4.20 in Suburbia, also the day I ate a toenail
It’s been a rough week already, so I started Wednesday with a strong desire to crawl into a hole and hide for a while. Too many expectations coming from too many directions–business, kids, marriage, house, pets, parents….After having a hard time getting ready for the day I gave myself permission to stay a lil high all day, it was 4/20 after all. I’ve never officially celebrated or used it as a reason to partake but dammit this year it just feels right.
I spent the morning working with my business partner. We run a virtual real estate company so we meet in person often to focus and get shit done. We had some great productivity–the kind that sets the tone & re establishes our business’s course for months to come. It’s times like this together that has enabled us to get past some tough times and go on to crush goals that we’d never have imagined a few years ago.
We went on to walk through a house to see what needed to be done to get it ready for someone to move in. So much thought went into each decision. “Do the baseboards need to be repainted?” “If I were spending this much to live here would I expect them to be repainted?” “How much of this ceiling needs to be painted?” “The way the light hits this room it always looks darker but it’s not actually dirty, so stop at this threshold”. I even found a piece of chalk in the yard and wrote “Welcome Home” on the patio for the family moving in.
After having a little all day I decided once I was finished with work I decided to eat the largest units of measurement of a gummy I’d had in quite some time (I can never remember how they’re measured, I just know that 40 whatevers is a lot for me). Compared to how I felt at the start of the day I felt GREAT!
I’d already decided to mow my front yard and knew tonight would be my only opportunity this week. In our very suburban neighborhood, filled with lush St. Augustine lawns, ours is the only house on our street that doesn’t have weekly professional lawn service; there’s an unspoken pressure to not look like the worst lawn on the block. Unfortunately I got trapped inside my house when a car full of door to door sales people parked out front and descended upon our short street with vests and clipboards. This is what nightmares are made of for an extreme introvert like myself–unnecessary face to face interaction, forced conversation with strangers, no thank you. I’ll wait.
When I was finally able to go outside and mow I was pretty high. I realized I’m not really an expert mower–I do it like I’m vacuuming–I go in rows but often stop to pull it back and forth a few times and then go in the other direction. At least it got done. I felt accomplished. We’d recently dug up some flowerbeds and had to dig up some big roots from our nearby pine tree. I had the brilliant idea to take the biggest roots and put them in the mud in the creek behind our back fence to see if we could grow trees there. The house on the other side of the creek behind ours recently cleared out all the greenery so we can see right to their house and it’s really messed with the private, lush green vibe in our backyard so this sounded like a solid idea to replace that. We’ll see how that works out.
Next step was a nice thorough shower, the kind where you scrub everything and rinse away all your worries. I decided to have a granola bar while I waited for the water to heat up. I dropped a piece on the floor, I quickly as lightning (way less than 5 second rule) picked it up, held it up to the light to make sure there wasn’t dog (or other) hair stuck to it, there wasn’t so I popped it in my mouth and chomped away. After a few seconds I got to something that was a different texture than the rest, pulled it out of my mouth to discover a toenail….a mother fucking toenail!….that wasn’t even mine! I have freakishly tiny toenails that don’t get very long so there’s never much to cut. This was a sliver of a man’s toenail! BARF! Shit like this is why I’m forever asking myself why the fuck I have to share a bathroom (first world problems, I know), especially with a MAN. I realized this is the kind of hilarious story that seems to happen to me fairly routinely so I sat down to type the story on my phone for tonight before it left me.
I went on to have a late night 3+ hour flood of creative ideas to research and write up for my super secret blog that I’ve been working on for the last 4–5 years, which is actually 3 separate blogs, if a “blog” is even what it would be called. This is when I get my best, most creative ideas and I had more that night than I’ve had for the past year. What a way to wrap up a pretty successful day!
