Maxigumee

My family is kind of into quick fixes when it comes to home improvement. When my father originally layed out the floorplan for the restoring of our house, he failed to include enough bedrooms for the whole family. He must have either assumed that my sister and I would share a bedroom until I went off to college or that one of us would sleep on the couch. Sharing a room with my sister obviously had its complications and I tried several different room arrangements throughout the years living in this house.

I tried sleeping in the wash room. That wasn’t particularly fun what with a washer and dryer making a big racket all the time. I tried sleeping in a spare room downstairs. That was horrible considering that I’m totally paranoid and sleeping on a completely separate floor all alone scares the crap out of me. In my current bedroom situation, my room is actually sort of an alcove that one comes to when you get to the top of the stairs. There is no door, no wall even, for this alcove, so I had to make a sort of stage curtain to make a “wall” between my “room” and the hallway. Although I take some pride in the creativity and attractiveness of this curtain, it is sometimes extremely irritating and it offers little privacy or filtration of light and noise.

Back to the quick fixes thing. My bedroom’s wall is not the only thing that my family has tried to fix with fabric. The wall divider separating the living room and dining room, an ingenious (note that ingenious is said with a very strong note of sarcasm) idea that my father came up with, is made up of two book cases facing the dining room table. In order to pretty up the back of the shelves facing the living room, my father bought a bunch of fabric from FWS and hung it up there. It still remains there to this day.

It seems that the whole fixing-with-fabric thing is a continuing tradition in this household. Not wanting to spend the extra money on having doors installed on the entryway to our living room but also wanting to save money on heating, my father decided it would be a good idea to simply hang fabric from the entryway to keep heat in. Hooray! It would be a nice idea if the fabric were not ten feet long and totally hideous. Every time I walked by the staple-hemmed monstrisity hanging on a cheap tension rod, shivers went up my spine. No other member of my family seemed ready to take action, so tonight I decided to.

I excavated my sewing machine from underneath piles of junk and brought it out into the living room. I tried to cut off the uneaven edges of the the fabric as best I could before pinning it down and hemming it. The hemms on the two separate curtains were off in height by about an inch, but I decided that it at least looked better than before. I cut off the fabric at the bottom so it stopped just at the floor. I put some little decorative beads from Pier 1 on it and ta-da! It was complete! It still looked horrible, but at least it wasn’t SUPER HORRIBLE.

And of course, this is when my father starts yelling at me. “THIS THING LOOKS LIKE A RETARD SEWED IT! ONE HEM IS FIVE INCHES LONGER THAN THE OTHER ONE! AND YOU CAN’T SEW A HEM ON THE BOTTOM BECAUSE IT’LL BE TOO HIGH OFF THE FLOOR!” I try to tell my father that since heat rises, it wouldn’t matter that there is like one inch of space underneath the curtains. “DON’T TRY TO MAKE EXCUSES! I SPENT FOURTY DOLLARS ON THIS FABRIC AND NOW IT’S RUINED! RUINED!”

I really don’t think it’s that big of a deal. We’re taking it down when guests come over anyway. And nobody else in the family knows how to use a sewing machine and my sewing skills are mediocre at best. I think it would have turned out that way no matter how long I put it off. Still, this whole experience is just one more notch on the stick of reasons why I am desperate to GET OUT OF HERE.

So yesterday night, I was basically out of everything. I went to Walgreens to purchase all of the stuff I was out of. Yeah, so. I thought that that was that. I got home, I washed my face, I cleaned up a bit, I did some wash, I watched the Victoria’s Secret fashion show which ohmygod I have to direct a Victoria’s Secret commercial now. And a Britney Spears video. Those are like the two things I have to do before I die. But anyway…. I went off topic a little bit. I turned off the fashion show about forty minutes in because all the famous people had come out and they were just repeating stuff after that. I went to the bathroom to put on my moisturizer before I went to bed and I discovered that OH NO. I had no moisturizer. Without my facial moisturizer, my face, which is so accustomed to generous moisturization, would dry up like a raising and get all dry and gross and stuff! Ew!

So I started frantically searching through the baskets on the bathroom shelf. I probably put it in one of them, right? So I search a good five or so times before deciding that my moisturizer was absolutely nowhere in that vicinity. So I went downstairs. Maybe it was in the downstairs bathroom. Nope. So. I went back upstairs and went back to that bathroom. I thought that maybe I had thrown out the moisturizer since it was almost done anyway.

I emptied the trash out onto the floor and used a small box that was in there to sift through it. No luck. I started putting things back into the trash can when I suddenly realized that HOLY MOTHER OF GOD JESUS, I was picking up BLOODY PADS. I sort of freaked out a little bit and applied a ton of hand sanitizer. I decided that it was hopeless. My mother must have emptied the trash earlier and THROWN OUT MY MOISTURIZER. My face would be doomed to a night of DRYNESS.

I went into my parents’ bedroom and asked my mother if she had any facial moisturizer. She said she did. It was on the so-and-so shelf in the bathroom. I looked at that and I found that it was not only scented with a hideous lavender scent, but it was also NOT OIL FREE. I love my moisturizer so much that if it were a human being, I would probably marry it so it could constantly provide me with constant moisture. My moisturizer not only hydrates my quenched skin, but it also reduces shine. So skin is both moisturized and attractive. I sound like an ad.

Okay. So. I decided that any moisturization was better than none and I put on the gross, oily, itchy lavender stuff and went to sleep. Or not. I had one of those nights where you never ever ever can get to sleep and you just have awake-dreams all night long. I basically tossed and turned and had the same exact awake-dream over and over again. Surprisingly, I was pretty awake when I woke up early and had my father drive me to the 24 hour Rite Aid so I could finally be reunited with my beloved moisturizer. Of course, the brief happiness and relief I experienced was brought immediately crashing to the ground when I found the stuff I had been looking for in my sister’s bedroom.