So now that I'm safely and snugly at home, my entire attention is focused on
staying home. There are a lot of people who might feel useless, estranged, bored, unproductive, maybe even a little grimy if they sat at home unemployed for any extended period of time, but I'm not really one of those people. And I don't even have a kid. If I had a kid? Like, a justifiable
reason to stay home? You'd have trouble getting me to go to the fucking
mailbox. I managed to save enough money to cover my immediate bills for the next few months, and my plan is to quietly and complacently milk that shit into the fall.
Not surprisingly, R is of a whole other camp entirely, and his camp gets genuinely excited about federal tax withholdings and dry cleaned clothes and soap. His camp also seems to get a little worked up about this gross ponytail and the stereo being on all day and me dragging the laptop into the crapper. So here's my plan to brainwash
his camp into thinking that
my camp is mostly harmless, outwardly (and
inwardly) clean, and generally pretty agreeable:
1. I’m going to try really hard not to break anything. And when I say “anything”, I’m referring to actual
things, like televisions and mirrors and furniture, as well as
body parts. I don’t have money lying around to replace the dryer when it breaks because I jammed eight flip-flops in it and one got caught in the gear mechanism and almost started a fire (thanks for talking me through that one,
Cait) the same way that I don’t have health insurance to cover any more drunken “walking straight into the wall with a beer bottle in my mouth” accidents. We’re calling a hiatus on all formal breast checks, and any “does this mole look funny to you” inquiries will be stifled. If something serious
does arise, something that a shot of Jack, a well-wielded nail file, or a fistful of Tylenol 3 won’t cure, the standing instruction is to get me into my car, throw it in neutral and roll me into a telephone pole so that I officially become State Farm’s problem.
2. Keep the man full. I’m a surprisingly good cook, if a little bipolar; R could never be sure if I’d come tearing home after a thirteen-hour day to furiously sweat over homemade crabcakes and remoulade (an endeavor that always ended exhaustingly, for after the fifty bucks spent on supplies and the two hours of production, it was always unerringly clear that R would have been just as happy eating cold cuts out of a plastic bag an hour and a half ago) or whether he’d be happily left to his default Atkins bachelor meal of pistachios, sliced turkey, and scotch. We’re going to shoot for a middle-of-the-road consistency. This morning, for example, I stuffed three different kinds of meat in the crockpot and I stocked up on mixed nuts. What it lacks in effort it makes up for in protein. We’ll play this one by ear.
3. Sex. Lots of it. All the time, in fact. And not the sex of yore, the “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me right now” 5:30am bullshit obligatory sex, oh no. I’m talking about “Yes, I think doing it in the shower is a fabulous, not at all awkward idea, and I can’t imagine why on earth I haven’t done this since I was nineteen” sex. I'm setting alarms specifically to remind me that it's been twelve hours since the working half of this faction got emphatically laid. I’m keeping a spreadsheet. I have a quota. I think that my best shot of becoming a professional slacker rests right here in Number 3, but when I outlined this whole plan for R he scoffed at me. He said that I was welcome to try, but that he was pretty sure that I'd have another job in the next thirty days. So he came home from work last night, the house was spotless and smelled like slow-cooked meat, none of his shit was broken, and I was jumping up and down, wide-eyed clamoring to do it in the car again. I don't know, I think I've got a fighting chance.
