list for this money and time-sucker of a house.)
Let me tell you about the bird. The bird is special. My friend Alaina’s mother, Jan Krebs, is an artist. She’s my adoptive mother from back in our college days, and one of the first people to teach me that life should be reserved for doing things you love.
I’ve always wanted a Jan Krebs original, and as of Christmas this year, that wish came true. It’s not a painting, but some type of carved ceramic that has a rough texture and looks fabulous in person. I knew that this couldn’t just be something I let sit around on my console table or propped up against my backsplash like so many other pieces of art I have around. Not this time. The bird would be the start of a movement.
And I didn’t stop there.
The tea light holders were purchases I made on a trip I took to Europe in 2004. I bought them in a tiny shop in Strasbourg, France.
Well? What do you think of my progress?
First, the bathroom was a paisley-infested crime scene:
You’d think my parents would have put one of those attachable crib-like railings on the side of my “big girl” bed because clearly, a big girl I was not, but no. I suppose they figured the best move was to leave me free to fight my monsters of the night without first making me launch myself over a barred piece of metal. Because, you know, concussions are so much better when you don’t have to work for them.
Not that I was ever concussed from the ordeal.
In fact, I never even actually woke up.
Nope. I just rolled on out of there, landing with a muffled thud on the (presumably) orange shag carpeting, and continued right on sleeping. I honestly think my parents did nothing to stop my nighttime base jumps because they enjoyed coming into my room in the morning to see where their toddler had ended up in the night — curled up in a ball at the foot of the bed, or sprawled out like some sort of beached squid, my limbs all knotted and contorted, jammies unshamefully bunched up to expose my baby pot belly and white little calves, the epitome of nonchalance and innocence and bendiness — all the stuff it is to be a toddler.
Then, one night, all of that changed.
One night, I woke up. It was pitch dark. I was lying on my stomach, on what I knew wasn’t my bed, so I pushed myself up.
Or at least, I tried to.
But I couldn’t. Thwack! The back of my head struck metal, just inches above where I lay. I scootched up onto my elbows, chin tucked down, and tried to raise my tush. Thwack! My bum hit metal again.
As an adult, my reaction in this situation would be, 1) What. the. f*ck. 2) Sheer panic.
As a kid, my reaction to this situation was, 1) Sheer panic.
I screamed, I cried, I yelled for mom and dad with such urgency that I’m pretty sure they must have thought someone was trying to kidnap me in the middle of the night, especially when they barged into the room, in panic mode themselves, and couldn’t see me anywhere. I could hear their terrified voices yelling, Katie? Katie?!, but they sounded so far away and muffled by the walls of the wormhole into which I surely must have slipped. The carpet turned soggy with tears below my cheek — carpet? — and suddenly, there was light.
My dad had lifted the bed skirt, took one look at his terrified daughter lying helpless under the bed, and started laughing. My mom’s face popped into the window he’d created, and she joined in.
Now. If you’ve ever asked yourself whether toddlers can feel embarrassment, believe me when I say that they can. And to this day, I’m pretty sure either one of them would react the same way if they woke up in the dark and couldn’t move. But my humiliation didn’t stop me from reaching my arms out to them so they could drag me to safety and place me snugly back in bed.
After that, I stopped falling out.
It’s like the inner workings of my unconscious little mind said, Enough. We can’t handle this kind of stress.
Just one little scare is all it took, and my nighttime antics ceased.
But I think, ever since then, a little part of me has missed the unleashed feeling of the free fall.
And I think that maybe, many of us spend our adult lives trying to get that feeling back again.
Does that title sound as gross as I think it sounds?
Good. Then I have your attention.
Some of us have a time in our lives when we have to take a stand. When we have to say, from the gut of our gut (because just our gut isn’t enough), and with as much confidence as we can muster (which usually isn’t nearly sufficient), “I may not know exactly what I’m doing, but I know it has to be done.”
And some of us have to do it twice.
God help us.
But since God (or whatever superior being to whom you might occasionally make a plea for help) likely has more important things to do, like end world hunger or help Tebow win a football game, we’re usually pretty much on our own.
And that can be a pretty hard thing to do. It’s a tough call — to go against the grain of you feel you should do, and instead choose what you want to do.
The super enlightened among us might call this “living our truth.”
I call it “throwing out the shoulds.” It’s less mystical sounding, and a little more self-explanatory.
After all, if you’re unhappy, it’s likely the shoulds that got you into this mess. You should go to college right after high school. You should land a stable job and start a retirement fund and have medical coverage. You should buy a car. You should buy a house. You should water your lawn and wear nice clothes and attend company holiday parties and smile, because you just got a promotion which pretty much guarantees that you now get to spend even more time each day in this place that’s not so bad, but it’s not, somehow, where you know you’re supposed to be. It’s not. But you feel stuck because you should be happy. You have all of these things, and everyone else who has these things is happy, right? And if you change, you might lose these things.
So you should stay.
And you should learn to love it.
And you should spend the rest of your days trying to hypnotize yourself into this trance known as the American Dream that seems to come so easily for everyone else.
And that, my friend, is how you waste years. How you brush them into the dust pan, one by one, and throw them out with the trash. Because if you really feel this way (and believe me I feel you if you do), it’s not just going to magically get better. Because if you’re not happy, you’re missing the things you already have in your life that are wonderful. You know you should love these things, but you can’t. It’s like you’re not even present. You’re watching your life through a telephoto lens, and you never really even experience it.
So.
I didn’t intend to get all deep and philosophical on you this morning. But I’m going to assume you needed to hear it, because I needed to type it. What I actually intended to tell you is that I need to do it again. I need to make the difficult choice. And while I know, in my gut of guts that the choice is already made, sometimes a pep talk is necessary to do the deed.
You see, if you’re fairly new here, you might not know that I quit my job back in August 2010 in order to go make hot sauce in Costa Rica for a couple of months. I had intended it as a jumping-off point — a type of cold turkey shock therapy to push myself into figuring out what, exactly, it was that would make me happy. The plan was ill-conceived, at best, and when I returned home my depression was at its peak. (I know, lucky Justin.) Instead of focusing on building a writing career, I let people should all over me. I had no job. My marriage was in a state of limbo. My self-esteem was lying somewhere along the side of that lonely stretch of road that took me to that lowest point in my life, and I just didn’t even know where to begin. So, by August 2011, I took a part-time job as a real estate assistant. The job market was horrendous, and, if you want to know the truth, that is the only interview I could get. Even though I’ve had some baby-step success at getting my foot in the writing door, I lacked gumption. And now, here I am, nearly a year-and-a-half after the epic quitting event of 2010, and I’m scarily close to where I first started.
My backyard view in Costa Rica.
And now, I find it’s time to make another choice.
On New Year’s Eve, my boss sent me an email. A very nice email. A complimentary email, on how he appreciates my hard work and dedication to the team. And he extended me an offer. A very nice offer. An offer to work for his company full-time, to become an integral part of the team, and to devote myself to this career path. To his career path.
The money would not come close to what I was making in 2010, but it would be better than where I’m at now. The job is more stimulating than where I was back then, but I still know that it’s not where I’m supposed to be. At least, not full-time. Because, if I choose that path, I know I won’t dedicate the ambition I need to fulfill my goals this year. It feels wrong, so wrong, to turn it down. And yet. If I accept, it will mean I’ve learned nothing in the past year-and-a-half. That it was a waste. That I’m destined to make the same mistakes over and over again. Turning down an opportunity that would put us in a better financial state feels wrong because that’s how we’re trained to feel. But, if I remember how I really felt in August 2010, I remember very clearly that money was not the issue. Not even close. So, I’m going to politely decline his generous offer, as soon as we’re done here. And hope I’m not making a huge, huge mistake.
Something tells me I might need something a little stronger than coffee this morning.
But you know, so far, all I can figure is that we need to make a series of difficult choices to start taking back control of these limited and precious lives that we have — choices that feel right, even if they don’t look right.
Obviously, I can’t tell you if this is really the way because I’m not there yet myself.
But.
You can be sure I’ll let you know how it turns out.
I’ve already run through the gamut of extreme New Year’s emotions this morning, so I’m feeling way ahead of the game.
I woke up feeling hopeful — hopeful that the new year would bring a sense of clarity about what I’m doing and where I’m going and how I can manipulate and pinch and twist the world like it’s my personal ball of Play-doh to get it to do what I want.
Hope, of course, immediately turned to anxiousness. What ifs came barreling through my mind — What if I don’t do anything significant this year? What if I spend this next New Year’s Eve as disappointed in myself as I was this year? What if I still haven’t learned Spanish, started that book, toned up my arms, published my first travel article, taken a cooking class, or remembered that it’s possible to change my ISO setting on my camera every single time I use it?
Fortunately, instead of swirling down the rabbit hole of self loathing or panic that can follow anxiety, I have the innate ability (probably derived from my pot smoking years) to stress about a problem for a few minutes, then get over it and move on.
It’s really kind of wonderful and has probably saved me from the straight jacket on more than one occasion.
So move on, I did, into the pep talk phase of New Year emotions. You CAN do these things. You just need a plan. You need to set goals. You need to fight every. single. go-with-the-flow urge in your body to avoid letting another year just slip away into a mushy pile of 9-5 workdays, should we/shouldn’t we have a kid conversations, and hours of online curtain shopping.
Then, zen. Of course, that’s not really the point. Life IS your daily activity. Your job. Your conversations. Your curtain shopping. You should learn to enjoy these things rather than wishing them a speedy passing, otherwise your whole life will be a speedy passing.
And finally, indifference. Whatevs. This isn’t any different from any other year. What’s going to happen will happen, and what doesn’t, doesn’t. There’s no sense in trying to control it. The world is not your Play-doh. Just stop.
Stop.
So, already this morning I’ve managed to do what takes most people 2-3 months to do — stop stressing about the new year and all of my big, big plans for it, and just let it happen.
And no, I haven’t forgotten about my word for 2012. Ambition will hopefully still play a role this year. Because that, I can control. And I’m pretty sure if I can conquer that, everything else will just automatically bend to my will.
That time when we’re supposed to get all reflective and introspective and think about everything that happened (or didn’t happen) during the past year — about all of the goals we accomplished and how our lives changed because we achieved said goals and how we’ve miraculously become these emotionally centered, successful, zen-like people because we perfected the art of meditation somewhere in the time between attaining all of our hopes and dreams (which ironically isn’t the goal of meditation but just work with me here), and now, finally, we can enter the new year with a sense of peace, contentment, and, most important, sans resolutions.
Right.
Because that’s realistic.
Sadly, if the psychological distance on the self-satisfaction scale I’d hoped to travel during the last year was a mile, I’ve managed to physically propel myself forward a foot. Maybe two feet, if I want to account for the fact that I’ve mostly emerged from a pretty uncomfortable bout of depression.
And why wouldn’t I want to account for that?
But still. That means I fell 5,278 feet short. I’m not disappointed, per se, because I’m not surprised. I mean, it’s me we’re talking about here. I frequently quote the Gin Blossoms in saying, “If you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down.” Genius. Or demoralizing. But whatever, it’s true, and it applies to me, too. If *I* don’t expect too much from myself, I can’t let myself down.
…right?
If I were to look back on 2011 and come up with a single word to describe it, there’s really only one obvious choice:
anticlimactic.
I mean, really, Katie? 2010 was an all-around shit year, which lead to you losing your shit, quitting your respectable, well-paid job, and moving to Costa Rica for 2 months to make hot sauce. Oh yeah, and to find yourself. But really, all you found was the first decent tan of your life and the fact that you have to first know yourself in order to find yourself.
And what do I know about myself?
For starters, I’m happiest when I am traveling and meeting new people.
I have a passion for writing.
I like learning my way around a camera.
So, after a brief bout of the fire-under-the-ass kind of inspiration which led me to vehemently absorb a zillion books and articles on freelance writing and photography, submitting exactly one super professional official travel article pitch, receiving exactly one acceptance after multiple follow-ups only to learn of an 80% decrease in the original advertised pay, and then working in a bar for a few months, I’ve settled, once again, into a job for which I have exactly zero passion except now my income is significantly reduced and my co-workers aren’t as fun.
Well, that’s not entirely true. My co-workers and I are getting to know each other, which takes time, and my new job does allow me some of the freedom of creativity I lacked in the former — I do get to write, take pictures, and mingle with the townsfolk, which is a vast improvement from sitting for 8 hours a day in front of a computer monitor.
But this is not, to say the least, where I’d hoped to find myself with just a few days left in this 11th year of the new millennium. I mean, it seems like just yesterday we were partying it up like it was 1999 because it was 1999, dammit, and we had all this time to become more awesome than we already were when we were only 17 frickin’ years old.
So.
It appears as though I need to take this goal thing a little more seriously this time around.
I’m not going to call them “resolutions,” because that has all kinds of negative, clichéd connotations about not following through or only lasting until the Christmas lights finally come down, which will probably be sometime in February, much to our neighbors’ dismay.
(Our Christmas lights, in all seriousness, are the most hideous display of half-assedness we’ve publicly flaunted in a while, my friends. The thing is, after Justin finished installing new floors, smoking a turkey, and baking 2 cheesecakes for upcoming holiday festivities, for some reason he didn’t have the energy to commit to professionally stringing outdoor lights. Yet he still insisted on doing it. And all I have to say is that the drooping, scalloped string of white lights hanging from our front porch — only our front porch — look something akin to a melting frosted gingerbread house. But I didn’t have the heart to tell him. At least, not until guests were arriving and I’d already had a glass of spiked cider and it was finally okay to just relax and laugh it out.)
Anyway.
This year I’m going to stick with the term “goals,” instead of resolutions, because it sounds more political and serious and spreadsheety. There’s a sense of accountability, if you know what I mean.
But I kind of feel ahead of the game because I’ve already done Step 1 and Step 2. Step 1 is to make an “Eff Yeah” list for 2011. That’s easy. I survived depression, I went to Spain, I threw the best baby hot tub party ever, and I didn’t die. Eff-to-the-Yeah. Step 2 is to come up with a word or phrase that best represents my hopes and dreams for the coming year. Again, that’s pretty easy. If the word for 2011 was anticlimactic, especially when it comes to finding a sense of purpose, then there can only be one word for 2012:
ambition.
So. We’ll see if I can actually make that happen. Not that it will matter since the world is supposedly going to end at the end of the year anyway.
But, if I follow the steps, at least I’ll be able to say I tried, right? And in the end — the real end of the end of the end of the world type end — that’s all that really matters.
If you celebrate Christmas, you probably fall into one of two categories:
1. Those who honor family tradition, cooking the same meals, drinking the same drinks, playing the same love-worn Harry Connick Jr. Christmas album year after year, and taking comfort in the thought that while everything else changes — people grow old, babies get born, the ovens are stainless, not avocado, and presents arrived pre-wrapped at the front door — these other things, the ones we can control, will stay the same.
2. Those who forego tradition and family gatherings to sip mai tais on a tropical island somewhere and forget that the world even exists.
Me? I’d say I actually fall somewhere between the two extremes. When I was younger, my family did the whole gathering thing. We baked, played with cousins, sang carols, annoyed each other in that hate-you-yet-love-you way families do… the works.
Then it fell apart.
And I started moving.
And my sister started moving.
And we eventually came to learn that while some people really can go home again, it becomes a little impossible when home no longer exists.
When most of your belongings were sold while you were away.
When someone else is living in your room.
Sliding down your stairs.
Playing your sheet music like it’s theirs.
And we realized that traditions can break — will break — if the people you counted on to keep them going are no longer on speaking terms.
Then I met Justin. The first year he invited me to his family’s Christmas gathering, I felt all crumpled. Broken. Out of place. How come they could hold it together? How could they be so happy? Every year 40+ people, related by blood or by choice, all gather in a single house to eat Grandma’s famous lasagna, play a detested (yet loved) family trivia game, watch the children take turns opening gifts one-by-one, exchange white elephant gifts and laugh, once again, when the 20-year-old cousin tries to grab the one with the beer, Mom shakes the shake weight, and Grandpa wins the coveted gift card to Omaha Steaks.
Rinse, repeat.
Sure, there’s gossip. There’s bickering. There’s family tension. But, in all of its stagnant predictability, it’s all kinds of wonderful.
So I started to love it — to look forward to hanging out with the “outlaw” aunts who speak my language, to see how many cousin’s names I could remember, and to absorb through the pores of my skin whatever the stuff is — egg whites, perhaps? — that makes his family stick.
But sometimes we don’t go. Whether we can’t afford the tickets one year, can’t muster the energy for holiday travel another, or “accidentally” book a trip to Hawaii instead, some years we just don’t go.
And inevitably, we miss them.
I miss them.
Family via osmosis, not marriage.
But, for the years we’re not there, we’ve started our own tradition of sorts, maybe in honor of my own crumpled history. We invite all of the misfit toys — those who can’t travel or have nowhere to go or just haven’t gone yet — to our house for a little dinner. Only this year, it turned into a big dinner, where nothing was traditional: The turkey was smoked, the lasagna was vegetarian, the potatoes were au gratin, and the stuffing was German. There were meatballs. And hummus. And peach something-or-others. And white chocolate cheesecake. And mulled cider spiked with Southern Comfort.
And a new kind of family.
Not one we were born into or chose through marriage, but one we made on-the-fly, built purely from us leftovers who somehow managed to come together to make something worthwhile.
So, thanks to our motley crew of misfits on Christmas Eve and my friend Alaina for inviting us to her family dinner on Christmas, it felt, strangely enough, like ours.
I think maybe my last post was a little long. It scared me away for a few days, and I apologize for that.
Also, my little sister is in town, and she keeps me busy doing stuff like cooking. And then eating. And then cooking again.
And I have a cold.
And what I originally intended to become our every-other-year small dinner gathering of Christmas misfits — an intimate dinner served family style with wine and board games for those who aren’t traveling “home” this year — is now turning into a full-blown party of sorts, and I’m kind of stuck wondering how the girl who doesn’t like throwing parties (that would be me, in case you’re new here) keeps ending up throwing parties.
Not that I totally mind.
I mean, the idea that people who have no where else to go this holiday are willing to settle for our little ol’ house that can barely squeeze a comfortable gathering of 6 is kind of a heartwarming thought. I just hope they all don’t mind confined spaces. And a really strange medley of food. And not moving. Like, at all.
Other than that, it should be fun.
And the good news is, they will have a floor to stand on.
Yeah… so please ignore the unpainted door trim, odd green tinge I can’t seem to get rid of and unfinished shoe molding, and just look at the floors.
Yes, that’s a giant gear.
I’m working on my style.
Don’t judge.
We still have a long way to go, but I’m thinking the floors are a step in the right direction, no?
Did you catch what I did there? I rhymed “why” with the “Y” in “DIY,” which is essentially the same as rhyming “I” with “FYI” or “IDK” with “OK” or any other equally un-clever device.
Also, it doesn’t even make sense. Why would we do it yourself?
It’s grammatically incorrect.
It should say, “This is Why We DIO.” DIO, of course, meaning “Do It Ourselves.” But then it wouldn’t rhyme. And no one would know what that means. You’d read it and be like, This is why we… dance in offices? Dine in orphanages? Do it orally?
And although I probably could write about any of those things, it turns out that office dancing, orphanage dining, and anything-lingus is not what this post is about.
Sorry.
And, come to think of it, it’s not even about why we DIO. If anything, it’s about why we shouldn’t DIO.
And it’s about this teeny, tiny, eensie, weensie little project that involves ripping up the flooring in the main living space of our home, and the fact that we decided to take it on ourselves. To save money.
Which kind of brings to mind that little rant I made about Black Friday and the other one about couponing and how if people valued their time as much as the cash in their wallets, they wouldn’t do silly things like… say… spend 4 solid days installing laminate flooring just to save the cost of paying a professional.
Well. I’d like to point out that I’m not a hypocrite, clearly, because Justin is the one doing the majority of the work (with the help of some neighbors on Sunday). All I did was spend a couple of hours painting baseboards.
Don’t judge me.
It’s not that I didn’t want to help — it’s that my help wasn’t wanted.
See, clearly I’m way too intelligent to waste my brilliant brain cells doing collaborative menial labor with the boys, and my criticismsuggestions input wasn’t appreciated. So. I stuck to the undervalued-yet-still-completely-necessary tasks that no one else wanted to do, like painting baseboards and pulling staples from the sub-floor. And I took photos of the boys as they compared ball size were totally awesome and installed my floors.
Which brings me to the first reason you should probably think long and hard before taking on a major DIY project.
Reason 1: It will test the limits of your marriage/partnership/friendship. And not in a good way. Seriously. When we tiled our guest bathroom and laundry room floor, the work for which was much more evenly distributed, it almost ended in divorce. Especially when, after Justin had spent a good 45-minutes intricately cutting the last of the tiles so it would fit around the door frame between the bathroom and laundry room, I knocked it over. Onto the other tiles. All of which were porcelain.
FYI, porcelain cracks when it’s dropped onto porcelain. Into like… a million tiny pieces.
But it wasn’t my fault. I was delirious after 2 straight days of measuring and stooping and troweling and why the hell would you lay such an intricately cut tile — the last tile — up against the frickin’ door frame anyway??!
Even if you think your relationship is solid — if he asked you to be nice to his mother during your last visit and you didn’t even react when she said that she better get cooking because he’s too skinny and clearly no one is feeding him — if you forced him to watch Titanic because you just couldn’t believe that the fact that he’d never seen it was a conscious decision on his part and he actually stayed awake for its entirety without making a joke about Rose’s weight when Jack couldn’t fit on the floating board — if he asked you to try that thing with the feathers and the ball-gag and the nipple butter just that one time to “see how it went” and you did it because you love him and you forgave him when you couldn’t stand straight for several days — even if you’ve survived all of those things, do not, under any circumstances, fool yourself into thinking that a collaborative home improvement project will be easy.
Failblog.org
I’d be willing to bet that even John and Sherry sometimes want to smother each other while they sleep.
So.
Aside from the relationship turmoil they invoke, which I’m willing to risk, DIY projects are worth the time they take, right?
That depends.
Reason 2: DIY projects always take more time than even the maximum amount of time you could possibly imagine. Does that sound worth it to you? If you think a project like laying a click-and-lock floating laminate floor in a small rectangular room and hallway should only take you a couple of days, think again. First, there’s the prep work: Remove furniture, clip dogs’ toenails one last time on carpet since you don’t have to vacuum it ever again, run around blotting and spraying carpet cleaner on blood spots because you clipped one nail too far then realize you don’t even have to clean up the blood spots because they’re getting removed with the carpet, run to Lowe’s to buy a table saw, tapping block, and various other supplies that somehow add up to way more money than you expected, cut and pull up carpet, cut and pull up padding, pull eight-and-a-half-million staples out of the sub-floor, realize sub-floor is uneven, run to local hardware store and find it closed, go home because you forgot your wallet anyway, run to Lowe’s again to buy floor leveler, level the sub-floor, start painting baseboards, realize the baseboards haven’t been cleaned in about 9 months, clean baseboards, paint baseboards, then, if you’re lucky, you might be able to start the actual work.
The point is, any major project — especially one where you might be exposing the sun-deprived underbelly of your beloved home — will likely result in the discovery of a hair-riddled muffin top where you thought for sure there would exist a 6-pack of baby-butt smooth abs.
So don’t be surprised.
Okay, so I might lose my marriage/boyfriend/girlfriend/best friend and it will take me running through all 6 seasons of Dexter plus 4 showings of Titanic plus every single episode of every Real Housewives show that’s ever existed to finish it, but it’s worth it to save the money, right?
Really? You think you’re going to save money?
Reason 3: After you buy all of the sh*t you need to finish the project, you may as well have swallowed your pride and paid for a professional. Really. Table saw. Floor leveler. Any other tools you don’t already own (many were used for this project). Did you take time off from work for which you might not get paid? Not to mention the time, my friends. The time. Oh, I mentioned that in Reason 2? Well it’s worth mentioning again.
Reason 4: If you screw up, there’s no one to blame but yourself. Enough said.
And yet.
I do have some tips for not evading, but at least minimizing the DIY effects described above:
1: When it becomes difficult to work together, stop working together. Period. Take a break, and step away from the stress. Appoint one of you the role of tool-grabbber/back-rubber/wine-drinker, if necessary, and try your damnedest to keep your mouth shut as much as possible.
2: Plan projects before a major holiday/event/guest arrival so that you are motivated to either finish the project or forced to explain to Aunt Geraldine exactly why you keep feeding her Jell-O shots while pulling staples out from the bottom of her foot.
3: Okay, so you had to buy a few tools, and when you add up the cost of said tools and the time it took to complete the project, you really didn’t save any money at all. But. You’ll at least have those tools for the next time you take on a similar project, which will probably be a cold day in hell.
But at least your neighbors will think you’re cool.
And the good news is, not all is lost. There’s a certain feeling one acquires when finishing a major house project — a sense of satisfaction that doesn’t come with hiring a professional installer.
It’s like when veteran mothers try to explain the feeling of motherhood to non-mothers in that annoying habit they have that they can’t seem to help. (Kidding, mothers! You know I love you for perpetuating the human race when I’m too lazy to do it.)
That is, you just have to experience it to know how it feels.
And, by the time you do, it doesn’t really matter how it feels because it’s too late to turn back.
Yesterday, Justin slit open the belly of our living room carpet like a surgeon cracking the chest of a heart patient, exposing all of the bloody, oozing innards of our home’s structure.
Except there weren’t any bloody, oozing innards. Thank God.
I imagine an FBI investigation would be a major setback when it comes to finishing these floors. Selfish bastards.
However, as you so faithfully expressed in yesterday’s Facebook poll, it would make you accurate when it comes to what the majority of you believe to be the expected completion date — sometime in mid-to-late 2012.
At first, I thought surely you would be wrong. I mean, even though our past procrastination would suggest otherwise (a fact that Justin and I apparently forgot, but not you — not you), I thought these would be complete before my sister arrives with her 2 dogs late Tuesday evening, for sure. That is, until today.
We spent this morning painting baseboards and pulling staples from the sub-floor.
Some of our family members were less than enthused.
Others were downright bored.
Then we discovered some problems. Problems like one piece of sub-floor sitting nearly 1/4″ higher than another piece of sub-floor. Two trips to Lowe’s and a smelly cement-like concoction later, good things are happening.
Really good things.
And Tuesday might be a day for celebrating, after all.
