Once I got over the fact that I didn’t have to work, I learned I actually quite enjoyed not working. I slept a lot. It occurred to me that the tightness in my chest is not a permanent condition. I experienced, for the first time in years, what it feels like not to be stressed. I didn’t know such a blissful condition existed. It was like a cleansing, like an opportunity to let my creative engine heal at last. Like one of those juice fasts that my dad swears don’t work. Where you eat nothing solid for a week so that your digestive system has time to heal. “It’s bullshit,” says my father, the esteemed physician, gruffly, when I ask him, for the thousandth time, if I need to go on a juice fast. “Your digestive system is fine. You shit, don’t you?” I tell him that the books say I need to go on the juice fast so that the toxins can get out of my body. “What toxins?” he says. “Do they name a single one of those toxins?” I can’t answer this. It occurs to me that they do not. “Toxins,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Imaginary toxins. What, do they look like gremlins too? There are no toxins in you that don’t come out when you shit.” I’m still convinced that the secret to life lies in the juice fast. That everything will be just fine if I go on a juice fast. I keep at him, hoping he’ll cosign on this. “Does your personal doctor tell you to go on a juice fast?” he asks me. I have to admit the answer is no. “Does your personal doctor tell you to quit smoking?” The answer here is, of course, yes. “Well okay,” he says. “You wanna get healthy, quit smoking. Quit smoking first. Get those fuckin’ toxins out. Then we’ll talk about juice. Sound fair?”
My father’s wisdom never fails to awe me.
Having assembled the SteamVac last night, I went after some of the urine stains on my carpet from my urine-tastic doggie, which the carpet cleaner from DA Burns told me would be there forever. “You can’t get those out,” he said, shaking his head, before launching into a fifteen-minute discussion of his wife and his brother-in-law and their children and other things I was supposed to care about. I finally tipped him a twenty just to get him to leave. Long story short, the Hoover SteamVac got those “permanent” stains out on the first try. I totally Yelped about the carpet cleaning company. I love being spurned by a company enough to Yelp about it. It makes me feel like an involved consumer. Like I’m one of those people who’s involved in a consumer community rather than one of those people who wanders into a Target to use the bathroom and somehow leaves with two carts full of electronics, shoes and sporting equipment, which is the kind of person I actually am.
It’s gray and dark and perpetually raining in Seattle now, and I couldn’t be happier. I think it’s about managing expectations. When it’s bright and sunny and warm outside, I feel so much pressure to have a fun-filled, happy, activity-oriented day. To use up every ounce of this “perfect” day. To fear and mourn its passing. When it’s gray and rainy and chilly, anything goes. If I manage to plod through the entire twenty-four-hour period without jumping off the Ballard Bridge, it’s been a success, everyone agrees. There’s no pressure at all to enjoy myself, and I find I enjoy myself much more on days like that.
