Documenting

This is a scene from my dad’s train layout that he’s titled “Family Gathering.” Thankfully, our real life family gathering this weekend required no police cars.

Yesterday was a long, but good one — meaning perhaps that though I did wake up late (10:45am is now “late,” unbelieving college self), I did so clear-headed and happy. I got a lot done before scaling towards the plateau on which I currently rest in patient quietude. When it passes, I’ll have done a lot of laundry, there’ll be 7 cups of fresh kale washed and frozen in individual smoothie portion, and a lot of things will be cleaner in the kitchen. Today I began adding small changes to my routinized dish-washing process to keep my hands from being under hot, running water for over 5 minutes.

Dishes need to be washed in hot water to be clean. I have believed that starting somewhere in the deepest recesses of my childhood memories, and I feel like science can plainly back me up here re: food viscosity in relationship to temperature. The trick this morning was to get dishes clean using soapy, hot water but to do so without brandishing a metaphorical starting pistol for my great kaleidoscope races.*

Now heat intolerance is a real easy foe to dispel, either through combative cooling or complete avoidance. Something I can’t sidestep during the day is changing direction. The sink is on the wall opposite the stove, to the left of the trash can, to the right of the fridge and anything else I’d need to do is not on the sink side of the room. To achieve shorter time under the water without having to face adding more turns to my kitchen repertoire (just to, say, space out moments of self-heating-via-faucet between other kitchen tasks) I settled on a cold rinse and scrub before a final hot rinse.

 It’s not as if I no longer possess the physiological capability to turn my body, it’s that changing more than one direction at a time gives my body a spectrum of pause aligned in severity with any increasingly circular journey.

When sitting I can still easily turn my head from side to side in gentle conversation; if I do it while walking, I risk throwing the “on” switch that lives in my [brain/inner ear]. Going up and down grocery store aisles, for example, requires two direction changes at each’s end that results in one long circle after another. If I go up and down each aisle of a grocery store with 10 aisles, I will have changed direction at least 20 times by the time I make that always-gotta-have-the-last-word turn into a register line.

It is why I am often too dizzy to properly handle myself at cash registers. I’m that young lady ahead of you who’s got to be drunk because she’s dropped three cart items and had to run her card twice before payment went through.

It’s four turns to the toilet from my bed, resulting in anywhere from 12-40 turns during the time my body should be staying prostrate for a while in recovery from a day of engaging a minimum of three directions of space. Any bathroom anywhere requires you to turn round to sit; I use the bathroom around 30x day. That, friends, is a pun-intended real pisser.

The poetic irony here isn’t lost on me — I’m trying to look figuratively at all sides of a given problem, and said problem is my own inability to physically negotiate the facets of each literal side toward which I turn.

SILVER LINING: Grocery shopping, dishes done. Time to have a seat.

*I will spend the rest of my life trying to find succinct turns of phrase that adequately communicate how my bad moments feel.