Scenes!

When I was in college, I lived with 60-something other women in a sorority house. I am an only child so you can imagine how well I adapted to these living arrangements. I loved the people but there were just too damn many of them sometimes. 

The first year I lived there, my room (which I shared with 3 other people) was located right above the large, heavy, self-slamming exit door. Because of the location of my bed -- up against the same outside wall as this door – I did not require an alarm clock to wake me up.

Here’s why…

Our house was technically “off-campus” but it was actually only a few hundred yards off campus. Instead of driving up the hill to the area where many of us had our classes, we chose to use the University’s transit system – specifically, the Brown Bus.  We called it “the dookie” – I guess because it was brown and so is poop – and the women in our house who had 7:30 am classes had to be out the door by 7:00 if they were going to catch it and be on time for class.

Every morning, this was my 7:00 am wake-up call:

• Gwuf-gwuf-gwuf-gwuf-gwuf-gwuf-gwuf-gwuf-gwuf (that’s the onomatopoeia I’ve selected to represent the sound of Birkinstocks quickly clomping down carpeted stairs).
• YOU TAKIN’ THE DOOKIE? (Shouted in a thick Southern accent.)
• THUNK. (The sound of the push bar on a heavy metal door being forcefully shoved open)
• BLAM!!! (That’s the slam.)

I have a comical visual of one of my roommates acting this out at one of our chapter business meetings in an attempt to entertain her way to some relief from this startling interruption to her sleep each morning (she didn’t have classes until much later). It failed. I mean…the entertainment didn’t fail, but it didn’t convince anyone to stop it. This is mostly because people with 7:30 classes are resentful of people who don’t have class until 11:00 so why are they going to protect their sleep?

There were times that living with a bunch of girls was fun. One example was on Wednesday evenings at 7pm when we all (well… 25 -30 of us) gathered in the TV room to watch Beverly Hills 90120 (the original…the best). After an hour of reveling in the poorly-written, lazily acted and directed melodrama, we anxiously awaiting the scenes from the next episode. We would all yell “SCENES!” in unison. Incidentally, the 30-second preview was always more interesting than the hour-long show would prove to be. Our excitement about what was next – the expectancy – was always greater than our enjoyment of the actual episode.

I still become giddy with anticipation about “scenes from our next episode” for the shows I watch now and I am pissed when they don’t have any. It feels like a personal slight. Which is why sometimes at the end of a blog post, I mention what I’m going to write or talk about the next day. It’s a gimmick that bloggers use to encourage people to come back the next day.

Yeah, I’m going to stop doing that.

First of all, what I think I’m going to want to talk about tomorrow is almost never what I want to write about when I actually arrive at tomorrow -- which happens to be the case today. And I don't want to be forced to live in the past. 

Secondly, if you know what's coming tomorrow and you eagerly anticipate it's awesomeness then I'm setting all of us up for disappointment. Because there is no guarantees in life -- about our own awesomeness or that of others.

Since I did this yesterday, I have two choices today. I can either write about what I said I would write about so that I remain true to my audience…or I can write about whatever I want and be true to myself. I guess if I’m going to be an artist, being true to myself is really important but I appreciate the people who are reading this – and providing feedback – because it’s helping me hone my craft and that’s valuable to me.

And this is all about me, right?

So I’ve come up with a compromise to satisfy both the need to resolve my final cliffhanger ending from yesterday (just in case someone was really looking forward to it) and the need for me to exercise some artistic freedom.

I’m going to do both…probably badly.

First, here is a list of times when I would feel completely justified in hovering over my children:

• If he or she had special need that I felt were not being addressed – or worse, causing them to be discriminated against -- I would become a school’s worst nightmare.
• If my child were hurting him or herself or abusing drugs or alcohol, I’ll be all over it like white on rice.
• If my kids started getting into trouble all the time – or if they had sudden behavior changes. Because that would likely be a sign of the above-mentioned issues.
• And now I hover and interfere and micromanage technology and social media because I don’t think kids are equipped to do this alone. I mean, they know how to use it, but they just can’t grasp the impact that it has. Their still-not-fully-formed brains make it impossible for them to use foresight in their decision-making process. They don’t know what constitutes “too much”. They don’t even know how much time they’re spending on it. And I know I can’t protect them from every situation outside our home, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a predator or bully threaten them virtually inside my home. So, to the extent I can maintain control in the vast, borderless arena of the Interwebs, I’m going to do it. And I’m going to talk them to death about it so that they hear my voice in their heads every time they hit “send” or “post” or “submit” or whatever.

Thwap-thwap-thwap-thwap (that’s the sound of my substantial helicopter rotors hovering over their technology.)

But onto more important things…

I want to talk about my refrigerator because I cleaned it out yesterday and I actually woke up feeling like the whole world was a better place for it.

I don’t perform this task often – certainly not as often as most “good” adults would think necessary. Don’t misunderstand…we throw things away periodically – like the fermenting fruits and vegetables that end up at the bottom of the crisper or the once-yellow cheese that has transformed into a stunning lump of algae-colored blues and greens. When I’m running low on Tupperware (which I recognize when the lids have no watching containers and vice versa), I’ll usually go in and dump stuff that’s been pushed to the back or has become indistinguishable from Play-dough.

But the all-out clean-out usually only happens after we’ve had a days-long power outage and the decision to purge is made by the power company and my nose. The only exception to this is the time my friend had her daughter hide a gargoyle in my refrigerator when she came over to babysit. One day, she (my friend) asked me – quite randomly – how often I clean out my refrigerator. I said I hadn’t really thought about it…probably not enough. And then I thought to myself, hardly ever. So I went home to clean it.

And that’s how I found the gargoyle. It had been in there for two weeks – tucked in behind a bottle of champagne that we had had since before we got married in 1999. So that’s what we’re dealing with – someone whose fridge is so jammed full of stuff that she doesn’t notice a GARGOYLE. Or that the champagne is in a different spot.

This is what it looked like when I was finished

This is the photo I took for the gargoyle gifter.

Yesterday, I cleaned out my fridge just for fun and I learned some things that I’ll share:

• My husband doesn’t ever eat the other half of the steak he saves “to put on a salad the next day.”
• Brisket sauce sticks to plastic like black dog hair sticks to white pants. So does barbecue sauce, ketchup, hot sauce, jelly, and anything else you put in the refrigerator door shelves that aren’t removable.  
• Real food spoils and fake food doesn’t – macaroni and cheese is the perfect example. The box stuff, though not necessarily edible, still looks just like it did when we stored it weeks (months) earlier. The stuff I made from scratch should have been sent to a lab for analysis. I think we invented something new there.
• Round Tupperware containers are the devil. They waste space. Also, they roll when they get knocked on their side. And if the lid isn’t on tight when they get knocked on their side, they spread their contents about very efficiently.
• Whoever invented refrigerator shelves with rims around the perimeter was a genius.

I learned more, but those revelations might cause you to turn me into the Health Department or Children and Family Services…so I’ll stop with those five.

Now for those of you who didn’t really read (or absorb) anything after the part where I said my friend hid a gargoyle in my refrigerator, well, you’ll just have to wonder about it for a while and know that it’s a good story…

That I might share…

At some point in the future…

But I’m not doing scenes from the next episode and we’ve already talked about why.

And since I haven’t even explained what the title of my blog means (to me), you know I’m operating on my own timeline.

And we’ll all be ok.

Because my refrigerator is clean.