Everything Happened | vol. 243

Post-apocalyptic appliance repair

There are a lot of new subscribers here, so here is your invitation to casually unsub if you can’t remember why you’re here or if you got accidentally signed up via whatever Substack is doing when you sign up for someone’s newsletter and end up clicking things and getting auto-added to all their friend’s newsletters too?? Also, Substack is a ghoulish platform and once I have two brain cells to rub together I might concoct a way to migrate off of it but for now, here we are.

I’m Evie, I write these occasional essays here and other places too, I have three kids, live in a small town on the east coast of the United States, and one time I genuinely believed a cool jewelry brand on Instagram wanted me to model their products but it turned out to be an MLM.

---

Every time I let it go too long before writing, my attempts at an update feel like the lyrics to a Lifter Puller song that’s been open in a mental tab for like 20 years:

jenny, what's the story? all the chicks in her sorority
asked her how she spent the summer
She said “I interned at some law firm, I got a little sunburned
I saw some raver kid get murdered”

Five years ago March, I had a meeting in my office on campus with someone about their pages on the website. I had these kinds of meetings all the time at the small liberal arts college where I worked. There was never a meeting agenda, and we often didn’t get much done. But still, we’d trudge across the cobblestone to meet each other in crumbling brick buildings with wheezing HVAC systems trying to either boil us alive or freeze our tits off.

I felt like an exiled queen in that office, up in a tower much taller than most of the surrounding campus buildings. I wrote a lot of these newsletters in that office, and emailed freelance pitches, and applied for jobs, and refreshed my bank account in the browser like it was a slot machine just a few nickels away from the click that would solve all my problems.

In the spring, my floor would become overrun with bees, oozing out of the cracks in the mortar, living and then dying on their backs in the windowsills. If you called Facilities about it, they’d be like, oh, yeah, that building has bees. Fair enough, I guess, the bees were here first.

I was meeting with the new registrar, I think, but anyway, we hadn’t met before and he had walked up four flights of stairs to find me. He went to shake my hand, then pulled his hand back and said, oh, but we aren’t not supposed to…and then we opted to touch elbows instead. Was this a thing? Bumping elbows? I can’t remember now, but it’s what we did.

Earlier that week, I’d led a software training session in a library computer lab. After one too many juicy coughs and sneezes among the participants, one professor dramatically stood up and left. He had pulled his sweater up over his nose and mouth and shuffled out the door, clutching his laptop. I smirked inwardly, thinking of him as an another fragile dweeb academic. I had surrounded myself with academics, in work, in marriage, in my small town built around the existence of a college. They vexed me because most of them had never had bosses and were in the habit of writing the most toxic emails I had ever encountered in my working life. He emailed me later a very respectful apology for bolting and I regretted my judgement.

The same day that I bumped the registrar’s elbow, we got the email that the campus was closing for two weeks to ~flatten the curve and we were to work from home. At quitting time, I wheeled my knockoff Aeron office chair to the elevator, to the parking lot, and to where Nick was waiting to pick me up. The chair never made it back to the college (::does a slow spin back to keyboard::).

A freelance check came through that week in the exact amount required to buy a dishwasher and have a handyman dig out a section of cabinetry to accommodate its installation. We were so broke that all crises had to be handled by me having a writing idea and successfully landing a pitch.

The year before, we’d spent every cent of our savings on the smallest down payment possible to buy our home. We’d gotten the house but every month of bills was a roulette wheel to avoid overdraft. When your ‘60s time capsule house doesn’t have a dishwasher, and you have two little kids home with you indefinitely, suddenly the freelance ideas EFFERVESCE. Oh, how they bubble.

In my current financially secure reality (some of our kids outgrew daycare, I got a better paying job, Nick’s dad died), the only thought I have in my head at any given time is the jingle from Pistol Pete’s Pizza circa 1994. Everybody loves it!

The dishwasher changed our life. A week into lockdown, I had the idea to throw it a birthday party, inspired by my friend who received a little cake with a “0” candle on it in the evening after her homebirth.

We baked a cake, we frosted it, we sang to the dishwasher. Every once in a while a viral tweet about this makes the rounds again and people who know me from various stages of life come across it and message me.

It happened again this week. It’s a little embarrassing — really don’t want anyone to go looking for the Twitter account I haven’t had access to in 2 years!!—but it’s one of the few images from that time I can bear to look at. My over-dark 2010s eyebrows, my army green skinny jeans, the old sheet linoleum in the kitchen, Desi at four years old when I thought he was huge but he was actually just a widdle baby.

The star of the show, our shiny new dishwasher, so quiet we couldn’t tell when it was running at first. The near-distant past! A different universe entirely!

I interned at some law firm, I got a little sunburned, I saw some raver kid get murdered

I couldn’t get my footing this winter. Our washing machine broke in January. There are economies of scale with three kids in that most of your work doesn’t triple. You’re cooking one dinner, just at a higher volume. But laundry is the exception. For each person you add to your family, you are doing one additional football team’s worth of laundry.

We spent a week trying to fix it ourselves, not eager to buy a new major appliance for a house we plan to sell next year. Nick and I took turns doing shifts at the laundromat trying to bail out a sinking ship. By the time we gritted our teeth and placed the order for the new machine, we had to wait another two weeks for it to arrive.

By this time, lack of access to laundry machines had us completely shipwrecked. No one could find socks for school. Everyone’s sheets smelled like a pet store. And as if I wasn’t going through enough at home, my husband started commuting to work on an electric skateboard.

I think we maybe just last week recovered from the month without a washing machine. The kids kicked off a carousel of various pooping and barfing illnesses sometime in February and then sometimes school would close for snow or my favorite Eastern Shore specialty, “high winds.”

Do you know what feels like luxury to me though? Being able to feel merely annoyed at spending $500 on a new washing machine, and not having to move ten things around to make it possible. To meet basic needs without harvesting a vulnerable personal essay from my hippocampus. To just wake up and score my day to the Pistol Pete’s jingle rather than a restless, panic-inducing Bernard Herrmann string arrangement.

REE REE REE REE

There is an insidious mindset that presumes financial comfort in one’s forties. The reality for most middle class and lower middle class folks is that stability comes in boom and bust cycles. I still sometimes catch myself feeling “behind.” On what? Hoarding wealth while the planet burns? Ok, Ebert.

The dishwasher is turning 5 soon. We’ve acknowledged its birthday every year, but maybe a cake is in order. Not because of some idea of triumph but because we’re still here somehow, getting by. Is our compact Bosch threatening to buckle under the weight of all the meaning I’m stuffing into it? We’ll see!

🎶Dishwasher birthday! Everybody loves it!🎶

yr mate,
Evie
###