how do you drive this thing?

This morning I had a very difficult time getting dressed. And for once, I don't mean that in the very girlie sense of being rendered incapable of picking out which shirt to wear or which shoes work to make my ass look better. I mean it literally. Physically. In the way that a 2-year-old has a difficult time getting dressed.

Everything was just out of whack. I plugged in the iron then tripped on the cord, sending the dangerous hunk of junk crashing to the floor in the immediate direction of my naked, defenseless toes. Amusingly, my defense is to scrunch up my naked, defenseless toes, as if this will make the impact of a heavy, flat piece of metal hurt less. So at the last nanosecond, I jumped upward and away from the iron, and watched it crash to the floor leaking the water that should instead be converting itself to steam at this time.

After cleaning up the iron debacle, I walked over to my closet to pick out pieces. I then realized they were all piled in a heap on a chair in the other room, so I went back. I pulled out some not-too-bad smelling pants, and grabbed a collared shirt and a v-neck sweater. Okay. Hard girlie part is over.

I ironed the pants with a great deal of difficulty, largely due to the non-existence of an actual ironing board. Mine's a long, distorted pentagon that lays upon my bed (or other horizontal surface) and pretends to be an ironing board. It's about half as long as one of my pant legs, which means that for each pair of pants I must iron, flip, rotate, shift, and tangle myself a minimum of nine times.

Once the pants are relatively wrinkle-free, I put them on one leg at a time, but not without first doing the "clean the dirty feet" ritual, which basically involves me standing on one leg, brushing the bottom of one foot against the top of the other foot in the hopes that whatever foreign objects I've picked up between the shower and now don't make it onto the inside of my pant leg only to gross me out and tickle me later. But often this ritual is severely risky, usually during the transfer when one leg is panted, and the other foot is dirty. It requires sheer amounts of balance and coordination, neither of which I possess. So in most cases, I teeter to the left or right, which isn't too bad now that I've learned to be near to a bed or wall at the time.

Pants on (Pants!), shirt on, I'm bustling around my sweltering apartment doing hair, makeup, packing my bag, waiting until the final moment to put on my sweater so I don't, well, sweat right through it. So finally the moment comes, and I excitedly grab the sweater from its hanger, clip off its tag (while neatly maintaining the little plastic pieces for disposal so as not to step on it later and think a) my father was right and b) I have to do the dirty foot ritual again), and pull the fabric over my head.

And...stop. I stood hunched, scowling at myself in the full-length mirror, wondering how I could have gone so wrong so quickly. I double checked that my head went through the head hole, which I was pleased to see it did, even though it would have been much more amusing to tell you I stuck it through a sleeve hole. But something was happening with the way the fabric was stretching and folding, and I was tangled up beyond all recognition.

After some fancy acrobatics and contortionism, I managed to get the sweater down far enough to stick my left arm through the left sleeve hole, realizing at the last minute that the sweater sleeves were 3/4 length and my shirt was 4/4 length. (Fashion error? Or trendy layering?) so dealing with the whole one long sleeve inside another long sleeve was causing me great pain, and yet I was only halfway there.

By now, of course, my hair is at full static tilt, and I look like someone has been rubbing a balloon on my head for the last 20 minutes. I twisted, snarled, tugged, and contorted my right arm into the right sleeve, and was amazed to see in the mirror that I was still so very, very far from finished. I pulled the sweater's armpits up into place, unfurled the rolled up fabric to cover my stomach, and danced around like someone with a hive full of bees stinging their ass. But I can proudly say, after all that, I finally got the sweater on, properly, right-side in, tags in the back, and armpits properly aligned.

Later, when I undress, I am taking the whole finagled mess off in one piece, and will never wear this sweater with anything else, because frankly, I don't think I can go through that again. Not, at least, without some adult supervision.