This weekend, I actually had most of Sunday to myself. The Professor and the Diva had tea ceremony practice at their teacher's house in Manoa and Oscar the Grouch took the Mad Cow to the park. On Saturday night, I put together a mental list of all of the things I would accomplish on my free, free Sunday - none of which had anything to do with cleaning house, doing laundry or picking piles of stinky dog poop in the yard. I briefly considered sitting down and actually sending out the Chinese New Years cards that have been sitting unopened on my dining room table for a month or so (if I could find them under the container of Valentines cookies, school annoucements, assorted socks and wadded up balls of used kleenix) but that quickly flitted away. Those of you who know me know that the Christmas cards usually reach you in March and birthday cards come a year after your birthday.
When I woke up on Sunday, the house was quiet. Oscar had gone out for his usual trip to 7-11 to buy coffee and the paper and amazingly, the insane dogs were sound asleep. This usually never happens as our usual morning routine is to wake up to the sound of Rayni barking at ear-drum splitting decibels and Tiger swatting you in the face with her paws (or worse, sitting on your head). What to do, what to do, what to do.
I was like a deer in headlights. Frozen, shocked, unable to function in this unfamiliar environment. The peace and serenity was overloading my usually overtaxed system. So, I reverted back to my comfort zone and sat on the couch to watch hours of RuPaul's Drag Race reruns and make sock creatures for the Fair.
When the gang returned home hours later, I was still in the same spot - surrounded by several finished I-GOR-LANI creatures (my new thing - don't know why I'm into cyclops all of a sudden) and totally catatonic from she-male overload.
I have a dear friend, SH, who accomplishes more in an hour than I do in a month. She is always on the go in a good way - a directed, planned, organized way and not in a frenetic, unplanned, totally disorganized way like I am. She is like a sleek, stealth aircraft - swiftly and efficiently finding her way to her goal. I am like one of those rafts that the castaways on Gilligan's Island would make - aimlessly floating in a circle, never leaving the shoreline, having no clue where to go. I sometimes feel like one of those jellyfish (uh, jelly-roll-fish in my case) at the Waikiki Aquarium who just kind of putters around while people gape at my total lack of direction. Well, I like to think that I at least look stylish while I flutter around.
I liken myself to Pig Pen from the Peanuts comic but with papers, receipts, checks, and stuff whirling around me instead of a hurricane of dirt (that hurricane is limited to the interior of my car). I tell myself each morning when I look at the piles of miscellaneous stuff surrounding my computer, stacked up on my dressers, shoved in the back of my car, that this day will be the day I get my act together and organize my everything. But then, I get a whiff of cookie and it's over, the ADD kicks in and I'm off to yet another totally unrelated and distracting activity.
Perhaps that is what the real meaning of free is to me. The freedom to live a life in unstructed chaos without a plan beyond the next ten minutes. I wonder if I would be the same person if I suddenly became the Buddhahead Martha Stewart with a homemade cubby for the gigantic knots of embroidery thread that populate my home and battle with the dust bunnies or put in the time to alphabetized my spice rack. I wonder if I would be a better Mom if my kids had kaiseki style bento lunches with musubis that look like teddy bears and octopi-shaped hot dogs like the kids of the moms from Japan have (instead of the usual lunch they get of high sodium, high fat, totally bypass inducing Lunchables I give them). I wonder if I would be less fluffy if I scheduled in exercise time and kept a food journal like K-Fed now does in Celebrity Fit Club.
But then, I realize that a great percentage of what makes me me is the total lack of any predictability, stability or normalcy. That is true freedom, right? Accepting yourself for the totally screwed up person that you really are.
To quote Marlo Thomas, "You and me are free to be, you and me".
