Hattie's Midnight Madness

It is late at night when the most insane nuggets of my psyche wake up and start to torment those around me.

And the vast majority of the time, it is Man who is privy to these certifiably insane outbursts. We will have done our normal bedtime routine, turned the lights off and then perhaps begun discussing things we are doing the next day, or gently remind each other about some chore which needs attention. We'll kiss each other good night and assume our own favoured positions for a speedy entry into Sleepsville.

However, occasionally, I am still hyperactive and cannot stand the silence, so I decide I need to introduce a riveting topic which will ensure he stays awake to keep me company just a little bit longer.





'Honey, you know trees?'

'I'm vaguely familiar with them'.

'Cool, well, what would it be like if there weren't any trees?'

'What'. (Let me be clear, this is always a statement, not an actual question).

'What would it be li-'

'No, I heard you, I just can't quite believe you're asking me that question'.

'But why? It's an interesting topic'.

'Look up the word interesting'.

'THAT IS MEAN'.

'You're 26. Now go to sleep.'

'Your face is 26. YOU go to sleep.'

He rolls onto his back and exhales. 'That makes no sense whatsoever'.

'So's your face'.

'What? That makes even less sense. You were making no sense at all and now by making even less sense, the sense you are making has negative properties'.

'You know what else has negative properties? Electrons. They buzz around the nucleus that is full of protons and Chemistry is so awesome I wish I was a scientist so I could do science all the time. Also I love pipettes and Bunsen Burners so it'd be like having fun all day with dangerous chemicals! I could melt stuff and make things explode and shit. I could win a Nobel Prize and spend all the money on sweets and toys! You know once I got sent to the headmistress's office for writing 'pooh' on the back of a girl's lab coat in chemistry class with distilled water'.

'Great'.

'It really was. You know what else was great?'

'Try not talking'.

My insatiable desire to win and glee at the prospect of acheiving something, no matter how small, will see me not talking with so much energy and excitement that my stiffly inert yet buzzing mass in the bed becomes more annoying than my actual voice.

He gives in. 'I can hear you trying to win'.

Silence. Then a little voice, 'See, I did not talking. I win.'

'Oh God, WHAT have I DONE?!' His anguished voice pierces the still night, and I know with unshakeable certainty that this is one of the unfortunately not rare moments when he begins to seriously question his major life choices, namely sharing his house and his future with a real life infant woman.

I rebut with a whiney 'Whhhaaaaaaaaat?'. It starts at a tone slightly higher than my normal speaking voice, descends slightly then plummets to a much lower resonance, a good octave and a bit below, then begins to slowly climb again. I can draw it out for a good 8 seconds and sounds not unlike a vuvuzela.

Silence.

I go on. 'Do you still like me?'

He then begins to plea, as if for his very life. 'For the love of everything holy, I am begging you, PLEASE just SHUT the FUCK UP!' The words fall on deaf ears, however, as one of the many weapons in my ever irritating arsenal is my ability to fall asleep in a matter of seconds. I have the last laugh, as he is wide awake and will stay that way long after the echoes of our infuriating conversation have ebbed away, due to a combination of unbridled exasperation and my unconscious habit of chewing ferociously in my sleep.




Win!

Hattie moves house

Hello everyone!

I have been absent of late because I've been moving house. Well, I've been living with my Man for months now, and have been subletting my flat, but the time has come for me to permanently vacate. I have been drip feeding my new digs with Hattie paraphernalia over the last several weeks and am now fully at home at our house :)

BUT, and this is a big but. So big in fact that Sir Mix-a-Lot would get a bonk on for it; I am a hoarder of the highest degree, which has single-handedly provoked a series of low fat nervous breakdowns.

Let me start from the beginning: Man asks me to move in in January. A couple of months later I have spent enough time alone in my flat smoking cigarettes, playing Nintendo and watching old episodes of Jonathan Creek whilst doing face masks and trying on ludicrous outfits that I am ready to bid a fond farewell to those days of shameless virtual singledom in favour of co-habiting with my man. A few months go by and we decide to make it permanent and cease my tenancy at my old place.

"Sure," I say, "it'll take no time at all. I've just got a couple of boxes of old school reports that I can store at my Dad's place".

This is how I thought things would be:


And this is how things actually were:



I had gravely underestimeated the amount of shit I needed to pack, and I'd been foolhardy enough to grandly presume that I could handle this monumental feat all by myself. Roughly 37 hours of packing and 19 large boxes later, I was still not totally finished and have had 2 or 3 fairly worrying psychological meltdowns. You simply would not believe the crap I have accumulated over the years - it has become patently obvious that I have a pathological inability to throw ANYTHING away. Old cracked pencil without a rubber? Yeah, I might need it one day, even though I haven't used a pencil since I was 7! Dog eared yellowed note pad with only 3 or 4 sheets left? Keep it, it's not good to waste stuff! A bit of frayed packaging string? Do NOT throw that away, you'll need it in a string emergency! And so on with a plethora of other useless dregs that have amassed into a metric fuck ton of a scrap heap that's so intrinsically overwhelming that I found myself in the foetal position, rocking gently and humming to myself on more than one occasion.

How the fuck did I manage to get through 26, almost 27 years of my life without seemingly ever throwing a single thing into the bin? Do I have a secret hatred of bins? Actually I kind of do - when I was 6, I was jumping on the bed having a great time and next thing I know I am plummeting head first into a wooden bin which left me bloodied and permanently scarred after a hasty visit to the emergency room and 3 stitches.

So I have spent a vast majority of the past few weeks throwing my life time of trash into endless heavy duty refuse sacks.

This needs some math! I would say I spend an average of 5 minutes and 23 seconds throwing things away every day.

Putting on man's coffee and emptying old filter into bin - 7 seconds.
Scraping cereal dregs into bin - 11 seconds.
Cleansing face and binning cotton pads/buds - 5 seconds
Sorting through junk amassed in bag from previous day and putting in bin - 2 minutes
Sorting recycling and putting in recycling bin - 2 minutes
General daytime rubbish to be put in bin - approx 1 minute.

This is pretty much how long I spend each day throwing things away (not including emptying Dex's litter once a week - 5 minutes - and act of emptying rubbish and taking out to garbage cans - about 10 minutes per week).

So that's 5 mins 23 seconds x 7 = 37 mins 41 secs, plus 15 mins = 52 mins 41 secs per week throwing out garbage.

52 mins 41 secs x 52 = 2740 mins per year = 46 hours per year

46x27 = 1,242 HOURS IN MY LIFE SO FAR SPENT THROWING OUT GARBAGE. That's 51 days and 18 hours. 7.4 weeks. Almost two months. All spent throwing out garbage - but of course I haven't been doing that until I moved house. So I have essentially spent the last two solid months throwing out garbage, and not doing anything else.

Of course I haven't actually done that, but I can assure you, that is exactly how it has felt. And that is why I have been so absent of late, and also why I have had a few fairly serious mental breakdowns.

The moral of the story is to always throw things away if you don't use them. Also, never, ever move house without hiring someone to do it for you! May this be a lesson to you all, children.


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