In which I complain about things

The universe is trying really hard to harsh my mellow today. Despite being tucked into a luxurious bed on the 14th floor of a ridiculously posh hotel in Galveston (for work, though), I couldn’t stay asleep at all. I woke up so many times that I remember waking up at 5 a.m. and being disappointed that it wasn’t time to wake up yet. I have to try to go to sleep again? So, I didn’t get nearly enough sleep, and lack of sleep makes me depressive and desperate.

At breakfast, the server who offered me coffee was like, “Oh, pregnant?” and I said yes, and she said, “Not too much coffee!” and I was like, “The doctor says I can have one cup a day!” but the cup held six ounces of coffee and the “cup” of coffee I tend to drink the morning is more like 12 ounces, but asking for more coffee would have felt about as irresponsible as lighting up a cigarette, so I didn’t. But now I have a caffeine headache.

Then my steak fingers from Dairy Queen in Bastrop were totally disappointing and I had to throw them away.  They were bland and salty at the same time. I had been looking forward to steak fingers at Dairy Queen for about 150 miles, and it was disappointing. And my stomach is increasingly squished by this squash-sized human growing inside me, so I still felt shitty after eating the steak fingers and it wasn’t even slightly worth it. (Funny side note, though: Joel feels sorry for the baby whenever I complain about being inconvenienced like this because “He doesn’t know he’s inside a person!”)

Then I got back to Austin and stopped by the house to change into work clothes and drop off my suitcase. As soon as I stepped in the door, a wave of cat pee fumes assaulted my nostrils. I tried to locate the source of the smell, but it smells like cat pee throughout the entire house. It makes me want to burn the house down.

HOW CAN CREATURES THIS CUTE BE SO INCREDIBLY BAD?!?

Then I got to work, where many frustrating emails awaited. Oh, I wish I could tell you about them. I can’t. And I can’t complain about work too much, because it sends me to places like Galveston, which I actually do enjoy quite a bit. Also, I’m lucky to have a job.

Okay, but then I got a computer virus and, long story short, I’m not allowed to use Google Chrome anymore. I’m never doing an image search again.

My mom left a message on my work voicemail (why does she think it’s okay to call me at work? Why?) and sent me an email to let me know that my grandma’s having surgery on her carotid artery this Thursday. My uncle sent an email to tell me the same thing. She’s got a 95% chance of coming through with no problems. Her artery is 90% blocked, so there’s really no getting out of this, despite her being kind of too old to be operated on.

My left eyelid will not stop twitching. I have no idea what to do about it.

The double-pane window in the living room has a bunch of mold between the two panes and there’s no way to get it out because theoretically, there was no way for it to get in.

I hate the color I painted the baby’s room. I’m going to have to take another whole weekend to repaint it, but there’s a very good chance I’m going to choose another color that I hate.

My dad thinks it's okay for a kid's room, but not for a nursery. Why would I know anything about what babies like? Fuck.

Believe me, I’m well aware of the #firstworldproblems nature of all of these complaints.  One of the reasons I update so infrequently is that I’m much too aware of this. I just really don’t know what else to tell you guys.

Oh, except for that Joel and I went to the Virgin Islands for three days and nights last weekend. I got to look at this for three days:

Not too shabby.

The vacation taught me that I need to take more vacations. After returning from St. Thomas, I felt a calm all week that I don’t remember ever feeling before. Everything was just fine.  Even my back stopped hurting for the whole week.  It was fantastic.  I took some money and opened a savings account just for vacations.

Well, it’s dark now. Time to break out the blacklight again and look for fluorescent green pee splotches.

Let’s buy everybody a sandwich

I was driving to lunch today and decided to pop in a CD by Joel’s old band. I skipped to “Easy,” hands-down my favorite song Joel’s ever written, and cranked it up. And then, as the song wound down, a familiar feeling of guilt started to creep over me, and it’s a guilt I’m really sick of. Let me tell you about it!

Four things I’d like to stop feeling guilty about:

1. Breaking up Joel’s band. I had nothing to do with breaking up Joel’s band. Joel’s band broke up a couple of years before I ever knew Joel. Nevertheless, every time I hear a really good Joel song, I’m filled with an intense self-loathing because had Joel and I never met, he might still be going out with his ex-girlfriend (they broke up before I knew Joel, too), and if he were, there’s a chance they’d still be in a band together.  A small chance…but some chance. But, nearly 10 years later, that band is probably never going to get back together. And is there another band to take its place? No. Probably also my fault.
2. Breeding. I get it: I should have adopted. That would have been the right thing to do. The world’s overpopulated and now we’re contributing to that. There are a lot of children in need of a good home; if I wanted to be a parent so damn badly, I should have taken in one of those children. And parking spaces for pregnant women are ridiculous. But I had a very strong urge to have my own child, and I succumbed to that urge. Do I need to apologize for that, and if so, for how long?
3. Declawing my cats. My mom declawed all the cats we had when I was growing up. When I got my cats ten years ago and decided they’d be indoor cats (I lived in an apartment), not declawing them didn’t occur to me. It was just what you did with indoor cats. Shortly thereafter, I was telling a coworker about it, and Father Williams, a Greek Orthodox priest who had lunch at the restaurant where I worked every day and an owner of many many cats, quietly sighed in disapproval. “What,” I said, “are you one of those people who thinks that declawing is animal abuse?” Father Williams said: “Yes.” And I’ve felt completely shitty about it ever since.  If I ever get another cat, I’ll probably let it be indoor/outdoor and won’t declaw. But I can’t undo the declawing at this point and I don’t want to feel guilty about it anymore. But I do.
4. Living on the East Side. Austin’s East Side is becoming one of the more gentrified neighborhoods in town, and being a middle-class white professional in a historically Hispanic neighborhood that many families can no longer afford to live in because of the skyrocketing property tax, I feel so guilty living there that I can’t even be out in the yard without feeling terrible. It doesn’t matter that at the time Joel bought the house, his household income was the same as any of the neighbors’, and he’s lived in the house for over a decade now (he wasn’t some kind of house-flipper).

Also, though, I have to say: self-righteous people can go fuck themselves.

Come back, sunshine! The clouds are making me morose.