I want to be Amish.
You know? I want to live in a house that I built and cook food that I gathered or raised myself. I want to sew my own clothes and knit my own blankets. I want to take care of myself and my family, and only occasionally have to weave baskets to trade for the things I don’t know how to make. That’s just a different way to live… a way that isn’t based on spending 8 to 5, every week day, dealing with other people’s egos. I don’t like working with or around other people’s egos. Not so often, you know?
The problem with being Amish is that you have to conform to their ideas about good taste, and you can’t use electricity. Maybe I want to be a Mennonite.
Or maybe I just want to be a farmer. In the movies, when times get tough, farmers always say “Well, we’re fine here — we have enough to feed ourselves for the rest of our lives. It’s the other people [their neighbors or love interests] I’m worried about.”
I want to be like that — where I rely on myself, and I’m completely reliable.
Really, I think all of that just means that I want to start my own business. Because I don’t really know how to slaughter anything, and I’m too finicky to sew whole wardrobes out of calico.
Or else I’d be happy working in a room by myself, maybe. Making widgets according to written specifications. It’s not the working that bothers me — it’s everything else.
It’s not even about people being jerks. I could be in a building where every single person is competent and nice, and it’d still exhaust me mentally. I’m an introvert, okay? (People who know me in real life, stop telling me I’m not. I am! I want to live on a farm or work in a room alone!)
spring time
Every spring I feel restless. I want to get up and run out the door.
Last night, though, me and Dat and the kids put together one of those patio structures that Target calls a gazebo, but which is actually more like a canopy with mosquito netting on the sides. Dat and the boys put it together, actually, while I trimmed the pear tree above them. We got a new lopper (is that what it’s called?) a while back and this was my first time to really use it, and it lops off the branches very beautifully. I did the pear tree so it’d be out of the canopy’s way, then started on the oak tree on the other side of the back yard.
Tonight I want to finish those and then do every tree and bush in the front yard. I’d been planning to do that anyway, but now that I’ve felt the power of the new … loppers… I’m excited. I love trimming the trees — giving them little haircuts and making them feel lighter.
We have a bunny living in our front yard, randomly. When he was smaller, he fit through a gap in the garage door and so spent his nights there. Now he’s bigger and we’re guessing he just lives in the nandinas. We get home from work and he’s there in the flower patch, eating weeds. He just watches us. We watch him. We say “He’s growing.” Then we go inside.
It’s okay with me that this entry might be boring.
Sometimes it has to go down that way.
Life’s just plugging along. Like the bunny, our wedding is growing. It’s still an informal wedding in our house, but now Dat’s parents are getting even more into it, and so they’re inviting extra people. Which is fine — I want them to be comfortable and stay the whole evening, and having their peeps next to them will make that possible. I’m starting to think the wedding might spill over into the front yard, though. We still have physics in which we have to work, you know.
We’re gonna… transform the back yard into a fairyland or something. You know how people do that for weddings, sometimes. It involves Christmas lights, mostly. It’s not difficult, I don’t think. I feel confident in my fairyland transforming abilities.
At first I didn’t think we were going to buy flowers, but then my cousin said she wanted to buy them for us, and now I’m thinking of many ways in which flowers will be called into service. See? It’s a tumor. Weddings grow faster than rabbits.
That’s all. Back to work! Happy spring.
Oh, one last thing, just to annoy my kids….
My kids didn’t know that Ozzy Osborne was the lead singer of Black Sabbath. Really, now that I think about it, how would they have known?
They found out the other day because they wanted me to look for MP3s of Black Sabbath songs, and I searched for Ozzy’s name. And the kids were like “No, Mom….” and then I told them, and then they were like “What? Oh. But…. I thought he was just a guy on TV.” And I was like “That’s why that World of Warcraft commercial shows him as the Prince of Darkness. Right? Get it?” and they were like “Oh-h-h-h….” and I saw their minds reconfigure around the world.
They’re also learning which musicians are dead from ODs and which are dead from suicide, and which were ever called “the best [guitarist or drummer] in the world” and which dabbled in black magic or were rumored to have done so. That’s important history, I think. Kids should know these things. Don’t you agree?
