Bathroom sinks...sized for cats or laundry?

On Mondays I open the new post box and write directly into it. No planning. No editing. Apologies ahead of time.

Last night I suited up for bed, ear plugs, eye shades, mouth guard and nostril wideners and tried to prime myself with controversial and worldly topics so that when I woke up and forced myself to write my Monday musings (that word isn’t working for me, but, alliteration) I wouldn’t seem quite so shallow.

It worked. I woke up thinking of Capitalism and privilege.(should that have a capital P?) What Capitalism actually means and what it is code for, who and what villianous (in my world) or heroic (in other people’s world one of which I may or may not be raising.)

Then I got out of bed and saw an enormous blood stain on my favorite (only) sheets. For those of you that thought I could go much more than a week without writing about bodily fluids we must not know each other in real life. Interest in bodily fluids increase proportionately with the busy-ness of ones life. Then add in a whole bunch of pets and your world is swimming with opportunities to interact with such fluids.

In any case there was a lot of blood. And for those of you that think you only have one X chromosome what I am talking about is my period. With a capital P. So I am in the bathroom on our ice cold floors (why is it still ice cold and also why did our radiant floors break to the point that the electrician told me with a gleam in his eye, to fix this you are going to need a really big sledge hammer. Are there small sledgehammers? Pink ones? Sledgehammhers that they market to women and then charge twice as much for. (Ended in a presposition damn you Mondays) (if these asides distract you you could check out some of my other posts…I cut back on them some as I try to keep my mind going in one-ish directions.) (Would that be a shitty British Cover band? If you don’t get that joke your musical taste is worth commenting on.)

OK. So I am at the sink dealing with my PJ bottoms using the only thing I have on hand which is Mrs. Meyer’s’ pine soap. I secretly hate this smell. It was limited edition and I am a forty something woman so that marketing tactic worked very well and despite having at least four hand soaps in reserve I bought this one too and put it in my bathroom to welcome winter and fuck you winter and all of your pine-y scents. So now I am scrubbing blood and trying not to breathe through my nose and realizing I have just a slight tickle in my throat so I am probably having a fake cold. My colds never seem to get going. Its a tickle and then anticipation of blankets and tea and my whole family rushing to give me sympathy and then the tickle goes away and I am not sick and then there has to be blankets and tea and zero sympathy. (Memoir title?) But then, its a total soap bottle is half empty moment. If I USE the soap I won’t have to use the soap. I am gleeful as I strip the bed. One graceful cat leaps to the dresser, one chonky cat hits the floor with a thud and one Chihuahua has the comforter ripped off of his lazy tan dog ball and looks at me with scared bug eyes. Tough to distinguish from his loving bug eyes and his guilty bug eyes but I can tell.

Maybe I hate it because it is Iowan Pine and I used to ignore Iowa and now they are proposing (Passing?!) anti-trans laws and it feels a little bit like Switzerland opened some enormous slot in the middle of their country to reveal the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.

So I am dragging the mattress pad and sheet to the bathroom sinks which is too stylish to be super useful and applying (fine I wrote squirting and then erased it but remembered that I can’t erase it so its back in and now we are all really focused on the word squirting.) loads of it. (Thats right I was going to write ‘squirting loads’ sorry mom.) And Steve walks in. I would like to tell you that I had yanked the sheets out from under Steve in a magic trick where all of the dishes and wine glasses stay stable on the table but he was already up (ALREADY UP) because he was away at work all week and we all know (those of us that have jobs or know people who have jobs) that when you leave your family to work 16 hours a day you come home to at least thrice to work. So he is up getting ready for his Monday.

I took this picture before I wrote this blog post. Did the sheet makers phrase it this way in solidarity or ignorance? Also these are the same sheets because they are my favorite (and only) sheets.

He sees me at the sink.

“You don’t need to do that sweetie, we can take it downstairs and use oxyclean and it will work a lot better than the soap.”

In response I give the soap three extra squirts.

“Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, you hate the smell of that soap.” I guess I wasn’t so good at keeping my soap loathing to myself.

If you scan back up to Steve’s first sentence you see that he said “we” would use oxyclean. Not true. He will do it. He says “we” so that WE can maintain the fiction that I run the laundry machine. It will be Steve that runs it, that switches it, that tugs the incredibly heavy purple mattress from the wall to put the sheet with the either cheeky wink to gay sex or total oblivion on its tag (Top or Bottom) firmly over the edge to make sure it stays tucked in. All I had to do was bleed on it.

We can talk about Capitalism and Socialism next Monday. Right now I need to find a blanket. Steve already made my tea.

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Choose one to answer:

1. What have you bled on?

2. What scent that is supposed to be appealing makes you want to vomit?

3. Which post industrial economic system has had the biggest influence on subjective measurements of life satisfaction (please cite 69 sources.)