Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

It has come to pass

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Before we had them, Darin opined that our kids’ main mode of communication would be “banter.” And lo:

Earlier this week, I left the kids with Darin so I could go to Playwriting class. I had left some stuff at home for him to make dinner, but rather than do that he took them out to dinner at a local restaurant. The next day, I asked Sophia how Daddy liked dinner.

“Oh, he had a blast,” she said. “By the way? That was sarcasm.”

Just like that.

(Apparently both kids acted up and were cranky and out of control rather than, you know, eating dinner. There is a reason that we don’t go out to dinner if we can’t be at a restaurant by 5:30.)

I am afeared.

Forgiveness

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I realized today that I have to do some serious work on forgiveness. I don’t forgive and forget. I might forget — as I keep telling everyone these days, I no longer have any short-, long-, or even medium-term memory — but I find it very, very difficult to forgive. I am probably not alone in this inability or unwillingness to forgive. That’s why most of the major religions, including psychiatry, point to it as one of the things you have to do in order to grow. And if it were easy, no one would have to tell you that you have to do it.

I followed a link from a favorite blog to an essay on another blog. That essay was well-written, it spoke to a lot of things on my mind, and since I am always happy to find new blogs I added it to my friends list over on LiveJournal. Then I looked at the name of the person who wrote the blog.

And my first thought was, Goddammit, I am not reading anything by her.

The blog is written by the person who was supposed to buy our house in LA. When I mentioned I was moving, she wrote me within minutes to ask about buying the house. We took care of everything ourselves, because, you know: friend. And with that, we packed up all of our stuff and moved back to the Bay Area. We got installed in the company-paid apartments and got ready to move into our new house.

Then the day we were supposed to close on the house in LA we discovered she had backed out of the deal. Did she call us? No. Did she have her lawyer (who was handling all the paperwork) call us? No. We found out when the title company called us and said, “Where would you like us to return these house keys?”

(My blood pressure is going up just writing about this.)

The purchase of our house here was contingent on the sale of the house down in LA, of course. And without a sold house, the deal up here almost fell through. Almost, because Darin luckily has very trusting (and very wealthy) friends who loaned us the money we needed on the spur of the moment in order to complete the transaction up here, and we managed to get the house in LA sold a few months later. But our move, already stressful enough, was made nearly unbearable. And if this house deal had fallen through, I don’t know what we would have done — housing prices in the rest of California might have leveled out, but they’re still increasing at 10-20% in this area.

But we didn’t have to do anything. Everything turned out all right. We got the house sold. We paid back Darin’s friend with interest. We’ve settled in, we’re happy, we’re in no way affected by what happened.

It’s been four years since we moved, and I’m still furious about what happened. I get angry when I hear her name. I don’t like to watch the TV show she works on because her name’s in the credits. (What the fuck does she do when something goes wrong on the TV show she works on? Does she wait for upper management to somehow find out? I doubt it. That level of incompetence or underhandedness or whatever she reserves for friends.) I heard a snippet of gossip about this person and felt a certain satisfaction that something had gone wrong for her. And I’m not the sort of person who generally feels schadenfreude, because frankly, life’s too damn short.

At least, I thought that was how I thought about things.

Darin puts this out of his mind. We trusted the wrong person, we don’t need to worry about that again, move on. She has her issues to deal with, we have ours, let it go.

I am trying. I want to find compassion and kindness to replace the anger — if for no other reason than to free up the psychic space. But wow: is that hard.

Mr. Cthulu, white courtesy phone

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Today’s Adventures in Non-Euclidean Geometry:

Your pantry is a small room, approximately 8 feet by 4 feet in size, with shelves on three of the walls. It is crammed full of stuff and you are beginning to have trouble using it. You are also annoyed because you have a cereal bug infestation that you have not been able to stop. Because spring fever is setting in a few months early, you have decided to spend your Monday, with the help of two others, cleaning out the entire pantry from top to bottom and then only put back the things you like. You remove every single object from the pantry — boxes, cans, books, glassware — and you fill up your entire kitchen with what used to be in your pantry. Then, after the pantry gets scrubbed down and mopped and disinfected, you return things to the pantry. At the same time, you fill three black garbage bags full of items you are discarding.

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When you finish, your first thought is:

  1. “Wow! This is so wonderful!”
  2. “Take THAT, cereal bugs!”
  3. “Why is it I have a ton less stuff and it still doesn’t all fit back in?”

Answer: 3. I still can’t figure it out. If you have a lot of stuff, and you remove a ton of it, you should have LESS, right? Apparently it doesn’t work that way. Weird.

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You have removed the six shelves’ worth of cookbooks so that you can rearrange them or get rid of them, as the case may be. It used to be that collecting cookbooks was your husband’s thing. Since you’ve begun cooking and more especially since you’ve begun baking, however, you’ve taken over the cookbook buying habit. How many books have you bought in the past year?

  1. 10
  2. 20
  3. 50

Answer: 2. I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to keep it to about 20. Lots of cupcake books (Why? Have I been making many cupcakes? If so, when?), lots of baking books, a couple of casserole books.

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What’s the oldest expiration date you find in the pantry?

  1. 2005
  2. 2002
  3. 1993

Answer: 3. Which means it’s from the year Darin and I got married. Which means it survived a move to Los Angeles… and a move back. It did not survive today’s purge, however. And strangely enough? I can’t remember what this item was. Probably for the best.

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You are confused by the presence of which item(s) in your pantry?

  1. The Flours: all-purpose, bread, cake, rice, potato, and whole wheat.
  2. The endless containers of balsamic vinegar.
  3. The three separate bottles of Ancho Chile Powder, a spice you never use.
  4. All of the above.

Answer: 4. Okay, I kind of understand the flours. But the 5 separate bottles of balsamic vinegar? I think the pantry must have been such a mess I didn’t know I already had balsamic vinegar. (Gee, ya think/) And the Ancho chile powder: go figure.

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One of the first things you find once you’ve put everything back in the pantry is:

  1. That library book you’d been searching for.
  2. A cereal bug.
  3. Something for tonight’s dinner.

Answer: 2. GodDAMN cereal bugs. Everything that a cereal bug might find tasty is in plastic buckets, so I’m hoping to God this is going to starve whoever’s left.

Despite having had a lot of help in doing the pantry, I am completely wiped. Tonight’s dinner will be leftovers, ’cause I got nothing left for actual cooking. This is why you need a small house, so that you aren’t tempted to have all this crap to begin with.

This is totally the year we get this house in order. I need to feel less hostile toward my living environment on a day-to-day basis.