off balance

My inner ear has gone AWOL. While I spent the morning getting ready for work, which usually involves a lot of darting through the narrow doorways of my historic home because I've forgotten to do three or four things in the same room at the same time before moving onto the next in a sensibly systematic fashion, the walls and doorframes and corners of my bookshelves kept lurching at me and catching me hard on the shoulders and shins. Mean old house, I thought. Has it in for me this morning.

But no, it's my inner ear that decided to curl up in bed and stay behind while I did the responsible thing and went to work. All the walls, doorframes, filing cabinets, and desk corners ambush me every time I turn around. So I'm going to arrive home tonight with some stunning new bruises. On the day I decided to wear a tanktop and skirt, too.

Maybe it's the earplugs. I wear them sometimes at night because the neighbors across the hall get noisy from time to time, and as my bedroom borders the stairwell, I can hear them stomping up and down the stairs as they come and go about their God-knows-what nighttime business (they appear never to sleep), and last night they were fighting. So in went the earplugs. But apparently the pressure inside my ear canals did my balance no favors.

But it does make for some funny moments. You don't realize how much you rely on your perception to line up with reality until your perception's out of whack and reality smacks you a good one. It's especially embarrassing to bounce off a wall that's quite obviously and solidly there in front of a client. I kind of half-spin a pirouette and laugh at myself and offer them more coffee.

In other news, I feel like I've taken another step toward settled adulthood. When Kevin moved out, he gave me his recycle bin. At any time during the past two years I could've asked the City for one of my own, but since the City is so lackadaisical and accepting about recycling -- they'll take it in trash bags -- I never bothered. (And, really, South Bend recycling is great. You don't have to sort anything, and they'll take everything. Plastic, paper, cardboard, dead rats, whatever you want. Well, not actually dead rats.) The recycling is so great that the garbage men are evil and won't take cardboard boxes. If you pack them carefully into the city-supplied bins, come Thursday morning, trash day, you'll find them tossed back, rejected, onto your lawn. Evil.

Anyway, since the garbage men come up and down the alley on Thursday, there's no need to go dragging the garbage cans around, and since I've been for two years without a recycle bin, I've just thrown my recycling into other people's bins or into a box or garbage bag and let the containers get recycled too. But yesterday was my first recycling day using Kevin's old bin, and when I got home from dinner with Meg and Phillip, there it was sitting by itself on the curb, and I thought, Oh. I have to bring in the recycle bin.

So there it was. Something that ordinary grown-ups do that I've never had to. And now I do. And I was excited.