Why do things break?

While you ponder that profound question, I’ll give you a few answers.

Because it wasn’t put together properly, because the laws of physics/gravity/erosion/time were applied and ate away the material, because it was made in China by an enslaved five year old, because because because. But, why, pray tell, does shit always break in THREES????

There is a law we all seem to know about, that doesn’t really have a name, but applies in many regards to our life. Things will ultimately break down all around us, not once, not twice, but three times, like a bully at the playground slamming your head into the pavement. This bully, I’ll call her Life, can be a total bitch to deal with.

“I SAID, I want all the money you make, up front, now, in the form of a water tank, a broken shower, and a new roof. NOW! Quit your crying about a vacation or a house payment and GIVE ME THE MONEY,” she says, relentless. So you cry and give it to her, because, what else can you do? Jerk-face Life.

Its superstition, and if you look anywhere you can find a third to back up your two random bits of awfulness, whether they actual things or more nebulous scenarios like a break-up or a sickness. For me, I often lose something, break something, and then, god forbid, break a favorite mug. I try not to take my possessions too seriously, but a favorite broken mug is a real bummer. It’s like a friend, always there waiting for you in the morning, saying, “Hello, tired traveler. I’m sorry your kids woke you up ten times in the night. Here is a perfect cup of coffee. Yes, my handle is a smooth and soothing piece of ceramic, warmed by the liquid within. Go ahead, it’s okay, you can hold me in both hands if you need to. You can even bring your lips to me and hold them there far longer than you should. I am here for you. I am your mug.” There is a tiny part of you that knows this is just a simple object, that it serves a purpose and that it can be replaced.  But somehow, that is the three that breaks me. “Why are you crying over a broken dish?” my husband once asked me, the last time I (sob) lost a mug. I smiled to show him that I knew it was nuts, that I was really just pre-menstrual, that I was in a mood, ha ha. But the reality is that I couldn’t put into words how my Mom and I laughed about this mug, it’s simple “that hits the spot” statement, that we bought it in a small and dusty town filled with antique stores, where we ran into an old neighbor we hadn’t seen in fifteen years, and where I’d had one of the best meals of my life in a place that made it’s own butter.

This law of threes could be happening around us at all times; we just only take notice when it becomes ghastly expensive or starts messing with our sentimental items. I don’t shake my fist at the sky if I break a razor, find a grey hair, and stub my toe on the bed: that stuff is happening all the time. Next time I break something I will follow the old wives tale, and take two jam jars outside and immediately smash them, offsetting any further issues that are itching to arise. Take that, jerk face.

It’s the end of the world!

Maybe! You never know!

Okay, so the Mayan’s didn’t have it right, we should have seen that coming. After all, they certainly didn’t have a problem when white men in large hats came traipsing in. No alarm bells rang for the Shamans and Holy men then, and they supposedly had divine knowledge, not to mention the best calendars ever!

Me? I just have a vague sense of unease and anxiety about the future, which some days translates to ITS THE END. This has something to do with turning 40, sure, but I have felt it for a few years, as have others.  (Read: Individuals that Only Travel by Bus) A few years ago I got very excited when I thought a large meteorite was going to take out the planet. Excited? Yes, actually. I was. Let’s say the ENTIRE world knew it was about to bite it. Would people stop fighting, bombing, killing? Wouldn’t it be a giant love in, where we all came together in Humanity for one final last gasp? We could all ponder the great questions of life together, such as, does the pepperoni really go on the outside of the cheese, or does it belong inside?

I’d like to think we would, and I’d rather see that, just for a moment, than live to be 100. Don’t get me wrong, I am a lover of life and most things in it. But I see all too clearly that we have inherited a world that we do not deserve. Took it rather, appointing ourselves supreme overlords. Let it start over, amoeba style. Next time maybe the Frogs will rule. But I digress.

When a chunk of meteorite slammed into the Ural Mountains in Russia, I thought, Holy Guacamole! Maybe this is the start of it! But, nothing, no giant rocks since. All my disaster-movie preparedness will be for naught, as Nasa probably has a ray gun to blast any huge passing chunks of star. They won’t give up that easy. Plenty of folks out there would not want to clasp hands around the world singing Kumbaya. Sigh.

I have to accept the fact that it probably isn’t the end of the world, at least not soon. I still have to make deadlines and keep buying groceries and occasionally make the bed. I have also accepted I live on a fault line (this can give one some anxiety about the future) and have prepared the Earthquake kit. This is me taking some responsibility for the inevitable. And I would hate for it to almost be the end of the world, or at least feel like it, and there I was, hankering for some beef jerky, freezing, my kids incredibly pissed off.

So I go on. But as The End nears, you may see me on the corner of Edgemont Village in nothing but a signboard that reads, “The End is Nigh!” (You have to say NiGH, it’s in the Rulebook for Nutters) That, or 40 is just around the corner, and this will blow over like a fart on the wind, only bothersome for a mere moment. Stay tuned.

You never know.

I was at the rec centre pool the other day, when a guy walked past in some very tight trunks. I wasn’t looking at his trunks, believe it or not, but his tattoos, which held all the old familiar phrases and bands of my youth, etched across his slender frame.

He’s my age, I thought, recognizing some of my album-cover favorites. Beneath his shoulders, in large black script : Carpe Diem.

I’m not sure when “Carpe Diem” became en vogue, but we were all saying it, or trying to live it at some point, because we were on student loans and thought we were invincible and generally behaved like idiots. I should speak for myself. I was an idiot. But many of the best stories of my youth can be summed up by that “devil may care” attitude we have shrugged off in favor of realistic and responsible roles. It’s true, when you think about it. Your stories, your very good ones, usually involve some level of just going for it, just seizing it.

Which is why I thank Jesus each day that YouTube came after my “time”.

Actually, not every day. Just when I remember, as in, when someone sends me a link to some idiotic antic on YouTube.

Still, I probably wouldn’t have written “Carpe Diem” largely, in script, right across my torso like a billboard. I’m all for seizing the day, if you think it through a little. Sure, seize the day, as long as you won’t get arrested. Guys who end up on alligator farms late at night, wasted? Rethink before seizing the day (or the alligator-see drunk alligator dude) Seize the day if you aren’t going to end up getting a Darwin award. Small swimming trunk man seized the day and got a big ass tattoo that said seize the day. That is seizing it, in a way.

I almost got a tattoo. I was trying to seize the day. I had a design picked out off a hippie tarot card that I liked, an intricate “tree of life” colorful swirl that would have ended up looking like a Rorschach’s inkblot. As I sat down in the chair, a very inked man gearing up to put needle to flesh, I noticed out of the corner of my eye…my car being towed away. Car tow=$100, tattoo=$125. I needed my car more than I needed a tattoo. I took it as a sign. “Wait,” I stated. “I’m not ready.”

I am still waiting to be ready.

I will get a tatoo, when the time is right, or I see a design that I want to look at forever on my body, even when I get all flabby and wrinkly.

Correction, more flabby and wrinkly. If I’m really clever I’ll design something that works WITH the rolls, like a pirate sea-shanty that discusses where the booty is. Or was, rather. Or a skier on some moguls, or directions, if I am getting surgery,

Cut here, remove this bit, etc.

I’ll have to think about it, before seizing.

I knew it was going to happen before it happened.

It might have had something to do with the Mom, who knelt in front of her pale child and said, “If your stomach hurts, sweetie, come back and tell Mommy.”

She then sent her kid off to our first community centre soccer game for four-year olds, where my daughter was anxiously awaiting a chance to kick someone in the shins.

For those not in the know, the “Norovirus,” (basically the worst of the barfingcrapping virus) is going around laying people out all over North America.

Here it is straight from Wikipedia, a somewhat reliable source:

In one incident, a person who vomited spread infection right across a restaurant, suggesting that many unexplained cases of food poisoning may have their source in vomit. 126 people were dining at six tables in December 1998; one woman vomited. Staff quickly cleaned up, and people continued eating. Three days later others started falling ill; 52 people reported a range of symptoms, from fever and nausea to vomiting and diarrhoea. The cause was not immediately identified. Researchers plotted the seating arrangement: more than 90% of the people at the same table as the sick woman later reported food poisoning. There was a direct correlation between the risk of infection of people at other tables and how close they were to the sick woman. More than 70% of the diners at an adjacent table fell ill; at a table on the other side of the restaurant, the rate was still 25%.

 Moral of the story? Stay away from people who are vomiting!

Soooo anyway, the kid comes running back to Mom, four minutes in, and spews in an amazing rainbow arc all over the floor. Near all the parents, all the water bottles, etc. Immediately I think, I dislike you, lady. We all make bad calls, but she knew. As she was mopping up the puke with paper towels and looking around sheepishly, she knew. The instructor came over to see how everyone was, and the Mom explained that her daughter had a “big breakfast.” But after seeing all of us staring at her, she hastily added “And I was sick last week.”

What? YOU were sick and you didn’t make the connection?

At least they will leave now, I think. I causally mention we might want to bag up the garbage and take it out. (“We” meaning her, not me) The Mom stares at me for a moment, decides this is reasonable and carries the bag outside the building.

They don’t leave.

“Why don’t you just sit here until you feel better, and watch the other kids?” The Mom says.

At this point my eyebrow goes up, and I give her the stare. I start swearing internally, having an argument in my head about whether the common-sense fairy forgot to make a stop-off at their house when this baby was born. Your kid pukes, you go home. I thought that was a rule! Doesn’t your child want to go home now? They just yakked in front of strangers; they want to watch cartoons!

The girl then gets up, crosses the gym, and takes a big drink from the water fountain. Yes, the girl who just puked her guts out. Drinking from the fountain. This is how pandemics start.

And then she pukes again.

They leave after Spew#2.  I wanted to yell, “THANKK YOOUUUU!” after them, but I manage to hold back. What have we been exposed to? I start giving the kids bland meals, just in case I have to see them later. I cancel plans. I fully expect the house to erupt into a Barf-o-rama within hours. We got off easy, a few twinges in the gut, but nothing major. I chalk up my resistance to love of curries, which must kill off most things. The kids however, just sidestepped a nasty one. We never puke on the run, only at three a.m.,in our beds, layering all of the stuffed animals and blankets in steaming piles. I guess that is lucky, sort of.

I will try to give this Mom the benefit of the doubt. She was tired, she wasn’t thinking, she had to leave the house or she would go mental, etc. But next week, I am not sitting near her. I don’t want to be friends.

In a fit of desperation, our hero decides he has had enough. It’s three a.m. and he cannot sleep. The F%@#ing   hotel pillows are driving him insane!! Why are they like this! He thinks, becoming more agitated by the minute. He begins to pant, and sweat, like Animal from the Muppets.

“MUST STOP…PILLOWWWWW” He yells.

Taking a knife from the room service leftovers, he rips into the seam of his gigantically huge, overstuffed neck breaker, chucking half of its feathery bits into the wastebasket. His panting lessens as he places a new pillowcase over the new, normal-sized pillow. He smiles, realizing his gutting job will suffice. He climbs back into the sagging pit of a bed, drifting off into spine-twisting slumber.

This is a (mostly) true story. My mom’s friend attacked a pillow, after years of putting up with hotel hell. The pillows are just one of the many ways hotels have of driving you insane. This is why there is a mini-bar. Hotels are hoping you will be so annoyed with multiples of niggling, not-quite horrible offences, that you will pay the outrageously overpriced fee for two swallows of cheap whiskey.

Sure, staying at a hotel seems like a good idea. In theory, you will have a bed, a bathroom, and a place to store your stuff. But surely, hotels must have access to normal pillows? I’m sure they could get a deal at Costco if they ordered in bulk.

I recently discovered (i.e. last night) that some hotels prefer to pepper the inside of their bathtubs with sand-like grains, rather than add a bathmat. It may prevent lawsuits, but who thought making the inside of a tub painfully rough was a good idea? I like to take baths; they relax me. But bathing in this bathtub would have meant the exfoliation of my entire backside, which happens to be a tender area. I don’t want to scratch the shit out of it.

So, no bath then. Okay, I will turn off the lights at 9, as my kids can’t sleep with any of the ultra bright wall scones on. I will lay in the dark listening to the air conditioning, which is taking off in intervals of three and a half minutes. It makes a sound like a Volkswagen beetle’s clutch giving out at a high speed.

KACHUNNNNGG! It kicks on. It delivers a blast of freezing cold air, until it decides the room is now at my desired temperature, and then dies. WHHummPP!

Just a gentle whirr of the fan now, as I listen to the creaking of the bed next to me, the little snores of blissfully unaware kids. I hear someone in the hallway go to the ice machine. I listen as they place heavy footsteps in a stagger back to their room. They are having more fun than me. But I don’t feel jealousy, only the desire to sleep or be hit over the head, rendering me unconscious. This is when the mini bar comes in handy, except I am no where near it and it’s pitch black, as the heavy curtains block out the streetlight outside and all light inside.

KACHUUNNNGGGG!

WHHummppp!

This is what it feels like to be inside one’s conscious mind. It’s pitch black, and there are disturbing noises.  KACHUUNNGGGG! WHHummpp……I somehow find sleep.

…only to awaken with a searing pain in my heel, OUCH! What the hell? I think, still encased in blackness. Then I realize I am using my foot much as a hiker would use an ice-pick, attempting not to slide into the black hole in the middle of the bed. I know this won’t help and give in, sliding deeply into the nesting hole, letting go of my grip on the edge. I curl into the fetal position, hugging a gargantuan pillow.  KACHUUNNGGGG.

Anger finds it’s way into my tired body as I throw the boiling hot blankets off. I find my way to the AC, cranking it to a place it can’t possibly get to in the next few hours.

We awake to a chilly room, but no matter, I have a boiling hot cup of mud waiting for me! If I stir in three packets of sweetener, my brain will be fooled into thinking I’ve just had something like coffee and may now start working. I feel like a sweaty, mashed potato, but I’ve made it. I vow to avoid another hotel for at least a year, even if it seems like a good idea.