Before I started staying home with the baby all day I always wondered how people could be so lazy. How people could spend their entire day not showering, wearing sweat pants, watching ridiculous soap operas and never doing anything productive. I wondered what sort of mindset a person would have to be in to not leave the house all day and read gossip websites.
I look at the woman who lives downstairs. She has two kids, 10 and 8 (and still thinks she is 25). She takes them to school in the morning, comes home and I rarely see her for the rest of the day. She never leaves. Ever. She must just be sleeping, watching TV, probably getting stoned and listening to music. Easy life. Sometimes her adult-skateboarding boyfriend is home, too. He leaves to walk the dog, but not much else.
Now that I am over a month in to this experiment, I am afraid to confirm that I am becoming one of those people. I have already started to lose my mind, and now I fear that I am growing accustomed to these walls. It is a slippery slope. This is how people become hermits.
It is not that I am lazy, I don't think that I am, it is just the hours crawl by so slowly, and I wake up so early, I have really lost touch with the outside world. The baby is easily entertained and, most of the time, doesn't want me to play with her as much as she wants me to just give her what she wants and leave her alone.
When I first started staying home all day I would try and keep myself busy with chores, or try to plan a lot of activities to keep us occupied during the day. Now there are times where I look at a sink full of dishes and say 'nah, not today.' I can't even get myself motivated to write this blog half of the time.
Instead of walking to the park, now I'd rather drive. Instead of showering while she takes a nap, I would rather watch ESPN or the SPEED Channel. Some times it is the Game Show Network, the History Channel, or A&E. It doesn't matter. As long as I don't have to think.
My internal clock is so messed up that sometimes I eat chips and queso dip for breakfast. It isn't that I think it is a good idea, it is just that I don't have any concept of time or space anymore. I am officially a figment of my own imagination.
Some days I am still in my slippers in the afternoon. Yesterday, I intended to do laundry when she took a nap, but just ended up laying on the couch and watching reruns of Scrubs. Because apparently I can never get too much cute, well-intentioned comedy, even though I have seen every episode six times.
I will say that watching so much daytime TV has definitely made me a little bit dumber. I lose a brain cell every time I see a commercial for denture paste, and can't wait for the day that I need a Hover Round. At least old people have an excuse to do nothing. I don't.
"With help from Medicare and my insurance, I didn't pay a dime for my diabetes testing supplies!"
When I am not watching TV, I find that I spend a lot of my time during the day, especially when she is asleep, talking to myself, questioning my purpose in life, lamenting about my laziness, lack of motivation and out-of shape figure, but never doing anything about it. It is tough to explain. I spend my day climbing the walls, fighting anxiety attacks because I don't know what the hell I want to do with my life, and I feel like I am an unproductive, useless part of society. Yet- I can't bring myself to actually do anything about it.
I even got depressed the other day when I saw a commercial for Kaplan Career Institute. ' Man, maybe I should go back to school,' I said to myself. 'If this girl with a GED can do it, so can I. It only takes like three days to get a degree in the growing medical field.'
I then proceeded to list off all of the excuses actually given in the commercial for why people don't go back to school. 'I can't afford it.' 'I don't have time.' 'I haven't been in a classroom in years.' I am actually becoming the demographic that daytime advertisements appeal to.
This baby is the only thing keeping me from being one of those daytime drunks that stumbles around collecting cans that he can redeem at Steve's Quality Market to put toward a 40 OZ of Old English or a cheap bottle of scotch.
I guess I knew going in to this that there was a good chance I would lose my mind, and it appears to be happening. What I didn't expect was one of the side effects being that I have turned in to a welfare mom. Minus the cigarettes and the mental and verbal abuse toward my child, of course. But, insanity is the fuel for good writing, right? Right? God I hope so.
Speaking of verbal abuse, the obese sweat pants family across the street has made a few lifestyle changes over the past few days. Originally, I had thought they moved out, but it appears they are simply doing some house cleaning. Yesterday they finally towed the 1988 Ford Bronco that had been sitting, not working, in their driveway since we have moved in. Filled with trash, it was loaded on the back of a flatbed tow truck yesterday (right after I put the baby down for a nap, of course) and taken away.
The father then pulled his new/used Dodge Caravan in to the same spot, opened up the back hatch and sat down to take a rest before going in to the house, On speakerphone he then called just about everyone he knew to tell them that 'its gone.'
From what I could hear through our open windows he planned on selling the truck for scrap metal because 'there is enough metal in one door of that thing to make 10 cars nowadays.' A clearly exaggerated statement that I somehow think he actually believed.
In appeared as though the vehicle is some sort of family treasure, as when the man was speaking to his mother he said on multiple occasions that both his wife and two daughters would be 'crushed' when they saw that it was gone. He was thinking of lying to his wife and telling her he traded it in for the Caravan so she would be less mad, but was talked out of it by his mother.
I did not get to hear him break the news to his family that the Trash Truck was gone, but I did see them come home in the Caravan, riding just inches off the ground, presumably due to the massive amount of weight he carries. It even seems like obese sweat pants man has a job, though, and he probably watches a lot fewer denture commercials than I do. I guess spying on your neighbors is one way to pass the time. Hopefully today I can finally make the long 2-mile trek to Marshall's to get that generic hooded sweatshirt I have had in my head. It will really compliment the pajama pants.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment