For many years now, my husband and I have been eating off of the good china. Actually, it isn’t our good china, but it was somebody’s good china until we acquired it from a secondhand store and ran it through the dishwasher 14,000 times. The failing of this china, besides its oh-so-slightly delicate pattern, is that it only has seven dinner plates. This was fine for a couple, and then even fine for a couple plus one, but when our youngest graduated from plastic Sesame Street plates (find a card at Hallmark for
that), we were always scrounging for dinnerware.
This past October I stumbled across an incredible deal at Ross (which is a lower-class Marshall’s), a huge set of plates, bowls, mugs, serving plates for twenty bucks, just because the box was open, crunched, and two bowls were broken. Quite the bargain. The plates were simple white with a dark blue band around the edge. I took them home, washed them, and placed them in our cabinets. And immediately regretted my purchase.
The plates were
huge. The bread and butter plates were the size of our old china dinner plates. The “cafe-style” dinner plates were large enough to serve a whole roasted chicken with mashed potatoes and corn-on-the-cob on the side. They didn’t fit well in our dishwasher, and in the next few days as I used them I felt like I was either skimping on the meal (from
Chez le Fancy, here is your chicken nugget on a bed of corn) or fattening my kids up to make wrestling weight. (“Come on kids! We need to gain fourteen pounds by Friday! Eat your pound of s’getti!”)
Two months ago at Ross (I like lower-class Marshall’s) I found a set of dinner plates that were less imposing, and cheap. I loaded two boxes into the trunk of my car and took them home.
And there they sit, still in the trunk of my car.
Oh, I visit them. Every time I get groceries, I see them as I load the car. And as I take the groceries into the house, I think that I should really carry those plates in. But I am sick of carrying things after carrying
all the groceries. And later, well...
Here’s the thing it has gone past procrastination. I need to admit that I made a mistake, either in buying the old plates or the new ones. But something was a mistake. And I need to remedy that mistake, either by replacing the old plates or returning/donating the new ones. And either is going to involve work at this point. Packing up the old plates, washing and putting away the new plates. Arranging for donation. I don’t want to deal with it. That is why this is more than procrastination, it is also denial. Hence my new word, ProcrasDenial. (Hey, if Colbert can do it with “truthiness,” so can I.)
So, here I am today, Friday as it were, and looking to a weekend visiting my mother. That would leave little time, wouldn’t you say, for the rather important book-talking presentation I have to give on Monday, whereby I will stand up in front of seventy of my colleagues and demonstrate how they should present a select number of books to the schoolchildren across our large county. I will present four books. I have known about this presentation for five months. I have read the books, five months ago. My preparation for this presentation since then...
Zippo.
ProcrasDenial.