Mommy Blog (sort of): "You don't love me: please confirm!"

We've all been depressed, right? Even if not clinically, we all have gloom and despair, pms and annoying relatives, or dead relatives, or something. My wife's BFF, Cindy, said once that when you're depressed you wait for your spouse to come home so that you can tell him/her, "you don't love me: please confirm!" I thought that was pretty funny, but then I realized it was true. Only the object changes. Sometimes it is B, or sometimes it is some long-suffering friend of mine, or a house-guest, new or old. Recently I have been trying to self-soothe in these moments, rather than engage with my loved one. It's pretty hard. For some reason, when I'm down, I just want to call every one I know and accuse them of never having liked me at all ever in their entire lives and try to make them admit it because that sure would cheer me up!

Anyway, so one of the things I do when tempted to engage my loved one in a "you don't love me: please confirm!" conversation is start a project. This distracts me until the YDLMPC moment passes and I feel normal again. For one recent project, I built a square foot garden. This is because I want to grow lettuces. I have lettuce envy. This friend (semi-houseguest?) of mine is an organic landscaper. We had dinner at her place, which is on five acres, and she grows most of her food. I wouldn't normally care to eat things that grow in the ground because they aren't steak or donuts or Twinkies, but she made this salad, see. She went outside and plucked some lettuces out of the ground, tossed them in a bowl with some tomatoes and salt and oil and vinegar, and created, in approximately eight seconds, The Most Delicious Salad I Have Ever Eaten. Let me explain: this salad contained neither meat nor ice cream. I do not like things that contain no meat or ice cream. And yet! These salad-making people lately are confusing me.

Exhibit B: my friend Mara, who may be the best cook I know (Further data required to confirm.) went to the Alabama Shakes concert with me, and when I picked her up she had lunch for us. It was some kind of salad with lettuce and cabbage (yuck, right?) and other stuff I didn't think I liked and peanut sauce, which I know I don't like. However! Mara put some very lovely, rare steak in it. To get to the meat, I had to eat some salad. It was delicious -- would have been yummy even without the meat! So now I have lettuce envy and peanut sauce envy. And then! Mara told me all about how to get my lettuces to thrive. I forgot already, but you get the idea. These people know everything--my friends/house guests. Am lucky to have them.

Especially since my square foot gardening project has been so fraught with challenges. First, I am allergic to Homo Depot. No, I mean literally. As in: it makes me sneeze and sneeze. Eyes water. The whole bit. Further, I do not understand The Rules Of Homo Depot. Did you know that before you take a cart that has been sitting empty and alone for 20 minutes, you have to ask every single person in the store? Insanity. If you don't ask, then you risk the Homo Depot lumber crew's anger. They may even try to refuse to cut your lumber. (Of course this did not happen to me because I am far too mannerly to steal somebody's cart. Just I wanted to warn you people.)

Then there was an incident with the local wild life. As in: a crow came and cawed so loudly I heard him over the blaring, macho heavy metal I was playing to encourage my drilling prowess. I leapt up in fright, nearly plummeting over the edge of my balcony, but luckily landed on a spade instead, which injured my shin, causing me to spill my beer. In all this ruckus, my phone somehow forgot its device (speaker), so I didn't even have a soundtrack to my pain gesticulations. (Which I prefer to think of as an interpretive dance, thank you very much.) The crow would not leave, was completely unintimidated by anything I did, including the hurling of projectiles, wild swinging of long objects, shouting and cursing, spraying water from Ari's super soaker, and pretending to call the police and/or my (imaginary) flying pit bull, Butch. My interpretive dancing didn't scare him either. Finally he left because a neighbor three flights below the balcony where he was harassing me shut the door, and it made a little noise. That terrified the stupid bird. Who hadn't been afraid of deafening ACDC, my pain yowls, being hit with a wall of water, etc. I suppose expecting a bird to make sense about as rational as having a YDLMPC conversation.