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January 10, 2005
You know that old saw?
So last night, my head just wouldn’t shut up. There’s something about Sunday nights, this killer combination of factors: You’ve been staying up late and sleeping in for the past few days, so you’re not as tired as you should be at this hour. You suddenly realize there are a lot of things you really should have accomplished this weekend besides watching the commentary tracks on three episodes of Freaks and Geeks and learning how much you like gin gimlets. It occurs to you for the first time in 52 hours that you have a job during the week and there are about five things you need to get done on Monday morning.
Add to this the fact that I seem to be having trouble getting to sleep generally, and I was a little ball of tossy, turny stress last night. And once the focus of my stressing landed square on the subject of The Wedding, all was lost. I started freaking out about not having reserved a rental cottage for myself and Patrick or our group of friends and picturing us all being relegated to a motor lodge on the outskirts of town with a view of the miniature golf course, instead of a cute cabin on the water with a view of the sun setting past spruce-covered islands, and I was freaking out about not knowing what we were doing for dinner on the night before the wedding, and about not having the faintest idea where to register, and it built to a frothing, steamy storm of worry and I decided I was never going to fall asleep, not ever, and that therefore keeping my eyes closed was just making things worse, so I opened them, and looked over at Patrick, and damn it, he was asleep. Hadn’t he felt the psychic distress vibes? How could he be lying there, breathing in and out so peacefully?
Anyway, my eyes were now wide open, so I decided just to stare at him, figuring maybe he would feel my gaze and wake up. But it’s hard to focus your eyes on a dark face in a dark room in the middle of the night for very long without going totally cross-eyed, so I upped the ante. I opened my mouth wide and bared my teeth, still staring, like the stuffed tigers and bears in natural history museums, and I perched there over his face. I felt very much like a scene from Calvin and Hobbes.
Only then I thought about how I would feel if our positions were reversed and I woke up with someone’s teeth poised right above my head, and I started to feel bad. So I closed my mouth and closed my eyes and decided not to torment my sleeping beau anymore. But the problem is, I was thinking about how hilarious it would have been if he had woken up and seen me there in full-on taxidermy mode, and I started to giggle. Very quietly, but also kind of right next to his head. So a few seconds after I’d decided not to wake him up, I accidentally woke him up.
And what I’m realizing is that these entries keep being like bizzare versions of textbook illustrations for annoying adages. Yesterday, “Been there, done that.” Today, “Misery loves company.” Maybe it’ll just sorta keep happening, and then someday I can publish a hip comedic memoir called Aesop Rocks: The Timeless Truth of Truisms in One Girl’s Life in which the title of each chapter is an aphorism!
Chapter 12: A stitch in time saves nine!
Chapter 19: Every dark cloud has a silver lining!
Chapter 24: Don’t cry over spilt milk!
Chapter 27: There are plenty of fish in the sea!
Oh, lord, stop me before I make myself puke. ("Oh, you mean she was kidding? Damn, I was looking forward to reading that book, too.")
Looking at all of those platitudes, it occurs to me that I learned most of them through MadLibs. No one I knew ever really used these types of phrases in their speech, so when they started to pop up in the MadLibs my brother and I liked to play with when we were living in Mexico, I often had to ask my mom what was supposed to be funny about the sentence, “A toilet in time saves sandwich,” and she had to try to explain.
(So, the other funny thing about “a stitch in time saves nine,” is that I had just read A Wrinkle in Time when I learned the phrase, so instead of understanding it as simply being about mending a tear, and thereby metaphorically, you know, about catching problems early, I always pictured someone –- probably the three Fates, because they were kind of mythic and had needles and thread, and I was into Greek myths at the time –- sticking a needle through the fabric of time, gathering it into one of L’Engle’s wrinkles, and stitching it together –- thereby making the temporal distance between point A and point B nine times shorter than it would otherwise have been. That image still comes to mind whenever I hear the phrase.)
But meanwhile, back to last night. Tossy-turny me was now accompanied by a tossy-turny Patrick, since my giggles had woken him. We talked wedding stuff until we had satisfied ourselves that trying to make decisions about anything meaningful at 12:45 a.m. on a work night is patently ridiculous. So, yeah, for maybe three minutes, tops. Then we both tried our best to fall asleep, with what I suppose must have been eventual success, evidenced by the fact that I was asleep this morning when the alarm went off. But hey, at least we both had to get up. You know what they say: misery loves company.
Chapter 32: I’ve got a case of the Mondays!
Posted by sarah at January 10, 2005 12:51 PM
