MOVING THE FUCK FORWARD
Cindy Maddera
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I've been up since five this morning (this was Sunday morning). I tried to fall back to sleep for a little bit, but it just wasn't happening. I ended up sitting on the couch at seven thirty, eating eggs and toast and watching Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. There's a moment near the end when Kim Baker, Tina Fey's character, visits one of the first marines she interviewed. After her story on his unit aired, he was transferred. He lost his legs to an IED a few months after his transfer. There's a moment during the visit where the two of them are sitting on his back porch and he says to Kim "We embrace the suck and then move the fuck forward." I rolled those words around and around in my brain, like rolling marbles across the floor. I didn't want to forget them, so I hopped up and jotted the words down on a random pad of paper.
Most days, I feel like I'm moving the fuck forward pretty well. Barreling on ahead. Running stop signs. Breaking speed limits. Then there are the few days wedged here and there between the most days when I get stuck in suck. We've all been there. Flat tire. Overheated radiator. Do cars even have radiators these days? I have the tiniest idea of what my car looks like under the hood. I popped the hood once, thinking I could figure out what was causing the engine to miss fire or something like that and had no idea what I was looking at. I remember way back when Dad would be under the hood of my old Skylark. He'd pull out a part and place it in my hand and say "Go to the pull-a-part and get one of those." I'd place the part on the counter in the pull-a-part store and say "I need one of these." All parts where "one of these" because technical terms are not my forte. Unless it's something sciencey like nuclear core complex or planaria.
Wait...what was I talking about? Right. Moving the fuck forward. Sometimes I think I move forward so well because I tuck things away. If you look at my house, it looks neat (mostly) but that's only because I strongly believe in multipurpose storage furniture. If you open up a drawer, you find random bits of flotsam and jetsam. I am a compartmentalizer. I nearly exploded with joy when the Container Store opened in town. I could spend an afternoon wandering the isles and running my fingers across all the colored boxes. Things, feelings, thoughts. All of these get sorted and compartmentalized into their proper spaces. It's one of the reasons I love my desk. I came home the other day and Michael said that he found something that I wasn't going to like. He'd been rummaging through my desk drawers looking for a marker, but he never found the marker. Instead he found mouse turds in every single drawer.
My life is a total sham. Not even the flotsam and jetsam is clean. That whole idea of me speeding forward with life came to a screeching halt when confronted with the news of the presence of mice in my desk. I also took a minute to swear at the cat, because COME ON! Cat brings in dying and or dead animals all the time, but he can't get the mice who have set up an apartment complex in my desk?!?! If I want to be really honest though, those mice turds could have been there for ages. I only ever open maybe three of those drawers on the front of my desk. One contains pens, one is where I store things like extra cards, my Jawbone charger and an SD card reader. The other one has a pair of scissors hidden in it. My first instinct is to just pick up the whole desk and set it on the curb.
Except I won't. I won't because there's pictures in some of those drawers. One drawer contains two external hard drives. One of those hard drives is mine and has all my photos and music on it, but I lost (threw away) the power supply cord. One of those hard drives is Chris's and I have no idea what's on it, nor am I close to being ready to know. I will clean out that desk. I will get rid of things that I have compartmentalized. I will not only embrace the suck. I will embrace the shit (but not literally because gross). And then I'll move the fuck forward.