Adulthood is hard
Iam not much of an adult. I procrastinate childishly. I don’t make the common-sense connections that others do in order to efficiently navigate the world. I am like a dog or cat who simply accepts current reality as inevitable and immutable.
For five days last month, my hair — always unruly — seemed unusually greasy and dirty, and no amount of showering could help the problem. I assumed this was some cruel part of the process of aging.
Eventually, when using my bathroom, an observant friend asked me why there was no shampoo, only conditioner. Nonsense, I said, indignantly — I don’t even use conditioner.
So she showed me the bottle. I’d bought conditioner by mistake.
My point is, without the help, I would have slimed but not cleaned my hair for the next two months, until it resembled a cormorant fished out of the ocean after an oil rig mishap.
After checking caller ID, I answer only about 10 percent of my phone calls.
That is because the vast majority of the calls I have gotten during the past year were ostensibly from Sneedville, Tenn.; Mandeville, La.; Grapevine, Texas; and other such burgs but were really routed from an online Canadian pharmacy that got my number somehow and wants to, Gene, sell me, Gene, Viagra, Cialis and/or Lipitor at surprisingly affordable prices, Gene.
I tried begging them to stop calling, then threatening, then wasting their time with inane questions, but nothing worked. So eventually I gave up. I have lived with a frequently ringing phone — boinging, actually, because that is my ringtone. I have walked around sounding like Wile E. Coyote on a pogo stick. It wasn’t until last week, purely by happenstance — I’d made no inquiries — that I discovered it is possible to block specific numbers as they come in. The process takes seconds. The calls have stopped. But my biggest dysfunction is with the U.S. mail. I don’t like opening snail mail because it seldom makes me happy.
A disproportionate amount of it is bills, or past-due bills, or notices that I’ve been caught on a speed camera, or letters addressed to “current occupant” or “free” credit cards with enormous interest rates.
Because of this, I sometimes procrastinate opening the mail, which is not good because sometimes it gets buried under other things, or Barnaby the cat will knock it on the floor between bookshelves, or whatever. So it is not infrequent that I will discover a very old piece of unopened mail.
I have one in my hand right now. I just retrieved it from under the refrigerator, apparently pushed there by Barnaby. It is from Honda.
The letter is quite long-winded and technical, and it ends with an apology for “any inconvenience” Honda has caused. It is informing me that it had just discovered that my 2008 Civic contains Takata air bags that can explode and kill or maim people.
When the air bags deploy, they fire shrapnel into the car; jugular veins and carotid arteries have been severed. Eyes have been gouged out.
Honda is offering to install new air bags free of charge and suggests that I make an appointment with a dealership immediately. In the meantime, it urges in a single sentence highlighted in red that I do not let anyone ride in the front passenger seat.