Happiness

Just about every morning I wake up earlier than I want to.  I rarely sleep well and instead of "hitting the snooze button" on my alarm clock, I always just get up when the alarm goes off.  I don't even know what  a snooze button is, quite frankly.  It is completely foreign to me, like getting money from my parents or having a mentor.

And so when I wake up, I head downstairs to the kitchen and start the morning ritual: empty the dishwasher, cut up the fruit, make my tea, check on the dog, and figure out what I am going to make my disabled father for breakfast.  You see, I live with my parents.  My dad is 80 and my mom is 77, and I am 49.  We are all living together in the house I grew up in, a 3000 square foot mess of a shithole where no cleaning is done, no trash is taken out, no spills wiped up, and no shrubs trimmed or leaves raked unless it is done by me.  And that ain't even the start of it. 

But this is the life I have chosen.  Thankfully, I like my parents.  My dad is a total pain in the ass quitter who would eat cookies 24 hours a day if we would let him, but my mom is an industrious planner/thinker-type who keeps busy all day long and rarely asks me for anything unless she just cannot do it.  Like fix her TV when she pushes some wonky buttons on the remote control and gets a blue screen for an hour and then finally asks for my expertise, which is zero.  But I always manage to restore her cable, always followed by a stern admonition that she'd better not do it again!  And I say it real mean-like because that's how I roll. 

Needless to say, I often feel that my life is not my own.  On the very rare occasion when I have the chance to spend an entire weekend with my boyfriend, I still leave for a few hours to go back home for no other reason than to make sure no one's lying in a pool of blood or urine, or just counsel my mother not to carry pans of scalding grease across the kitchen (code meaning: drip it all over the floor and onto her bare feet which has already happened).  I count it among my many blessings that I was actually home when the pipe burst on the back sink when my mother was out of town, or that I hadn't yet left for work when I discovered the old back door that we haven't used for almost two decades had somehow rotted it's sneaky self open and would not stay shut. 

I think a lot about having no demands on my time.  You could even call it a dream, like I dream of having an enormous hot air blower in my bathroom or a vacuum that straps onto my back.  It would be nice to only do self-indulgent things all the time, which is not a terrible thing being that we all have to hand over our souls to The Man for 40 hours a week.  But when I hear someone say that we are supposed to pursue happiness in life, that above all we must do what makes us happy, I shake my head in amazement because I just don't see it. 

Where does it say that we must make ourselves happy?  How does one arrive at the conclusion that personal fulfillment is the objective of life?  Conversely, how can one not think that doing for others is the sole purpose of life?  I guess I view my life as my child: I can't not change it's diapers or take it to school or go to it's room when it's crying in the midde of the night.  (Yes, my child is an It.)  These things have to be done, no questions asked.  Although I am a pretty piss poor housekeeper, and would probably benefit immensely from devoting myself to a major cleaning/organizing expedition, not to mention that I have been staring at a hair tumbleweed at the top of the steps for, oh, about a month now, I wouldn't think of saying anything but "Yes," to my sister if she needed me to watch her son, or my other sister if she wanted me to attend her child's recital, or my brother if he wanted me to dog sit for the weekend.  I will leave the house at 9:00 p.m. to get my dad a lottery ticket or buy him some more pee pads.  I will take down the umbrellas on the patio furniture and stack the chairs and put away the pool toys even though it's not my damn house!  I will learn how to operate a chain saw and then spend days cutting down a giant Thing in the backyard that once was a tree but we cut it down and then it morphed into an uncontrolled bush until another dead tree fell on it and it became A Thing That Broke The Fence.  All to keep the city beautification committee from coming after my parents. 

But I don't really want to do these things.  Just like I don't really want to drag myself out of bed every morning to cut up my dad's fruit.  And I don't do these things because I am a good person.  I am cynical and a bit of a grouch.  I scream at the cable company every single time I call them.  Only a few days ago I yelled at a homeless man because he wanted ten dollars instead of my loose change.  I am categorically not a good person. 

But I certainly have no doubts about why I'm here on earth.

Christmas Nineteen Eighty Something

This is a true, for realsies, rebuttal of my sister's Cats with Knives blog regarding the great Christmas tree caper of 1980-something. 

It was Christmas Eve 1980 something.  I was home for the holidays, visiting from the east coast where I lived.  We were all sitting there minding our own business, which meant everyone else's business.  My mom and dad had gone to bed.  I don't remember anyone crying about not having a Christmas tree.  Christmas trees cost money and dammit I didn't have any to spare--I had an expensive Hoboken apartment, seven brothers and sisters, two parents, and a Limited habit to feed.  Money was tight at Christmas. 

Suddenly I was in the car with my brother Ed, Billy Bope (his friend from college), and I think my sister Liz, on a mad hunt for a Christmas tree, guns blazing, all fired up about making Christmas right.  And that's how I rolled:  so easily manipulated and forever gullible about other people's sentimental bullshit.  (Truth be told I LOVE Christmas trees but I also don't typically put them up in other peoples' houses without their permission.  Generally.) 

We found a lot not far down the main drag and found a tree.  Maybe we hopped a fence, don't really remember.  It was dark.  When it was time to depart I distinctly remember knocking on the door of the trailer at the lot, getting no answer, and then leaving.  Pretty quickly.  Then we bought beer with all the money we had shaken down from our siblings to purchase the tree.  I seriously don't remember actually extorting any money from my pubsecent siblings, but it sounds vaguely familiar and I distinctly remember buying the beer.  Huh. 

When we got home we put up the tree in the hallway, drank some beer and went to bed.  I remember nothing else except that my mom was happy when she saw the tree in the morning.  I'm sure we ruined the day for her at some point later on, though.  The poor woman put up with a lot of shit from us.  And still does.  

Merry Christmas.