I normally have a real love-hate relationship with December. The last month of the year is usually kind of nutty, but in a good way, but also a bad way, and every year I (like I said) love/hate it. But the final twelfth of 2008 is taking the cake, I gotta tell you.
- I skipped like a stone over the asphalt and tore up my knee (improving, but still stiff as hell, thanks for asking!)
- I opened the car door into my eye and gave myself a cut and a very faint black eye. Seriously. The first thing I thought when I did this was – Man, that was really easy to do. I can’t believe I have never done that before. And the second thing I thought was – this is the excuse battered women make when they have to explain away a black eye. No one is going to believe that I actually "ran into a door." They are going to take away my child and lock up my husband because I am a clumsy idiot who hurts herself twice in a week. (And then I remembered how I dated that jackass for 3 years and nobody did anything about my situation then, or even gave me assistance when I actively asked for it, and I stopped worrying and was relieved. Sort of.)
- Because I’m lurching around like Frankenstein on this stiff knee, I have kicked chairs, tripped over the dog, and nearly wiped out on a couple of sets of steps several times in the past week, resulting in painful toe suffering and exacerbation of a right foot problem I’ve had for several months (I think it’s a stress fracture from running perhaps?)
- And now I sound like a hypochondriac.
- We’re in the final stretch leading up to Christmas, and I am so exhausted because . . . ***we interrupt this very typical Christmas-time whine about finding presents for everyone, and overspending, and not having enough time or Scotch tape or butter to make a zillion batches of cookies, and the pets are EATING ALL OF MY RIBBONS AND TISSUE DAMMIT, in order to bring you the PSA that First-World whining about the fact that your sparkly bow is silver and your wrapping paper is gold and they Don’t Match, Woe Is Me – well, there are children starving somewhere who would not find it very interesting. Or deserving of pity. Thank you.*** . . . the end of it. Phew.
- Work is busy. Like, more so than usual. I am unmotivated. Like, more so than usual. This is not a good match. People are depending on me to provide the educational and enrollment materials for our brand new Roth 401k so that they can wrest their retirement plans out of the gutter (haha. invest! more! continue to lose it all! only now do it post-tax! awesome!) And I’m like – yeah, can I get that to you in January? Because I really need to re-charge, and I’m not feeling like doing my job this week. Not so good, there, little HR lady.
- I fired (DEHIRED!) somebody. A mom. That sucked.
- I am gaining the old holiday pounds. I talk a big game about embracing the season, in all of its clarified butter and high fructose corn syrup glory, but when the fat pants start to fit a little better I really do feel bad. I can’t help it. Even though I know it will come off in January, I still feel gross, like people are judging me. Of course nobody cares, how self centered am I, but still that plus the short days make me feel all over kind of blah and sad. Also, since I have the extra belly skin, my belly is REALLY unforgiving of a few pounds these days. If I am standing totally relaxed, I look 4 months pregnant. Very handy if you get pulled over or want somebody to carry something heavy for you, but not so good for the old self esteem.
- And again with the First World complaints. I have so much food! God, it just makes me so FAT! It totally sucks to be surrounded by food all of the time!
So there you have it. December bullet points.
Two purely hypothetical questions for the masses, if you would care to help me with a pair of purely hypothetical dilemmas, and then I shall go.
- How much do you pay your neighbor to check on your cat? Keeping in mind that while you are asking the hypothetical ten year old little boy (with Downs syndrome) and paying this little boy so he has some pocket money, his parents will actually be the ones doing all of the work. I was thinking $5 a day? Is that too cheap? It’s 6 days. (Hypothetically speeaking, you will be out of town 10 days, but your sister will handle the first 4. You will pay her in cooked tuna casseroles and homemade vegetarian minestrone, so she has some damn nutrients in her beer and chips diet, godsake.)
- Say you have a lovely coworker, a really sweet and generous person, who keeps buying you things. It’s a woman. She has a daughter your age who lives in Nebraska (aka, quite far.) Her husband is on disability, and you know that she is struggling a bit for money. And she buys you stuff like jeans and turtlenecks and even random things like a lint roller or liquid bandage, just because you mentioned in passing that you lacked those items and were thinking of picking them up at the store on your lunch. What do you do? Accept the gifts and thank her, because you know you are a surrogate receiving motherly smothering that she can’t do for her daughter? Encourage her to stop? Buy her things back (you can’t really afford to do this, but feel you should?) It isn’t a lot of money, but a little bit of money times a lot of incidents starts to add up to a lot of money, and you feel guilty. Any ideas?
Thank you, and good day to you.