Cry me a river

The sun is out, but instead of providing some mid-winter energy, it is serving merely to highlight the fact that it has been a long time since the Windex and the windows have made their acquaintance, a fact that I studiously ignore in favor of reading a copy of Vogue from March 2006. I had the same kind of day yesterday, perpetually feeling at loose ends. I started today with a different attitude, even dressing myself and the children by 9 a.m., but when the ATM said my PIN was wrong so I couldn't withdraw cash for the bread store and Frankie belatedly announced she had to pee RIGHT NOW, I gave up and turned the car around. Now Frankie is watching a full length animated movie for the second time in as many days while eating a Whopper Junior and periodically wiping away green snot on her shirtsleeves. Both kids are not fit for human companionship because of their juicy nasal discharge and hacking coughs and yesterday I didn't even manage to get them out of their pajamas. The beds aren't made, the towels are on the bathroom floor, the baby was eating chocolate chips off a kitchen floor so littered with food particles that it looks more like a graham cracker pie crust than a wooden walking surface. Add in four loads of washed but unfolded laundry, five loads of unwashed and unfolded laundry, and a refrigerator with only a bag of brussel sprouts and three eggs. Plus something smells in there. Then top it with a woman who needs a haircut and a pair of jeans that buttons and you have a picture of my current mental state. I know, get some real problems, get a set of octuplets or cholera or a missile through the front door, but I need just a moment to wallow in my privileged middle-class problems.