Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never Lancaster, Jen (read more books .txt) 📖

him over the edge about my hobby is the packing peanuts. Thus I’d like to present How to Make Fletch Apoplectic in Ten Easy Steps:

1. Spend two weeks spite-bidding on a bunch of random, delicate, heavily packaged items.

2. Accidentally win every single item due to the aforementioned spite bidding.

3. Attempt to open the boxes of shipped items with a tablespoon. [Hey, it was the most handy pointy thing.]

4. Be so excited about the random, delicate items deeply ensconced in packing peanuts that you simply abandon the empty husks of boxes all over the kitchen.

5. Completely forget about the packing peanuts while you arrange your snappy vintage Brownie cameras and croquet balls and cricket bats.

6. Have Fletch fill one entire industrial-sized garbage can with packing peanuts.

7. Suddenly become bored with antiquing on the first sunny day of spring and decide gardening is your new hobby, and thus it’s imperative to start planting now, now, now!

8. Accidentally knock over previously mentioned garbage can while backing out of the garage in your haste to get to Lowe’s to buy geraniums.

9. Return home to find white substance spread over 1.2 acres, prompting you to ask, “Did it hail or something?”

10. Bray like a jackass upon discovering those thousands of little blobs are free-range Styrofoam and then wish Fletch a Happy Earth Day.

Fletch has now begged me to reconsider both gardening and antiquing as hobbies, instead opting for something less competitive/messy/expensive.

He suggests sewing.

Sewing?

Huh. That’s a thought. I have lots of friends who sew and I love seeing the stuff they create. My friend Wendy is an ace and her basement’s so well stocked it’s like visiting a tailor.

This… might be useful. With some practice, I could whip up some casual, more modern curtains for the bedroom to replace those drapes that look like casket-liner. Plus, I could use the time that I was sewing to listen to opera and that feels really sophisticated and mature.

Yes.

This idea is growing on me.

This could work.

Thing is, fabric can be really expensive, so I’d probably want to start with tiny projects, like napkins or place mats or dresses.

Very small dresses.

Like… doll-sized dresses. Really, wouldn’t Miss Joan enjoy something comfortable to change into after a long day at Sterling Cooper? Her little purple suit is so stiff and fitted. And those girdles are murder! I bet she’d love a nice, soft housedress. Ooh, better yet—some yoga pants! Just imagine how popular she’d be if she were bendier!

As for Betty Draper—I imagine she’s as bitchy as she is because she’s stuffed into a girdle all day, every day. All that restricted circulation must angry up her blood. If she had some elastic-waist pants and maybe a loose tunic, she wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Don and then they’d get back together and poor Sally Draper could stop acting out her daddy abandonment issues with all the little boys in her new neighborhood.

If you think about it, by learning to sew, I could (in theory) save an entire (fictional) family.

Plus?

Then I’d have an excuse for playing with dolls!

Reluctant Adult Lesson Learned:

It’s not always what you do that makes you a grown-up; sometimes, it’s how you spin it.

C·H·A·P·T·E·R N·I·N·E

I Wish I Could Quit You, Gladys Kravitz

In retrospect, the whole spying thing seems pretty childish.

In my defense, keeping tabs on my neighbors’ comings and goings was a necessity when we lived in the city. I mean, someone had to act as block captain because the police certainly weren’t on patrol.

I can count on zero fingers the number of times the Chicago PD responded to 911 calls when we lived in Bucktown, and I’m not talking the usual, “Hello, Jeannie, who’s bothering you today?” reports about assholes parking in front of my garage. [Listen, blocking the alley violates fire code and I’m pretty sure that’s a crime or violation or at least very annoying every time I had to drive around and park out front.]

Squad cars never rolled when we phoned about the sound of gunshots or the knife fight on our sidewalk or when acts of prostitution were committed in the vacant lot next door.

Yes, the van was rocking but did five-oh come knocking? Negatory.

I’m not sure what the Chicago PD considered real crimes in that godforsaken neighborhood, but they included neither drug deals nor domestic violence.

Clearly I had no choice but to name myself Neighborhood Hall Monitor, [I should have bought myself a sash and a beret to go along with my whistle, cell phone camera, and good whacking shovel.] and it’s totally not my fault that this dovetailed nicely into my natural propensity for observation. Could I help it if my Constant Vigilance™ occasionally turned up a few hidden truths about my neighbors?

After I spent a full day on Neighborhood Watch, Fletch would return home from work and I’d fill him in on each transgression I witnessed, like which of our idiot neighbors drove her kids around without seat belts and who threw an empty McDonald’s bag on my lawn and did he know the McRib was back? Then Fletch would call me Gladys Kravitz [Other Notable Nosy Neighbors in Television History include Messrs. Roper and Furley. If you don’t catch any of these references, turn on Nick at Nite, like, immediately.] and suggest (urge, plead, implore, demand) I find another way to occupy my time.

Every day we had some version of this conversation while he changed out of his grown-up clothes after work:

“You don’t understand,” I argue, sitting by the window on the bed where I can keep one eye on my husband and the other trained on the street, like one of those creepy chameleons with the swivel-y eye sockets. “It’s my civic obligation to note comings and goings.”

“What did I tell you about your ‘citizen arrests,’ Deputy Fife?” he sighs.

I sigh right back. “That I’m ‘not allowed to dole out street justice with a shovel.’ Even though the dipshit who doesn’t believe in car seats deserves a solid whacking. Have you ever seen those highway safety