Flipping Eggs! (And Other Sad Stories)

I can't flip an egg to save my life. Apparently I was not granted the egg-flipping gene, and egg-flipping doesn't seem to be a learned trait, although I'm sure there's a paper or something Wingal could direct us all to if we really had an interest.

It's only a shame because I love eggs over-easy but I more often than not end up with scrambled eggs. And I (admittedly inexplicably) hate scrambled eggs.

It actually came to my attention last night while attempting to flip some eggs that in fact many of my most recent posts -- similarly to the way this one appears to be shaping up -- have focused on things that are not working in some way thereby causing me loads of anxiety, encouraging great strife, and really just disrupting my self-contained little universe to no end.

I want to make it clear that, while I certainly appear to invest an unreasonable amount of personal energy on these unhappy circumstances, and while I am in fact horribly melodramatic about such events and bemoan them for days to Raphael, to my coworkers, to random people on airplanes (not actually true), and at people's birthday parties, I really don't dwell on the them quite to the extent that it might otherwise be interpreted from a glance back over the last few posts.

Unless I have had too many glasses of wine, which probably explains the birthday parties.

So to prove the point, I'm not even going to venture into the territory currently occupied by my car. More specifically, by weird car-related flapping noises combined with strange jerking first thing in the morning and whatever that expensive thing was a couple weeks ago where the ignition stopped working. And I'm certainly not going to mention how in order to unlock the driver's side door you now have to open the passenger's side and crawl over the seats because as of yesterday the key doesn't work anymore.

In fact, since I want to shift my dramatic focus from bad things that are happening to good things that are happening, I would like to talk about how much I LOVE my otherwise trusty little red Toyota pick-up. Not counting the ill-fated Izuzu Trooper I owned for three weeks, it was the first vehicle I ever found and bought all on my own. I test drove it by myself, signed all the paperwork with nary a family member in sight, and proudly sent my grandparents a hand-drawing of it. At age 27, I think it was.

It's got over 100,000 miles on it. I paid it completely off on my 31st birthday last year. It takes me everywhere. It's been on archaeological surveys with me and has the scars to prove it. Mainly from a fencepost I backed into. It's had a tree fall on it. It's been rear-ended twice. We slept in the back during our west coast roadtrip. I rode in the back with a terrified Lila when we picked her up from Phoenix while she was still Maggie.

My little truck has carried trees, large rocks, massive bags of laundry, numerous random pieces of furniture scavenged from alleyways, hundreds of archaeological artifacts (and too many archaeologists to count), and two bachelorette parties without complaint. Until about two months ago.

And I'm still not here to discuss its failings. Because, like many things in my life -- including my relationship, my family unit, my friendships, our garden, the computer, the sewer system, my pharmacy benefit manager, the food processor, my cardiovascular system, the US Postal Service, and the dog -- it works perfectly most of the time. It costs something to have everything, of course, including relationships and puppies and a decent pharmacy benefit manager. And the more you have, they say, the more you have that is going to fail at some point.

But when it comes right down to it, in spite of my dramatic reenactments of how the fridge imploded or a coworker got dragged away by mountain lions, I know I'm lucky to have so many things that work so well. I'm lucky to have so many things that will someday stop working. And I'm lucky to have all the eggs I need any time I need them, even if I can't flip them to save my life. Scrambled eggs are the price I pay for an egg over-easy every now and again, I guess.

And I will never want for scrambled eggs.