If you are a very routine-oriented person, caution: You may be two steps away from becoming a monkey.
I don't know much about monkeys. I have a friend Heather who studied them professionally. If I asked her, she could clear up my misconceptions in five minutes, but that would involve a text, waiting for a response, listening and learning something...it just sounds like a whole thing. Maybe I'd be up for it, if I weren't already living tail deep in the monkey life.
I look around my apartment, and some days, it looks like a murder scene. Correction: a taxidermied murder scene. There's no blood, but I look at the ransacked empty cupboards, the piles of laundry, myself under heaps of disheveled bed covers, the dog sprawled and motionless and I think, "If this were the 20s, a detective in a snappy fedora would be here to make chalk outlines any minute."
The thing is, we aren't depressed.
I mean, I can't speak for the dog, and she did take last year's election hard, but we aren't unhappy. We are just in transition, our routine has been shot all to hell, and we are tail-deep in the monkey life.
In my mind, the "monkey life" is having no meal plan, no money plan, no morning plan, no routine. Yes, I make it to my most important places: work, parenting gigs, and...okay, that's all the places I make it. And yes, that's fairly impressive, because I'm alive and well, and so are the kids. But the rest of my life feels very amorphous.
In reality, the description of my life sounds like any 20-something. However, I'm 46, and very much a grownup. Also, I never lived the 20-something lifestyle, even in my 20s, so it feels even more monkeyesque. You see, basically, I was born a 40-year-old man. By the time I was 40, I was an 80-year-old man. So you can see why it feels like I'm Benjamin-Buttoning here.
Growing up, I was my father's daughter and modeled whatever he did. He didn't have a rebellious stage after 40. Therefore, while I was observing as a much younger person, neither did I. As soon as I was in college, I was up early, drinking coffee and reading the paper in the cafeteria (where people could see). That's not normal. By the time I was in my 20s and living with roommates, I was doing the same, plus adding a jog before work. By my late 20s, I was up reading the paper AND the bible for an hour, and writing bible studies. Y'all, that was not the right age for that. I should have been sleeping off hangovers and wondering where I'd left my top. And if/when I found said top, it should've had bong burns on it. Honestly, I don't even know if bong is spelled right or if it's something that gets hot. In Jackie Brown, I think I saw a lighter and I think that was a bong, so hopefully I'm right.
At my rehearsal dinner, my childhood friend Amy toasted by saying to fiance, "I can't believe you get to live with Pam - you'll have so much fun," but my 20s roommate Lee said, "Every morning I'd be so inspired because I'd get up and see Pam there with her coffee reading the bible and writing and she'd been up for hours already." [Side note: That same night, if you'd asked my dad how his morning began, he could've told you, "I was on the curb watching for the paper at 4:30am. That guy just gets later and later]. If you know either of us, now you understand that we do not have narcolepsy. We just doze off every chance we get, because our days start early and fast.
All of this is fine, impressive even in a weird way. I'm an early bird, I've got a routine. I get that. I've always embraced it. But I only described a few hours of my day to you. The other hours of my day were organized too, and I thrived on my routine. I exhilarated in knowing my purpose, and even though I was never clear on my life's purpose, I knew my daily purpose was that routine, and by god, I embraced it heartily. I often joke that I'd flourish in a cult, and it's true. Part of that is because if you give me a structure, I'm just grateful and root in hard.
Skip ahead to 2017, life being in total transition, routine annihilated, morning activities no longer relevant...all hell breaks loose and I am living like a monkey.
Sometimes a taxidermied monkey.
(and just when it might get interesting, I stop writing to take the dog out).