I am apparently one of the cosmically fucked, just chosen by random to be the living embodiment of Murphy’s Law. Instead of like the rest of you, who experience it only occasionally,* every single thing I do* is bound to invoke it.
I also suffer from Congenital Clumsiness, inherited from my klutz of a mother. I walk into walls. I trip over anything available. I wear shoes all the time because of how often I stub my toes. I have also noticed a tendency towards premature dementia, but of a bizzare type: whereas I can remember every one of the thousands of books I have read, I can’t remember my dental appointment.
That aside, I’m tempted to believe in a higher power only to be able to blame it for fucking with me. A dish will seemingly leap from my hands of its own accord, taking care to land in the center of the room which has no throw rugs, smashing into more peices than would seem possible to create without nuclear technology. The bare area in which it lands is small-- I have a lot of rugs. The irony is, of course, that I probably couldn’t hit it if I intentionally threw the dish into it.
Every trip out of doors is a fucking drama. I have theorized that I exude a pheremone which attracts crazy people, and I’m beginning to accept as fact that bizarre circumstances of the jeeze-what-are-the-odds type are triggered by my very presence. My co-workers have even commented on it: “Wow, weird stuff like this always happens when you’re around.”
Case in point: No one will come to the museum in which I work for two or three days (it’s the slowest season of the year.) So, we’ll decide to use this time to start a project of cleaning and organizing artifacts for proper storage. It is only after we have everything spread out in the back offices that the doorbell will begin to ring. And ring. And ring. Tourists will flood the place. It won’t stop until closing time, after which we will have to stay and pick up everything we so carefully laid out and re-pack it in proper temporary storage.
Let me walk you through my day today, a very average day, really. I didn’t have to work, so I decided to catch up on some projects at home.
4:30 AM-- The oldest of our dogs, Bean, wakes us up by hurdling onto the bed like a wrecking ball. She was panting heavily, shaking the entire bed with it and emitting long, piercing whisper-whines. Sleep was, of course, impossible, so I had to get up and go get her a Valuim. She has storm anxiety, you see, and this is not the first time we’ve been awakened by her terror. But last night it wasn’t storming. Yeah, it was snowing lightly, but the wind wasn’t even strong enough to make my chimes sound.
I break a nail down to the quick prying open the child-proof bottle, and drop the pills on the floor. My dog, long trained to be alert for tidbits of food dropping from her sloppy masters and anxious lest the other two canines get a bit, lunged. I pushed her away and began to pick them up, bumping my sore finger on the water cooler in the process.
9:30 AM-- I drop new bottle of body wash and it busts open. Naturally, it did not land in the shower so that I could easily rinse the mess away, but manages to slip through the small gap at the side of the shower curtain and explode on the floor. Yes, it was a plastic bottle, which shouldn’t have broken, but this is me we’re talking about. Yes, the floor had just been mopped-- actually only half an hour ago.
9:32 AM-- The power goes out, and I hear the housekeeper calling for me. I rinse, dry and dress in the dark. I discover that I forgot and left the space heater on while the housekeeper was vaccuuming, which blew a fuse. No problem, I thought. I bought extra ones when it happened last time.
I can’t find them, of course. I look in all of my storage areas, combing through them multiple times in-case-I-didn’t-see-'em. When I shut the big junk drawer, a little wooden key holder jams into the top of the jamb and breaks. I even check the tool room in the basement, thinking Hubby might have put them there for some unknown reason. I try to call him, but he can’t be reached.
11:00 AM-- I leave to run errands. As I back up the car, I hear a crunch. One of the lids fell of my landscaping lights and rolled under the car tire.
2:30 PM-- I return from running errands to realize I forgot to buy a fuse.
3:30-- I find a package has been delivered. It’s the UrineGone I ordered. All of my dogs are finally housebroken, but I worried I might not have gotten up all the stains. I saw the commercial with the blue light, and decided I had to get it.
The blue light doesn’t work. I fiddle with it for a while, and decide to leave it for Hubby to try to fix when he gets home.
4:00 PM-- Hubby finally calls me back. Most days, he calls me a couple of times to chat, see what I’m up to, or discuss what we’ll have for dinner. Today, when I really needed to ask him something, he couldn’t return my call because of various crisis which had arisen at work. He tells me where the fuses are, and then asks me if I picked up his suit from the cleaners.
4:15 PM-- I go to the dry cleaners. I discover when I arrive that the claim ticket is missing from my wallet. Why it would be is a mystery which will forever unsolved, for I certainly wouldn’t throw it away, and no one else digs in my purse. I blame the gnomes who steal socks from the drier and give her my phone number, which calls up the suit’s location.
5:00-- In the grocery store. I needed eggs, thin-sliced chicken breasts and a bottle of rum, and thought it would be silly to get a cart for such few items. It was a decision I’d come to regret as all my goddam decisions are.
This day, of course, there are no thinly-sliced chicken breasts in stock, though it’s an item they usually always have. I stuff bigger ones into my basket and go to get the other stuff. When grabbing the rum, I realize it’s no good without Coke, so I grab a twelve pack and head to the Express Lane.
I had grabbed a few impulse items, so my basket was kinda heavy, as is a twelve pack-- especially if you’re standing in line for ten minutes. There are two men ahead of me, one of them an elderly gentleman who is arguing heatedly with a young female clerk who looks back at him with the blank incomprehension of a stuffed animal. He believes his register-printed coupon should be doubled, though the coupon sports a printed legend that even I can read five paces back: COUPON NOT SUBJECT TO DOUBLING. Well, he didn’t know that and doesn’t see why he should be penalized. And they’ve doubled them before at this store! Well, if he’d known they were going to be so unreasonable about it, he would have taken his business elsewhere.
At the end of it, he’s five cents short. The cashier pointedly waits for payment, and then repeats her request for the money. “I don’t have any change,” he tells her, standing placidly, apparently expecting her to tell him to just forget about it. The poor gir is utterly bewildered as to what to do until the man in front of me gives him a nickle. The elderly man takes his bags and leaves without a thank you to either of them.
The cashier is glacially slow, handling a package of beef like it was a premature infant, rotating it so slowly before the scanner you’d think she was displaying it for bid on The Price is Right. She puts each item into the bag with great tenderness and opens a bag more slowly than I open ancient, crumbling papers in the museum in which I work.
The weight of the basket and twelve pack are really starting to bother me. (I have a back injury) The man in front of me removes all the items from his basket, and leaves it on the counter so I can’t lay down my items. I keep hoping he’ll move it, but he doesn’t. I finally pull out The Big Guns: I shift the items in my arms and give a small sigh. He continues to glance around, oblivious. His eyes finally alight on me. He smiles briefly and looks away, my plight unnoticed. Not until he has paid, put away his money and gathered all of his bags does the cashier move the empty basket.
She looks down at the rum and recoils swiftly. “It’s alcohol, isn’t it?”
I keep a straight face. “Yes, it is.”
She’s under 21. She has to call for a manager to scan it. We wait. And wait.
6:00-- There aren’t many bags, I decide when I get home. I’ll just try to take everything at once. Hubby’s suit falls from my hand as I try to unlock the door onto the wet porch, and as I could have predicted, the plastic wrap bunched up as it fell, so three-quarters of the suit is now wet.
6:30-- I decide to have a snack. I try to tug the cellophane bag open, but it won’t budge. Sighing, I get up to fetch the scissors. I have to go all the way downstairs (oh why, oh why didn’t I buy a little house?) It didn’t occur to me to try to open it before I went upstairs and settled on my reading chair.
I can’t find the scissors. I have to use a steak knife, and the awkward way I hold it while cutting it causes it to tumble from my hands and scatter the contents on the kitchen floor.
I’m like some anti-Midas-- everything I touch turns to shit. Maybe I’m just easily frustrated, but it seems from a distance that others manage to have nice, boring trips to the store, uneventful package openings and don’t have every possible thing go awry on a daily basis.
