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Tradition
We managed to get through the gauntlets of highway driving with reasonable amounts of screaming and spilling, and hadn't even finished picking the sand out of our teeth when the annual tradition that I always forget about until it jumps out and bites me. It is nipping now.
Every summer is the Summer of Angry Appliances.
I should have seen it coming when the vacuum cleaner quit two weeks ago (finally unhappy, perhaps, that the terrier failed to understand its incredible usefulness and persisted in biting it), but this latest development really hit home. The air conditioner has failed.
There are many reasons to despise the air conditioner, but the thing keeps us all from losing our minds. Someone promises to show up and tinker this morning, so there is the proverbial light in this tunnel.
But these incidents always, always remind me about how poorly I deal with the domestic. I am bad at diagnosing appliance problems. ("Why, no. I have no idea if the compressor is working. We haven't actually been introduced. What would you say the compressor looks like?") It is difficult for me to explain technically what certain problems are. ("Well, when I said that the drain doesn't drain, I really meant that water will continue to pool in the sink until it overflows.") Sinks are actually my bete noire. It took me years of not-wildly-diligent pursuit to replace a sink bowl that got smashed, no doubt by some misstep of my own.
Mornings like this one, I can't help but think about Joan Didion's wonderful essay about migraine "In Bed," with which I fell in love shortly after I was diagnosed with migraine. (In college went to the doctor and said: "Don't tell my mother, but I'm seeing double and have this headache that is so bad it has to be a brain tumor.") Here is the passage that rings loud this morning:
"We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I. It never comes when I am in real trouble. Tell me that my house is burned down, my husband has left me, that there is gunfighting in the streets, and panic in the banks, and I will not respond by getting a headache. It comes instead when I am fighting not an open but a guerrilla war with my own life, during weeks of small household confusions, lost laundry, unhappy help, canceled appointments, on days when the telephone rings too much and I get no work done and the wind is coming up. On days like that my friend comes uninvited." (From Joan Didion's "In Bed" published in The White Album
The atmosphere is dodgy today.
posted by Elise at 5:00 AM
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