Stress Management

After living in our house for 6 years we’ve finally put up curtains to replace the beige (originally white), mangled, dusty mini-blinds that made our place look like a cheap rental with an unresponsive absentee landlord. We’re on a tight time budget so we bought tension curtain rods – the sort that require no installation save squishing the rod ends toward one another, sticking the apparatus in the window, letting go and allowing the spring to hold it up. But with the weight of the curtains will it stay up? In our house, you bet. The whole damn place is held together by tension.

The humans of the house have both been a little on edge for the past, oh, four years or so. Well, six years, really, to be fair. Or eight, maybe eight years. Anything before that I’ve deliberately blocked out.

I am capable of controlling my anxiety, especially with a glass of cabernet in one hand and a tube of Xanax-laced cookie dough in the other, but besides those moments of calm, let’s just say I wouldn’t be the world’s greatest air traffic controller. Unless that's how air traffic controllers "get in the zone." As a frequent flyer I really hope that's not the case.

At home I have an excuse for my, shall we call it, excitability. Picture this: Gracie the uptight terrier squealing and frantically pawing at the back door like she’s going to dig right through the glass; the phone ringing, its location unknown (between the cushions of the couch? in a coat pocket? who the fuck knows?); the old cat circling my legs figuring if she trips me I’ll feed her breakfast which consists of gourmet kitty pâté that is not good enough on its own, so it has to be diluted with hot water, blended with a second type of chunkier food, served by the heater vent and guarded from the riff-raff; Sweet William sitting in his room acting like he can’t fly, screaming his high pitched panic CAW! CAW! CAW! that gets higher and faster and higher and faster like a warning signal that any second he’s going to blow. Oh, and I’m late for work. Work. I can’t even talk about the j.o.b. I mean it.

Like me, Gracie is uber-tense. After a few shots of espresso each morning she patrols the perimeter. She runs from one window to the next, rises up on her hind legs like a meerkat, places her sharp little front claws on the already scratched window sill, presses her snotty nose to the glass, and barks at anything in her air space, which extends to the outer limits of her sight and hearing range. The only good part of the process is that every time she hops up to look out the window she audibly farts. I don’t know why farts are funny, but they always are.

For the most part Sweet William knows how to deal with stress. Sometimes he screams like a spoiled 2 year old until he gets what he wants – usually a shoulder to sit on and a sweater to surreptitiously eat a hole out of, other times he finds an expensive textbook, rips it to shit and then takes a crap on it. Charming, I know. And, by the way, he also does that when he’s happy too, so his mood is sometimes a little hard to read. Now don’t you want to get a parrot?