A Morning Walk

I turned my heel walking to work this morning. I'm wearing these new boots, and they don't even have a high heel—just a slight one. But they're slightly loose around the ankle, and as I was walking too fast, my heel turned, and I lost my balance.

I didn't fall; I wasn't hurt; no one saw. Still, my face flushed with embarrassment and my heart sank a little bit. It's so ridiculous. It wasn't a big deal at all.

But to me, it just felt like another small example of how I fail at all these simple things so many other adults seem to intuitively grasp. You know, like walking. Why am I so hard on myself? I regained my balance, took a deep, slightly shaky breath, and grabbed the railing as I walked up the stairs.

The season is changing, and the air has that crisp, cool feel once again. It's my favorite time of year, but it also makes me feel homesick as well. Not even homesick, exactly, but more like longing for something lost, a place that no longer really exists.

This morning, before I turned my heel, and before I let my confidence shatter over something so small and so silly, I sat on the train next to this woman reading The New York Times. She held the paper, and even her head, exactly the way my mother did when she read the paper at the kitchen table. I had my New Yorker out to read, but I just let it sit on my lap, strangely contented by this complete stranger who looked nothing like my mother, but read the paper in the exact same way.

I felt a little sad as I got off at Clark and Lake and started walking to the office. There's a small part of me that keeps telling myself, "Someday, you won't miss her so much," but there's another part that holds on to the feeling, tight, because it's all I have of her now. I clutched my phone in my hands and wished away the desperate part of me that so badly wanted to call my mother, and that's when, lost in my thoughts, I turned my heel and almost fell down.

I know I won't stop missing her. It's constant, and expected, like the inevitable turn of the season. Today, I guess, it's just like that crisp, cool feel of the beginnings of fall—you feel a chill that you haven't in some time, but it's not entirely unpleasant. And just as I start to feel like I'm a little too cold, I turn the corner, the sun hits my face, and I'm warm again.

No One Can Get to You Here

Hey Rainbow Groupies! It's a beautiful, sunny Sunday in Chi city, and seeing as how it's Labor Day weekend, and Obama's talking to us about jobs (or the lack thereof), I thought it was a good time to take another blast from the past.

I wrote this essay a little more than a year ago, right after moving back home to my dad's house. Nothing will kill a lady's self-esteem (and bank account) like not being able to find a job, and at the time when I wrote this, I was feeling pretty damn defeated. But at the same time, I was still clutching the last strings of hope. Barely, just barely. I also laid awake at night in my childhood bedroom, heart racing, worrying that I'd still be there when I was 40.

Maybe I'm still struggling to really be a "grownup," but I made it back to Chicago, and drove a new car here. I felt like total, complete shit when I got rejected from that job (and countless others). But the thing is, if I had gotten that job, I'd never have made it back to Chicago. Who knows what might have happened?

It's tough out there. But if I can do it, YOU can do it. uggh, that was cheesy, but whatever. I meant it from the bottom of my little heart.

So! Read this essay! (After the jump.)

On Doing Laundry & Trying to Be a Grownup

Today, I'm doing laundry.

I realize that this is a pretty run-of-the-mill, normal activity for a Saturday afternoon, but when you're me, it's an actual fucking day. Laundry. Day. I've got my third and fourth loads in the wash right now, and really, since I got a whole roll of quarters in order to take care of my laundry "situation," I should probably do a fifth load, too. But a fifth load means I'm being so ambitious that I'm washing my comforter AND the old comforter that's been balled up on the floor of my closet for three months, and really, I'm just not that ambitious.

I have promised myself that when I take the first and second loads out of the dryer, I will immediately carry them upstairs to my apartment, and fold them. I promised myself. Typically, this is what happens: I wait to do laundry until there's absolutely no way I can wait one more day, one more hour, or really, even one more minute to just do my fucking laundry. I wash two loads of clothes, max. By the time I pull the clothes out of the dryer, I'm just ... over it. I want to be doing something else. So I put my hamper full of clean clothes in my bedroom, and I tell myself I'll fold and put them away soon, maybe in an hour or so.

Next thing I know, it's a week later, and I'm still pulling clothes out of the damn hamper as I put them on. Pretty sure for a huge chunk of our relationship, Rene thought I was consistently wearing dirty clothes. And not only that, with absolutely no shame about it! Just pulling them out of the hamper in front of him. Sheesh. I’m not that gross.

But seriously. This is ridiculous. I want to be like normal people who pull their clothes out of drawers and off hangers when they get dressed in the morning! I want to wake up early enough in the morning so that I sit and drink a cup of tea while I flip through the paper and eat a grapefruit. I want to iron my clothes in the morning! Instead, I wake up 20 minutes before I’m supposed to leave, run around like a maniac and eat a granola bar while I’m half-walking, half-jogging to the train.

Why are simple, domestic tasks such a difficult feat for me? Whenever Rene would finally reach a point of exasperation from my piles and piles of both dirty and clean clothes scattered around my bedroom, he'd be like, "Why don't you give me some clothes I can throw in with my load at home?" (Of course, Rene is some kind of superhuman that doesn’t actually seem to get exasperated or annoyed by anything, ever. Basically me in Bizarro world. It’s both wonderful and ... exasperating.)

Two hours later, he'd be back, with my clothes neatly folded and stacked. What?! Once when he was doing laundry at my place because his washer was broken, I walked into my bedroom later that evening and just stared. He'd already folded everything! It was in neat stacks! How did this happen? Is this how real people do laundry?

I have no idea. But today, I’m going to try it. Wish me luck.

I’m writing this post while drinking Kool-Aid out of a wine glass. Something tells me I’m never going to be the kind of grownup who sits around in the morning, reading the paper and eating grapefruit. Oh, well. You can’t win ’em all.