I’m flying off to Long Beach tomorrow to visit with my Shanghai bestie Pamela, and holy shit, this is a much-needed vacation. Yes, you may recall that I had a “vacation” over the Christmas holiday; well, let me remind you: family time does NOT equal vacation. Enough said.

I’m stoked for my little trip. To be honest, things at home have kind of been a buzz kill… today was John’s first day out of work (he gave notice at the beginning of the year), and he stayed home while the window contractors replaced our original, untempered single pane casements with new energy-efficient sliders.

I wanted him to talk to the contractors about repairing shoddy stucco work done by a previous contractor. Could he ask them about it? Nope. He’d rather just live with a shoddy stucco job than inquire the cost to fix. Whatever.

So sure, he was captive to the home all day, but you know what? Except for one afternoon at the windows showroom, he didn’t have to do any of the vendor research, meetings, and scheduling. And just like that, voila! New windows in the bedrooms.

I went home for lunch today, ate the leftovers he reheated, and the sink was full of dirty dishes. I started cleaning up. There was a mostly used jar of minced garlic by the sink. I thought we could still get garlic out of it, but he considered the jar done, so fine. It sat by the sink for days. Today, I told him to recycle the jar, and then he started asking whether the jar really needed to be rinsed out. It takes 10 seconds to rinse the goddamn jar. Supposedly, he was just asking because it wastes water to rinse the jar, and if in the end, it doesn’t matter for recycling purposes anyway, why bother? Are you fucking kidding me? If he wants to learn more about the glass recycling process, go right ahead. He has a Mac Pro, an iPad, and an iPhone to research to his heart’s desire. But you know what? It’s 10 seconds to rinse the jar and put it in the recycle bin. Save me the lazy-ass bullshit about saving water. I know he doesn’t give a fuck about the environment.

This is what I have to deal with on a daily basis. Bullshit. So as much as I myself feel inspired to do more, every day I’m faced with bullshit like this. Stupid, simple little things that I have to debate every single time. It’s exhausting, and like I said: all the work of living alone without the benefits. Now it’s very late Friday night, and I’m still pissed. He went to bed hours ago.

Needless to say, it’ll be refreshing to hang with my kindred spirit. We’re going to shop, commiserate, watch Blue Valentine, get pedicures, go for walks by the Ocean… it’ll be a whirlwind two days and then I’ll be all rested and ready for more bullshit come Monday night.