Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Vexing vegetation

I hate it when my own damn hubris comes back to smack me in the face. I'm doing great! Just this wee little lawnmower problem, which is easily solved! Whoo hoo!

Yeah, not so much. The problem is that I relied on other people for help: people of the male persuasion, to be specific. I should have known better than to assume Daniel could help me with one chore. The kid has few practical skills and is too busy gallivanting around the country to use the ones he does have. I had to make a series of increasingly threatening and pitiful phone calls just to get him over here to cut the grass. When the mower wouldn't cooperate, I tried to make arrangements to have Kevin come over and show him how to work it, but Daniel's jetting off to a friend's family farm this entire week and is completely unconcerned about what I'm going to do.

I asked Kevin whether he could come over this morning and show me how to get this %^$^%! piece of machinery to run. He said he would ask Sam whether he could use his car and get back to me yesterday afternoon. Naturally, he didn't, and he didn't call this morning. I called him around 12:30, and he said, without a tinge of apology, that he didn't have the gas money to come down here. I said, "You're kidding me, right?" No, he wasn't. I snapped, "I supported your man-child ass for 12 years, and this is the best you can do when I ask for ONE SMALL FAVOR?" What was I thinking? He has no "best."

I should have known better than to rely on a man for anything, and I was an idiot for leaving the task of cutting grass up to Kevin all these years and never learning how to run that stupid lawnmower. Now I'm going to have to pay someone--and probably a GUY--to cut my grass, and that's money I can't really afford this week. No, I don't know any neighbors or friends up here well enough to ask for help, and I'm certainly not going to ask any friends from Mayberry to drive 40 minutes one way to cut my grass. I loathe asking anyone for help, and the one time I'm forced to, I'm disappointed. Gah. My sunny optimism has been felled by goddamn VEGETATION.