Ah, Spring, sunshine, rollin’ down the windows and lettin’ my hair blow madly in the wind as I stroll through San Dimas in my minivan. I’ve been enjoying spring, mostly.
However, Spring has arrived and with it, gnats!
Gnats are pesky pests. They hover, linger, and pester. They don’t buzz, but they do make themselves known. It seems, lately, wherever I am, at my desk at school, my desk at home, standing at my podium teaching, walking through the neighborhood, there are gnats! I walked into a gnat cloud on my walk. I even swallowed one on another walk. (I’ve since been practicing the art of breathing through my nose and exhaling through my mouth to avoid the untimely Death by Swallow event again.)
Then I started thinking about the significance of gnats and how this connects to other events in my life right now. (Of course you did, Joy, because that’s what you do. You overthink everything.) These gnats have become an analogy for the negative thoughts that I’ve had lately. There’s melancholy connected to our house and all the what-ifs of how we’re going to make it through this tough time and come up with enough funds to pay for it. The thoughts that IF ONLY, I hadn’t insisted that we HAD to HAVE solar panels back in August of 2015. The if-onlys and the what-ifs have one thing in common— if.
How would you explain the word if to someone who didn’t know English? Pondering the idea of if, I looked up synonyms and the one that struck me was uncertainty. There is so much uncertainty about what will happen next in the events related to our house.
Right now, we’re packing up our bedroom and the studio, 800 square feet of our house, and moving it to the front of the house and into a storage pod. If-only we hadn’t gotten the solar panels, then we wouldn’t have gotten the building code violations. If-only we hadn’t gotten the solar panels, then we wouldn’t have forked out this gigantic suckage of money. If-only we hadn’t gotten the solar panels, then we wouldn’t have to reconfigure our foundation and take off the newly placed roof of the house. If-only we hadn’t gotten the solar panels, then we would have been content with the way things were, or maybe not. When you go down the rabbit trail of if-onlys, you assume that the outcome would have been better had you made a different choice. I have to remind myself that possibly, this is all happening because there is something that is in my blind spot. Like, possibly, maybe our house needs to be remodeled before the next Big One (earthquake, for you non-Southern Californians.) Or maybe it was only a matter of time before the LA County Department of BS came out to look at our house for some other reason. Regardless, the if-onlys are really a waste of time. I’ve been trying to smack those gnats (if-onlys) whenever they come around me.
I literally clapped 5 gnats to death this week. I must have looked like a total freak, but hey, they were buggin’ (get it?). Seriously though, I’m determined to face this mess, one box at a time, one phone call at time, until this house is back to its better self. It’s the Little House that Could. Come on y’all. Root for us. (I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.)
Until next Friday. Love you loves.
Gastric Bypass Update:
Thrilled with the idea of eating a sandwich, I loaded my gluten free bread with chicken and a few other fixins. Then proceeded to eat about half the sandwich at which time, my body said, “Stuck! Ew. Stop eating!” So, I had to stop and lay on the couch for about 10 minutes while I waited for the food to go down. Then I ate the rest of the sandwich because it was there and I wanted to finish it! I will probably wait awhile before I have a sandwich again. Eating bread isn’t as fun as it used to be, especially when it’s gluten free. It just ain’t the same. Naw, ain’t the same.
Why You Keep Judging Me? 