About three weeks ago, I lost it.
I didn't plow into some a-hole in an SUV on that stretch of Rossmore that narrows to one lane, even though they were honking up the road and totally deserved it.
I didn't call out some a-hole at the grocery store who jumped into the newly-opened lane ahead of me even though I was next, or push someone into the poop their pet just left on our parkway or sidle up to some loud, self-important, cell-talking loser at Marshall's and cut a ginormous fart. Oh, no, nothing so plebian and tawdry as that (although where urban civility has gone, I'll never know, and as a civilian who's sick of loud-talking, SUV-driving, poop-leaving a-holes, I'm not promising I won't in future).
I cleaned The BF's laundry room. With a vengeance. And without his express permission.
I'm not a particularly neat person, or even a particularly clean one. L.A. Jan, whose own apartment has been known to be liberally sprinkled with cat hair upon occasion, confessed to sometime repulsion on coming into proximity with my cooktop; suffice it to say there are several hundred things I'd rather do than clean my appliances, including emptying my own trash. It's just that I have a certain threshold for dirt and/or clutter (which is pretty high, by the way) and every once in awhile, it's exceeded. If I happen to be somewhere it would be ill-advised to touch anything, I hightail it out of there. If not...
I try to time these freakouts to coincide with some necessary task chez communicatrix, but since I spend a great deal of time at my country house (a.k.a., The BF's), sometimes it happens there. Three weeks ago, it was a blocked laundry room passageway (note: no one needs more than ONE gigantic Hefty bag full of rags); today, it was a bedroom door that wouldn't yield for all the stuff hung on the backside of it. First, a door that won't yield; next, a pantry cabinet full of expired medicines. Pretty soon you're wandering around a battlefield of moldy dry cleaner bags and ancient Tupperware.
Somehow, and I'm not quite sure how, I managed to make my gumption even out with the piles. It is not always thus. In my own little place, I am living with the neatly stacked manila folders that house the start of a major familial photographic overhaul, along with several other begun-and-abandoned projects. There are shelves that await relining, crap that awaits eBay-ing, dirt that awaits removal. No matter. I hit my ceiling today, opening a door that wouldn't quite.
Maybe tomorrow, I'll trip over the manila folders that hold my 1099s and blaze through my taxes.
One can only hope...
xxx c
Photo: Me as the Weird Family Mom in Peace Squad Goes 99