Over a week without a post! I am ashamed. It’s not like I didn’t have things to recount — like how I got wasted on Limoncello on the 30th and had to take it easy on New Year’s Eve — or the lazy parenting skills of a couple at Outback Steak House who plopped their 1-year-old child in the high chair and gave him a portable DVD player to entertain him during dinner! — or the Dolby 7.1 theater-in-a-box we got suckered into buying (oh sweet surround sound) — or the fact that I burned thru Mike’s DS battery twice playing Animal Crossing…
NO! Mike and I have been slowly preparing for the impending visit of my parents and grandmother tonight. Last week we bought enough insulation to finish the first level of our attic and it was our goal to have that finished by the time my parents got here. Unfortunately, “Project Insulate – Part I” took longer than we had expected, and the commencement of “Project Tidy-up” had to be waylaid. What’s the need for this frantic clean-up, anyway?! We are all guilty of it at one time or another — the desperate searching for praise and approval from our parents. We long to prove to them that we are no longer that destitute college student living in squalor — wearing week-old dirty jeans and refusing to do dishes because your roommate doesn’t do hers. “I’m not that person anymore. Look Ma! I’ve got everything together. I’m organized!” On more than one occasion I’ve mentioned how my mother manages to maintain a spotless home — free of dust and clutter — and it leaves me wondering why I fell short of such cleanliness. Also I wish to avoid giving my grandmother the opportunity to say, “How can you live like this?!” And the subsequent guilt trip for her washing my dishes in disgust.
So all the cleaning isn’t done. I still have to clean the room my grandmother will be sleeping in (which is currently Bella’s asylum), and I have to make a sizable dent in the laundry pile — especially since there are no clean sheets. No doubt I’ll be running around like a maniac between 5 and 8pm tonight. Good Lord! The thought just occurred to me that they could arrive earlier, and Mike has already informed me that he will be late tonight due to a project he has to finish! Looks like I’ll be flying solo on “Project Tidy-up.” Well it wouldn’t be the first time I wasn’t ready by the time my parents came to visit.
During the last few days of my first trimester in college, I broke up with the boyfriend whom I had been going out with since orientation (Holy super-shit! That was 10 years ago). I was a wreck and hadn’t slept a wink the day before my dad came to get me. (Odd though it may seem I was upset about cutting him loose. I was neurotic and he was practically my only friend after 3 months of being in school.) When my Dad arrived around noon time, I had just woken up and didn’t have a thing packed to go home! Imagine my father’s displeasure when I approached him with bloodshot, swollen eyes and told him to “drive around for a few minutes” after being in the car for 5 hours. He bawled me out for a good portion of the trip, and I had to endure my mother doing the same when I got home. Good times.
A bit older, and only slightly wiser… I’ve got my work cut out for me this evening, but I think it will all get done (God willing) and I’ll be able to say, “Look how clean and with-it I am!”
