In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross proposed a five-pronged model of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Scholars have argued to the moon and back about whether her model is “scientific” and “empirically validatable,” and all of these things that scholars care about. Basically, what they want to know is: does her model actually fit the typical grieving process? Forty-two years later, the verdict is still out on that one. In spite of this, the verdict is in regarding the first four of my stages of grief: 1) denial, 2) overreliance on psychologically numbing agents and behaviors (this is the drinking stage, folks), 3) sublimation, 4) CRANKY, and 5) ?
Tonight I’d like to talk about stage four, CRANKY, because that’s where I am tonight. I’m actually so cranky that I thought I was too cranky to blog, and wasn’t going to. I was going to put up my feet, continue on in my sixth reread of the Harry Potter series (an attempt at a lateral move to numbing, see step 2), and go to sleep early. I know this is actually what I should be doing, because part of the reason I’m CRANKY is because I’m tired. Tired+ me= no good, for anyone, least of all me (or maybe you, if you get the pleasure of seeing me on a day like today. You tell me).
As I prepared to leave my world for Hogwarts, I saw the jeans strewn across my bed and sighed— they’re physically dirty and they were starting to have that “reworn one too many times” smell. I need them for tomorrow, and there’s no way I could possibly wear them again without offending someone, probably myself. So I hefted my damn jeans and my damn dress pants and some damn shirts downstairs to throw in the damn laundry.
I put a bunch of crap in the washer and dump in the detergent. Now, Jeb and I got ourselves this fancy new-fangled HE Washer & Dryer set last year. The washer has very specific places to deposit each washer agent—the detergent goes HERE and only here, the softener goes HERE, etc. Well, I’ll be damned if I didn’t put the detergent in the fabric softener hole. SHIT. The other fun thing is that there is no way to dump the stuff back out; the stuff holder is attached to the washer. So I’m tired, I’m super CRANKY, and now I’ve dumped the wrong fluid into the wrong damn hole (shame on you if you had a dirty thought after reading that line).
I consider putting the softener into the detergent hole and starting the load up anyway, just to “see what happens.” I consider yelling at Jeb and getting him to fix this issue for me. We’re down to our last “serving” of detergent, so I don’t want to waste it by wiping it out with a cloth. What to do, what to do. Suddenly I get this flash from my undergrad freshman biology lab, where we had to breathe through straws to inflate a rat’s lungs. Second flash is the bendy straws that we keep in our kitchen to populate Evie’s spill-proof cups. Viola!
So how do I spend the next five minutes of my CRANKY night? Sucking damn laundry detergent out of the fabric softener hole and spitting it into the right hole. (I feel that by doing this I may have somehow bastardized my fancy washing machine.) On one suck I was careless and got a little detergent in my mouth. I rinsed thoroughly afterwards, but I still feel like I could open my mouth and bubble on demand.
I wish I could end this story with saying “And then the whole thing was so humorous looking back that all of my crankiness was gone! Rainbows and unicorns everywhere!!!” Nope. I’m still CRANKY as hell, and now I’ve got a nasty soapy mouth (and retainer. Yes, complete the image). When I opened up my computer to blog it was running slowly and I seriously wanted to punch it.
And that, my friends, is all. I’m putting my CRANKY ass to bed. After Ron whisks Harry away from the Dursley’s in the flying car, mind you.
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