Catching Up and Then Some

I was going to cut and paste the whole ketchup joke from Pulp Fiction as the title for this post--you know, baby tomato isn't walking fast enough so papa tomato stomps on him and says "ketchup". . .

But after a very brief search, I couldn't find it word-for-word (except I did--please see below*).

Also, I was going to post a photo from each of the intervening eight or nine months and that way, it would be easy for me to get into blogging on the regular. But when I went to look for a photo from, like, March. . .

There weren't none! The cupboard, as it were, was bare.

It appears that we did nothing worth photographing between Christmas and July. . .

Well, that's not exactly true, either. I found a few pictures, but I can't exactly say why I thought some were worth photographing at the time. Like this one from May:

What the--?

I don't remember taking it and I can't imagine why I chose to take it, if the photographer in question was, indeed, I (it could have been my man; it could have been a creepy stranger who wasn't very good at being creepy after all--photos of me and the ol' husband sleeping would be way more menacing than an inexplicable snapshot of one of our many junk drawers that is also our liquor cabinet).**

Plus, the drawer is open! And there is a lottery ticket (Winner? Loser? Expired? Still in the drawer as I write this, some six months later? Stay tuned to find out!) perched atop that never-watched PBS documentary about something so boring I haven't bothered to read the back...the DVD is resting on a used-but-not-discarded puffy shipping envelope. And those three things are actually, come to think of it, piled on top of an ancient iPod speaker which we blew out before we got married and moved into this house! So, the speaker has been worthless for at least two years and yet we went to the trouble of moving it into this house; we keep it in our liquor cabinet in a corner of our postage-stamp-sized dining room where space is already at something of a premium.

*Sigh*

Here I thought this post was going to be about how this photo is and always will be evocative of our little rented house, because that wine rack and that lamp and that painting and the little cabinet are probably never going to share the same space in any of our subsequent homes. I was going to go all breezy and zen and let's be honest--it would totally come across as smug when I went prematurely nostalgic on your asses about how I have no idea how this photograph came to be taken but it's just so reminiscent of our moments in this little house blah blah blah/ha ha ha/my-life-is-so-accidentally-perfect-and-worthy-of-photographing-and-publishing-to-the-internet-at-any-given-moment. . .Except, jeez, this isn't a pretty picture at all. It's junky and boozy and weird. And crooked, for the love of God. Not actually evocative of our lives--ummm. I'm going to ruminate on that one. . .

I think it is telling to note that instead of following through on my intentions of getting nostalgic and waxing poetic about how my dad painted that (admittedly awesome) painting in 1968 and then gave us that lamp (after he bought it on sale at his favorite warehouse store) forty years later, I got all (justifiably) butt-twitchy about the contents of that drawer. I need to tell you I didn't have to check the contents before I cataloged them. I am, in fact, not at our tiny rented house right now. I have memorized the contents of that damned drawer after looking in it for batteries or stamps or matches or a flashlight or my college transcripts or our passports like thirty-thousand times. Yet I have never cleaned it out and turned it into a place to store useful, needed items. Do I need to restate the definition of insanity right now? I didn't think so (*but even after the rest of 2010 has moved past it, I'm a little enamored of that thing where you link to something a tiny bit unexpected but punch-liney--it's like David Foster Wallace and his compulsive footnotes only, you know, far less intellectual and literary and brilliant and may-he-rest-in-peace).

Where was I? I mean, besides on my fourth cup of coffee (goes without saying, you say?). . .

The intentionally-snapped photograph of this particular junk drawer raises many questions. One of them is: did I actually intend for my subject to be that bottle of scotch? Boy, that's one for the ages. But the other questions...the other questions are making me tired. I just want to draw some really obvious conclusions now, please.

For a long time, I've been very understanding of the way people can live in really messy or badly- or under-decorated homes: when you see it every day, it becomes more familiar than it is unsightly. Spending the last hour geeking out over this junk drawer thing has refreshed that feeling for me--I've blocked out this black hole of space in our house. I've totally failed to see it as anything other than a drawer which never, ever, no matter how many times I optimistically (insanely) pull it open, contains an item for which I'm actually searching. I understand how these things happen, but when I'm forced to look at it for what it is, I still agonize over how it could have happened to me. After all, that drawer could be so many things! It could be the place where we keep napkins!

"And if it were," says my internal, skeptical, kick-ass/feminist/sensible psychoanalyst, "would you be a happier person than you are right now?"

And I give her that look that Dr. Phil's studio audience members are wearing at predictable intervals of his show. That "it just dawned on me, slowly and reverentially like the most beautiful glowing angelic light" look. Only my look is real, not the result of crazy bald-man brainwashing. Because the answer to the question is "no." In fact, it's "hell, no"--as in "hell, no, I won't go." You know? (Aagh! The rhyming! Stop the rhyming!) I mean, I'm protesting right now.

I have to snap out of it, out of the assumption that my messy house is an indicator of one or all of the following things:

1. I am unhappy, miserable, depressed and said condition is, like, leaking out and manifesting itself in the messy spots of my home.
   
2. I am inferior in every way to people whose lives are in a constant state of peaceful, ravishing, seemingly-effortless photographability
3. I am rough, gruff, unpleasant and slovenly.
4. I am unprepared to be someone's Mom, Mommy, Mum or (most of all) Mama.

Yeah, this is internalized anxiety in a lot of ways. But I didn't invent it out of thin air, y'all (or more accurately, y'none--don't worry, I haven't lost sight of your nonexistence). We still, like, deify the women who exemplify domesticity. We still slobber all over their graceful, sun-dappled kitchens and children and perfectly-imperfect "corners." We fall all over ourselves trying to recreate the paint colors and the flea market finds and the food photographs.

(And I think I do mean "we," by the way. I'm afraid I sound manifesto-ey, or at least a little presumptuous by going plural, but I don't think I'm alone. However, I'm going to switch it over anyway because it's making me feel a little neurotic.)

I have really gotten in to sewing. I like it; it's an awesome way for me to feel both creative and productive. I make a huge mess and I do it in fits and starts and sometimes I go months without touching a sewing needle. Some of the things I've made are really beautiful to me, and some of them are quite ugly. I started this blog because I wanted to be part of the community of people who "craft," but after almost two years, I still haven't had the nerve to share this stuff. Ick.

It is totally natural to want to show our best face to the world. I know I'm not the only person with multiple junk drawers and latent teenage inferiority anxieties. We take pictures from the best angles and we crop out unsightly stuff or stand with the pile of trash bags behind us when we do the photo-snapping. I mean that literally and figuratively.

But I don't want to do it anymore. It's exhausting. I want you to know that my junk drawers often stay open to reveal the expired, losing lottery tickets inside. I want you to know that my sewing room goes from this:

to this:
almost the second I pick up the rotary cutter. While we're on the subject, I want you to know that I once mauled the hell out of my finger with my rotary cutter.

I want to be able to tell you I feel kind of pathetic and amateurish, but I don't want you to assure me--patronizingly or otherwise (although I'm convinced there's really no "otherwise")--that I'm "really awesome :)".

That's it. I can't shut up!

**P.S. That was one of the most grammatically confounding paragraphs I've ever written, or recently written, anyway. Why was it so hard to get it right? Not that I got it right... Jeez. The sheer illiteracy of it has followed me down to the postscript! I mean, "if the photographer in question was, indeed, I"?! I (indeed) ask you! What goes on here? What is the meaning of this?! Also, puh-leez. And that's leaving aside the length of time it took me to decide how exactly I wanted to describe the following: "one of our many junk drawers that is also our liquor cabinet." I mean, huh? The problem was, I felt dishonest calling it "our junk drawer" because that implies we have only one junk drawer (scoff! One junk drawer is for organized people who consider a junk drawer to be a place that contains useful items such as batteries and flashlights and, well, see above). So, sorry, nonexistent reader. Just working out some kinks before I go around telling the internet my blog exists. I guess I'm gonna have to build up one hell of an archive so I can be sure this guy gets buried deep.