Nebulous Mooch

I come from a long line of printer obsessed people. Well that’s not exactly true. Printers haven’t been around long enough for that to be true, but my parents do have five printers. When my husband reorganized my father’s studio they were reluctant to get rid of any of their printers. Everyone had a specific and very important function.

I understand this love for printers. I’ve had the same printer for years and years. It was a cheap printer, but it never gave me a problem. Let’s call him Melvin. Melvin was well-behaved and friendly–well as friendly as an inanimate object can be. One day Melvin stopped working. I needed a scanner anyway so I decided to buy a new printer. Let’s call him Brad.

I didn’t like Brad one bit. He took up too much space and was really into himself. Melvin sat under my bed gathering dust while Brad sucked all the money from my bank account with his super expensive ink habit. Yesterday, when I noticed that Brad was already starting to whine about wanting more ink….AGAIN, I decided I needed to do something about this problem. I was going to fix Melvin.

I’m the first to admit that I’m not mechanical. My idea of fixing something is bashing it around a bit and then seeing if it’s started working. The idea being that if I hit it in just the right place some loose parts will magically fall into place and it will start working again. Sometimes that actually works, but usually it doesn’t.

I decided to take Melvin apart. It didn’t start out well. There was lots of pulling and twisting and hitting and slamming before I got myself under control and found a video explaining how to fix him. In the video the person gives specific instructions not to remove certain items from inside your printer. Ooops….I already removed those items in my early thrashing around stage of my repair job.

Now that Melvin is in pieces on the dinning table there are a few pieces that I don’t know what to do with. I just don’t know where all these little springs came from. This morning when I suggested that the springs were so small they must not be important my husband laughed and told me that if I put it back together wrong I’d end up with ink spilling all over the place when I tried to print something.

I guess Melvin is ready for the trash, but I’m still not ready to give him up. Of all my regrets taking Melvin apart without proper instructions is my biggest.

This conversation happened at check out in the store last night.

My Husband: (Taking the money out of his wallet to pay the cashier) Do you have any change?

Me: Yeah. I think I have a quarter, but I don’t have it with me.

The Cashier: (Laughing)

Have you ever had one of those days? You know what I mean. A day when anything and everything that can go wrong does.

I started the morning by burning the rice. That’s not a good start to anyone’s day. I was cooking rice because I planned to make vegetable fried rice for dinner and that always works out better if you start off with cold rice. I put the rice on when I got up and an hour later I was busy working away at my computer and wondering what that smell was. I thought the neighbors were burning something. Then I realized I was the one burning something. I really should get a rice cooker, but every rice cooker I’ve seen has an aluminum pot and I don’t want to cook in aluminum.

Then about half way through my day computer was attacked by malware. If you don’t know what that is you’re lucky.  I couldn’t even turn my computer on without a million windows putting up telling me I was being attacked. I’ve spent the bulk of the day try to get that evil spyware made by the Devil off my computer.

Then the worst thing happened when I was making dinner. I dropped an egg on the floor. Have you ever tried to clean raw egg off your floor. It’s not fun. I really like egg and I hate to waste even one.

I noticed a wiry gray hair sticking out of the side of my head the other day. At first I though it must belong to someone else, but when I tried to remove it from my own hair I found it was attached firmly to my own scalp. Now that I’m closer to 40 than 30 I guess gray hairs are just going to randomly attach themselves to me like leeches sucking all my youth out through their silvery strands. Am I being a bit too melodramatic?

Some people like to get up early. They like to see the sunrise. It makes them feel like they’ve got more time in the day. I know some of these people, and I’m definitely not one of them. I don’t have much need to see the sunrise. I see it set everyday. I think that’s pretty much the same thing just in reverse. In my opinion only the clinically insane would want to wake up before the sun comes out. Nobody needs that much time in their day.

My mother has always gotten up very early. I’m not trying to imply that my mother is insane. I’m just saying that she likes to have a lot of time in her day. At 11:30 at night she’d say things like, “I have to get to bed soon. I have to be up by 4 in the morning after all.” She likes to brag about not needing much sleep. My mother’s minimal sleep requirements used to be what I aimed for. I thought this was a pretty good goal. I’d read websites about how to shorten my sleep requirements. Then I’d try these techniques out and always come to the same conclusion. Sleeping less definitely gives you more hours in the day–more hours to suffer for the splitting headache you have from not getting enough sleep.

I used to think it was because I needed 8 hours of sleep, but recently I discovered that isn’t exactly true. I’ve realized that as long as I don’t get up before 8 o’clock  I’m fine. I could go to bed at 7 in the morning and get up an hour later and be totally fine. I would never do that of course because I don’t need that many hours in my day. Ideally I’d like to sleep until 9 or 10 or maybe even 11:32, but life isn’t always ideal.

The saying goes, Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. I’d like change that saying to early to bed, early to rise makes a man unable to get to sleep at night, gives him a huge headache the next day and puts him in a  bad mood. That saying probably won’t catch on, but I think it’s more realistic.

Have you ever wanted something really badly, but been unable to have it? When I was a kid I really wanted a monkey. I’d even heard that you could train your pet monkey to change its own diapers and I thought that was pretty cool. I don’t know why you couldn’t just train it to use the toilet. Anyway, I wanted a monkey so badly and my parents just weren’t having it.

“Those are evil animals,” my father told me like he’d had personally experience with monkeys. He seemed so sure about it  that I wondered if a monkey had killed his best friend and stolen his girl when he was in high school. “We’re not having one of those things in this house. They stink.”

That meant no monkey for me. When that was finally made clear my desire turned to disdain. I decided to hate monkeys which is funny really. How can you possibly hate a monkey? They have such cute little faces. They do such entertaining things like dance and juggle. You can dress them up in outfits. They can even wear hats and sunglasses.

If there was ever a monkey on TV I’d change the channel. I would never watch a movie that featured a monkey, chimp or orangutan. Looking back this was a wise decision. I think that a monkey in a movie is just a desperate attempt by film makers to keep viewers from noticing how bad the script and actors are.

Producer: Do you think the audience will be annoyed when they realize they sat through two hours of story just to find out it’s all a dream?

Director: Not at all. I mean Hulk Hogan has the dynamic range and acting chops to really make the main character come alive.

Producer: Maybe we should put a monkey in it just to be sure.

Director: Great idea. Everyone loves monkeys!

Now that I’m an adult I could have a pet monkey if I really wanted one, but somehow the whole idea has lost its appeal. I no longer hate monkeys. I believe that monkeys are just as good as cats or dogs. Maybe they’re even better because they have cute little hands and opposable thumbs. The two men I live with already make it hard enough to keep the bathroom clean. Imagine how bad the toilet would look if a monkey were using it too.

First photo:  mape_s’

Second photo: Public domain

My husband who is a professional musician and really should have promotional photograph thing taken care of by now needed a picture for a gig he’s doing next month. So we hung a sheet up in the living room and started taking pictures. Of course, we couldn’t let him be the star of the show. We had to get in on the act too.

I must be hard of hearing. That’s the only excuse for the difficulty I have understanding what people are saying to me in a noisy room. Having a conversation in the midst of the buzz of many other conversations going on all around you is hard of a lot of people, but I think it’s harder for me. It’s probably even more difficult for the person I’m trying to have the conversation with, because it usually goes something …

Other person: Isn’t the weather lovely today?

Me: Pardon me?

Other person: I said, isn’t the weather lovely today?

Me: I’m sorry. I can’t hear you. What did you say?

Other person: The weather, isn’t it nice today?

Me: (I have no idea what was just said to me, but I know it ended with day and was a question. If I ask her to repeat it again she’ll be annoyed,  so  I’ll just have to guess.) I’m doing well. How have you been?

Maybe the problem isn’t really my hearing. Maybe I’m just a really bad guesser.

I’ve thought about learning to read lips. I’m good at reading. I especially like reading novels and take-out menus. Learning to read lips should be no problem.

My stepson has been having problems reading at school. He’s been complaining of headaches and eye strain, so it was time to take him to the eye doctor. Of course, he needed glasses. Jealous of all the glasses wearing going on in the family, my husband got his eyes checked too. We all knew that my husband needed glasses. He used to have some that he never wore. When we moved we found them under the computer desk with the lenses so scratched no one would ever be able to see out of them. So, he threw them away.

We all have very different approaches to wearing glasses.

Wearing glasses is old hat for me. I’ve done it since I was in 4th grade. My lenses are constantly smeared and smudged and I just ignore it. I’ve learned to see around the smudges. I only clean my glasses about once a week. I figure why even bother, they just get smudged again in a few minutes.

Since my husband’s gotten his new glasses, he spends more time looking at himself in the mirror saying things like, “I really look good in glasses.” He keeps his glasses very clean. He’s always cleaning them. If even the tiniest smudge appears on them, he cleans it off immediately. “How can you see out of those things,” he often says to me while closely examining my glasses.

My stepson’s method for dealing with his glasses is the most unusual. When he does wear them–which is almost never–he puts them up to his eyes while holding the arms. He rarely ever lets them rest on his face. Instead, he holds them up off of his nose takes a quick look at something then quickly removes them, returns them to their case and shoves the case in his pocket. He treats them like some kind of disease.

The reason he was having problems reading is because his bad vision is straining his eyes. If he wore his glasses all the time, he wouldn’t have this problem reading, but of course he won’t wear them. Instead, he’s gotten some reading glasses somehow, from somewhere–the kind of reading glasses  old people buy from the drugstore. He insists on wearing those to read because his eyes are bothering him. His eyes wouldn’t bother him if he wore his glasses, but you can’t tell him anything.

Now that we’re all bespectacled we can go out together as one big, happy nerdy chic family. Some of us are nerdier than others. And some of us are chicer than others. But we can still all get along.