Jan
19
I gave up on a book recently, not because I had read enough of it to determine that it wasn’t for me but because I’d spent a few days trying to get into it and the thing never happened, the thing where you sort of fall into the pages and the rest of the world disappears. I kept dragging it hopefully from one end of the house to the other in the hopes that if nothing else at least proximity would prompt me to make it past the first chapter, but I never did. Every time I picked it up it felt like work, rather than pleasure.
Granted, for me the experience of losing myself to a book has been sadly elusive over the last *checks calendar* eleven months or so. I know I’m not alone in my ongoing reading slump because there have been plenty of social posts and articles describing this issue, so I guess there is some small comfort to be found in the fact that this is a documented bug in our pandemic-life meatware.
What a big, fat, stupid bummer it is, though. I can hardly imagine a time when I have been more in need of literary escape yet so weirdly, mouthbreathingly incapable of accessing the wealth of reading material at my fingertips.
Out of the many depressingly valid reasons that 2020 made it difficult to concentrate on much of anything, it was probably the loss of routine that really borked reading for me. I’ve been a remote worker for years but I’ve always been able to wrap my day around some sort of schedule. Without the kids going to school, without any real structure to the day or the ability to work somewhere aside from my living room couch, everything just …. bleeds together. Any sense of boundaries, of work time vs relax time, have largely disappeared. There is an endless list of things to do and none of them are compartmentalized any more and my brain is less of a healthy functioning organ and more like a roiling mess of misfiled fight-or-flight chemicals and whatever twitchy dumb mental effects can be linked to nearly a year of doomscrolling.
I’m hopeful that my love for reading will eventually return, and in the meantime there is always the tactic of seeking out lighter fare (bless you, Jenny Colgan, for your endless stories of Scottish seasides, hunky men, and delicious baked goods), but goddamn, having books turn into a CHORE, one that is sometimes INSURMOUNTABLE, is a bona-fide fucking tragedy.
As the author of this article so perfectly puts it, “It’s felt like losing a friend in a time when we’ve already lost so much.”
Jan
15
The other day I spilled 18 eggs inside my refrigerator. It is important to clarify that these were not 18 cooked eggs. I wish I could tell you this happened as the result of some sort of impressively ambitious recipe — there I was, carefully transferring my delicate yet comically oversized soufflé, when suddenly — but the truth is it was a moment of pure karma, the universe doling out an unpleasant bitchslap which I have to admit was well-deserved.
I’ll begin my process of attempting to deflect blame by pointing out that when your family eats a staggering amount of eggs on the daily and yet you have not yet progressed to backyard farming, it’s a better deal to buy those stacked flats of eggs that are surely filled with hormones and sorrow as opposed to whatever health benefits the expensive brown free-range organic packs claim to offer. The problem with that strategy is that you then have to figure out where 36 goddamned eggs can go in the fridge, no easy feat if you’ve recently stocked up on groceries and there’s no extra room to be found.
Let us also turn our attention to the egg tray in my refrigerator. It is, you know, a tray — an area that is clearly meant for eggs but offers no storage feature aside from a lid that drops down. It works great if what you have is a standard 12-pack of eggs. Put the carton in, shut the lid, bam. ♫ You’ve got eggs! ♬
However, if what you have is 36 eggs and no tray-sized container, you might be tempted to come up with a creative solution for the tray problem. You might oh-so-carefully stack 18 eggs in a tupperware-type holder, then put that container — brimming with eggs, too big for the area, somewhat precariously balanced — into the egg tray. When other people in your family react with various levels of concern to this setup, you may repeatedly issue a statement based on something that vaguely sounds like it could be true: “The weight of the eggs will keep it in there!”
It was later the same day that I went to the fridge for a drink, had the thing happen where the door gets slightly stuck, carelessly gave it a bit of a yank, and —
Narrator: The weight of the eggs did not, in fact, keep it in there.
Have you ever had to clean up a spilled egg? Multiply that mess of mucus-y clear goo, gloppy yolk, and sticky bits of shell eighteen times over and put it everywhere in the fridge. Down in the drawers, somehow sprayed over milk containers and jam jars and bags of celery, puddled under the fridge itself.
Really I cannot overstate how time-consuming and gross this was to clean up, especially once a sea of floor-egg mixed with several tumbleweeds of dog hair, but I will say that I was quite stoic about the entire thing. As soon as the container tipped I was like oh noooooo but also well that wasn’t exactly surprising, was it. (Eggs, in Thanos voice: WE ARE INEVITABLE.)
In conclusion, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I pretty much never want to see an egg ever again in my entire life, but I did go ahead and order a tray holder.
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