The art of being a grown-up...
Hello my darlings,
Happy Fall! I LOVE this time of year. Cool mornings and warm afternoons, shorter days and finally appropriate weather to enjoy soup. I'm such a dork, but I love soup and it's impossible to enjoy a delicious, hearty chowder when it's 100 degrees outside. Since I don't really like leftovers very much, soup offers me an additional benefit as it is one thing that I actually enjoy eating leftover. With an upcoming weekend that is forecast to be cool and rainy I have been fantasizing about which glorious soup I should make on Sunday. FWIW, my life really is pathetic enough that gray skies and soup are part of a fantasy, there might also be a tall, Italian man in this fantasy, but soup is at least within the realm of possibility.
I officially left my job at the soul-sucking mortgage company on Tuesday, spent the last couple of days running errands and catching up on crap that piled up in the last few weeks/months and today I am relishing in a quiet day at home cleaning and swapping out light summer fabrics for fall colors and warm sweaters. Did i mention that I LOVE FALL!!!! This brief stint of unemployment, coupled with my pre-fall nesting and few hours on the couch with my love, Jen Lancaster "Stories I'd Tell in Bars" has me pondering life as a grown-up. One of the errands on my to do list yesterday was to take my car in for service and get new tires. Mmmm sexy. (eye-roll)
Buying tires is one of those stupid things that no one wants to do, but you do it because you need new tires before you even attempt to drive in the snow that will inevitably fall within the next few weeks/months. Full disclosure, since I've adopted my new, no-driving lifestyle, I am really hoping I can avoid driving entirely when it snows, but I do have brand new all-season tires on my very sensible (and paid for) AWD Volvo wagon. Woooooo this really is shaping up to be one super sexy coffee. (Giant eye-roll) In my previous life, buying tires was a different process. Ray was Mr. Research! He would have googled and compared and price shopped and printed quotes and told me exactly what to buy and how much to spend. There's a good chance he would have even ordered the tires for me. Undoubtedly, I would have taken the car to the shop to have the tires put on, but I would not have made the decision about what tires to buy. Since I suck at being a grown-up all by myself and since researching tires is frankly. a thing I don't even know how or where to begin doing, I did what I do best -- I made an impulsive decision! I called on Wednesday, ordered the only ~$100/ea all-season tire they could have available the next day and made the appointment to drop-off my car. You'll be pleased to know that I was smart enough to have them change the oil and replace my cabin air filter while my car was in, so I don't have to bitch about taking my car in for service again anytime soon. It's only been 3000 miles since my last oil change, but that was in February, so I figured I should just get it done. Now I realize you are probably wondering why in the hell I am blathering on about tires, well, I'm getting there, so just cool your jets and keep reading.
The last few months have been a roller coaster, I finally got all of the financial crap done and handed that off to a fabulous financial planner (XOXO Todd) to make magic happen with my money. (MAGIC Todd, that's what I'm looking for - don't screw this up! No pressure! Pfft) I spent an exorbitant amount of energy wrapping up a project for a manager that I didn't really trust at a company I didn't like all while continuing to plow through the reality of figuring out how to navigate my new big girl life, which, just so happens, to include doing a lot of shit I don't want to do, like buying tires. Additionally, I've had an opportunity to spend some time with fabulous friends and their children. No need to call child protective services, these people aren't fools and they don't trust me alone with these children, though I do think that a couple of them could be pretty great little proteges if provided an opportunity to learn Ronda's Creative Linguistic skills. OK, so maybe don't place the call yet, but if you don't find the idea of children swearing gratuitously endearing, you might just want to keep that child protective services number handy. Anyway, all of these grown-ups that I've hung out with and this grown-up stuff that I've been doing has me realizing that I suck at being a grown-up. In all fairness, I kind of suck at being a human, but I really suck at being a grown-up human. Here are a few things that I've realized about grown-ups.
- Grown-ups (especially the ones with children) do NOT swear gratuitously. I've actually heard them say things like "holy cow" and "are you kidding" without including an f*bomb. Apparently, "holy fukstix" and "are you f*ing joking you moronic asshat" are not included in the grown-up vernacular.
- Grown-ups have the ability to politely observe without interjecting smartass, snarky comments about every mundane occurrence they witness. Somehow these proper adult kind of people are able to witness one curvaceous adult women wearing impossibly tight clothes and ill-fitting undergarments with n'er a "bitch please, what are you wearing" uttered.
- Grown-ups offer a polite retort when confronted with the "this is probably a stupid question..." comment rather than raising one well-manicured eyebrow and snarkily saying "I'd expect nothing less..."
- Grown-ups concern themselves with things like making sure they have bread and milk rather than taking measures to ensure they have a couple of screwtop bottles of wine available just in case they are unable to locate or too drunk to use a corkscrew. FWIW - on my resume where I state that I have "exceptional planning skills" that is a direct reference to screwtop wine! Skillllzzzzzz
- Grown-ups, when asked to bring wine to a dinner party, politely show up with two bottles, one red and one white, rather than arriving early with multiple bags containing approximately one entire shelf from the wine store around the corner. Seriously, when I show up at your house in an Uber with wine, shit's 'bout to get real and we gonna drink some vino! I didn't even bring many varietals, just a lot of different options of Rioja. FWIW Rioja is delicious and the hosts made out really well because after splint a few bottles (way more than the two that an actual polite grown-up would have brought) I left the truck load of wine that I arrived with.
- Grown-ups apparently do not publically declare that they are from a long line of dysfunctional asshats. This is a big cuppa crazy and I thought you all deserved to know why I am like this... Sorry to those of you that are permanently scarred and/or afraid to be in the same time zone with me after that little declaration.
- Some grown-ups are not even aware that asshat is a real word! Obviously, those are only grown-ups that have not yet availed themselves to Ronda's asshattery.
- Grown-ups are able to witness a gaggle of women donning full makeup, and perfectly coiffed hair enjoying lunch wearing yoga pants without having heart palpitations. Full disclosure, as I write this I am sitting at my kitchen counter wearing yoga pants and a Wyoming t-shirt with a rip at the neckline and I haven't washed my hair in two days. Sooooo sexy! But I'm not out in public, so yoga pants are totally acceptable.
- Grown-ups don't threaten to "beat a bitch down" because she experienced a momentary lapse in judgment that allowed her to procure and/or wear sweatpants with words on the ass.
- Grown-ups do not accost waiters with comments like "buckle up son, I don't know if you realize what you are getting yourself into" when the poor kid approaches the table and says (as he has been trained to do) something innocuous like "Hi, my name is Mark and I'll be taking care of you this evening"
- Grown-ups do not utter phrases like "put your big boy panties on" in their out loud voice, in meetings. Though, I bet they'd like too....
- Grown-ups do not laugh hysterically when someone accidentally teaches their toddler to say things like "shut yo ass up" which comes out in toddler babble as "you shut ass!" Hilarious! Seriously, swearing toddlers crack me up. Weird, but the mother of this child didn't find it quite as adorable as I did. Maybe I should have titled this bullet point as "Grown-ups have no sense of humor" so there!
Once again, You are welcome! I too am delighted with my decision to not procreate because what the world needs now is NOT more of this brand of nonsense. While it's obvious that I suck at being a grown-up and I probably won't ever achieve anything that actually looks, acts or sounds like a proper grown-up I manage to have a pretty good time and you all know that I laugh, a lot, so maybe it's not such a bad thing that I leave the "grown-up thing" to all of you, er wait, some of you, hmmm probably a few of you! Don't you roll your eyes at me! You know who you are and you ain't grown-ups either.
Until next time...
XOXO
PS - this is a completely extraneous PS because I've had a couple of people question me using PPS versus PSS. PS is short for Post-Script, so PPS is POST-Post-Script. PSS would be Post-Script-script and that wouldn't make any sense at all.
PPS - I do realize that most of the PS's I add are completely extraneous, but verbosity is a thing I do and I do it well. XOXO