It's a Small World

A couple of weeks ago, my husband asked me, “Why did you put ‘a marble that looks like the earth’ on your birthday list?”

I had a hard time explaining to him why I not only wanted, but needed such a thing.  He came through anyway, because he is a good husband.

Instead of continuing to try to explain why a marble-sized world is such a wonderful thing, I will let these photos speak for themselves.

First:  The Obvious

It's a small world after all. 

I've got the world in the palm of my hand.

The world is at my fingertips.
(And I wish I had more attractive fingertips.)

I've got my eye on the world.
(Or the world in my eye.)

Next:  Alternative Origin Myths

 

The world was born in the head of a fish.

Gaia was actually a tabby cat.

The earth was sneezed out the nose of a dog.

Then:  Planet Under Attack!!!

AAAAAAAA!!!

This shall not end well for us.

And Lastly:  Some Random Pics of the World

See?  Next time your birthday rolls around, get creative with your wish list.

I’m not through being entertained by this.  Send me your puns, your plays on words, all your ideas for my tiny world and I will do my best to make them happen.

WAIT!!!

Before anyone chastises me for wasting time with my tiny world rather than working on my NaNoWriMo novel, I would just like to tell all you bossy-pants that I already wrote 2,000 words today (so there) and I deserved a break.  Also the cricket on my porch is driving me crazy and I had to get out of earshot of him for a while.  If I ever find him, I am going to crush him with the whole world.

Time Capsules for the Short Term Memory-Challenged

I recently got my very first safety deposit box, and I love it.  I love everything about it.  I love the shape of the key.  I love the official-ness and secrecy of it.  I love the little room I get to go in when I take things out or put things in.  I love the way the lady says, “Take all the time you need.  I’ll be right outside.”  She says it so solemnly that I always feel like I’m in a funeral home instead of a credit union.  Today, wanting to respect the pseudo-solemnity of the situation, I stood inside the room a few moments longer after I was finished, thinking, What a nice quiet little space.  I wonder what they REALLY mean when they say ‘Take as long as you need’.  Could I come here and get some writing done?  When I came back out, the lady said, “Wow, that was fast!” and I wondered what other people do in there.  I mean, how long does it take to put something in a box?

My favorite thing about it though is the element of surprise.

My attention span seems to be getting shorter as I get older and my memory is not what it used to be.  (Proof:  A common occurrence in my marriage involves me asking the hubby to send me a text message reminding me of something.  Four seconds later, I am exclaiming, “Ooo! I got a text!”  I am proud neither of my attention span nor my excitement over getting texts.)  So, even though I am the only person with access to my safe—not even the hubby has a key yet; I should probably remedy that—I get to play practical jokes on myself.

For instance… last month when I went to access my safe for the first time, I couldn’t think of what all to put in it.  I had brought the few important documents that I needed to store, but they looked so small and insignificant inside the 3 x 10 x 22-inch tray that I felt the need to add something else.  Unprepared for such a dilemma, I rummaged around in my purse for items to spice up my collection.  Later, back at home, I looked around for things to store in my secret compartment that were more fun than birth certificates and savings bonds.  I came up with a few. 

So today, when I took my new batch of random possessions to the bank (including, but not limited to: a cd of wedding photos and—in order to help prevent The End of the World as We Know It—a greenroom notebook and a Pentel RSVP pen) I was pleasantly surprised to find the twenty dollar bill, stick of gum, and note to myself that I had left there last time.

Seriously, it’s like a time capsule.  So much fun.

NOT the contents of my safety deposit box.  (But they could be...)
This is actually what had accumulated in the "odds and ends drawer" of my
classroom by the end of my teaching career.  You know... ancient cell phone,
slinky, assorted rubber chickens.  Oh and that coin purse in the middle made
out of an actual frog.  (It was a gift.  Thanks, Dad!)

I love my safety deposit box.  I love the fact that is just high enough to be almost out of my reach and for some reason the attendant never helps me get it down.  I love wondering what the boxes above and below mine contain.  Last will and testament?  Unpublished novel?  Great-great-grandmother’s wedding band?  Skull of a Paleocene rodent?  I love keeping a straight face as I walk into the private room, knowing that I have nothing important in my purse and am wasting this employee’s time putting happy meal toys and pink ballpoint pens in my safe.  For all she knows, I may not have anything in my purse.  Someday, I may just go to sit in that quiet little room and read for a few minutes, or look at my strange little collection and just get away from it all. 

Maybe what that box really contains is a small piece of my sanity.  I’d better not lose the key.

Things I Think About While Bathing Dragons

I just finished bathing my husband's dragons.  (Don't look for symbolism or euphemism or any other hidden ism in that statement.  It is what it is.  See photos for confirmation.) 

 

There are things they don't tell you about marriage.  Like the fact that once you are married you will have to periodically do things like bathe your husband's dragons because they have been sitting on top of the bookcase in the living room for two years collecting an inch of dust and the dust has become so thick that small pieces have actually broken off and floated down in the gentle current of the fan so that you can no longer ignore the dust five feet above your head and you will ask your tall husband to take the dragons down and he will, but then he will ask you to bathe them.  No one warned me about that.  Then again, I am not sure that warning would really apply to that many wives.  Maybe the warning is something more general like, "You will have to deal with the stuff your husband owns" or "Your husband will at some point ask you to clean something that you have never cleaned before" in which case I do think, actually, that someone told me those things, and I just ignored them.  Or at least I just never pictured dragons.

I like my husband's dragons. 

I do.  I'm serious.  How can I convince you that I am not lying about liking my husband's dragons? 

How about this... I got him a new one recently.  It's small, but it has two heads, so that makes it cooler than bigger dragons with one head.  Here he is eating a fake cockroach with one of his heads. 

(Note I said FAKE.  We may have spiders and scorpions and cats and dogs and dragons and occasionally even an armadillo at our house but we do NOT have cockroaches.  EVER.  And I love that about this house.  Come to think of it, why don't we?  We don't exterminate... and we let our house get pretty dirty... and there are obviously cracks big enough for scorpions to get in so I am sure they are big enough for cockroaches too... Hmm.  Ok, I am still glad that we don't have cockroaches, but now I am slightly afraid that we have something bigger and scarier that EATS cockroaches.  Hang on while I google....... Huh.  It turns out that cockroaches actually have many enemies.  Apparently we could have wasps, birds, bats, or "other small animals" keeping our cockroach population at bay.  Hmm.  Also of note, if you want to read a sad CNN article about a guy who died after winning a cockroach-eating contest, click here.) 

Exhibit A - Dragons

(top of bookcase)

Exhibit B - Krusty

(left of bookcase)

But back to my point (the second one, not the one about things they don't tell you before marriage), I like my husband's dragons.  They go well with my Krusty the Clown doll (who suspiciously ends up in the background of a LOT of my pictures) and my Muppets and my various fortune-telling paraphernalia.  And by "goes with" I don't mean that they actually have anything in common, because they don't, I more mean "doesn't go with", as in "nothing in our house goes with anything else".  I like that. 

When the hubby and I got married, we did the whole registry thing, so yes, we have matching dishes (unless you count mugs-- I sort of have a mug-buying problem, but I do use them all-- I choose my mug each morning based on my mood), and we have matching towels, mostly, except for the blue ones that got bleach on them and turned pink (who knew blue towels would turn pink?!) and the random ones that I use to wrap my hair up in when it is drying because they are smaller), and we have... um... ???  What else did we register for?  I feel like it was a whole big deal at the time and now I can't think of anything else.  Uh... ladles?  I think we have matching ladles. 

ANYWAY, even though we registered for stuff and got new dishes and towels and bedding (BEDDING!  That's what it was!) we didn't REDO our whole lives or anything.  We moved my purple couches in with Hubby’s green couches and lived for a while in over-stuffed-living-room-semi-harmony until various events caused us to get rid of one piece of each set.  So we still have one green couch and one purple couch, except that the green couch was really ripped up from the cats (like... you could see the wood) so I patched all the corners with not-quite-the-same-green cloth because I couldn't be bothered to look more than one place and find the actual same color.  And we decorated the walls with Hubby’s samurai posters and my framed photos of my family and some cool paintings our friend made.  And of course my VCR tapes sit on the same shelf next to his blu-rays, etc. 

Christmas cards 

still displayed in May

What I'm getting at is we don’t live in a very grown-up house, and I’m ok with that.  Although, I tend to forget just exactly HOW un-grown-up our house is until I visit someone else’s and realize that all the colors in their living room go together and they have things like rugs and end tables and curtains and an acute lack of dragons.  I don’t know what other people think of our décor because not that many people really come to our house and those who do have been too polite to say things like, “What the heck is up with all the mismatched furniture and dragons and Muppets?”  But it doesn’t matter because I like our un-grown-up, dragon-infested, cockroach-free house.  I think it’s pretty awesome. 

And you gotta admit, those dragons look pretty darn good after they’ve had their bath.

Upon re-reading this, I realize that A) It is a lot longer than I realized, and B) It really has no point at all.  I fear that I have wasted your time.  Please accept my apologies in the form of this short video clip from The Princess Bride.

    

A Poetic Mess

There’s really no reason for this.

This mess I’m in, mostly literal, is all my fault.  I know how to be tidy.  When I’m a mess, it’s generally because I choose it.  97% of my time I go around washing things and wiping things and stacking things and straightening things… on bad days I do it over and over.  Right angles.  Line it up.  Must have order.  But then there’s that 3%. 

Once in a while, I make a mess.  A big one.  If you’re going to do something, do it right.  The floors become filthy, the dishes play Jenga in the sink, there is an unplanned haphazardness to the items on the coffee table.  Things lie where they fall.  Objects that seldom move suddenly change rooms.  At first, I am simply ignoring the mess.  And then I am appreciating it.  And then… I am actively contributing to the chaos.

We have entered the 3%.  Point of reference:  I have recently lost my desk.

I would like to point out, in my defense, that the wine glasses have accumulated
over the course of days and one of them actually only contained cranberry juice. 
Though, yes, that one that’s precariously perched on the edge of my desk
by the tape measure, is in fact half full (optimist!) of wine.

Eventually, of course, I will clean.  And it will be glorious.  Cleaning turns into cleaning out.  Straightening bookshelves turns into rearranging furniture.  Sometimes, I emerge from the mess into a brand new house.

But before I become the Goddess of Cleanliness and reclaim the home that is rightfully mine… I have to freak out a little bit.  It’s a natural part of the process.  I see the mess, finally truly see it for what it is, assess how much work it will take to remedy it (and then assess again more rationally) and then have a small panic attack.  What have I done?  How did I let this go on for so long?  Where is the cat?  Then I deal with my panic attack through avoidance.  And I use avoidance to create a bigger mess.

We have now entered the stage of avoidance.  Point of reference:  I just spent the last two hours pulling old college and teaching binders off my shelf and going through them, thus creating large slippery piles of paper on the floor.

Nicely done.

Ok, actually that is the same wine glass from the previous picture. 
Seriously.  It didn’t multiply—it migrated.  Get off my back!  Sheesh.

That larger pile over there by my flip flops consists of poems.  Extra copies of poems that I accumulated in college or during my teaching career.  And they’re good ones too.  And they do not deserve to sit in a dusty binder not being read by a woman who desperately needs to clean her house.

And so, I want to give them to you.  (Really.)

Send me an email at cariejuettner@gmail.com with the subject “I want a poem” and include your name and a mailing address.  Don’t tell me you would prefer to have the poem emailed to you—that’s not the offer.  These are pieces of paper that already physically exist in the universe and which need good homes.  If you give me your address, I will snail-mail you a poem (maybe two) and nothing else.  By agreeing to receive a poem you are not accidentally selling your soul to the Devil, joining a club, or signing up to receive newsletters.  I don’t have a newsletter.  Oh, and there will be cute stickers on the envelope.  And I will pay for the postage.  Even if you live in Antarctica.  What have you got to lose?

My cool friend Stine took this picture many a year ago.

There is no reason why I should have to let my house fall into “condemned” status before giving it a good cleaning, and there is no reason why I should have to give you a reason for wanting to send you some poetry.  But if you need one, April is National Poetry Month.  And let’s face it… you need a little poetry in your life.

Enough said.  If you need me, I’ll be licking envelopes and applying stickers.