a post about pots and polyfill clouds, chiefly to cheer me

It's eight thirty and the kids are asleep. I am sitting on the couch in the living room feeling vaguely anxious, like I should be doing something. I am sure, in fact, that I should be doing something. I have a to-do list next to my computer in my office. It has items listed on it like:

clouds
cape
internet connection!!
memory!
bill being human
pots

These entries are surrounded by crossed-off things I've already done, and the reason they are not also crossed-off is that that are just too hard. So I walk back into the kitchen and sit down and resume feeling vaguely anxious.

Let's start with pots.

I threw them out yesterday, all of them. This wasn't anything I planned, Kirsten offered to take my pots and pans down to the garbage and I let her. She said that Anely had brought over macaroni cooked in one of them and little flecks of teflon were floating around in the pasta and she felt she had to say a little prayer for Genevieve. So she wouldn't die of cancer. I too had noticed the nonstick coating flaking off on all my pots, but I'd ignored it because, well, I didn't want to buy all new pots. Kirsten kindly offered her old set—to which the teflon seemed firmly attached—and which she just happened to be carrying with her, and which I gratefully accepted. But after she left I discovered that her pots won't work for me. Their design is ill-suited to my closet-sized kitchen: I cannot hang them on my rack and there is no room for them in the cupboard. So now I must buy a whole new set of pots. And since we have been eating a teflon diet for years, I must certainly buy uncoated pans. But of course this is complicated. Do I get the kind with copper bottoms? They weigh a ton! And cost a fortune! I don't even like to cook! What about just plain old stainless steel? Still heavy. Charles insists on glass lids. Maybe we see how long we can go without any pans except one old enormous pot that I took from my parents house 20 years ago, made before pots came with fancy carcinogens painted on them? I'd go for that, but Anely and Charles think we need pots appropriate to what we are cooking. Heck, they do more cooking than me, I need to humor them.

That is only one problem on the to-do list to solve. And it is probably the easiest, besides clouds— which merely means I need to stuff some polyester fiberfill into scraps of an old sheer scarf and sew them up in cloud-like ways so that our teacher can hang them on the sky I made to cover the classroom's un-Waldorfy air conditioning unit. Piece of cake.

The two in the middle, internet connection!! and memory! make me want to weep. They have been on my to-do list for nearly a year, carefully transferred from one list to the next. And now they are urgent. I think I'll just go lie down.