Sucking at Life

Sometimes, when I say that I don't know the answer to a simple question or I'm unable to perform a simple task, my younger daughter (who will be 17 in one month and one day), will say, "Well, you suck at life." I've heard her say it often enough now to realize that it is hyperbolic and is not really a statement about my life in general, but it's a statement about how good I am with the minutiae of living. Recently, she said this to me on a day when I read my sister's and brother's blogs, both of which involved compliments that they have received and what they considered the 10 best. Because of their blogs, I recalled one of the most surprising compliments I've ever received which was from a friend that I greatly admire (and who has just ended a ruthless combined session of chemo and surgery to curb breast cancer). She once told me that she admired me because of how much I accomplish each day and how much I've accomplished in my life. I was thrilled, but very shocked, because I see myself as barely making it through each day by the skin of my teeth while my house continues a downward spiral into disarray, decay, and depreciation; my pets are eaten alive by critters like fleas; bats fly down my chimney because I've never gotten around to putting a screen down it; and my daughters are forced to order pizza or Chinese for the fifth time in one week because I'm pounding on my keyboard late into the night and won't emerge from my exile to my office long enough to cook something and I have not provided them with anything in the cupboard for them to cook other than an old box of jambalaya mix with bugs in it and an ancient broccoli and cheese soup mix.

The merging of the notion of not being good at life's minutiae yet managing to impress a friend came just the other day as I was sitting on the beach with my significant other, Wayne. He noticed a couple walking on the beach with their very young daughter and pointed them out to me as "the next couple for the vacation guide cover." He and I play this game often--we point out people that we see and peg them for different roles in life and the vacation guide cover is one of our favorites. Even though it was extremely windy and a rainstorm had ended a bare 30 minutes before, the little girl's hair was charmingly arrayed in lovely ringlets with a bright bow in it, there was not a speck of sand on any of them, and the woman was wearing one of those cottony-crepe oversized beach wraps in the style of a man's Oxford shirt over her bathing suit. I remarked to Wayne that if that couple had been Alex (my ex), my daughter Mary when she was young, and me, we would have looked like we'd been sandblasted in an attempt to remove the bright pink and red hues of our sunburns, Mary's hair would be a huge mass of tangles that no ribbon could go through, and the shirt would be clinging to my legs so that I could barely walk and blowing open at the top so that the whole world could see that my stomach never recovered totally from childbirth, leaving me to grab at it ineffectually while trying to hold Mary's hand.

The reason that I don't see myself as being successful at life is because I am bogged down by my inability to do many of the small things other people do so effortlessly. For example, I cannot attach a cell phone to my body in anyway that does not result in either a crushed cellphone because a car ran over it after it fell off my belt loop on the way to a hockey game (true story) or a frantic search through my cars and those of others to try and locate a phone that has fallen out of the clip somewhere in the course of a day. I am also completely unable to keep earphones either on my ears or attached to MP3 players, laptop computers, phones with headsets, or diskmen/walkmen. They either become unattached when the device they're attached to falls off my body or out of my pocket or I get my hands or some other body part tangled up in the wires and the wires detach themselves, usually by breaking so that they can't be used again. And forget about bluetooth headsets--they can only stay on my ear for about 30 seconds before sliding onto the floor. Wayne's son Jeff can go on 30-mile bike ride with his iPod strapped to his arm with an arm band and earphones without incident; I shudder to think what might happen to my poor iPod if I tried to use it while riding a bike.

I'm also unable to clean up spills properly and I cannot mop a kitchen floor to any satisfactory state of cleanliness. I can sweep the floor, then vacuum it, then sweep it again, but when I try to mop, there are huge dustbunnies that attach themselves to the mop. Many people think that I have someone clean my house every two weeks because I can afford it, but the real reason is that I cannot perform any house cleaning task successfully. If I try to use those wonderful scrubbing bubbles, after the first spray, the sprayer clogs and the bubbles become tiny spritzes of air or a dribbly bit of liquid. I don't want to go into cleaning toilets other than to say that no toilet bowl cleaner I've used ever flows upward and under the rim like you see on T.V. I'm not bad at getting dishes into the dishwasher, but thanks to the immense pressure put on me by Wayne to buy a dishwasher that was not my first choice so that I have a dishwasher that has a huge spot in the middle of the bottom rack where no dish can be put and an incompetent installer who did not hook it up to my hotwater valve (because that would have required extra work), it barely sanitizes the dishes. If even one little tiny speck of food is on anything, it's sure to be there still after the dishwasher has been run. Also, if there's any slightly difficult spot on my clothing, such as spaghetti sauce or a bit of chocolate, my attempts to remove it will result in its permanent addition to the item of clothing unless I send it to my mother for emergency spot removal.

I have a very difficult time cooking, too. I hate to stir things over a stove and am prone to forgetting to set the timer while something is baking and then either undercooking it or burning it into an unidentifiable mass that looks like something Neil Armstrong brought back after he walked on the moon. When I drain hamburger, there's a 50-50 chance that the grease will land on some part of my body. Combined with this are my wars with packaging. If a package has a "tear here" line, it will steadfastly refuse to tear. Then, I'm on a frantic search for scissors that ends fruitlessly with a butter knife that I try to poke into the package with either no or disastrous results. If it's one of those packages that you're supposed to pull apart, it either refuses to come unglued or it bursts open and half the contents ends up on the floor. This is more likely to happen if the contents include something like coffee, sugar, or cheesy powder that's difficult to wipe up. If I give up and manage to tear or cut the package open in some other way, the contents both rush out in a lump far away from the bowl or pot I want them to fall into or they cling desperately to the package so that only about a third comes out. I'm not even going to describe what happens with one of those salad dressing or mustard packs with a tiny slice on one end that's supposed to help you tear it open.

Then there's my computers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the laptops I have (the one I'm using right now to type), has lost its R key and the other is the first laptop I've ever seen that has almost all the letters on the keys rubbed off. This is okay when I'm "touch typing," but if I'm hunting and pecking with one hand because I'm holding a phone with the other (remember, I can't use headphones), my keyboard turns into something akin to Chinese water torture. I will never forget the laughter of the customs agent in Lima that saw that laptop. All of my computers have unbelievable amounts of dust under and around their keys, even though I close my laptops every night. My friend Debbie has the same model of Thinkpad that I do that she got a full year earlier than mine and it looks like she just unpacked it. Of course, Deb is also able to edit 60-100 pages a day and still take time to sing in the church choir and do crafts, including baking gingerbread houses with her daughters. She's also a witty and fun person and a superior editor. Now there's someone worth admiring. Also, no one else I know has a cat throw up on their laptop, rendering it both completely ruined and classification as a biohazard.

My hair is a candidate for sucking at life, too. I can never get it to look like my stylist does, no matter how I try. If I try to blowdry it so that it curls under, one side will curl under but the other will flip out. My stylist has no such issues with it. I can't pull it back without it all falling out within an hour, either. And you know those quick updos and topknots that most women with shoulder-length hair can whip their hair into in about 30 seconds complete with a few hair clips? Well, I can forget even trying to do something like that without looking like I got out of bed after sleeping in a pony tail and damaging my scalp with the clips or pins.

Other things I can't do include:

• Wearing anything with a strap (it'll invariably slide down my arm and tangle up on my wrist until it's almost sprained)
• Carrying more than two things in my hand at a time (something always ends up on the ground)
• Keeping a suitcase with wheels upright
• Standing in the ocean without being knocked down by the first slightly strong wave
• Exercising in the sun without swallowing half the sunscreen that's sweated off my face into my mouth
• Sucessfully removing sand from my body and belongings
• Eating ice cream without dropping some of it on my body or, if I'm wearing a light colored shirt, on my clothes
• Eating a fast-food sandwich in the car--much like the ice cream, no matter how much I cover myself in napkins, I still get mayonnaise and ketchup on my person somewhere
• Keeping a car in running condition for more than about a year, no matter what the age of the car or how often I take it in for tune-ups
• Glowing with good health after exercising--instead, I look like I'm a candidate for the cardiologist's office with my bright red face and body covered in sweat
• Being the kind of parent who keeps up with each child's life milestones and reminds them to do things like register for the SATs or sign up to get their senior pictures done or study more than one hour for an exam they need to get greater than an 80 on
• Getting my daughters to pick up after themselves or putting something away as soon as they've finished with it (except at other people's houses, where they do that as easily as breathing)
• Opening a CD case without cracking it, or worse, cracking the CD
• Walking down the steps to my family room without missing the step and breaking my ankle

With these kinds of struggles with daily living, it's no wonder that I was shocked at my friend's compliment. The hardest thing is accepting that it's not likely that these struggles will end. In fact, they might get worse. So, my project at this point is to remind myself that my friend complimented me because of the big things I can accomplish and to try to stop sweating this small stuff. Unfortunately, the small stuff is more likely to jump up and remind me that I can't do it in some horrible way such as ankle splint or a stack of cracked CDs, but I have resolve. I'll let you know how it goes.