I arrived home after a late-afternoon meeting yesterday to find that my husband had left two boxes of Domino's pizza on the dining table accompanied by a flurry of sticky notes, one of which told me not to worry about the kitchen, which, of course, propelled me into the kitchen to see what I wasn't supposed to worry about, where I saw that the cabinets under the sink were standing open and it looked like the cabinet had vomited its contents all across the floor.
Plumbing problem. Nothing a handy husband armed with PVC pipe can't handle. Last night, I just walked away from the mess and told myself not to worry about it, which is about as effective as trying not to think about pink elephants.
Still, I welcome these minor kerfuffles because they give me something to talk about when I can't talk about larger and more consequential problems that don't quite portend The End of the World As We Know It but certainly feel that way. I mean, we are in the middle of a budget crisis that will eventually lead to the brutal amputation of faculty positions and programs. There isn't enough PVC pipe in the world to fix that problem.
I keep going to meetings where I am asked to envision the future of various programs and departments, but it's hard to get motivated to plan for a program that may get axed at any moment. It's like spending a lot of time picking out new cabinets for the kitchen only to come home one day and find that the whole house has been swallowed by a sinkhole.
Too many metaphors? Since I can't talk about details of the current crisis, metaphors are all I've got. Somehow, they're not helping.
So it's comforting to know that my helpful husband is at home fixing the plumbing problem while I focus on trying not to worry about the kitchen. That's a level of not-worrying I can live with.
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