I’ve realized my last few posts have not exactly been light reading. Church abuse, cults, terrorists, sick orphans. It’s fine, I am not exactly into humor writing. But, believe it or not, I can write about things that are not so intense. Sometimes. Here is my attempt.
Yesterday I went to try to get my motorcycle license. After waiting twenty minutes in a line that was reminiscent of a soup line on skid row, I found out that the documents I needed, I did not have. Important things, like my passport and birth certificate. I have this horrible habit of keeping things I don’t need like fliers from the musical I was in in sixth grade, and losing things I do need. Or throwing them away.
Singing in a terrible christian children's musical. Probably "Psalty"
Four years ago I threw away my passport, birth certificate and brand new Ipod I had gotten as gift two weeks before, because my purse strap broke and I was in a hurry to transfer my belongings into my new one in a mall bathroom. By the time I realized it an hour later and ran back to the mall, the old purse with the pocket I had forgotten to empty was in a large black trash bag piled in a giant dumpsters behind the mall.
Sometimes, my absent-mindedness freaks me out, but usually I just laugh at myself. I mean, if you can’t laugh at yourself, how can you get through life?
My day continued as so. I came home from the ghetto license office located in a seedy strip mall. I tore apart my room in rage, going through everything I own looking for the lost identification items. I gave up, and realized I really, really needed to do laundry. I gathered my dirty clothes and reached on my shelf for my detergent. It wasn’t there. Then I saw it, upside down on my closet floor, surrounded by blue lovely smelling goo. I picked it up cautiously and realized, somehow, the force of the fall from the top shelf had caused the lid to implode on itself and the measuring cap was floating around inside.
How is that even possible??
I grabbed my coins and headed to the laundry room. I love my apartment complex, sometimes. I love the ethnic variety of people, I love the location, I certainly love the price of rent. But I don’t love the domestic fights that happen at 2 am, or the cars with the bass that make my insides shake like a tambourine, and I certainly don’t love my laundry room. Occasionally, there is a nice Hispanic lady that will point out the 1 out of 12 machines that actually function. This time, someone had written BROKE in sharpie on half the machines which I appreciated.
I selected one that didn’t say BROKE and dumped my dirty clothes inside, placing my coins in the slots, then shoving the little coin drawer shut. It didn’t budge. I shoved harder. No work. I sighed, and put my clothes in washer number two. Same thing happened. Washer number three- didn’t work. Finally I decided to be a jerk and take out someone’s clean, wet clothes, place them nearly in their basket and takeover their washer, after all it was a guarantee at least that one would behave. The clothes came out, the coins went in….. and they got stuck. The water did not turn on. By this time I was kicking the machine and cussing. I had exactly enough coins to do my laundry, and if I didn’t have clean clothes by tomorrow- I ‘d feel sorry for any one who had to cross my path. As I yanked on the coin slot in rage, it finally released. I looked at my coins, noticed one looked a little off…. it was the same size, but didn’t have any ridges. I studied it closer.
It was a freakin’ Rupee.
I must have dropped it on the floor as I was madly searching my India stuff trying to find my passport.
I think I laughed so hard I almost cried.
Sometimes I wish I was this neat, organized person that had everything together. I could walk into a room and notice things, details, like whether the trim had been painted another color. I could have filing cabinets and folders that were labeled and receipts from everything I have wasted money on in the past three years. I could stop repeating the same phrases like “Has this always been here? I never noticed it,” when referring to important, giant things like entire buildings I drive by every day. Maybe my head is just in the clouds.
Sometimes, I think I do better with abstract truths then reality. But I have learned that this is not something bad, not something to be ashamed of. My “true self” is a writer, a poet, an “artist” (even though that term sounds so smug) and while I can force myself to have some sort of system just to survive in this world, my natural tendency is to run away from them.
I have just illustrated this point, perfectly. I wrote this post simply to tell a stupid story and to prove (mostly to myself) I don’t have to be serious when I write, and here I am, psycho-analyzing myself in the conclusion.
I am a mess.
In summary: Be yourself. And don’t be afraid to laugh at your own stupidity.
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