Finding The Shard.

Some people are just damn unpleasant.  Even when conversation with them is fine in the moment; with them, you just know it’s going to turn unpleasant soon.  You generally can’t even refer to it as ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’  because …well, not only do you know what’s going to happen with that idiom,  it just does not strike me as *bad*.  In the slightly twisted words of John Bender  “…. fall all the time. The world is an imperfect place.”  With the people I’m talking about, it’s almost always bad, right?

I got to thinking about this while I started shopping for a new vacuüm cleaner.  This seems a random subject for shopping for a vacuüm, yes?  I agree, but this is where I’m at. Let me share how I got from point A to point B.

Last night,  I was sitting around chatting with my lovely.  She’d been away so we were playing catch-up and gossiping.  About 10 days earlier,  I had changed the bulb in the hallway, and evidently,  I had not reattached the fixture correctly.  Hence, during Lovely Times, it fell off the screws and shattered on the hallway floor.  Damn it!

Most Important thing:  No Blood.  Not from the kitties. and most importantly, not mine.  This is a pretty tall order and much more clear if you know me, as  I’m not the most graceful person in the world.  So I’m immediately doing these… contortions to reach over the mess of glass to the pool shoes I have laying in the doorway of my bedroom.  Then I have to shake them out vigorously to obsessively check for glass.   At the same moment, my cat, Renée, is jumping up and down *in* the glass like a tiny fakir.

I get the shoes on and down on my hands and knees, picking up the larger hunks of glass first.  Lazy Layla gets tired of that very quickly, though. And since my attention is focused there, the cat is RIGHT THERE in the center of it all.  One of my less brilliant ideas in quite a while, leaves me grabbing the vacuüm and sucking it all up.  I’m fairly certain, if I didn’t also mess up the motor somehow, I definitely destroyed the belt.

I spend the rest of the evening 1. wearing my stupid shoes, feeling trapped and stifled.  I can not think of many things that are more wrong than shoes worn inside.  And 2.  being compelled to abandon my Lovely conversation every 2 minutes to go stand in the hallway and peer at the floor.  I was looking for the “Forgotten Shard.”  It happens every time I break something glass.  I miss a piece and slice my foot open.

Which, for a change, brings me squarely back around to my point.  Talking to those people is often quite like that.  You know it’s there.  And any moment you’re going to be minding your own business and feel a sudden sting, generally accompanied with quite a lot of blood.

~ by Layla on July 26, 2011.