There’s nothing quite like a university degree to make one toss all anal-retentive tendencies straight in the crapper, the crapper that I’ve neglected to clean this week.
Ok, so it’s only Wednesday and I clean the can twice a week, so it’s not exactly a toilet in need of a HazMat crew. It’s just that my June Cleaver skills, the ones that are the envy of all, the ones that make me the butt of jokes, the ones that paint me a the ultimate little housewife…have suffered this week.
I have clean, unfolded clothes on the bed, a pile of shirts to iron, dinner to make, and a shower to scrub.
Oh, dear God, I’ve lost my Anal Mojo!
And it’s all due to making copies.
Who knew printing would be so time consuming? I’ve spent two days at my office–on what’s supposed to be school holiday time–printing out 3 copies of my thesis and novel in order to submit them to external examiners. So that’s a thesis, and a 323 page novel, which equals a few reams of paper, which means I’m killing trees since I can only submit one-sided copies. And the crux of all this is how printing this sucker has made me anxious, so anxious I actually MISS cleaning the toilet, because I’m in control of how sparkly that bowl is, as opposed to not having any power over the freakin’ temperamental copier some call Fred.
Fred likes to spew out pages that are stuck together. He gets a kick out of jamming, and spitting out paper drawn from the drawer with the school’s letterhead, or deciding to change the paper to landscape when I set the print to run as portrait.
The upside of this is the fact I’m more or less done with my thesis. I expect to get some comments from the examiners, but nothing major.
This means I have time to write a synopsis, a buttload of query letters and enter a few contests. This means already I’m hard at work on another novel. Its tentatively titled And She Was, and it stars, yep you guess it, Kevin Bacon.
I can just see it happening. When it’s made into a major motion picture, Kevin Bacon will jump at the chance to play…well, himself.
Then Kevin and I will become best buds and discover we’re kindred pretzel lovers.
Oddly, I’m writing this And She Was in a rather backward way. Backward because I’ve got a half-written novel that’s related. I started it two years ago, before A Basic Renovation, before the Great University Thesis Experiment. It’s called A Genuine Imitation. Someday I’ll get back to that story and the hero with shingles
Of course, If I’m really, really clever, I’ll manage to work Kevin Bacon in to that novel too.
By then my toilets should be clean.