finslippy

Bang. Bang. Bang bang.

A lot of stuff is going on, most of which I cannot yet discuss. (Professional matters, I’m talking about. In my personal life, all is pleasantly on track.) I have decisions to make. I’m spending way too much time writing pro and con lists. And slamming my head against the table. Again and again. How do you decide what to do? Do you make lists? Do you consult with friends? Rattle the bones of your ancestors? Stare at tea leaves?

So! In other news, this is the funniest impersonation I’ve heard in as long as I can remember. And that’s a long time. I am quite old.

Kelly and Olive

Do you remember how once, not too long ago, my family and I lived in the Brown Place? How we swam every day in a Sea of Brown? Well, when I was getting all manner of helpful comments on how to spruce up Brownland, one of my commenters recommended using Kelly and Olive—virtual decorators who’ll advise you based on the information you give them.

As I was already overwhelmed with all the different advice I had, admittedly, asked for, I thought and thought about this Kelly and Olive idea. It sounded promising. I looked at their site. I liked their site. I looked at the fee they charged for a consultation. It was reasonable. And then it occurred to me that my words might be valuable to them, so I asked—would they do a consultation in exchange for my bracingly honest feedback on Finslippy? Assuming they would tell me to go to hell, and I could move on with my life.

Courtney, one of the two designers involved (please note: no one is named Kelly OR Olive in this operation. Do not be alarmed) wrote back right away. It would be their pleasure, she said. I was thrilled. Although I’m not a reviewing kind of blogger, I thought this would fit in perfectly with my apartment-design preoccupation and would provide a valuable service to you, the reader. Plus: tips! Tips for me! I like tips.

So I filled out their questionnaire, sent them tons of pictures, told them far too much about my complex likes and dislikes, bored them to tears, and anxiously awaited their reply.

Soon afterward, my apartment building went berserk. You may remember this as well. The residents above me were beset with some kind of collective insanity, and there was much screaming and violence. As you may remember, I didn’t handle it well.

(By the way, People Who Emailed to Tell Me I Was Overreacting and Should Get Over Myself: I received a call when I was there from the Director of Special Ops, recommending that we look into a restraining order against our upstairs neighbors. This came the day after the massive raid on the guy upstairs. It was beyond the normal rowdy-apartment shenanigans. So there.)

The day after my building became a nightmare factory, Kelly and Olive sent me their in-depth report on how to spruce up the apartment. That’s right: the horrible screamy one that we were now vacating.

I felt terrible. All that work, for nothing! With great regret, I had to inform Courtney that the deal we had struck had hit an unexpected snag. We were, however, going to move with the same stuff we had already, and changes would undoubtedly be made, so I promised her I would weigh in on the report once we were in our new place and settled in. She handled it graciously.

Well! We moved later than I thought we would, and then life got hectic, and then my computer died, and just today I was going through my recovered hard-drive contents when I found the report from Kelly and Olive. The recommendations they had so graciously provided me. The ones I had mostly followed, too. Yeah. THOSE.

So it immediately occurred to me that I should take pictures today and post them, but there was another problem, that being that my home is a mess. But I swear to you, I will clean this apartment—I will clean it soon and I will show you the wonderful non-brownness of it. True, it’s a different apartment. But look, Courtney and Lauren, if you had included recommendations for casting out the demons, maybe we could have worked things out at that other place. But that wasn’t in your questionnaire! You guys need to work on that.

In the June issue of Redbook...

I'm not in the July issue, because occasionally they bump me due to space issues. Apparently advertising is more important than me. And because the advertising means I get paid, I do not complain. To them. Actually sometimes I do anyway. They're quite patient with me.

At any rate, here's my latest column. I'll be in the August issue, which I believe hits newsstands in late July. Which is ridiculously soon. Does it seem like the summer is almost over, already? Is that just me?

I've been a chronic worrier ever since childhood. Early in life, I reached the conclusion that bad things always seem to happen when you least expect them, so the smart thing to do is simply expect them, and that keeps them away. In the many stories I had read about people who suffered catastrophes, no one ever expected them. Why didn't anyone write books about the people who anticipated all manner of disasters? Because those people led completely disaster-free lives, obviously. That's just good logic!

That's only a small chunk of it, you understand. There's more! It's over there. Please visit, read, comment, tell Redbook how irreplaceable I am. Not that they're thinking of replacing me! At least, I don't think. Oh, dear.

Uh, camping we did go

Thanks to the unhappy marriage of a course of antibiotics and a week in the Utah sun, I am now reluctant host to a full-body rash, most of which* is invisible but has left my skin sandpapery and feeling like I am being pricked all over by needles and occasionally assaulted by millions of invisible mosquitoes. I’m in a great mood!

(* the part which is not invisible is on the backs of my knees and looks like my skin has actually been removed by sandpaper, which is grotesque, and renders any kind of skirt/shorts-wearing exquisitely painful, and did you know that bandages will not stay on the backs of your knees? I have tried to keep them there, but all the bending and flexing that I apparently do all day long makes them drop right off; I’ve tried to remain still but they won’t stick on for more than a few minutes, so anyone who ever walks behind me gets an eyeful of my awful knee-back situation.)

We were in Utah for a few days to visit my brother-in-law and family, who, inexplicably, live in Utah, even though they swear they’re not Mormon. The kooks. It’s unnerving that they have chosen to live in the middle of the country —I always believed that only zombies would live somewhere that didn’t abut an ocean—but they seem to like it. And my niece and nephew never tried to eat my brains. Maybe they were being polite.

And we went camping! I have never been camping before**, and my brother-in-law Gregg and his wife Carolyn invited us to camp with them, because camping is among their favorite activities, right up there with nude-wrestling bears (probably) and mouth-fishing (after they’re done with the bears).

(**I said this to my mom and she murmured, “Not that you remember.” I’m going to assume she meant I was too little to recall the last time I camped. I think that’s for the best, if I go ahead and assume that. We can’t afford any more therapy for me.)

I was really excited to camp, as I have always wanted to. Camp. For years I've been telling Scott that we should go camping, but he insisted that I would hate it. “You would hate it,” he said. He wouldn’t even bother telling me why. When I asked him to list the possible reasons I would hate camping, he just stared at me, like it was so obvious, it was all over my damned face. Was he focused on the fake eyelashes I need to apply each morning? The exquisitely hot-rollered hairdo? The floor-length satin house-robe I was wearing, as I do each day in the early hours—from 1 pm, when I arise, until sundown—at which point I change into my evening silk pajamas?

“Now, dear,” I said, “I love nature, and nature loves me, and I know deep in my heart that I will enjoy this ‘camping’ I’ve heard tell of.” And then I flounced about comically and powder-puffed my décolletage.

We were supposed to go camping for two nights, which didn't seem like nearly enough time, to me. Why not longer? But then after the first night I had to tell Gregg and Carolyn, with great regret, that if we stayed there for one more night I was going to cram my pockets with stones and throw myself in the river. (We were right next to a river.) (Maybe it was a stream. I think technically it was a stream.)

They took it well.

I actually did enjoy camping, during the daylight. I did! We were in this beautiful campground, and there was even a bathroom, and I am a fan of bathrooms. We relaxed and wandered and ate dinner, and I like all of those things. Henry was having fun checking out nature, and I felt like we were good parents for once, giving him this well-rounded experience. The country! UTAH!

Then it came time to sleep, and so we all bundled up, as it was getting cold, and Scott and Henry and I smushed our bodies into our sleeping bags, and zipped up our tent. So we could go to sleep.

It then occurred to me, as I tried to sleep, why camping is a bad idea. First of all it is uncomfortable. You are sleeping on the ground. Why would you do that? Secondly, if you can’t sleep, what do you do all night? All you can do is lie there. You lie there, and you think. Mostly you think about how the only thing keeping you from being murdered is someone else’s decision not to murder you. At any point during the night someone could drive through the campground—a murderer, say—and that person could think, “Say, what if I murdered these people, all defenseless in their thin, easily knifed-through tent?” And they could then murder you, and there would be very little you could do to stop them. So really all you can do is hope the murderer then thinks, “Nah,” and drives on. Or, “Maybe another day,” or, “Wouldn’t want to ruin that nice tent,” or “I’ve already done enough murdering this week.” (Do murderers ever decide they’ve done enough murdering? I’m not so sure. I’ve never asked a murderer, nor do I ever intend to. And imagining that some traveling murderer has already reached his murder-quota is not enough to help me drift into unconsciousness.)

So then you realized that you’ve thought the word “murder” enough that you will never sleep, and you’re stuck in this tent and there’s nothing to do because 1) it’s dark and 2) it’s cold, and that’s when your child sleep-stumbles around the tent and lies back down the entirely wrong way, which is across all three pillows. And you fight with him about how he has to get back in his sleeping bag, only you can’t fight with a sleeping child, who is crying that you don’t understand and the armor doesn’t work the other way when the raccoons broke the barber shop, lettuce zephyr quantum noodles, and finally you heave him back into his sleeping bag and he sobs once and then is instantly snoring peacefully but now you’re really awake, as is your husband, who every time you stir at all says, “You still up?!” like maybe you two can have a party, but you can’t have a party; all you can do is try and sleep, so you don’t want to talk or look at his wide-awake eyes looking back at you, so you squeeze your eyes shut, at which point you realize you have to use the bathroom.

Which means you have to 1) find the flashlight, 2) put shoes on, 3) not get murdered. And then you think that if you were home, or in a hotel like a sane person, you would not have to do any of these things, and that is why one night of camping is more than enough.

But if we could find a murder-proof tent, and I'm sure you can buy one of those, I think I would enjoy camping very much. So there, SCOTT.