Disenchanted

Things are going wrong in our little rental house.

Just in the past week, the air conditioning unit revealed itself to be older than Pants and me put together and far too small for the house since its various add-ons. Then the breakers kept popping, randomly, and various outlets and appliances, most notably the refrigerator, would lapse into eery, silent death. It's weird to have to keep checking things when the place seems too quiet. Then yesterday the thermo-coupling (??) on the water heater went out and Pants and I had to take angry cold showers in preparation for work/interviews.

At each new and irritating event, we called our property manager, who has a wispy princess voice and a talent for seeming perpetually bewildered. I picture her sitting in a bower of trees, shaded from the harsh light of the sun and weaving garlands of daisies for her hair. Occasionally a blue bird or a butterfly will light upon her outstretched finger and she'll sing it a little song. Then, from somewhere deep in the patch of clover by her side, a phone rings. Startled, she drops the garland, and the blue bird cocks its head in curiosity and perches on her shoulder as she gently lifts the receiver and says, breathlessly, "Hello...? [Our Town] Real Estate?"

And on the other end is me, sweating in the dark and constantly yanking open the refrigerator door to make sure my lunch meat isn't going bad. Luckily, Pants has no qualms about using the No Bullshit voice with this woman, so while my attempts to garner her empathy ("I have an interview in two hours and no hot water to take a shower") inevitably fail, his implicit threat to burn down her magical unicorn grove somehow gets through. We now have an new air conditioner, a replaced breaker, and in another 30 to 40 minutes, hot water.

Tomorrow I have another interview, a second one for a job I really, really want. My task is to prepare a five minute presentation on anything in the world, and be interesting, memorable, and engaging. In theory, this sounds doable, but when I started to scroll through my list of possible topics-- Tupac, crazy dictators, infectious skin diseases, and famous people eaten by bears-- I started to realize how very much time I've spent alone in the past few weeks. Where was I when they were teaching charming skills like napkin folding?

So today is for cramming and hyperventilating and self doubt. Then tomorrow morning I will run another 4.5 miles and ride the tide of endorphins into the presentation reminding myself that it's only five minutes, it's only a job, it's only... Christ, it's only a job?

Still, there are other options. Downtown there's a bright orange sphere on wheels from which a bored, sweaty college kid sells orange-flavored chipped ice. The hinges on the orange open at the middle and he sits inside with little more room than a golf cart's interior would offer. Throughout the afternoon, he periodically gets out of his orange ball and rotates the stand so that the sun is partially blocked by the top half of the orange. But in order to stay completely in the shade, he'd have to turn his stand's back to the street, so there's a good hour and a half there where he sits in his orange, squinting and baking and possibly hating God. So there's always that.

Back to cramming...