Often when I’m at work, I’m just dying to get home. I’ll think about all of the things I need and want to get done at home and just know that if I didn’t have to be at work today, I could be so productive and pleasant, like Rapunzel in Tangled : cook, clean the whole house, paint some oil paintings, exercise, run a bunch of errands, and accomplish ten million useful and enlightening things.* Notably, I don’t dream all that big: I just want to be not in the office. I am actually daydreaming about doing the housework that Rapunzel is daydreaming about NOT doing.
But of course, the truth is that as soon as I get home at the end of the day, I have a lot more in common with Sleeping Beauty when it comes to personal productivity around the house. I share both her need to a ton of sleep (hey, sleep is good for you!) and also her sort of dumb tendency to just wander around and touch objects in the house for no apparent reason. She had the excuse of being enchanted (I think? someone back me up here) but I have the excuse of being tired after work and forgetting why . Of course, Husband and I have cleverly proofed our house to not have any fatal spinning wheels around the house, or spinning wheels of any kind. It’s best to be cautious.
And I also share some unfortunate tendencies with one Petite Sirene: instead of getting anything done, or learning an instrument such that I could jam with the band, I often find myself endlessly online shopping or browsing Pinterest. Which is obviously the equivalent of what Ariel was doing in her room full of random stuff she had collected: if that’s not a low-tech, undersea Pinboard, then I’m the Queen of the Atlantic. But of course, I’ve never made the same mistake Ariel did: I always read the fine print, always assume provisions in a contract will come back to bite me, and I never sign deals with sea witches. (You learn that day one of Contracts class.) Plus, I have to think she made a bad decision on giving up the ability to breathe both above-water and underwater: anyone with gills AND lungs would make an amazing Navy SEAL.
The truth is that if I can’t even muster the energy to clean the house, I really wouldn’t be up for, I don’t know, undergoing rigorous military training from Donny Osmond in order to defeat a large-scale invasion by one of the greatest military commanders in history. So I suppose it’s good my tower is just an office, that I can leave WHENEVER I WANT SERIOUSLY UM I JUST NEED TO SEND A FEW MORE E-MAILS, ahem, and that I’m not actually a fictional princess. Not least because if I had the power to iceify things and some expletive deleted had tried to kill Sassy and take our throne, I would put that expletive deleted’s whole kingdom (including his jerkwad, sociopathic-tendency-creating brothers) into a state of permanent popsicle. If someone tried to kill my only family, I don’t think I’d just let it go.
But just in case I am ever called to be such a princess, I took a highly scientific quiz to see which Disney princess I’m most like, because that’s a productive thing for a licensed attorney to do. And I got…. BELLE! Who is my favorite anyway! So I guess I’m downright regal after all - I forgot that constantly reading stuff to the detriment of real life counts as princessy if you throw some musical numbers in around it. Which, of course, I always do.
*I have never even aspired to be like Snow White. Think about it: her job was to keep house for SEVEN DUDES. I remember what Husband’s college apartment looked like, and he only shared it with two other dudes, and he and one of the other dudes were fairly clean. Snow White was living with SEVEN guys, all of whom had extremely dirty jobs, and bizarrely fixed emotional states which were extremely disparate (which could lead to fighting in the house) and do I also recall atrocious table manners? I seem to. #nothankyou
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