Doing Nothing

The opposite of hysteria

The rich women are all wearing bootcut jeans. I can't spare the attention, but weird details like this keep obstructing my focus.

It’s a hectic Friday night at Escape Route - my other experienced co-worker is out sick, leaving me single-handed during the mad rainy day rush. Technically, I have help. We’ve borrowed a ski tech from our rental location to help me on the till and keep an eye on things. This last is especially important, since our CCTV is on the fritz. Still, I’m the only one with our backstock locations memorized, the only one here able to produce product equivalents in every colour possible and size-match between brands. I answer the phone. I hunt down a misplaced shoe order. I simultaneously handle three demanding, entitled, nit-picky customers in two languages, earning derision from the snooty Belgian with my thick Anglo-Quebecois. I barely qualify as fluent, and his rapid continental accent frequently leaves me guessing. Someone is speaking Spanish nearby, and the latin cognates make it even more confusing. The short American woman wants a hoodless puffy that’s “casual but packable and technical”, in an XL, and not in black. She rejects every single jacket, one by one, following me around the store with a volley of pointed questions and unsatisfactory coats. The other tourist woman is clearly a size Large but refuses to acknowledge this, trying every pair of medium pants on the sale rack, and castigating me when they don’t fit. Why don’t we have more colours on sale? Why don’t these have a zipper for your boots? Ridiculous. My arms are piled high with Gore-tex and puffies and hangers. Nobody is satisfied. Flustered, I speak French to the Americans and English to the Belgian, who I suspect secretly understands but is just being difficult. A Quebecois woman is mad that she accidentally purchased a softshell pant on clearance, and insists it's lack of waterproofness is my fault. She wants a full refund. She bought it a month ago, final sale. I don't know how to explain the difference between Gore-Tex and DWR - is there another word for impermeablé? - so I switch to English and earn another Francophone eyeroll. Just when I think I've managed the chaos, another clump of tourists comes in to kick tires, and I abandon my armload of garments behind the till so I can monitor the camera-less section. It's a day. Cleaning up and cashing out takes me a full hour after close, and I dash out towards my van in a slurry of frozen slush.

I got stuck that morning, you see. The thaw/freeze cycle created a patch of ice-rink beneath the van, and in the cold early hours of the morning I could not get myself free with all the sand in the world. Fortunately, I was parked close enough to work to walk - or rather, sprint. First to the gym for a shower and then back across the village for my shift. My boots need to be re-waterproofed, and I didn't have time to find my rain jacket in my bin of gear, so by the time I arrived at work, I was thoroughly sodden. A brilliant start to a brilliant day. At least I remembered my work sneakers. Not so lucky on the towel; with the rain coming down as hard as it was, I simply struggled my wet body into my jeans after the shower, tying my dripping hair in a bun. The rain soaked through my coat in approximately four minutes, which I tried to welcome. I needed it to keep raining - I was counting on it to free my van, and I absolutely needed to be in Squamish at 9am the next day. So after my shift, I ran home over the ice with a frantic penguin waddle, hoping the temperature hadn't dropped too far. My friend with a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi was too drunk to drive, and if the parking lot re-froze, I didn't know what I'd do.

I was lucky - the parking lot was still a lake when I arrived, and I splashed heedlessly through the shin-deep slush, knowing dry socks and heat were only seconds away. The rain poured down in sheets, and the black highway drive was a trial by memory. Blinded by the lights of oncoming drivers and the silver obscuring rain, I steered Blue as much by recall as by sight, paying close attention to the reflective edge markers and faint, eroded paint lines. Another terrifying drive for the history books, though at least it was my last appointment in Squamish for the foreseeable future. Doctors’ consensus is that there's nothing particularly wrong with me - my guts are just kind of weird. My IBS has no connection to my frequent, inexplicable nosebleeds, nor to the weird itchy rash on my hand, nor to the occasional bouts of fatigue that I continue to struggle with. The dentist put me on more antibiotics for the tooth infection. The dermatologist gave me a steroid cream. My GP switched my circulation meds and told me to eat more greens. I am, apparently, perfectly healthy. I'm resisting the urge to google “rarest autoimmune disease".

What else have I been doing this week? A big fat load of nothing. I went touring with some acquaintances out to Musical Bumps on Tuesday, a much-needed endorphin rush and social outlet all in one. But on Wednesday, rain pissing down as it would for the next couple days, I spent the entire afternoon in bed playing a Civilization-style phone game. I haven't even really been reading, despite having several long-awaited holds checked out from the library. With the hectic days I've been dealing with, all I want to do is nothing. I haven't started my embroidery project, I haven't clipped my new collection of free magazines for collage, I haven't cooked stew for the work week. I haven't even changed my thermal clothes. You can get away with a lot in merino; loose jeans and a rotating selection of sweaters conceal the same five-day-old Icebreaker set.

I feel okay about being so idle. I'm trying to convince myself that it's natural and necessary to rest, even if my bias is go-go-go. I think that's why I've been getting sick, if I'm honest. I never let myself rest unless I'm exhausted, or have a good “excuse” to do so, and my body knows this. I'm psychosomatically forcing myself to slow down. Conversion disorder, the new medical slang for Freudian hysteria, has occasionally come up over the years as I've attempted to get my varied and non-specific symptoms diagnosed. It's often used to dismiss young female patients when doctors can't figure out the problem, so this is the first time I've taken it seriously. Or maybe I don't even need to intellectualize it - I am tired, and I deserve to take a rest. Why is that so hard for me to believe? .

In the spirit of doing less, I don't have a song for you today - my first impulse is to apologize for being so late and so lazy for this update, but I won't. I'm trying out a trick to break the habit of needless apologies, which is to say “thank you" whenever you're tempted to say “I'm sorry.” So, thanks for your patience this week. Maybe something worth reading about will happen to me soon.

Until Thursday,

-Magpie