The Junk Drawer

These are trying times. Kathy has no words. A whopping ten drafts in her queue and nothing worthy of posting.

I think if I don’t post something today, nothing will ever get posted again, the Junk Drawer will close shop and you guys will loiter outside wondering what the hell happened.

I have to get something on the page to kick start me out of this funk I’m in.

Come back in a couple days if this post bores you to tears. I’m about to tell you about my weekend:

1. I fell asleep on the couch at 5PM yesterday and awoke at 8PM thinking it was the next day already. I slept hard. I even had full, movie-length dreams. In one of them, I was standing in a reception line at a political function, holding hands with Henry Kissinger. Discuss.

2. I worked all day Saturday, brought a lunch, but ate it before 10AM. So the rest of the day I took from the other junk drawer in my life and gave myself a headache, a stomachache and left work on such a sugar high I don’t remember how I got home.

3. My husband cleaned the bathrooms, God bless him, but broke the toilet seat off one of the toilets. How is this possible? Broke an entire toilet seat off its hinges? Men, if you’re going to help clean the house, don’t do it in the manner you would, say, play football. Cleaning a toilet needn’t be a race nor a destructive act. It just needs to be wiped down — gently.

4. In the process of preparing to send DrowseyMonkey her prize magnet for having the fattest head, I got sidetracked researching whether I can mail it with U.S. postage or if I have to take it to the post office to get international postage put on it. I tried Googling for the answer to this simple question, but could not find a satisfactory one. I’m too embarrassed to ask Drowsey, so I’ll just head to the post office tomorrow where I’m sure a clerk there will tell me what a moron I am.

5. I didn’t have the energy to fix something that’s been bugging me for a month. Our wall clock is stuck at 4 o’clock. We don’t know why because the batteries are fine. The pendulum below the clock face continues to swing to and fro. I meant to check on why it’s malfunctioning, but now I’m getting really used to it being 4 o’clock all the time. Four happens to be my favorite number, so I’m keeping it.

6. Since I took such a long nap yesterday, I couldn’t get to sleep until midnight last night. But my body always, always gets up between 4AM-5AM, which means I’m running on fumes right now. I’m sorry. This is the kind of post you get on fumes.

Forgive me for having to post such lame material, but this was the prescription for funkitis and it had to be done. Pray I’m funkless tomorrow.

Night.

Back in November, I laughed through a post by one of my favorite bloggers, Cardiogirl. She wrote about her experience working in a fast-food restaurant as a teenager and how she had to wear a hat as part of her uniform.

Only one problem. She says, “I hate wearing hats. I do not have a hat face. I do not have a hat head. I don’t look good in hats and I will gladly let my ears succumb to frostbite in the midst of winter.”

I dropped her a comment that I didn’t have a hat head either, which made wearing a ridiculous cowboy hat as part of my restaurant uniform all the more humiliating.

I told her about my goofy hat and vowed to search high and low for the one picture in existence showing me in the uniform, complete with hat, in all its splendor.

Cardiogirl, this one’s for you!

Big Fat Head, Circa 1982

Here’s the thing about the hat and my big, fat head. This hat was issued to me on the day of my orientation. The manager pulled out a few hats for me to try on and none of them fit. None of the women’s hats fit. God bless her, she was so nice to me.

Kathy, it doesn’t seem that any of these fit. Let’s try some others.

She went over to men’s uniform boxes and pulled out a gigundo hat that would fit only me and Charlie Brown.

Here, try this one.

Practically sobbing, I tried on the hat and it fit. Sorta. I knew in my heart I could probably have worn an even larger one, but I decided to make do with the one I was given. There was no way I was going to try on anything larger or I’d have to quit the job I hadn’t even started yet.

But here’s the confusing thing. You know damn well that when I sat down to write this, I had to measure my head to know once and for all how fat it is.

It’s not!

According to several sources, the average circumference of a woman’s head is 22.5 inches. Mine is slightly over average, at 23 inches. I have to say I was really surprised. Only two things could explain why I had to wear a men’s hat as a teen. One, my head was larger in 1982 and shrank since then, or two, my head is so seriously misshapen that it just won’t wear a hat very well. I’m going with #2.

Now here’s a little contest for you: If anyone — family members excluded — can name the restaurant I worked at based on the above picture, I’ll send you a Junk Drawer magnet. It might be tough because I believe the restaurant went out of business sometime in the mid-90s and may have been located only on the East Coast, United States.

Let’s make it two contests! Women only. Go measure your head and whoever has the fattest head gets a prize, too. Of course, you may not want to admit your achievement, but if nothing else, you’ll have my sympathies. No lying just to get a magnet. I have it on good authority they’re becoming collector’s items.

Just when you thought you knew everything about me, I give you Kathy by the Numbers. Don’t worry, there’s no math involved and you won’t be quizzed at the end!

Position in birth order: 5

Number of years it took me to get my bachelor’s degree: 12

Courses I took in my last year: 12

Number of gray hairs that earned me: 2, 539

How many years I’ve been with my current employer: 23

Number of different jobs I’ve held in that time: 5

Cups of coffee I drink per day: 3

Number of times per week I forget a reheated cup in the microwave: 2

Years married: 15

Years together: 23

Number of houses or apartments I’ve lived in: 7

Greatest number of hot dogs I’ve eaten in one sitting: 6

Times I’ve ridden on a motorcycle: 1

Prayers I said while doing it: 47

Number of pets I had as a child: 1

Years my parents have been married: 62

Percent of married couples who make it this long in the U.S.: <5 

Miles I drive to work: 8

Months I’ve been blogging: 11

Letters in my maiden name: 12

Weeks it took to learn to write it as a kindergartner without a visual aid: 4

Number of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I’ve eaten: 0

Miles to nearest airport: 3

Number of planes that fly directly over my house per day: 75

Invention ideas I had that I never acted on: 2

Number of them I saw go to market without me: 1

Years I was a cheerleader: 2

Number of keys on my keychain: 9

Times I’ve won the lottery or a raffle: 4

Number of times a trip to Paris was the prize: 1

Magnets on my refrigerator: 11

Number of picture frames on display in my house with the picture that came with it still in the frame: 1

Height in inches: 64

Weight in pounds: Get serious

Books I’d finish per month before blogging: 2

Books I finish now: 0

Hours of sleep I get per night: 6.5

Naps I take on the weekend: 2

Number of times I got my head stuck in a fence: 1

Average number of times my family reminds me of this per year: 4

Number of times I’ve skied: 1

People I knocked down in the process: 2

Number of nieces I have: 2

Years they are apart in age: 25

Traffic tickets I’ve received: 3

Number I talked myself out of: 1

Times I’ve tried ending this list: 3

Shut up already!

I had a massive brain fart yesterday. I completely and totally forgot my blog password. In my defense, it’s the most awesome password in the history of complex, deadbolt, Fort Knox passwords.

It’s a beautiful thing, my password. Piece of art, actually.

It has a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers, special characters and at no point among the 13 characters exists any word in any language. It took me days to be able to enter it without thinking.

The problem with my password is that I only know the whole thing if I can get going on the first character. And that was my problem yesterday. I failed on take-off.

I couldn’t remember if the first letter was capitalized or not. Then I got all messed up on the following two because I wasn’t sure of the first. By the fifth character, I was way off the tracks and I knew it.

Come on, Kathy. You can do this.

Start over. Stop sweating. Think. But don’t over-think! Look at the keyboard. Don’t look at the keyboard! Find your center. Ooom, ooom.

It took me almost a minute to get it right. In password-remembering time, that’s an eternity. It bothered me a lot that I struggled. Why did I suddenly forget it after months of using it without a problem?

Maybe it means it’s time to change it to something like, oh I don’t know… password? What was I thinking using one so difficult at my age? Everyone knows the brain can only hold so much information. Critical stuff like word-for-word dialogue from every Brady Bunch episode, my high school locker combination, and the name of the girl in 4th grade who called me fat once.

That’s it. This brain’s full. I need a new one.

Cleaning out a drawer today, I came across an interesting combination of Christmas pictures taken of me, my sister Ann, and my brother Michael.

When I held them side by side, I noticed something about us had changed between 1971 and 1973:

Christmas, 1971: Michael with good eyes, Ann with good eyes, Kathy with good eyes

New Year’s Day, 1973: Sometime in 1972 we all went blind.

I’ll leave you to pick apart these pictures. Ask anything you want. Let’s start with Ann’s pants.