Oh wow.

Thank you.

Thank you for your -um- poignant emails regarding that last post.  Seems I was a bit misunderstood.  It's humbling to be misunderstood.  And being humbled is very good for personal growth.  And isn't that sort of the point of all this?  This blogging?  This life?


Many of you thought it was about flaws I find in my friends.  That's not what that last post was about at all. It was not about how weak my girls were, on the contrary, it was about how broken the guy was.

He and I used to work Tuesdays together.  Tuesdays were like a curse.  No one goes out on Tuesdays.  I remember one time the bar was empty, my tables were empty except for one.  The Chardonnay Lady.  She was always there.  The second saddest soul in the whole wide world.  She needed her sixth glass, I couldn't find the bartender. 
He was the bartender.
But then I did.  Find him.  On the back steps.  Crying.  Sucking all the air out of a can of whipped cream.  Another one, an empty one, was at his feet.
"I need help", he said.
"I can't fix you", I replied.

I couldn't.  Not wouldn't.  Not shouldn't.  I couldn't.

Nobody could.
A lot of people tried.
A lot of girls.
A lot of my friends.
A lot of my friends are the kind of girl who tries to fix things.  To heal people.  To help.  To  mother.  To care.  To tend.  To love.

And that's why they are my friends.
I like to write from my gut, to hit publish without proofreading. Maybe I'm not there yet, at a level where my writing is clear enough, my thoughts clear enough to just
Hit
Publish
without worrying about syntax or semantics or sense.

Anyway.

 
I got my new countertops!
They look amazing.
 
Different than the samples, but I'm not bitter.  The swatch was white with silvergrey specks.  The counter is white with what isn't quite navy and maroon but is sort of greynavy and silvermaroon.  I hate to describe it that way because it sounds gross like that burnished patriotic crap you can buy in the seasonal aisle at CVS, but it isn't.  It's gorgeous.  And now I'm afraid to touch it because I want it to stay that way.
 
You know those commercials?
Those ones where the wife is standing helpless in the kitchen while the husband is effing around under the sink?
Where he is reduced to a pair of legs sticking out of the cabinet at odd angles and saying words that are just inaudible, off the mic, because then they couldn't run the commercial, and then he hits his head and we see what the commercial is all about?  Drain cleaner/plumbing services/pain killers?
There is a reason for those commercials.
Maybe we can all laugh about this sometime down the pike.
Let this paragraph be a commercial to you.  One that persuades you to think about hiring someone to do your dirty work for you.
Especially if you live in a house that was built before indoor plumbing came standard, and you are switching from a traditional shallow drop-in porcelain sink to a newfangled integrated deep stainless steel one.
Just saying.
There is a reason plumbers have to go to school to become plumbers and there is an entire double sided quarter mile dedicated to plumbing supplies at the local hardware.
 
So, the walls are painted the most beautiful color of robins eggy Virgin Mary skyish blue, the knobs are updated, the sink and countertop are in, the accessories are gathered, the curtain is hung, and I know what backsplash is going up.  I will drag myself to Anthropologie and get the brackets and to a lumber yard to buy some planks for the shelves and then I'll be done.
 
I'm taking suggestions for new obsessions.  Ones that don't put me in the poor house but make my house look less poor.