Annoyance | Annie Fox's Blog

Day 10: I don’t want to be here

June 18, 2009

Now that's a safe place to park

My Annoyance Challenge continues. (Huff, puff, grrrrrrr, $#@%! ) David’s getting with the program too. The other day while we were driving, I was grumbling about something. What was it? Hmmm. Ah yes! Well, now that I actually remember, it’s too embarrassing to mention…. too petty and infantile. You say you want to hear it anyway? Allll-riiiiight. Might as well. Otherwise my good standing in Bloggers for Ultimate Truth-Telling (BUTT) might be unseated. (NOTE: This sentence doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but wouldn’t it have made a great image if it had?)

Here’s what happened: We were on our way to meet Ezra and Sarah to check out a possible wedding venue. We were early and had temporarily parked a few miles from the place while David fiddled with his iPhone (yes there’s an iPod app) trying to cue up the book on CD we were listening to. Because it’s got 211 tracks and lost the bookmark where we’d left off in the story we had a problem.

D: “Was this the place?” (narrator reads…)

A: “No, we already heard that part about the decomposed yellow dress.”

D: “How about this? Sound familiar?” (narrator reads…)

A: “Uh… Franks’ ex-wife the manicurist? I don’t think so. No, wait. We did hear this.”

D: “How about this?” (narrator reads…)

A: “I dunno. Whatever! It’s fine.”

D: “No. No. I remember that part with the old guy’s coughing fit.”

A: “So we’ll hear it again!! Who cares, David?! Let’s just get going!!!”

A bit over the top, I’ll admit it… now. Then, I was just, you know, completely unconscious and irrational, like most of us are too much of the time. But my sweet guy didn’t get sucked into my nastiness. He just calmly looked up from his iPhone and said, “You’re annoyed. Why don’t you do whatever you do when you’re annoyed (so you can drop it)?”

His pointing out the obvious actually woke me up. I took a slow deep breath, then let it out slowly. (That diminishes my embarrassment after I’ve made a fool of myself.)

A: “Honey, I don’t feel safe parked here. I want us to drive to the wedding place… now.”

Telling the truth has a way of getting me back on track. Coincidentally, at that same instant David located the right track. With our story cued up, we pulled away from the curb and moved on into the next chapter.

Filed under: Annoyance Challenge,Parenting — Tags: Annoyance — Annie @ 12:12 pm

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Day 5: Send in the clouds

June 12, 2009

A grand night for dancing

If you’ve got a good reason to be annoyed, but honestly you’re not, does it still count?

That’s what I asked myself this afternoon, Day 5 of The Annoyance Challenge, as I sat on the low wall looking out into the school parking lot knowing I might have an hour to kill before David returned to pick me up. Normally at this time I’d be mentoring an 8th grader, but today, she stood me up after calling on Wednesday to let me know that she wasn’t going to make it to our weekly Thursday meeting and then agreeing to reschedule for today. And yet… after David dropped me off to do a Trader Joe’s run (we were out of chocolate) it became clear that my mentee had gone straight home without telling me or the afterschool program director. In her defense, tonight is the 8th grade graduation dance and I’m pretty sure our meeting wasn’t on her mind as she rushed home to get ready.

Of course I called David to update him on my situation, but he wasn’t answering his iPhone. (Can someone please explain what is the point of having a phone that can shoot video and find you the nearest Korean BBQ if you don’t pick it up when your wife is sitting in a parking lot trying to reach you?) I suppose I should have been annoyed by all this, but I wasn’t. Could it be that after only five days of The Annoyance Challenge I was no longer annoy-able? Nah. More likely I was just in a good mood because it was a lovely Friday afternoon in June, I knew David would be back for me in less than an hour and… I love clouds.

Waaay up there were the high wispy ones (AKA mares’ tails). And there and there and there… so many bunched up little pouffy puffs, no wonder they’re called les moutons, ie., French for “sheep.” How cute is that? And to the north, wow! Such strange and wondrously shaped celestial masses you’d swear they’d been air-brushed.

Four hours later across the Bay, David and I walked back to the car after a fine meal at an Indian restaurant and spotted a shard of rainbow in the eastern sky, illuminated by the setting sun. It was a perfect night for a 13 year old to dance her heart out.