A Functional Adult Gets Handy

… No, not handsy. I respect most people’s personal space. Mostly.

Handy. Today, people, I did something almost worthy of the really mature bloggers with whom I am mildly obsessed! I helped Husband build some work benches! Mostly. Most of some work benches! I got my hair cut and came home and used a power tool! To drive screws through brackets into lumber!

Okay, I apologize for the excess of exclamation points; I told my mom she was only allowed three per page and I ought to be consistent. But it feels remarkable to have been so productive in the literal sense of the word: we produced (most) of something. 

Impressive, no?

And as you can see, I did not chip my nails in the process because I have discovered the wonders of gel manicures. People, they are amazing; my nails have held up for five days now. (If you are a guy, trust me, this is a long time because manicures are an exercise in futility by which you paint your nails to have the paint IMMEDIATELY begin flaking off. It amazes me that the paint on my car has been fine for 17 years when just now did I discover a process by which nail polish can last longer than 17 minutes.) 

This is what we’ve made so far:  

Yeah, they don't look SO much like tables.

They aren’t connected yet because Husband accidentally had the guy at the store cut the shorter side connecting pieces too long, so now we are going to buy a saw to trim them down ourselves. I voted that we buy the saw (rather than have the store shorten them for us) in the hope that if Husband develops an affinity for woodworking, some day he will make furniture for INSIDE the house and not just for the garage. 

I want him to be able to make furniture because I’m constantly amazed by how expensive furniture is, perhaps from having spent part of my childhood in a very timbrous – wait, no, I mean timber-filled – area of the country. There were trees just EVERYWHERE. On Earth Day, we didn’t go plant trees, we cleared ivy off of the millions of existing trees. So when I look at the price of wood furniture online, I am BAFFLED. It’s just trees and labor! How can a teeny nighstand cost $1000? This is why we bought all our furniture from the very chic store of Craigslist. It’s amazing the deals you can get when people are cleaning out their inlaws’ houses.

Anyway, the plan is to get him to become a master furniture maker in his free time, obviously. But in the meantime, I hope we’ll finish these workbenches soon. I’m somewhat eager to see how much this manicure can really take. Maybe I should go visit my parents and do some ivy-clearing to pick up lumber for the next project. 

A Functional Adult Uses Social Networking

As a functional adult, I don’t use Facebook in the way I once did when I was a callow youth.  Facebook launched at my college a few weeks before I attended admitted students weekend as a senior in high school.  The girl whose dorm room I stayed in showed it to me, pointing out its most excellent use - for looking up sundry cute boys one might encounter in one’s classes.


This was the primary use to which I put Facebook for two years.  And then it launched the photo feature - a miraculous online photo album where I could see all of my own pictures and also all the ones my friends took that they always forgot to e-mail to me.  The photo feature has also had the promising side effect of ensuring that presidential elections 20 years hence will involve infinitely more salacious photographic evidence of ill-advised youthful decisions involving .  It’s a wonderful world we live in - less than a century ago, many people didn’t even know FDR was in a wheelchair.  By the 100-year anniversary of FDR’s election, we will have seen every trashy Halloween costume of both major candidates:

Reporter:  Ms. Finkelwurst, do you recognize this photo of you at Halloween in 2007?
Candidate Finkelwurst: Candidly, I don’t think I’d recognize anything from that night.
Reporter 2:  Ms. Finkelwurst, what was your thought process in deciding to dress up as a “sexy Finding Nemo fish”?
Candidate Finkelwurst:  Well, Mr. Finkelwurst and I had just started dating and he mentioned that he really liked that mov...
Finkelwurst Chief of Staff:  We’re out of time.  Thank you all SO MUCH for coming today.

So that was and is clearly an amazing feature.  On top of, of course, looking at the profiles of whoever was cute in my classes.  

But no longer being an energetic youth full of too much free time and singleness, my use of Facebook has changed.  Now, it consists of:

1)  Using my phone to check in to places where I am at any given time
2)  Posting pictures of food I am eating
3)  Not getting Facebook messages people send me

I suspect the reason I do the first so often is that I’m so proud of actually going places when I do.  I actually spend most of my time rotating between three places:  work, my couch, and my bed.  Go to work in the morning, leave and proceed directly to couch, then slowly drag myself off the couch on to the bed.  Rinse and repeat.

So I get SO EXCITED when I am somewhere else I feel the need to notify all my friends, family, family friends, friends’ families, friends’ ex-boyfriends, ex-boyfriends’ friends, people I took an English seminar with once, people from two years ahead of me at law school, and a few former professors.  Hey, look everyone!  I don’t just live on my couch and get unhappy that my friends don’t have any funny new gchat statuses!  I WENT SOMEWHERE!  I BOUGHT SUSHI THERE!

Which leads into my second Facebook activity: posting pictures of food.  I love food.  Eating it, cooking it, awesome.  It is also one of the few non-horribly-boring skills I have.  No one wants to look at a really cool supply and demand graph I drew showing where a monopolist would set their price given a certain production function and a certain demand curve (leading to an easy derivation of the marginal revenue curve).

Trust me, I've tried.

But I feel like people might want to see when I made a really cool brunch:

Egg...

Or baked a cupcake into an ice cream cone:

That is my real hand.

Because other people like food too!  And might actually be impressed that I can make tasty foods - because even though it’s not that hard, people sometimes think it is.  Plus, even if I didn’t make the food, I do just get really excited about eating it.  Not unlike my grandma’s dog, now that I think about it.

And the third thing, well, Facebook, that’s not really my fault, is it?


So I suppose I use Facebook ultimately in bald attempts to attempt to convince people that I'm cooler than I am. Which hasn't changed that much since before I was a functional adult trying to impress the fellas in Econ 102(a).