May 14, 2012

Jammie Day

 I got up this morning and staggered downstairs, making only a minor attempt to cough up my right lung as I did so - which is a considerable improvement in my health, so I put in a load of laundry and made coffee and surveyed the disaster that we're calling a home. Joe and Sam were on their own for a week, and it shows. Sure, they do dishes, and cook and clean - Joe had fresh sheets on the bed for me when I arrived home, and I noted the freshly cleaned bathroom with as much glee as I could muster, but when I'm not here,  the house just sort of comes unglued.  That's the only way I know how to put it. It's like whatever fragile system that holds this house together needs me to work, and when I'm gone these tenuous bonds disappear and the whole house starts falling apart like something out of a science fiction movie.  For example, last Friday when I left, I owned five laundry baskets.  Today, I appear to have two and there's no word on where the others might be. Everything in the fridge smells funny and there's ice cream, but no bread, and it turns out it must be me who sorts the mail, because there's a mountain of it on the dining room table along with Joe's 25 year old Royal Canadian Sea Cadet uniform, which I really can't explain, except to think that as the systems that run the house dissolved they ravelled the continuity of time while they went. 

We could use some groceries, I really should unpack and sort out all my teaching stuff, and I have a huge backlog of email and work to do - the scope of what I should be accomplishing today is amazing, and yet, I can't do it.  I really can't.  I don't seem to even be able to get dressed, and while I managed to toss that single load of laundry in, that was apparently the sum total of all the housework I can bring myself to face.  It doesn't make sense, because last week when I felt like death I kept on trucking, and here I am today, feeling a ton better and I'm sitting around in my jammies. There's a discordance between what I should be doing and what I am doing, and I can't even seem to work up the energy to care. Normally taking a day off like this, I mean really, really taking a day off, not doing hardly anything when things really need doing makes me feel sort of guilty, but not today. I'm tired.  I have the tail end of this wicked cold/flu/black death, and yesterday I fell off my bike (literally) and you know what?

I feel like I have a lot of knitting to do today, and that I might have a nap, and screw the laundry. Screw it.  There's absolutely nothing in this house that's so important that it can't wait a day for a sane, healed, healthy woman who can think in straight lines to do it.  The kitchen floor doesn't even care if it's clean, it's inanimate, and if that email waited three days, it can wait four. 
I'm taking a day, I'm kicking this colds arse, and I think I can finish the wingspan I started Saturday night, and that feels plenty productive to me.

Posted by Stephanie at May 14, 2012 3:07 PM