Spontaneous combustion

I am NOT a spontaneous person. Meticulous planning is more my speed.

I’m talking booking my holidays a year in advance, planning the week’s meals and compiling a rigorously thorough shopping list, pondering destinations to retire 15 years out and choosing my daughter’s name a decade before she was born.

DD, on the other hand, is the let’s wing it type.

So he gets a little freaked when I start wondering whether we should have pumpkin or lamb risotto for dinner a week next Wednesday. This isn’t idle speculation. I actually expect us to make a decision … and then I require his ETA.

And I get very wound up about lateness. Oh, I’m OK for the first 10 minutes. I sit there assuring myself I’m totally fine and dandy with it, but as the minutes tick past I start tensing up like a jack-in-the-box that’s about to burst out.

By the 20-minute mark I’m VERY pouty. Let’s not even talk about timing transgressions beyond that because they may involve tears.

I am trying to be more at peace with spontaneity and lateness but, like Charlie trying to get Lola to eat her dinner, this is a hard job because Alana is a very fussy greeter/meeter (struggling to find an appropriate word that rhymes with “eater”).

The limbo-like horror of waiting for someone is running late, or not knowing what I’m doing a week from Wednesday, virtually paralyses me. I find it impossible to get on with anything. I just pace and jitter.

Conversely, if you suggest – when a week from Wednesday finally arrives – that we should go out for Thai rather than have the lamb risotto I’ve meticulously planned, it has a similar, panic-inducing effect.

And so, when DD casually wondered on Wednesday night – over a glass of riesling and a plate of patatas bravas – whether I wanted to go to Chicago with him the next morning on his business trip, I almost needed to do THIS …

Just writing those words makes me want to do THIS again …

But I smiled casually and said “sure.”

Then he asked if I could organise leaving the country on such short notice and I smiled casually and said “Sure!”

What I really wanted to do THIS …

So he called Qantas to check if there were seats available on the plane. And for the next 10 minutes – as the nice woman tried to organise it – I felt like doing THIS …

After 10 minutes of faffing, the nice Qantas woman announced that yes, it looked like she could get me on the plane to Chicago the next morning. But she just had to check with her supervisor, so she put us on hold for a minute.

I’d moved beyond THIS …

To THIS …

But I casually smiled and acted like it was no biggie that I’d have to find my passport, someone to mind the kids on Thursday, Friday and Tuesday, someone to mind the dogs from Thursday to Wednesday, register with ESTA, pack, cancel a visit to jail on Sunday afternoon, cancel a drink I’d organised with friends at my place on Sunday night, ask for three days off work, cancel a meeting with my boss …

Then the nice Qantas woman came back on the line and apologised profusely. She couldn’t give us seats in the same cabin class together after all, her computer had glitched when it said “yes”.

I didn’t want to go to Chicago – for four days – with less than a day’s notice if we couldn’t sit together, so we told her to release the booking.

And, while part of me felt like THIS …

Another part of me was like …

Although I did feel a bit moochy about saying goodbye to DD at the airport. It didn’t help when he sent me a selfie of his champagne in the Qantas lounge with the quip: “Look at that fine beading!”

He’s followed it up with happy snaps of the jazz band he watched while drinking Oregon pinot in a cool Chicago bar.

Cruel!

How about you? Are you a planner or the spontaneous type? 

Song of the day: David Bowie “Changes”