Over the past year, this blog has become many things to me. It has been a way to keep in touch with family and friends who are far away. It has been a way for me to take events in my life that are painful or frustrating, and make them funny. It has been a way to do a little writing without stress.
For this anniversary, I will repost the very first Bad Housekeeping blog, and then include a sister piece from this year.
Thanks to my readers, you, my friends.
Bad Day for the Bad Housekeeper
September 5, 2008
Sometimes the bad housekeeper just knows when it’s going to be a crappy day. For instance, when she finally rolls out of bed after a night of little sleep due to allergies and end-of-the-world nightmares. End-of-the-world nightmares where there’s no drinkable water but somehow also simultaneously worldwide floods, and she finds herself stranded atop a stone castle as tall as a skyscraper, and she’s being chased by robots and also for some reason her mother, and the only escape is to jump.
That’s the first sign.
Then she gets up and feels about fifty times heavier than she usually does and looks in the mirror and although her face appears normal she feels a major breakout coming on. And there are eyebrow hairs where she remembers no eyebrow hairs in the past. Ever.
So the bad housekeeper decides to be proactive, because that’s the way she rolls. She’s strong. She’s resilient. She’s going to conquer the morning hours by ordering a caramel macchiato and applying for three promising job positions she found online. Even if this means heading to the nearest wifi spot, which happens to be a Christian bookstore where she has to keep her eyes glued to the screen to avoid Jonah and the Whale hand puppets, choir robes, and Thomas Kincaid’s new line of teapots.
However, because this is a bad day, the internet decides to screw her over. Her pages aren’t opening and the cover letters she labored over don’t seem quite right. She begins to wonder what crap organization would ever hire her, or in the off chance that happened, how long it would take them to kick her ass to the curb.
She opens an email from her best friend, hoping this will give her solace. It does, in a way. But the bad housekeeper’s best friend is traveling the world, just went snorkeling with sharks, zooms around on the motorbikes of attractive Italians, and also was accidentally interviewed for CNN while in Thailand. Before reading this, the bad housekeeper had been excited about possibly shopping for new bedding.
So she says screw it and buys a hamburger and changes and heads to work, and thinks her luck is changing when her boss asks if she will attend a special event in the evening, for which she will be allowed to leave early and dress. Sure thing!
And the special event? A women’s health expo, dinner, and reception at the only Catholic church in town. The bad housekeeper picks up a skirt on clearance at Target and wrangles the boyfriend into being her date, but as they sit down in a gymnasium packed with a couple hundred middle-aged women at a table marked “Tennessee Valley Urology Center,” she fears she has leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire. The perfume-thick, menopausal fire.
Then, surprise. The chicken isn’t that bad. There’s a tube of lavender-scented intensive foot cream in the complimentary goodie bag, and the night’s speaker tells a few funny stories, the longest about being pinned inside a wrecked Crown Victoria while wearing no underwear.
And the cherry: the bad housekeeper wins a door prize, a $50 gift certificate to a local boutique, which is nothing to laugh at.
Although what she and the boyfriend decide IS something to laugh at- that the Women’s Health expo at the Catholic church ended up being the best night out they’d had in a while.
Here’s to a better tomorrow, with softer, sweet-smelling feet.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………
Good Day for the Bad Housekeeper
September 5, 2009
The bad housekeeper still has nightmares. Sometimes they involve being chased by tiny, fast, spiderlike robots with venomous needles. Sometimes they are about her grandparents dying. Sometimes, still, her mother makes unexpected cameos.
But not every night is like this.
In the morning, she drinks a cup of coffee at home while checking up on her friends via computer. World-traveler friend has settled down, moved back to Chattanooga, started graduate school, is looking for a house to buy. Instead of being interviewed for CNN, she builds nitrogen-propelled rockets at the Discovery Museum for awestruck kids. She dishes up hot pies at Mellow Mushroom, sets down pitchers of dark, frothy beer. She has jumped off the Italian motorbike and onto the electric downtown bus.
The bad housekeeper’s change of scene is no less drastic. In twelve months, she has moved from Cleveland, Tennessee to Boston, Massachusetts, to Seattle, Washington. She has survived walking a mile to work and back in deep, dirty snowdrifts. She has ridden along Cape Cod in the bright blue cold. She has sucked hot grilled mussels out of their shells on Memorial Day while listening to Neil Diamond advocate America. She has opened up new bank accounts, and shut them down. She has made new friends, and left them.
Now she lives in Seattle, under the Space Needle, just down the street from old friends she loves. She takes a bus to work, to the job that she loves, the one she isn’t sure how she lucked into getting. Sometimes when she walks to the bus stop her heart feels heavy; sometimes it feels light. She passes the strangely-punctuated theater sign that reads: “Join us for the night, Shakespeare. Hitchcock.” She passes the large, rotating Easy Street Records sign that reads: “Live in Store, The Cave Singers.” Birds suddenly lift and fly over it in a sheet; they are black, they are crows. Maybe there is one gray seagull mixed in.
The bad housekeeper feels like a Cave Singer.
During the course of one day, the bad housekeeper wonders the following things, among others:
1. Is my family okay today?
2. Do I remind that elderly man walking towards me on the street of his dead wife?
3. Should I get bangs?
4. How long will it take before this place begins to feel like home?
5. Why does Thai food taste so good?
She rides the bus to work and tries to be brave about doing some things that scare her, like helping to solidify the logistics for a trip to Italy. She tries to figure out where is best to wash your clothes in Rome. She tries to figure out whether grape cake, sold in Florence in the fall, needs to be refrigerated. She tries to figure out the phone number to the Vatican. When she gets frustrated, she plays “Paint it, Black” on her computer- once in English, then in French, then in Spanish- and by the time she has heard all three versions she feels more confident about, well, everything.
Then at night she and the boyfriend will do something. Probably he will have dinner ready when she gets home, and afterward he will read out loud to her, a story or an essay, like from Shalom Auslander’s Foreskin’s Lament. Poor adolescent Shalom, ultra-orthodox Jew, sneaking Slim Jims, then worrying God will kill him for it. Poor Shalom stealing the soundtrack to West Side Story, then worrying God will kill him for it. Poor grown-up Shalom worrying God will kill his wife, his son, anyone he loves, because, as he says, “That would be so God.” Poor Shalom.
Or maybe it is a night out! It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Maybe the bad housekeeper’s friends Mark and Laura are getting married in two days, and so she and the boyfriend hop on the bus to meet them at a downtown bar to celebrate. On the bus they are surrounded by a motley crew—a grown woman sucking a sparkly pacifier, a Native American man with an oxygen tank and his white drunken wife, a two-year-old black boy who yells “The pigs IS the police, right mom?”, a 6 foot 5 (at least) white guy with dreadlocks who looks like a zombie, fifteen Asian teenagers, one white teen who licks her hand and uses it to brush her face and looks at her girlfriend and says, “I think I could be a cat.”
It’s all a little overwhelming. But then there are smiling faces and a glass or two of beer and electronic darts and happy wedding wishes. On the way home, the bad housekeeper and her boyfriend buy some cheese and crackers and some fish to cook for dinner tomorrow. They listen to music for a while before collapsing on the air mattress. They both agree it is the best night out they’d had in awhile.
Here’s to another year of new experiences and old friends, and good times and bad housekeeping.
