Furiously Happy (35 page)

Boredom makes you rely on your own imagination, or makes you realize how little you have. My sister, Lisa, and I spent a great deal of our childhood digging holes on our surrounding land for no reason at all. Perhaps when we started we were making caves or looking for bodies, but in the end it just became a matter of digging holes deep enough that we could easily drop into them and disappear completely because it freaked out people driving by to see a child waving furiously in an empty field and then suddenly vanishing completely as if being sucked into some sort of parallel dimension. Or at least, that's what we imagined it looked like. It probably just looked like little girls jumping into holes, which is just as baffling to watch. Later, Lisa pointed out that the place where we were often aggressively digging was directly on top of the rusty propane tank buried in the yard, which was probably not the safest thing ever.

Luckily the god of How-Did-Children-Survive-in-the-Seventies was looking out for us and we never ended up in a giant fireball, although we once lost a series of holes in the tall grass and forgot about them completely until several months later when we looked up just in time to see our mother drive the riding lawn mower into what looked like a sinkhole. And then she was like, “WHY ARE THERE SO MANY HOLES?” We considered claiming it was the mole people who'd created some sort of Scooby-Doo trap but we didn't have time to go over all the details so instead we just calmly explained that there were holes because we'd dug them and then she asked why and we honestly stared at each other and said, “
I don't know
,” and that was the truth. We were baffled by it ourselves. And maybe that's why people overschedule their kids now. Maybe it's to avoid driving your lawn mower over a small cliff made by gopherlike children.

But still, it seems like it's overkill to schedule away any chance of boredom. It's like when your cat brings you dead mice and you want to yell at her but you can't because she's just doing it because she thinks you're a really shitty cat who won't survive on your own. We're sort of like that with our children, bringing them private lessons and participation medals and beauty pageant tiaras as if we suspect they don't have the ability to succeed at stuff without our forcing them into repetitive drills and buying expensive costumes and spending long weekends at competitions and pageants. Plus, now we've set up our kids to expect to win at everything and they feel shitty if they don't because they can see how unaccountably emotionally invested we are in their ability to beat other children.

When I was a kid I never won anything and when I mentioned it to my mom she looked up from her book and pointed out that I had once been
the youngest person in the entire world
. Sure, it was only for a millisecond, but it was a record I'd set without even trying. Then I went back to my own book and forgot all about competitions until my own child was born. Then
she
took the title. Excellence runs in our family, I guess.

No one ever warns you about the complicated and political decisions regarding lessons and classes and sports you'll have to make when you become a parent. When I was in eighth grade everyone in Home Economics had to care for flour-sack babies for two weeks to teach us about parenting and no one ever mentioned enrolling your flour baby in sports. Basically, everyone got a sealed paper sack of flour that puffed out flour dust whenever you moved it. You were forced to carry it around everywhere because I guess it was supposed to teach you that babies are fragile and also that they leave stains on all of your shirts. At the end of the two weeks your baby was weighed and if it lost too much weight that meant you were too haphazard with it and were not ready to be a parent. It was a fairly unrealistic child-rearing lesson. Basically all we learned about babies in that class was that you could use superglue to seal your baby's head after you dropped it. And that eighth-grade boys will play keep-away with your baby if they see it so it's really safer in the trunk of your car. And that you should just wrap your baby up in plastic cling wrap so that its insides don't explode when it's rolling around in the trunk on your way home. And also that if you don't properly store your baby in the freezer your baby will get weevils and then you have to throw your baby in the garbage instead of later making it into a cake that you'll be graded on. (The next two weeks of class focused on cooking and I used my flour baby to make a pineapple upside-down cake. My baby was
delicious
. These are the things you never realize are weird until you start writing them down.)

Recently Hailey decided she wanted to be in Girl Scouts. I told her I thought it was a cookie pyramid scheme, but she loves it. I go to her troop meetings and hide in the back and try not to look like I'm uncomfortable around the other parents.

Last week I sat in my usual corner and as another mom sat down next to me and struck up a light conversation I silently congratulated myself on being a normal person. A few seconds later Hailey looked up from across the room with the other Girl Scouts and, smiling widely, exclaimed, “MOMMY! You made a friend!
Good for you!
” And then I fell through the floor because being embarrassed by your child when you're an adult is much like being embarrassed by your parents when you're a teenager, but worse, because you can't roll your eyes at them and pretend that they just don't understand you. Kids
totally
understand you.
So
much more than you want them to.

And maybe
that's
why they're sent off to so many lessons and camps. Maybe it's so their parents can stay home during that time and secretly watch bad TV and cry and eat a bucket of mashed potatoes and put clothes on the cats without getting harshly but accurately judged by their own children.

Now it all makes a little more sense.

 

These Cookies Know Nothing of My Work

“BUT I DON'T
WANT
TO BE A GROWN-UP,” I screamed from a vaguely fetal position in the corner of the office.
“I'M JUST NOT READY FOR THIS YET.”

It was a major psychological breakthrough and one I felt certain my shrink would have been very proud of, had she actually been there. Instead, my husband and our CPA stared at me as if this were the first time something like this had ever happened during an initial financial-planning meeting.

“I'm not really with her,” Victor mumbled.

He said it out of habit but it seemed a bit of a weak argument considering that he was holding a giant folder of papers proving that we'd bought a lot of shit together in the last seventeen years. Or perhaps it was the folder of evidence he was compiling to have me committed. If it was the latter, I was fairly sure that this incident was going to end up in there.

“Whoa there. No judgments here,” said our CPA (Maury) as he held up his hands with caution, like you might to someone about to jump off the edge of a building, or to a rabid dog that you hoped understood English. Then he said something about how he was “just here to help people get their finances in order” but what I heard was, “We're here to discuss how terrible you are at being a responsible, normal person. There are hidden cameras everywhere and this is all going on YouTube. I'm going to be super rich.”

Honestly, I consider myself to be fairly good at finances if you don't compare me to normal people. I make more money than I deserve and then I give away a lot because it makes me nervous to have it around. I pay bills when the paper they're printed on turns pink or gets threatening, and if my debit card is still accepted then I feel like I'm winning. At the end of the year I go to the tax office and throw a box of receipts marked “EVIDENCE” at the tax lady (there's a proper word for her job but I've never learned it) and then run away before she can tell me that I'm fired from being her client. She'll usually scream something like “QUICKBOOKS!” and then I scream back: “
I'm totally going to do that starting today, pinkie promise!
” and then I duck into the bushes before she can realize that most of the receipts are actually just napkins with scribbles on them, like “I needed to buy a kangaroo outfit for work but the flea market doesn't give out receipts. It was $15 but it was worth like $100. I can't confirm this but the blond guy at the flea market who doesn't use deodorant said he can be a witness if we need him.”

This seems like it's a terrible way of keeping records, but I can assure you that it's much better than the year I meticulously attempted to keep all of my receipts in a box under my desk until the cat mistook it for a litter box, or the year I kept a bunch of receipts in a clear plastic envelope and then when I went to pull them all out half of them were just blank pieces of paper. Turns out that if you expose receipts to sunlight they eventually just fade away, much like my intentions to keep receipts. Instead I just wrote what I thought should be on the now-blank pieces of paper. Things like “I bought a dead weasel for $40 but then I dressed her up and made her into Christmas cards for clients,” or “I think this was a receipt for a haunted Kewpie doll that I wrote about and then sold on eBay. But then eBay cancelled the auction because I mentioned that the doll possibly contained the souls of eaten children, and eBay said it was against the rules to sell souls. This is all on my blog if you need proof.”

In my defense, I suspect that my tax accountant probably enjoys doing my returns. I'd enjoy them too if math weren't involved, because looking through them is a glimpse into a life well lived. Or a life that needs massive sorting out.

A few of my business expenses:

•
Taxidermied wolf I wore to watch
Twilight
at the local theater. His name is Wolf Blitzer and he died of natural causes. (GO TEAM JACOB.)

•
Full-body kangaroo costume worn to impress and infiltrate a band of wild kangaroos while on writing assignment in Australia. (See “Koalas Are Full of Chlamydia.”)

•
Tetanus shot needed immediately after trip to Australia.

•
Postage to ship home a brain that someone gave me while I was on a book tour.

•
A taxidermied Pegasus for the cats to ride on.

•
A box of cobra.

•
A rented live sloth.

•
Stylish outfits for cats.

•
Two super-ecstatic taxidermied raccoon corpses for late-night cat rodeos.

Then the tax lady would call and say, “But what about your server costs and your office supplies and your real operating expenses?” And I would explain that I don't really know them because I only keep up with interesting receipts. Then she'd call Victor to get his help and he would scream at me: “You're paying too much in taxes because you're not being responsible with deductions!” And I'd scream back, “Well, maybe the government needs the money more than I do!” Then Victor would question why he'd ever married anyone who wasn't Republican and I'd question why anyone would ever trust me to do taxes to begin with.

And this was probably why I was feeling a little defensive at the CPA's office. It was our first meeting and was filled with questions that made me immediately uncomfortable and sort of defensively stabby.

Maury asked if I had life insurance and I assured him that I didn't because I didn't want Victor to be arrested. There was a pause in the conversation.

“She thinks life insurance is only taken out on people about to be murdered,” Victor explained stoically.

“It's true, though,” I continued. “Whenever someone ends up in the meat grinder the authorities are always quick to arrest whoever the beneficiary is on the insurance policy.”

Victor rolled his eyes.

“
I'M TRYING TO HELP YOU WITH YOUR MURDER DEFENSE
,” I yelled politely. Then Victor huffed a bit but probably because I'd accidentally said “meat grinder” instead of “chipper-shredder.” Victor would
never
murder me with our meat grinder. He's such a germophobe that he can't even handle it if I leave a used Kleenex on my desk, so there's no way he's going to be able to make his summer sausage after he knows I've been through our grinder. I mean, who knows where I've been?

Eventually Victor and Maury got back to discussing investment strategies and mathy stuff and I blanked out a bit until I noticed that they were both staring at me. Maury repeated himself. “Do you have any questions so far, or anything you'd like to add?”

I didn't but I wanted to contribute to the conversation so I asked, “Why is there a gold standard?”

Victor and Maury looked at me because the question apparently had nothing to do with what they'd been discussing but I thought it was still a good question, so I continued:

“I just don't get the gold standard. If America found a planet made of gold would that make us super rich, or would it make all gold worthless? And if it did make us super rich, what's keeping all the other countries from being like, ‘We don't like gold anymore because this isn't fair. We like spiders now. Pay us in spiders.' Would that make our economy collapse? Could you buy spiders with gold? What would the exchange rate be? Would it be in metric or imperial? I already can't remember how to convert to metric and it's going to get worse if I have to convert to metric spiders. And that's why I don't think we should go around mining on other planets and looking for trouble.
Because I don't want to carry a purse around filled with hordes of spiders. That's why.
”

“You're blocking out all of our conversations because you're too focused on how you'd pay for things with spiders?” Victor asked with disbelief.

“I guess so,” I said. “Having a purse full of spiders is actually less scary than having to think about finances.
Wow.
That's sort of a breakthrough.” I let out a deep breath and looked at Maury. “I should totally come see you instead of my normal shrink.”