MORE THINGS THE INTERNET THINKS I SHOULD BUY

In this episode of Things the Internet Thinks I should Buy, I bring you food mills, underwear, boots, and cat sweaters.

Let’s start with the underwear. That’s the most fun because those ads contain women in underwear and there you’ll be, harmlessly scrolling along in social media land, when suddenly there’s just a big lace clad butt picture or some woman adjusting her boobs in her bra. Sometimes there’s music playing in the ad. It has definitely made harmless scrolling a not safe for work activity. I do though appreciate the reminder that I could do better for myself in the underwear department. My underwear is not functional or sexy. It is a layer of fabric between my naked body bits and my pants and that’s about it. Maybe ‘buying nicer underwear’ should go on my New Year’s resolution. Right now and off and on since August, I’ve been just randomly bleeding and ruining underwear like in the days of my distant youth when the menstrual cycle was a new thing to me. So, I don’t really feel like buying anything nice until I’ve got this all figured out. I did see my gynecologist this week and we’ve made a plan to figure it out and with fingers crossed, I might be normalish by the new year. Until then, I don’t deserve nice things.

That’s not true. I am deserving of nice things.

The next ad I keep getting is for a certain brand of boots. I love this brand and love the boots. I mean I desperately want these boots, but ever time I click on the ad, I see that they are sold out of my size plus they’re not cheap. I’m almost willing to overlook the price because I know this brand and I know they’ll be comfortable, well-made boots. But I can’t overlook the size. If I’m going to spend that kind of money on boots, I should buy the right size. So now when I see this ad, it makes me sad. The same is true whenever I get the ad for a spectacular space cat sweater. First of all, the sweater is not my usual fashion choice. It’s brightly colored with a giant cat in a spacesuit gazing into the distance on the front. I don’t know why I love it so much, but I do. I want an oversized version of this sweater to wear with my leggings and the boots that they don’t have in my size. The sweater is not expensive, but the website is scammy. Like super scammy. I am guaranteed to loose all of my money and identities if I attempt to purchase this sweater. So I need some legitimate company to sell this sweater and I need those boots in my size please.

I believe those are reasonable requests.

Finally (not really…I get a lot of ads), I keep getting ads for food mill/composters. They’re like trashcans but only for food waste and they break up the food for compost. And I want one. Yes, I know that I could just throw my food waste into a compost bin in the backyard somewhere. Except I’ve done this, but you can’t just throw food waste into a bin. You have to stir it up and adjust pH and do things with the compost. I am lazy when it comes to gardening. Also, are you aware that compost bins can spontaneously combust? Especially if you do nothing but put stuff in the bin. The food mill/composters do all of the work for you. Then all you have to do is figure out what to do with the milled up food waste. I think I could manage that. Nope. I know I could manage this. I just have this vision that this product will reduce our amount of weekly garbage by half. Maybe more. I mean…we set out one to two bags of garbage plus a full recycling bin every week. It’s not like we’re big trash producers, but I can see where we can do better. The food mill/composters are expensive. Like really expensive. It’s like when the Roomba was a new thing expensive. I am a patient person. I waited long enough for the Roomba prices to go down and now I have a robot vacuum cleaner. I have no doubt the same thing will happen with the food mill/composters.

Sure, I do get a bunch of other ads every day trying to sell me some really useless crap. Those ads are easy breeze bys. I am not annoyed by, in fact I probably enjoy, the ads for the underwear, boots, sweater and composters and I’ll tell you why. Those ads are helping me dream of a better future for myself. A future of nice underwear and comfortable boots. A future of crazy cat sweaters and even a better environment. I like this dream. I like the idea that I can be that whimsical type of person that would wear bright colored space cat sweaters. I honestly don’t care much about the underwear, but I wouldn’t mind a nicer bit of fabric on my naked body bits. I am a practical person, so of course my dreams have a practical nature and if I have learned anything from my mother it is the importance of a good quality practical boot. And that composter thing would just make me a better citizen of the planet. Do I understand that this is capitalism at it’s finest and “they” have figured out my financial weaknesses?

Yes. And I do not care.

WHAT I BROUGHT BACK

Michael and I drove down to my mom’s Thursday evening, arriving just in time for us all to go to bed. The two of us and Josephine slept on mattresses that had been plopped down in Mom’s living room. I woke up early Friday morning, achy and frozen. We dressed and took Mom out for breakfast. The whole time, Michael and I steered the conversation to the positive and hyping up her big move. Then we went back to her house to load up the vehicles with the things for her new space. This did not take long. Her new space is basically a studio apartment with a tiny living area, a bedroom and bath and a small kitchenette with a small fridge, microwave and sink. We arranged furniture and that was that. Mom is now in her new home.

There were some moments of struggle, things she wanted to take but does not need like her microwave. For the most part, the transition was easy. It did not keep me from worrying about her for the rest of the evening. Michael, my brother and sister-in-law and I went back to my mom’s house to chat and plan the next course of action. I did manage to fill two garbage bags with trash just from clearing and cleaning the kitchen counter, but I quickly ran out of steam. There’s a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff that could be useful to someone. There’s furniture and dishes and pots and pans. I picked up at least five can openers while clearing the counter. There is not a table top surface that is visible from all the piles of knick-knacks and trinkets and just junk. The three of us, me and my siblings, all agree that we need time and space before tackling all of it. This will be how we spend Michael’s Spring Break.

I struggled to sleep that night. Partly because of comfort. Partly because I was so itchy. At some point on Friday, I broke out in hives and have scratched for two days. A big part of my struggle to sleep though was how I couldn’t stop thinking of Mom sleeping in her new space for the first time. Would she feel safe and secure or would she panic and have a restless night, jumping at every new tick or tock sound? The next morning, Michael and I got up early to head back home. I took my mom’s car and a small toy caboose with The Peanut Man emblazoned on the side. I also came home with a mild cough and lots of sinus drainage, which is not an unusual state for me when in Oklahoma, particularly in the Fall. I brought along a slight sense of dread and worry for my mother’s future.

I knew the hoarding situation was bad. I did not realize just how much my mother has declined mentally. I had been told and I had witnessed some of her fogginess, but it didn’t really register. It’s sort of like when the doctors told Chris and I that they found a tumor on his liver. We joked and called it a tortilla chip. It was cancer. Yet to this day, I can’t say that Chris died from cancer. The tortilla chip killed him. I was only seeing my mother’s decline in the times I could get down to visit, which filtered the severity. My sister was seeing and dealing with it daily. I talked to my sister right before we left Mom’s to head back home and she had finally gotten a good night’s sleep. I called my mother on Sunday to check in and she sounded almost like an earlier version of herself. She sounded strong and pleased. She said she had slept through two nights in a row. She’s making friends and I got a picture today of her participating in the day’s group painting project.

I’ve dropped the worry and dread.

I’m keeping the car and the toy caboose.

For now, we are all okay.

SQUIRRELS IN THE ATTIC

I just bought a beginners embroidery kit because I saw an ad for it in my Insta Reels. I watched the whole ad, mesmerized as I watched a needle and thread travel through fabric to form a perfect little bee and something inside of me said “Cindy…this is a need.” Normally I skip right over those ads without blinking an eye. I don’t know, man. This ad just spoke to something in my soul. I listened to a lot of NPR as I traveled between home and Mom’s. I got the beginning of this episode of Hidden Brain and the episode started with stories from listeners talking about their time during the COVID lock down. Every single story was sad and mostly all centered around the isolation. When the lockdown lifted, the consensus was that people were happy to gather with friends and family. That first get together after months of isolation brought excitement and joy, but over time the same kind of gatherings started to lose that initial sparkle. On my way home, I caught the next part of this story where Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist, explained what was going on inside the brain as we habituate our daily lives and how to find that sparkle of day to day life.

Maybe that embroidery kit is an attempt to reintroduce some sparkle.

While the lockdown introduced a level of anxiety I had not experienced since Chris’s illness inside of me, I’m looking back on some parts of it and feeling a longing for the good old days of isolation. [Side note: Did I mention that moment when lockdown became official and I drove my car over a retaining wall and got stuck? Three large fellas happened to be across the street and they lifted (yes, lifted) my car off the wall, declared that everything looked okay and I drove off. I only told Michael about it months (possibly a year) later when we drove by the now broken retaining wall.] If I set aside those moments where I was panicking about losing my job and trying to climb out of my skin from feeling like a caged animal, the lockdown wasn’t really all that bad. My house was the cleanest it has ever been and I spent at least two hours every day on my yoga mat. We experimented with challenging Bon Appetite recipes and murdered our first two lobsters. I kept a sourdough starter alive, something that I need to restart because suddenly people in my house remember the pizza dough I used to make with it and want pizza.

The summer months are meant to be the time when I do what ever I want and forget about the daily chores. I have not transitioned into this idea very well. To be fair, we did hit the summer running. Between theater camps, kid camp, moose hunt and another theater camp our calendar’s have been full. Earlier this week, I opened my Google calendar on my iPad and it was sitting there open when Michael walked by. He said “Your calendar looks like Donkey Kong.” I think he was referring to all the color coded boxes arranged in each day of the week. I was in the process of re-doing our dry erase calendar for the month of July. Wait. I’m about to confess something that is going to make everyone’s eye twitch. I have my Google Calendar. Then a work calendar through my work email. Then I have a dry-erase calendar for everyone in the house. At one point in time, I had my Google calendar connected to the TV screen on our refrigerator as reference in case I missed something for the dry erase calendar. Our TV did an update and I never reconnected my calendar. Look, just forget the part about my fridge having a TV because TVs in fridges are dumb and unnecessary. Trust me. I see the crazy as I write this.

While my calendar might remind Michael of a video game, I will say that the month of July is the most open, unscheduled month I’ve had in ages. I finally see some space for doing whatever I want. Museum date with Melissa on a Thursday evening? Yes please. Yoga on Saturday mornings? My mat is already in the car. I’m going to turn my focus to the daily feeding of a sourdough starter. I am scraping out more time for yoga and while Michael and the Cabbage take their train trip to Saint Louis, I’m going to clean behind all the furniture. Okay…that’s a chore, but I want to do it and I’m doing whatever I want.

I’m going to poke a needle and thread into bits of fabric, making flower and bee shapes.

THINGS I'M THINKING ABOUT

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See this Instagram photo by @elephant_soap

• Learning to play the fiddle. Or, I guess, learning to play the violin like a fiddle
• Editing and uploading all those pictures I took at the zoo on Sunday
• The fire and brimstone that will occur if Trump wins in November
• If those googly eyes I glued to my ghost pumpkins are going to really stick
• Giving the dog a bath
• Vacuuming
• Is my house clean enough for visitors
• Sex
• Those ten pounds that won't go the fuck away
• Buying some greeting cards and actually mailing them to people
• Making up some spider and Mummy pumpkins to go with my ghosts
• Why the chickens have stopped laying eggs (I had to buy eggs last week)
• What side dish I should take to that party I've been invited to next weekend
• Friends and family
• NANOWRIMO and finding time, no... MAKING time to write
• Winning the Nobel Prize in Science for figuring out how to actually make "extra" time