And telephones are not to be answered during your dinner hour, any more than at any other time. No talking with your mouth full. The Pitfalls of Living Alone
I was going to call this "The Pratfalls---", but I suppose we don't all have those. Regularly.
Did you ever consider the word "pitfall"? I consider words quite a lot; it's a bad habit of mine. Worse, I have a literal imagination. "Pitfall" plants a picture in my overloaded little mind of falling into a pit. Someone somewhere might even have written that this was, in fact, the original meaning of the word. Just as the word "standpoint" flashes a picture to me of somebody standing and pointing.
While it may be difficult to perform both of these words at once, here are the pitfalls from my standpoint. Of living alone, that is.
Your table manners are the first things to go.
Next the table goes, and you take all your meals to the couch in front of the TV, which is so full of garbage it will give you indigestion, or, in my case, the WebTV on the internet. Unfortunately, answering email while you eat dinner is a good way to get broccoli in the keyboard. Don't ask.
I happen to think table manners are overrated in the first place, after we are 7 or 8 years old and know the basics: Use a fork (unless you forgot to bring one), use a napkin (unless your T-shirt is sufficiently baggy), cut your meat with a knife (unless it has a bone or a firm edge on it), don't scrape the bowl with your fingers (unless it's guacamole, the price of avacadoes being what it is) and don't talk with your mouth full (except to yourself).
After you've lived alone for a number of years, you don't dare go out in polite company for lunch or dinner. Going out with relatives is okay.
You could go out in company for drinks, I suppose, as long as you don't spill them on anybody but yourself. In my experience, we pass an age eventually after which that loses its charm. One hint about spilling things: Don't set a carbonated beverage containing sugar on the same end table with your 5 or 6 remotes.
And telephones are not to be answered during your dinner hour, any more than at any other time. No talking with your mouth full.
Next you find yourself forgetting to comb your hair on days you don't go to work. I personally have set out for the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon in a coiffure left over from Friday morning more than once. Luckily, I carry a comb in my purse and no woman my age has ever gone anywhere without her purse. This could easily escalate into not combing your hair from Friday to Monday, if it were not necessary to wash it some time over the weekend.
It naturally follows that you might as well put on the same T-shirt you wore yesterday, because who will know? This is very handy, unless the spaghetti sauce on it is still wet. The pants you wore are right there on the floor, just as handy. I highly recommend this habit, because it saves you the embarrassment of answering the door in your jammies when the UPS man comes at 4:00, or running out in the rain to close your car windows when there isn't time for the jammies to dry before you want them again.
And telephones are not to be answered when you are not fully dressed, any more than at any other time. Who knows what fiber optics are beaming into our homes?
Then you start forgetting to do laundry until you have no clean underwear left at all and it's 11:00 on a work night. This can be remedied by staying up past midnight; in fact, almost anything can be remedied that way when there is nobody but the cat to nag you to go to bed.
And there is always the trash, which nobody is there to take out except you. It's too heavy for the cat. The only times I remember to get it out to the curb are the times they changed my pickup day from Monday to Wednesday and didn't tell me.
The only way to deal with general forgetfulness that works for me is to have a lot of those little yellow sticky pads. Then you can stick up little reminders to yourself all over the house. This is very helpful if you don't overdo it. You could get different colored stickies for different levels of urgency, I suppose, but that assumes entirely too much awareness on my part. Since I realized I don't have to look at the yellow or blue ones, I have to stick the bright pink ones on the coffee pot.
And telephones are not to be used for reminder stickies because you won't see them unless you answer it, which I see no reason to do.
The only problem there may be with the casual atmosphere of living alone is that you tend to lose things a lot. This problem increases in direct proportion to how blind you are without your glasses, because those are the first thing you lose. Many are the hours I've spent wandering around looking for my glasses so I could see to look for whatever it was I lost, if I could remember what it was by that time. I'm not alone in that.
I was pathetically grateful when the eye doctor prescribed bifocals and told me I had to wear them All The Time. Not only can I read street signs again and find my way home, now I frequently know right where my glasses are.
So I don't know that losing things can be blamed on carelessness, and wouldn't admit it if I did. In fact, I would seldom admit carelessness was any problem at all; I just thought I should bring it up. A little healthy carelessness might be good for us, might help us relax. Who would ever know for sure if nobody lived alone? We aren't talking about out in traffic, we are just talking about in the house.
And telephones are not to be answered if we don't feel like it, any more than at any other time, whether they are lost or not.
