At Least I Still Have My Sheets

You would have thought that the cell phone disaster was enough laundry trauma for one night, wouldn't you? So would I, particularly after the peculiar craft project I started didn't work out and the spaghetti made from the Italian sausage flavored Polish sausage turned out bizarre as hell. Note to self: sausage has a flavor already, and flavoring one nationality of flavored sausage with another nationality flavor of flavored sausage is just not a good idea. Italian sausage is good and Polish sausage is good, but never, I say, should the twain meet. Leave the sausage alone!

While that peculiar sauce was simmering, I was trying to make a basket out of old Sunny D juice containers. Or a wallet. Or something charming and colorful and crafty, you know, like something that some immensely talented African woman would make that would then be sold at a small artsy import gallery and which I thought, in my innocence, that maybe I could make too. Why, you ask, why would you look at juice containers and think about things like that? Because I am deeply, deeply weird and sometimes I come up with these bad really great, thrifty, creative ideas. Unfortunately, while I'm full of ideas, I lack talent and reweaving 2 juice cartons into 1 nifty basket turns out to be too much for me, even with hot glue. It's a good thing I'm not trying to make baskets for the family to survive because frankly, with that and my noticeable lack of skill at ceramics (I had to bribe a grad student to throw a cylinder for me or I'd still be sitting in that studio, many years later,) we'd all have died long ago after being laughed out of the village. I kept thinking about that last night, as the one juice carton I'd cut into one long continuous strip kept slipping out of the other juice carton strips and folding itself around my leg in a manner eerily reminiscent of what I would imagine river reeds would also do and I resigned myself to thanking the gods that we do live in a world where our survival isn't predicated on my ability to weave baskets.

The basket abandoned and the dinner setting uneasily, I settled in to watch a completely bizarre thing on the Ion TV channel called The Lost Empire. It was vaguely based on Chinese mythology but had a Caucasian American hero in what had to be the worst khakis & blue shirt outfit I've ever seen and whose presence bothered me all night, like, do you, whoever you are who made this so terrible as to be pretty good epic think we, American TV viewers, are incapable of watching a really bad special effects lameass lengthy made for TV movie set in ancient China without a stereotypical American to guide us? Because that's creepy, frankly, and also, that actor, whoever he is, looks like my first husband and that's creepy too because even my first husband doesn't dress that badly. At any rate, the movie was mostly incomprehensible, which is fine with me, because it had lots of horrible special effects and dragons and a guy with a pig's head and another guy with a necklace of skulls and bad guys who looked like they were just dragged off the set of Thunderdome and dropped into this movie, so, you know, one wants for nothing more. Also, they cast Confucius as a bad guy just for extra weirdness points.

So all would have been well in my universe as I was sitting there watching bad TV and knitting but then, alas, I decided to put the sheets I had just washed back on my bed during one of the lengthy commercial breaks. That would have been simple, except for the fact that the sheets were not there. No, they were gone and because I am a raging paranoid, I immediately assumed that someone, some dire, evil, hardened criminal type, had boldfacedly stolen them right out from under my very nose as I was absorbed in a not so good E. Annie Proulx novel across the laundromat. Because, you know, everyone wants my four year old threadbare flannel sheets with the snowflakes on them and a couple of ratty beach towels and a pair of young M's underwear - yes, everyone, clearly, wants them. Everyone except for the people who didn't steal them, since all that was still sitting there in a dryer this morning before work. Hurrah, because I like those sheets and also they're the only actual matching set of sheets I own. It was not a good evening for me at the laundromat, clearly. I can't believe that even in the depths of my dead cell phone angst and also the discovery that one of the dryers hadn't been heating at all for 18 minutes and the subsequent search of the car for quarters (ah, the delightful minutiae of the laundromat) I was so out of it as to completely forget an entire dryer load. And, adding insult to injury, naturally, I did all this stone cold sober. I swear, I hate not having drugs to blame when I do something that stupid.