The Opposite of Easy

Why is everything so hard?

The clothes your husband was thoughtful enough to take out of the dryer and put into the basket and carry into the master bedroom and leave on the bed for you to put away are actually still wet. So, you have to put them back into the dryer. But to do that, you have to take out what is already in the dryer and to do that, you need another basket. After a brief search around the house, you find that the only other basket you have is in your daughter’s bedroom, filled with clothes. So you have to put away those clothes first, but your daughter has gone through all of her folded clothes in the dresser and unfolded them in her pursuit of just the right t-shirt and in order to have room to put away the clothes in the basket, you have to re-fold everything in her drawers.

While you’re busy doing this, your daughter says she’s hungry. It’s lunch time. You leave everything you were doing and go to make her a meal, but as you’re working, your shoes stick to the kitchen floor and you realize something sticky has been spilled and not cleaned up. Again. You tell yourself you’ll mop it up just as soon as you’re done with the lunch preparations. As you’re telling yourself this, your email beeps repeatedly, but you’ve grown used to this and try to ignore it. When your daughter is finally seated at the table eating, you check your email and see, amongst fifty other messages, an important query from a business associate who wants sales figures for the last two months from three different vendors.

You start clicking on different sites, break out the computer’s accessory calculator, and start adding things up and putting them into excel when your daughter spills another drink. It has now joined its buddy on the kitchen floor, which you forgot to mop. She also got it on her clothes. You send her to her room to change, recalling that her clothes are in a half-put-away state and dreading what creative things she will accomplish with this new situation. You go looking for some towels to sop up the juice on the floor and run by the laundry, which you also forgot to finish and now the wet clothes in the basket are wrinkling and molding.

You sigh heavily, use a dirty towel to clean up the mess, and yell for your daughter to brush her teeth. She whines that she hasn’t had dessert yet and the doorbell rings. On the other side of the peep hole are cute little kids selling cookies your cholesterol level doesn’t need at ALL, but what goes around comes around, so you trek off to search for the checkbook.

You haven’t eaten anything, had anything to drink, showered, or started on your real, bread-winning work at all and by this time, your thoughts are so scattered, all you want to do is rip your hair out just to have something solid to focus on.

And then you remember that you’re having guests that afternoon.
Oh yeah, entropy is king.