Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never by Lancaster, Jen (e books free to read .txt) 📕

I need to remind anyone of how I once considered hiding a bucket in the first floor pantry of our old town house rather than climbing twelve stairs to the bathroom?)

(Fletch wouldn’t let me, by the way, which is bullshit because I have a pretty good idea of what went down in the mop sink when Fletch would drink beer in his basement man cave.)

Anyway, I came up with a rather elegant solution. I’d buy a case of water and store it upstairs. Ergo I’d never get thirsty to the point of dizziness again. Genius! [A tiny bit pathetic, but mostly genius!]

I bought the water, brought it upstairs, and deposited it on the guest bathroom counter where it was profoundly in the way for the next few days. Although I shower in the master bathroom down the hall, I do everything else in here. Fletch is a bona fide bathroom hog and there’s nothing more annoying than having to stay up an extra half hour waiting to floss while he’s busy reading War and Peace on the mug. [If anyone out there shares a bathroom with her husband, I implore you to either move to a larger space or add on to your existing space because this is the key to marital bliss.]

The problem with my genius solution is that I had to work around the bulky case when I brushed my teeth, washed my face, conducted whisker patrol, [Shut up.] etc., so I needed to find a place to store it. I thought the laundry room might work, but it was so tiny that I’d have to rearrange everything in the cabinets and that smacked of the exact type of effort I hoped to avoid.

Turns out the solution to my problem was right next to me. I drew back the shower curtain in front of the unused guest tub and placed the case in there, spic, span, and out of the way. Added bonus? If one of the bottles started to leak, the water would go right down the drain. Again, genius!

When Fletch arrived home, I proudly whipped open the curtain to show him where I’d stashed the water.

He slowly looked from the case to me. After a long pause, he finally responded, “You’ve decided to store items in an empty tub. Congratulations. You’ve just taken the first step to seeing yourself on Hoarders in twenty years.”

I moved the bottles. I’d rather be thirsty than on TV for the wrong reasons.

I’m so lost in thoughts about accidentally becoming one of those cat-flattening hoarders [There’s always at least one flat cat on those shows. Always.] that the woman in the doorway has to clear her throat to grab my attention.

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. What can I do for you?” This lady is part of the team busy packing up our house for the move. We thought we could do it all ourselves but we quickly became so bogged down in the decision-making process that we fell behind schedule and had to call in experts.

The packer appears somewhat perplexed, which is odd. Thus far she’s known how to pack everything from CD collections to a free-range assortment of Christmas ornaments. Fletch and I have been awed for the past day as she and her crew systematically disassemble every bit of our house, so I wonder what could have possibly thrown her off her game.

“Ma’am, what would you like for me to do with… your head?”

She holds up my blond, bodiless Barbie styling head, ordered one night years ago while on an Ambien trip. I’ve since learned that I can’t be trusted to be near a computer while on prescription sleeping medication, so I made sure to move my computer as far away from my bed as possible. (In fact, in the new house, my office will live on an entirely different floor.)

As for the Barbies, I simply tell everyone that I’m a collector. Of course, true collectors never take their prizes out of the box to see if they can finally master the art of cutting bangs, but whatever.

“Just give it to me and I’ll deal with it,” I say all businesslike and officious, quickly stuffing Barbie into one of the bags we’re moving ourselves. Then I try to look busy so she doesn’t ask why a forty-two-year-old woman is still playing with dolls.

While I attempt to chisel apart my office supplies, it occurs to me:

I should find a more grown-up hobby.

Between moving and unpacking and settling into my first real home, I sort of forget about my deep and abiding love of all things Barbie. I still keep my Mad Men Barbies on display because they’re so impeccably assembled. I mean, Miss Joan is wearing a tiny bustier and seamed stockings! Betty has a wee gold compact with a mirror inside! That’s just badass at any age. But the rest of my collection lives in the closet and has seen the light of day only when friends’ daughters have visited.

I can’t say that I fell out of love with my Barbies but there’s something about writing my first mortgage check that made me go, “You know what? Not so into the toys anymore.”

Plus, many of the enriching activities I learned about while writing My Fair Lazy actually stuck. Turns out I’d rather spend time crafting my own elaborate updo than Barbie’s, particularly when it means I’m going somewhere fancy; convenient because… Joanna and I are opera aficionados now!

Okay, by aficionados, I mean we went once but we both seriously dug it! The thing no one tells you about the opera is how many cocktail breaks are involved. With multiple intermissions, one never needs to lose one’s buzz and champagne makes everything better.

We saw A Masked Ball in December and were absolutely taken by the spectacle of it all. Between the music and the costumes and the set, the whole night left us breathless. [Oh, and we found out my friend Caprice was wrong and it actually isn’t appropriate