Dishwashers and irony

Today my mind is all over the place. So...here goes.

While my mother still thinks of me as the 8-year-old who would push the clothes under the bed in order to "clean" my room, my friends think I'm quite anal when it comes to cleaning.

The past few days I've been a bit lax. Several reasons. My annual New Years Eve doldrums and the fact that the furnace was blowing like crazy but there was no heat, so, I was huddled under big blankets, a dog and two cats for the past few days.

Today I came down and decided to get my rear in gear. I had a few dishes in the sink (a boatload by my standards) that needed to go into the dishwasher. I opened the dishwasher and saw the most discombobulated mess of glasses and other items in the top rack. My roommate's style. Of course all I saw was wasted space and a challenge to rearrange everything in order to double the machine's capacity. A personal victory. I fit it all in.

Then I got to thinking about how one learns to load the dishwasher. It certainly wasn't a part of home ec. way back when. We washed the dishes by hand. And as my roommate is many years younger than I, I don't even think they required home ec. when she was in school. I'm pretty sure that my mother drilled me and my sister in the art of loading the dishwasher. But that was my mother. Do other people's mothers teach them this life skill?

Back to the furnace. After two days of barely 60 degree internal temperatures, I called the repair man today. About ten minutes later the furnace blower kicked in and I felt heat! Why is it that every time you call someone to fix something, the thing that needs fixing decides to work? You know damned well that as soon as the repair guy leaves, the item will stop working again. I think there is someone in the great beyond that controls these things. I'll bet in some ways he's like the Joker in Batman - manipulating machines everywhere for his own amusement all the while tormenting the owner.

I also think this is the same being that knows exactly when your car's warranty expires. At one second past midnight on the day it expires, he presses a big button that makes your car fall apart.

As I mentioned, I spent the past few days trying to stay warm. I rented season 5 of the L-Word as I don't get Showtime. Great eye-candy on that show. Watching those women got me to thinking about Ellen DeGeneres and Portia DiRossi.

I'm such a hopeless romantic. I've looked at their wedding photos about a million times. Portia looked just like a princess in her gown with the pink toile skirt. What a beautiful woman. And Ellen was looking damn good in her ivory ensemble. But what really get's to me each time I look at the video or pictures is the look in their eyes. Such encompassing love and happiness.

My Myers-Briggs and Tarot readings both describe me as having equally strong logical (Emperor) and dreamer (Fool) qualities. My Emperor and Fool are constantly fighting. My Fool dreaming of my princess and dancing with my dad at my wedding. My Emperor running around with a big pin to pop the bubble.

I wonder, in the end, who will win.