Happy Mediums & Animal Friends

I'm really bad at finding them. Happy mediums, I mean. Most pertinent example at this moment: time management. Never been a strong point of mine. My mind runs on "chill" mode for a vast majority of the time, and always has.
When I was little, my mom would assign me to clean the bathroom mirrors. Quick job right? Yeah. Thirty minutes later she would find me sitting on the bathroom counter, spraying glass cleaner on the mirror and commentating each drip's race to the bottom of the glass. Working with a "sense of urgency" at a new job is probably always the most difficult thing for me to accomplish. I'm a smart girl. I'm good at stuff. But not fast paced kind of stuff. I would like to be a real go getter, the kind of person that others look at and think, "Wow, I want her on my team!" But unless that team's major goals are relaxation techniques, learning the complete opposite of multi-tasking, braiding hair, or perhaps singing, I don't think many people have thought that. Which is fine. I think there's a lot to be said for never being high strung. I'll probably live longer than high strung people, and I'm probably more pleasant to be around in stressful situations. So keep that in mind if you're bad at french braiding. You definitely want me on your team.

Another example of not finding a happy medium (a sad medium?): Dinner time lately. Whatever concoction I come up with in the kitchen is either wonderfully delicious or a complete bomb. My most recent mess-up? Grilled cheese. I can handle delicious home-made lasagnas, enchiladas, perfectly spiced roasted veggies, asparagus chicken rollups... but not one-ingredient sandwiches, apparently. Boyd ended up opening a can of beans and eating them for dinner. Bahah. Yikes.


Now this has absolutely nothing to do with finding life balance, but it was on my mind the other day.
Last week I overheard a classmate talking about how her son gets to take care of his class pet for the summer. It's a hamster, and he's very excited about the whole thing. Well, it took me back to the summer when I was given the honored responsibility of taking care of my class pet. It was the summer after 4th grade, and I had been chosen to take care of our Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. Until this moment, it has never occurred to me to ask my mom how she felt about it. Actually, until this moment, it has never occurred to me that perhaps I was chosen because no one else's mom was okay with it. I vaguely recall starting out with two of them, but I think one died while in my care. And I think it was the female one (the girls are smaller than the boys). But gosh, I thought it was just the coolest thing ever. I would watch him scurry around his plastic aquarium with the blue lid, blazing trails through the wood chips that covered the floor, over his big gray rock, and through the pickle-jar lid that I faithfully (ha) kept full of water. And yes, I would even take him out and let him crawl around my room, hold him and stroke his back - his 3 inch long, 1 inch wide smooth brown back. That was the coolest part. You can't really enjoy a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach without being willing to hold it. Because when you touch it, it does exactly what its name suggests. It hisses. A loud, threatening or warning type of hiss. But for my 4th, almost 5th grade self, it was a very entertaining and fascinating hiss. I loved that cockroach.

Actually, now that I'm thinking of it, would you like to know what my very first pet was? A slug. Yes. My sister and I were probably digging around in the dirt while Mom was working in the garden or something, and we successfully captured and tamed two wild slugs to be our faithful pets. We filled two small shoebox lids with dirt, my slug in one and my sister's in the other. Our first pets ever. We were so excited. We kept them right outside the front door. We went outside to check on them, we stirred around the dirt in the box lids so they wouldn't get bored with their surroundings, we held them and were so proud when they pooped out dirt. All of this tender loving care for a whole 24 hours... Until the next morning when we came out to check on them and the summer heat had dried their nice moist dirt to sandy clumps. And that was the end of our slugs.

The one other pet I experienced during my childhood was a tiny little water frog whom I named Prince, given to me by my sister who still understood the yearning for animal companionship that neither of us were granted by our parents. He was so cute, although I couldn't touch him. He swam happily in his little aquarium for about a year and half until his time on Earth was over and I found him belly up. He had swum his last swim.

As crushing as it was to not have the fun, cuddly kind of pets growing up, I have this horrible sneaking suspicion that my parents passed on their anti-pet heartlessness to me. I cannot stand the thought of having animal hair all over my couch and my clothes. I know that can be avoided, but do I want to go through the hassle of having a puppy whine through the night and then get bigger and chew things up and bark endlessly and pee on my carpet? SEE? I never thought I would sound so anti-pet. And yet, here are my true feelings. I mean, I LOVE playing with other peoples' puppies, and once I start playing with them I totally want one. And I've met probably 2 super cool cats in my life time. Maybe I could go for that sometime, if I lucked out and found a 3rd super cool cat (that doesn't shed...) I don't know. Perhaps since I've never experienced my very own furry friend I just don't know what I'm missing out on. I'm definitely willing to give it a try. Even now, I think my mother is finally softening toward the idea of a dog. I can even picture her with a small one in her old age. She quite enjoys my nephew-dog. Maybe she and I can jump in together.