Marshmellow Fluff

2011 is already an overachiever in the sucking department.  One thing I know about being an adult, it’s that you’re often cast into roles that you want no part in playing.  So far, I’ve been cast in the lead role of a movie that is fraught with tragedy, horrible cliffhangers and annoying co-stars.  I was hoping, that after such a roller coaster 2010, I could play a lead role in some sort of romantic comedy.  Something a little less dramatic with more one-liners, because if there is one thing I am good at, it’s one liners, over-exaggerating and making out to a really cool soundtrack.

This weekend my mom flew into town and we went to see my grandpa who has been pretty sick.  As I went to the bathroom I forgot that I was carrying my phone in the back pocket of my jeans (which is a feat in itself, given that in the past two days I have eaten an entire dutch apple pie and sleeve of sugar cookie dough all.by.myself!) As I unbuttoned my jeans, my phone decided that it had enough of my terrible text messages and incessant phone-complaining and promptly leapt to its death and into the toilet.  Fortunately, I rescued it in time for it not to sustain enough damage to render it useless, but unfortunately, I now have to hold a phone to the side of my face while also knowing that it swam in the same pool as poop.

So far, in my adult life I have learned one main thing- life never works out the way you plan.  Sometimes I wonder how I got here.  In case you were wondering, “here” encompasses, lost, hopeless and *ulcer riddled (*my assumption, based on theory and gut pain) I spent countless hours painstakingly planning out my life so that it wouldn’t end up like it has.  I guess that is the irony of it all, the only comfort I had was the false sense of feeling like I’ve always been in control, when in fact, I haven’t ever been.  No one is ever in control of their life and whoever says they are…well, give it time.  When I look around, I see friends and family all in the same boat, which in many cases is named “Titanic”.  Faced with one obstacle after the next, thinking today would be, “business as usual”, only to find that around the corner a gut punch was waiting to knock the wind out of them.  But, being an adult means building a strong core, so that when life sucker punches you in the baby-maker…you can suck it up, walk it off and make your way to the next gut punch.  Sometimes it’s years away and sometimes it is moments away but one thing is sure, there is always a gut punch in the future…that’s just the way life is.

Being an adult is the hardest thing I’ve done so far.  This includes the time I had to go to school the next day after getting dumped by my 6th grade boyfriend after he admitted going out with me only as a “dare” and the time I had to face the world after being “so sure” that perming my bangs was a good idea.   I’m sure being a parent (if I ever get that chance) will take over the title of, “hardest thing I have ever done”.  I know first hand from watching my mom that being an adult AND a parent has to be a battle of will over emotions.  My mom had a handful of gut punches, but I cannot recall any moment that she struggled to get out of bed.  I can’t remember anytime that she failed to make my lunch for school, or have dinner made for us.  Now that I am an adult, I know there must have been many of those moments.  Moments when she couldn’t sleep because she worried about how rent would be paid next month.  Moments when she wanted to feel sorry for herself and cry instead of figuring out how to put an outfit together that didn’t make her look homeless or careless.  Moments when she wanted to cry and scream and kick and punch things until all that pent-up energy was replaced by the overwhelming need to sleep.  I know she must have had those moments, because I have them as an adult and when I think about how hard it has been for me to get out of bed in the morning and I add to the mix some kid wanting me to pour it a bowl of cereal, it makes me realize that I am not ready to pour someone else’s cereal.

Today, I went to the DMV and a woman was standing so close to me I thought she was actually stepping on my spleen.  This wouldn’t have bothered me as much as it did, but in addition to having no regard for personal space, she also had no regard for my eardrums and chewed her gum so frantically, it was almost as if it was trying to run away from the inside of her mouth.  After a few minutes of the incessant cracking sound of her gum, I was deaf to everything else that was going on around me.  So much so, that I hardly noticed the man who was still wearing his pajamas, and I almost missed the couple in front of me who were dry humping each other.  I could do nothing but hear the sound of her, pop, pop, pop, crack, pop.  And, every time I took one step forward to try and escape the noise, she moved closer and bumped her enormously large purse into the small of my back.  I imagined turning around and saying, “if you don’t stop chewing your gum loudly, I am going to reach into your mouth and pull out your tongue.” But, I figured that would be rude and inappropriate, even for the DMV.  So, I stood there and listened to it.  I took every painful pop that terrible terrible woman had to offer.

If you ask Paul, I have a litany of things that annoy me.  If you ask me, I have one thing that annoys me which happens to have 30 subcategories.  The main group is food noises which includes, but is not limited to; gum popping, soup slurping, popsicle sucking, chip crunching, and coffee inhaling.  In the subcategory are other miscellaneous sounds like;  keyboard clicking and heavy nostril breathing. I know, I know, I am a D-R-E-A-M to live with.  I am this way for two totally plausible reasons…one, I am a superhero and this just happens to be my superpower.  Or, two…It’s quite possible that I’m autistic.  I am hoping it falls closer to the “superpower” possibility because that would be more acceptable, and it also means there is a lycra themed suit in my future.

My sensitivity to noises goes back many years. As a kid I would go through my grandma’s purse and would throw away her Clorets gum because I couldn’t stand how loudly she would enjoy it.  I loved my grandma more than life itself, but when she chewed gum, I would contemplate the depth of that love.  Once, in high school, my boyfriend came over after school and I made him a salami sandwich and chips.  It was his favorite, but after a while he stopped eating the chips because he told me that, “he wasn’t comfortable with how annoyed I got by his crunching”.  He loved chips and we loved each other, so throughout the 5 years we were together he mastered the ability to eat chips silently.  I felt accomplished by my creation of the world’s first, presumably, “Chip Ninja.”  I imagine, to this day he still eats his chips silently, which I am sure is the reason he and his wife’s marriage has continued to work out after all these years.

I’d like to think that the rest of the world is as annoyed by noises as I am, but every time I search others faces for support I find nothing.  It’s as if everyone else wears earplugs and my channel volume is turned up to grandma level loud.  Maybe I’m annoying, maybe I am a terrible person. Maybe I am just easily irritable.  But if you ask the internet, I could possibly have a diagnosable disease.  According to the Google search I conducted in the last ten minutes, auditory sensitivity has been tied to nutritional effects which may result in hypersensitive hearing.  Many people who are hypersensitive to sound are deficient in magnesium.  Also, apparently the 6 Splendas I put in my coffee could also lead to my super human hearing.  It could also be from stress, of which I have plenty, or abnormalities in the function of the brainstem or higher cortical areas.  But guess what, when I did a Google search for a disease whose symptoms were gum cracking and making terrible food noises, guess what I got…nothing!  Maybe what I have is annoying but it is medical. Food noises are nothing more than terrible and show a complete disregard for superheroes.

I am just as angry as you are for my lack of blogging as of late.  Work is running me into the ground and I am convinced that they are trying to kill me or, at the very least, push me to a Mariah Carey a la 2001.  For those of you who aren’t as up on their popular culture, Mariah had a very public breakdown in 2001, just ask Wikileaks (once it is out of jail).  Now, I apologize based on the assumption that you were upset with my lack of posts, however that is an assumption as I have received no scathing emails, no phone calls and no letters (but to be fair, who sends letters anymore).  So, I will just assume that my healthy following of anonymous readers were upset with me.  So, people whom I only assume exist…I am sorry.  Last week I worked 12 hours every day and promptly went home to cry and act like a crazy person, which in turn made Paul wonder what the heck he has gotten himself into.  On day three of working late, I arrived home only to hyperventilate and sob while climbing on top of the couch sniffing the air, between sobs, to try and figure out where the rank stench that filled the living room was coming from.  After climbing the furniture I discovered just what a normal person could have discovered without scaling the walls, that the stench was coming from the trash can.  So, like any crazy overworked person would do, it made more sense to throw the trash can out onto the porch, in the pouring rain and slam the door behind it….just to teach it a lesson to never silently stew with a 5 day old diaper in it again.  Lately, I have tried to take a more active role in being around friends.  I have made a pact with myself that I will return phone calls sooner, reach out more and get together with them often.  Losing a close friend has a way of doing that to you.  So, in an effort to kill myself, I decided that it would make complete sense to plan a party with a group of girlfriends on the weekend before a huge fundraising event at work (hence the reason I am working Ryan Seacrest hours).  So, this past weekend I had 15 of my lovely girlfriends over for a french toast girl-mosa party.  Complete with champagne, french toast and babies.  Because what goes better with babies than sugar and alcohol, am I right ladies!?

On Saturday, I dragged myself out of bed at 8 after working until 2am.  This gave me two hours to clean the house and ready french toasting.  So, I figured with a whole two hours, what could it hurt to sit on the couch and watch Grey’s Anatomy?  And, if I was going to watch Grey’s Anatomy, I may as well watch Medium and then, before I knew it the time had disappeared into the DVR time continuum and I had 20 minutes to shower, clean the house, find a reasonable table-cloth for the card table that looked like it was salvaged from a crack den and look cute, or reasonably cute, because after-all, it was only a girl party.  This lack of necessary time sent me into a frantic tailspin and before I knew it I had cracked a wedding-gifted glass water decanter on the counter with a metal chair which in turn filled my living room floor with 5 gallons of freshly filtered Brita water, cut the top of my index finger off with a serrated knife while chopping potatoes, dropped a wedding-gifted ceramic bowl onto the floor which quickly made it into 500 pieces and broke 2 wine glasses that, from the best I could tell were hand blown out of fine sugar and the same thickness as tissue paper.   So, by the time my party started I was bleeding profusely and I was 4 beautiful wedding gifts poorer.  Needless to say, I am mad at myself.  I am mad that I move too fast.  Mad that I am old enough to be married but cannot manage to have nice fancy adult-like objects safe in my vicinity.  If being married means eating the entire top tier of your wedding cake only after two months of being married and managing to break one wedding gift every week you have been married, then I am wife of the century.  And if being a good mom means throwing a baby diaper in the trash can and forgetting about its existence until 5 days later when the house smells like a homeless person, then when the day comes I am going to be an amazing mother!  And if being a good hostess means finding a suitable table-cloth for the cracked out folding table means using a duvet cover from 2008, then I am the host-mostess!  But, chances are, it probably doesn’t.  All these things probably mean nothing more than I am overworked and stressed and….dare I say, human.  Work still sucks…I am writing this just while I take a small break from my 11 hour day.  But, on the bright side the event is in two days and after that I will return to the somewhat stable person I typically am (please contain your snarky laughter).

But, this weekend I also got some very exciting news.  Exciting, life changing, wonderful and happy great news.   For now though, I cannot tell you as I have been sworn to secrecy.

How’s that for a cliffhanger?!