Thursday, December 7, 2000

 

1:04 a.m. Once a month or so, if you get my drift, I have what I will call a "sloppy day." There's no other way to describe it, really. It's a day that sort of creeps up on you -- everything seems normal enough -- until after the midway point, when everything seems to fall apart.

Today has been one of those days. And by fall apart, here's what I mean: I don't want to close the cabinet doors or put the food away or pick up my dropped clothing or move the pile of mail or ... do anything, really. Each unfinished thing makes the next thing harder to finish and so forth and so on and so it goes.

A long long time ago, when I was much less mature, I used to panic when a sloppy day hit and I thought it was my true nature coming out and I sometimes let it turn into a second day and then a month and then a whole season would have to be reclaimed all because I didn't want to put the lid back on the yogurt one dim afternoon.

Then, as will happen when you start to grow up, I began to ease up on myself a bit and I noticed that I only had one of these days a month, on the average. Sure -- that's 12 days too many in a perfect year, but I also noticed that if I just relaxed and let the day run its course, the next day would dawn and I would more than likely be back to my old ways and I could clean up the mess in record time.

Is any of this clear enough? I realize that my thinking's just as sloppy tonight as my desktop, but there is a salient point buried in here, and it's this: we all go through moods and phases, and isn't it wonderful that we do?

Some days I fold the laundry all nice and square and put every last sock and towel and t-shirt neatly into its appointed place in the scheme of things. Some days I don't. In fact, when I'm in one of my ultra days, I'm always poignantly aware that such a perfect Martha mood isn't going to last and my dream of total organization is not going to be achieved -- ever.

Of course, it's going to be the sum total of any one month that will end up creating your life for you. These days I try to contain the damage when I feel a sloppy day upon me. Today, for instance. When I got up, one of the first things I wanted to do was to take apart the bottom of the fridge and make sure the foul smell I mentioned a day ago wasn't coming from that mystery pan that I always forget about.

The smell is faint, but still around ... I'm still assuming that a small rodentia crawled under the house to die, but nonetheless I wanted to make sure that it wasn't that sneaky pan ... and so I got the grill thing off and the vacuum cleaner out and then I decided to clean out the veggie bins and the whole time the trial(s) were on TV and then I decided (not surprisingly) to make some soup, and before you know it: Sloppy Day descends.

Now it's 1:39 a.m. and the grill is back on the bottom of the fridge, sort of. It wasn't the pan, the soup is now in plastic containers, and the dishes are chugging away in the dishwasher, but it's taken me all day to get even these few minor things done and that's only because I'm mature.

I've learned to work with my moods instead of worrying about them. Today's mood was unreliable, undependable, irresponsible -- in a word, sloppy. But I did what I could. I may be dragging and slagging behind and moving slower than the moon, but I'm putting the lids back on.

And I'm somehow managing to write about it. That's something.