I have a new embroidery project underway. This involves hours of pushing and pulling a needle through fabric. It is meditative, and it has the added bonus of creating something tangible. Beautiful, even.
The three maxims currently guiding me, in all my granola-ness, are:
“Don’t take anything personally.” (aka the second of The Four Agreements.)
“You gotta do what makes you happy.” Quote by Leif from Animal Crossing, although I am sure he stole that quote from someone else. That shady fucker. (Just kidding, he’s cute and I love him.)
“Anything is a better use of your time than doomscrolling.”
I’m getting used to being untethered from my phone, but my friends have yet to become accustomed to the idea that I’ve become that person who goes for hours without looking at their phone. In everyday life, my phone is an accessibility tool. I type on it every day to communicate with people. For some people in my life, it became a crutch. They didn’t see a need to learn sign language, especially those who use a speech-to-text app for one-on-one conversations. I can’t force anyone to learn, but after a year or two, it gets me thinking, “You really consider us friends?“
I got the courage to ask the roomie today, in writing, what his intentions were when he apologized to me last year for not making more of an effort to learn sign language. He was stunned and withdrew to his bedroom.
Awkward. But, hey, I had feelings that needed to be felt out.
The unemployment, the phone detox, and embroidery have all restored a level of calmness I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Being alone with my thoughts this much has not been without pangs of sadness. Another sad memory was manifested by my recent visit to a tile store. I asked one of the three people behind a reception desk (there wasn’t anyone on the sales floor) whether they sold cool tiles individually (yes, I specified “cool”). I, valued customer, wish to purchase 4-6 cool tiles to use as coasters.
One of the administrative tile people guided me out the fire exit (!) and into a separate storage room outside, where they then started rummaging through a tub of scrap tiles.
“Is she planning on giving these to me for free?” I wondered.
Carrying a stack of about 10 tiles, they guided us back into the showroom and laid them out on the counter. None of them were cool. If they meant to give them away for free, they should have paid me to take them away.
As I sat hunched over my embroidery hoop, reminiscing about my recent experience popping into a tile shop as an unlikely customer and being temporarily stunned by the prices of some of the tiles, I thought about the astronomical cost of redecorating one’s home.
My parents were serial redecorators. My parents redecorated every room in both of the houses I grew up in, including my bedroom, even though I didn’t want to lose the clouds-and-birds wallpaper. I cried as my parents ripped it off the wall. The finished product was nauseatingly girly: pastel heart-patterned wallpaper split by a white-painted wood trim, with pastel pink walls on the upper half. At the time, I didn’t hate it: the clouds and birds were definitely better.
As I continued sitting hunched over my embroidery project, I could feel the soreness in my legs from this morning’s ride. I remembered my parents telling me that cost was a barrier to enrolling me in extracurricular sports. “Sorry, we just spent $1,000 on retiling the upstairs bathroom because your mother wanted a sea-themed washroom. No swim club for you this year.”
We kept a basket of seashells on the counter next to the water pick. It was not even a reference to Demolition Man: just a basket of dead mollusks that my parents scavenged from Long Beach.
Despite not having the money to purchase more than 4-6 individual tiles at a time, I am enjoying adulthood and the freedom it affords. Tomorrow morning I’ll go swimming. The pool is a five-minute walk, and I can afford it.
squaremeat.com 