wizard needs about 4 beers
MORE NEWS FROM NOWHERE (OR EVANSTON)
I hate going to the doctor, but what I would hate even more would be to die of something dumb and for everyone to say, “Wow, if only she would have gone to the doctor.” So I took a personal day (although I still took home the work laptop and did work, because LIFE IS LAME) and crammed a couple of carapace-maintenance appointments into one day. First was my annual physical up in Evanston. I found street parking but had trouble using their stupid retrofitted parking meters—it wouldn’t take my card and I’m not made of quarters, people—plus I swear it was about fifteen degrees colder in Evanston than in Chicago and that wind howling off the lake was really extreme. (There’s a parking app but it’s specific to Evanston and I’m only there about four times a year, for doctor appointments or in-theater movies, so screw that.) After about five minutes of frustration and yelling curse words into the frozen stratosphere I gave up and decided not to care if I got a parking ticket. (Spoiler alert! I did get a parking ticket! I snuck across the border and committed a crime in Evanston. But it was only $20 so yay. I mean, boo; but also yay.)
After I checked in and settled into a waiting room chair, an older gentleman* rushed in the door and went right up to the reception desk saying, with quite a lot of vocal urgency, “There’s a guy pooping outside!”
The receptionist: Huh?
OG: A man! Pooping! Like half a block down! Just! Out! In the open! You know, pooping!
R: Well that’s…not good.
Other receptionist: Nasty. And what a shame. It’s so cold out too!
OG: I was just walking, and I was like, what? What? WHAT? This guy was just pooping! Just pooping near a building!
Both receptionists:…
OG: What do you think we should do?
Both receptionists: …
OG: Sheesh. Anyway, I have an appointment with Dr Chang?
[receptionists start doing receptionist stuff for him]
I had so many questions.
(*When do I stop describing people like this, anyway? I’m old! Does “older” always mean “older than me”?)
IS IT TOO LATE TO HAVE GOALS FOR 2018
- I want, like, three times as much brunch. We have to go out for brunch, people, because brunch rules. You do your social thing, you have a drink, you come home and nap and BOOM! You have automatically not wasted your Sunday, so when the Sunday Sads come around and you’re all like I’M SUCH A LOSER you have at least one piece of evidence that you are not.
- More Hideout. More Write Club, more Funny Ha-Ha, more music too, sure why not. Basically any excuse to go to the Hideout.
- Ditto for Rogers Park Social, I love that bar.
- Try Pilates again. I’m angry at it, as it seems weird and prissy and the polar opposite of yoga in some ways. But I will have a second try.
- Be more loving and respectful toward fancy beer. Find more fancy beers I like. Try to prove wrong my crabby theory that IPA was a goddamned accident, invented just so the beer wouldn’t rot on a six-month passage to India via the Cape of Good Hope, and that we are replicating it for no reason (given modern shipping and storage and food safety practices). Go on more brewery tours. Find more space in the basement for LT’s homebrew stuff. He supports my hobbies (lying on the couch with a book) so I should support his.
- Speaking of, the basement gets remodeled this year and 80 tons of shit gets thrown in a dumpster or I will lose it. I hate the ugly tile and the homebrew area spilling into laundry area and vice versa. I want SHELVES and CABINETS and to I want to LIVE in the IKEA CATALOG.
- Eat more Ethiopian food because it is awesome.
- Only publish my diary entries when I feel like it. I love you, internet, but there is no such thing as an obligation to blog.
- This goal has already been accomplished: I did a massive unfollow on Facebook. Distant acquaintance sharing all those gross recipes? Gone. Old classmate starting political fights? Double gone.
- Use my Kitchenaid! LT and I took a cooking class that used one with the pasta-making attachment, and I fell in love, and he made it my Christmas gift. Fresh pasta and bread and pizza dough have already happened, but there will be more.
- This one will be hard to explain, but please try to hang as I fumble through it. Get a beer or something.
- This year I am going to work on Inhabiting The Role. For instance, in 2017, at work, I had to do a lot of presenting, persuading, directing, and generally getting people to straighten up, fly right, get back on course. This should not have been difficult or surprising, as I am responsible for a lot of people and content and money and other publisher-type moving parts, and doing so is part of my job. But I have a little box in my head labeled “Not What I Do” and some of that stuff is in it. Ridiculous! When you have to do stuff, and you do it, you’re doing it, and it is what you do. When I call a contractor and say hello I’d like to remodel my basement, I am a homeowner who is making a plan to remodel her basement. When I go to a schmancy salon to get my Area waxed, I’m an adult woman with money to spend who has decided, without TOO much internal women’s-studies-style debate, to do so. When I’m taking my kid to therapy (do you like how I slipped that in there—yeah, not going to type about it much), it doesn’t matter that I’ve been terrible at therapy my whole life, and that I can’t seem to speak to a mental health professional for more than 3 minutes—even at a no-big-deal intake session, even when it’s literally not about me—without starting to cry, I’m a mom who is doing the right thing, one step at a time, and not fretting about What It All Means or how The Future Is Scary.
- It’s not faking it until you are making it either. It’s maybe, as the kids say, owning it? Or maybe just not stressing out about how there is a way you are in your head, but from the outside people might think you’re another way (because you have to do stuff, and you do it, and you’re doing it, and it’s what you do). Who cares? WHO CARES. The end.
—mimi smartypants has only pooped outside once, and it wasn’t in Evanston.