I'm never going to stop the rain by complaining

Did you know I took tap dancing lessons? I did, in second and third grades. Tap dancing overlapped with the time in my life when I lost the ability to smile. Starting with my kindergarten school picture and until I was about eight, I went through a existential smile crisis. Any camera pointed in my direction caused my brain to panic and then attempt to move my mouth in various shapes. I tried everything from open mouth grimaces to tiny dimple-inducers to full on mouth commas. I was an ugly-cute kind of kid, the sort of girl with a Buddha belly, braces on my front four teeth, and a constant need for attention. Kids like me need a cute smile when all we have to offer the world are repeated shouts of "LISTEN TO ME SING LIKE THE LITTLE MERMAID."

Back to tap dancing. Every dance recital has a theme and my first year of lessons was "Dancin' Up a Storm", with each class having their own weather-related song and dance number. For Beginner Tap, we had "Raindrops Keep Falling On Your Head". Our costumes were ugly-ugly, as dictated by Dance Law, but the best part was our white umbrellas, a rare prop.

Twenty-one years later and I still remember thinking to myself, "Don't smile too big and ruin the picture," so in my personal dance portrait, one of me bending my knees while holding the coveted umbrella, I tried a wide no-teeth smirk. This smirk morphed my nose from an upturned snub to a pointy beak, made my full cheeks even rounder and caused my chin to grow an extra three inches. I looked like Dick Van Dyke. To be more accurate, I looked like Dick Van Dyke's chubby, awkward granddaughter trying not to pee her bloomers.

I guess what I'm trying to say I have a new job right next to a river and these are some of the things you think about when it takes you 15 minutes to drive to work and 10 minutes to walk from the parking lot to the office.

How an Andrea spends her Thursdays

Thursday is usually my only free night of the week. It's my chance do the things that need to be done around my apartment that I've been putting off the other days of the week. So, how do I spend my time?

A) Maintaining my truce with the dust bunnies who really own this joint.

B) Eating, making, or thinking about soup.

C) Rearranging piles of overdue library books to make myself feel smarter.

D) Singing "Save the People" from Godspell to my cat, but replacing the word God with cat and people with kitties ("When wilt thou save the kitties? Oh, cat of mercy, whennn? The kitties, cat, the kitties! Not thrones and crowns, but kitttttttiiiieeeesssssss.")

E) Not wearing pants.

F) Telling myself that I'll write something great but playing Words With Friends and liking other people's photos on Instagram instead.

G) All of the above.

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The correct answer is H) All of the above and then passing out to an old episode of Gilmore Girls.

If that answer surprises you, well, we must not really be friends.

Recent accomplishments and decisions

 

• Froze coffee in an ice cube tray and drank it with almond milk (delightful, highly recommended).
• Woke up at 5 a.m. without any help other than the alarm clock on my phone (normal wake up time: 9:30 a.m.)
• Ran 3.1 miles/five kilometers (painful but strangely euphoric).
• Remembered to tell the barista at the coffee shop to add a dollar for tip on my debit card instead of forgetting and then feeling guilty for not tipping (no guilt is a good thing).
• Made one of the house teams at the Steel City Improv Theater (excitement level: through the roof).
• Bought a new dress for half off (also delightful).
• Used an entire bag of scallions before they went bad (one of several firsts).
• Won $2 gambling at Little Italy Days (lucky).

How to Replace a Broken Toilet Seat

First, break it. Doesn't matter how. Being drunk helps. You won't remember the details and until confronted with the reality, you'll think it was a weird dream.

Don't replace it right away. There are more important things: brunches to attend, commas to delete, Say Yes to the Dress to watch. The detached lid is as cumbersome as a Novocaine-injected tongue, always in the way, but you put up with it. You even get used to the wobbliness after a couple of days. But upcoming house guests are a good motivator to fix it.

There two options: Call the landlord or do it yourself. The landlord is a nice guy, but you have a feeling that he worries about you a bit, the building's token Single Lady. Mr. Roeper also has a tendency of not saying when he's dropping by and you'd rather not hear him buzzing your door while stepping out of the shower. It wouldn't be the first time.

Plus, when you mention to your most handy-dandiest friend that it broke, in an off-handed way loaded with meaning, he replied "That's really easy to fix."

At Target, when the redshirt asks what size you need, say "Toilet-sized." When he doesn't laugh, just pick one, any one, then take it and your dumb joke home.

Start unscrewing the nuts holding the bolt part of the seat in place. A wrench would be helpful, but you probably don't have one. We evolved to have five fingers for several reasons and here is one of them. Your mind will wander as your fingers move in circles.

You can't remember your parents ever replacing toilet seats. If they did it, it must have been at night, when they did other secret adult stuff that you had to learn on your own, like filing taxes and walking in heels. Or you may have been too busy watching cartoons (a possibility). In college, one of the maintenance crew fixed a broken seat in your dorm bathroom. He teased you for your 12-inch TV and the next week knocked on your door with a massive television he found nestled next to the dumpster. It was constructed during Reagan's presidency and still worked. Even though you can picture him- a bald Paul Bunyan with a hearty laugh who loved to tell dirty jokes- you can't remember his name. This makes you sad.

Quite some time will have passed with minimal progress. Frustration grows.

Enter the wishing stage. Wish you hadn't broken it. Wish you were sitting anywhere but this dusty bathroom floor. Wish you weren't sweating. Wish you weren't so proud. Wish you weren't alone. Wish you hadn't wished that. Wish wish wish wish. Turn turn turn turn.

Stop. Realize the entire time, you have been turning the screws the wrong way. The plastic is warped, but you can pull out the old seat, fit the new one in through the holes, and a minute or two later, the new seat is screwed into place, as if it was always there.

Stand up. Open the lid. Shut the lid. Open it, shut it. Wash your hands, please.

Have a beer, have a glass of cheap wine, have a tumbler of melting ice and sharp gin. Even a plastic mug of Kool-Aid will work in a pinch. The most important part is to stand a little taller.

(Thanks to the How-To Issue for the inspiration.)

I have measured out my life in Popsicle sticks.

It's mid-July. I've been 27 for two weeks.

What have the late 20s been like so far? Well.

You make buffalo chicken dip for the office potluck even though there will be too much food (there's always too much food) mostly so the other ladies in the office won't give you a side eye.

You line up your shoes in the shelves where they belong instead of lying in doorways where Hurricane Andrea disposed of them like fallen trees before blowing out the door, late to work, because tripping of them will only slow down the hurricane and make it angry.

You're still working on your punctuality. You'll always be working on your punctuality.

You buy bright pink lip balm. You think you look ridiculous but a controlled kind of ridiculous, like the temporary tattoos you used to doodle on your arms with a Sharpie when you were 13 and wanted something permanent that you could regret. You never got those tattoos, but you embarrass yourself by taking photos of yourself in public to make up for it.

It's not all buffalo chicken dip and lip balm, pals. Some of the not-so-good stuff that have been hanging around for years are still there, like outdated clothes meant to be dropped off at the Goodwill that eventually make their way back to your closet. You only really make your bed in the winter or when you know someone is going to see it. You cover your chin whenever possible because chins are to you what necks were to the late great Nora Ephron. You know it's not healthy to listen in on other people's first dates in coffee shops rather than going on ones of your own but my god, this guy is never going to get laid if he keeps talking about how awkward the date is going as it's happening.

Each week, a new article becomes the essay the internet can't stop talking about, and lately they've been ones that give me a mild anxiety akin to five cups of coffee. If it's not the usual topics (marriage, kids, and Having It All), it's about the how the youth are in financial ruin, how friendships after 30 turn to dust, or how having a cat makes you crazy. I'm thankful though that I'm not where I was five years ago or so, where it would have pushed me into 10 cups of coffee anxiety. I can take whatever worries the world throws at me and I think that means I'm happy. Or I'm happy because I can take the world's throws? I don't know, but I think I'm okay.

If this was a made-for-TV romantic comedy, I'd end this with something like Just because I haven't fallen in love doesn't mean I haven't tripped over it. I can practically hear Jennifer Love Hewitt saying that. Instead, I'll just leave you with this: I don't have the answers, I just have myself.

And I ask is for Lifetime to let me play myself in She Rolled Hey Eyes At It All: The Andrea Disaster Story. If Joan and Melissa can play themselves, anyone can.