The Epic Door Knob Saga

I'm an only child, so when the time came for my father to teach his son how to use a hammer or build a dangerous contraption capable of bodily harm, he had to make do with me. And I like to think I learned the general principles of most DIY'ers. #1: Have lots of tools. #2: Why would you read the instructions? #3: Swear fluently when it goes wrong. And #4, the real kicker, the one that makes the other three work: Know how to improvise and work through trouble to achieve your desired outcome. Let's all take a moment and acknowledge my dad, who painstakingly taught his daughter these valuable lessons, including the bonus lesson "Don't use a sledgehammer while wearing flipflops."  Thanks, Dad.
So when I noticed that the door knob on my bedroom door was covered in masking tape, and my new roomie explained that it needed to be replaced, I offered to do it. After all, it's a simple thing I've done before, it's something that will bring me satisfaction from working with my hands, and it will keep my mind occupied, something else quite valuable right now. She looked at me like I was crazy, but acquiesced.
Day 1.
I knew I would need a new door knob. That seemed self-evident. To the hardware store! A cheap but lockable door knob is $6.99, no great price to pay for the healthy boost in self respect I was expecting when I opened and closed the door for the first time. (You know, when you finish a project, and stand back to admire what you've done, no matter how insignificant?) Of course, the package said I would need a Phillips screwdriver. And then it hit me.
I have no tools. Wait, no, what?
I have no tools! WTF? Whose daughter? Not even a goddamned screwdriver?
Not a single solitary goddamn screwdriver.
When I left Washington state, I left behind much of my old life (including, apparently, my toolbox). When I was living with my family, I had no need to replenish my toolkit, because most of the people I'm related to collect tools the way gravity collects...everything. Which meant that whatever tool I needed could probably be found with enough vigorous searching.
Then I moved in with K. K is a motorcycle mechanic, and shares my family's gravitational theory of tools. When we found an ad on Craigslist for Makita power tools, he crowed for days. Honestly, if we'd had a bigger bed he might have slept with the damn thing, like a kid with his favorite Christmas gift. So again, if I needed a tool, all I had to do was reach into his magical bag, hunt around for a couple minutes, and return victorious. I swore I was going to help him organize that someday.
Sigh.
Anyway, back at the hardware store, I realized I would need to buy myself a screwdriver. So, feeling like the noobiest noob in the store, I sidled on over to a clerk and asked where their tool section is. Have you ever had to ask where the screwdrivers are, in a hardware store? I felt like I'd walked into a grocery store and asked where they keep "that tasty stuff that keeps me from passing out-you know, you put it in your mouth and move your jaw up and down a lot?" But the young man obliged. A little too obligingly, he really wanted to stay and help me pick a screwdriver. Dude. It's a screwdriver! I grabbed the cheap one and split.
And thus I returned home triumphant, ready to wrest more self esteem out of an inanimate object. I set down my new knob, my midget screwdriver (the cheapest one was called the Stubby. This actually does affect the plot here), and faced my foe for the first time. Whereupon I noticed that, though my shiny new knob takes Phillips screws, my ugly old one takes...flatheads.
**Intermission, while I bang my head against the wall**
Day 2.
I'd been running back and forth all week from one store to another, trying to find the cheapest ways to stock a new house with the basic items that I take for  granted. Target was all out of cheap flathead screwdrivers, so I walked across the street, back to the OSH where I'd gotten the Phillips. Ah, but this time, I knew where the hand tools were. Improvement! I grabbed the cheap one again, though this one is regular sized, and came home to finish my battle. The old door knob came out with a little wrangling, using the longer screwdriver as leverage. I pulled out the new one's hardware, and fitted the inside part to the hole in the door.
It didn't fit. Whether the wood had simply swollen with age, or standard sizes had changed in the 3,000 years since the house had been built, I don't know. It almost fit. So close! But there was no way I could make it work, given my current circumstances. If only I'd had a hammer to tap it into place with...
**Intermission 2, while I stare at my handiwork and cry**
Later on Day 2, my new roomie, A, offered to loan me her hammer. Gratefully, I accepted. Taking a careful look in the instructions to see which way the tongue/latch is supposed to face (I know, this is where I went wrong, huh? I totally violated the rules!), I smacked  the thing into place. Beautiful! The knob went on, and I screwed it in. Even realizing that "stubby" is not a good thing for a screwdriver to be couldn't dampen my zeal. So what if the handle of the screwdriver is right up against the door handle itself and makes it 10x harder to use! It's working! At last, I tightened the final screw and sat back on my heels, ready to soak in that hard-earned pride. I closed the door. But instead of that beautiful little 'snick' of the latch I'd been expecting, I got a 'thunk'.
The tongue comes out the wrong way. Instead of sliding smoothly into the socket in the wall, it smacks against it. I installed it backwards. I. Installed. The goddamn door knob. Backwards.
And that brings us to this morning, where I sit in bed, staring at my quiet, smug little door knob. Soon I will have the patience and time to unscrew all those tedious little pieces, with my freaking annoying little Stubby screwdriver, find some way to leverage the thing out and turn it around, then hammer it back in, check to make sure I've got it right this time, then screw the thing down like the wrath of God.
I'd like to say there's some meaningful lesson behind this tirade, some kernel of wisdom I wanted to impart. But there isn't. This time it's just a frustrating story that I found amusing. Though, if I were to really dig, I suppose the moral of the story is that every woman needs her tools. Lots of them.

The Silver Lining Mining Co.

This morning marks the second day I've woken up in my new home. It's... not bad. There were no tears last night, nor the night before. I expected tears. I expected to cry myself to sleep, sobbing into my pillow quietly for fear of waking my new roommate.
That didn't happen, and I honestly feel guilty about it. Part of me believes there should have been tears. And there have been, believe me, many times in the past 10 days when I have simply stopped what I was doing and cried. But not here. Maybe it's because by the time I get in at night I'm exhausted, and I know how to make myself sleep quickly. Or maybe it's because I feel at home here. More traitorous "accepting the situation" bullshit. After all, if I can make myself happy here, then I can internalize the fact that this is not temporary. If I start to feather my own nest, and make myself happy by myself, I'm not waiting-or subconsciously expecting-K to call me and ask me to come 'home'.
Traitorous indeed.
But I do like my new place. Despite its drawbacks (thrown into bright, glaring detail when compared with my old home with K), it's charming. Up the hill, away from the cold and wet air by the ocean, but still in PG, this house has just about everything I need. It's old, uninsulated, the windows are single-pane, and apparently the walls are very thin. A, my new roomie, warned me that I'd be able to hear the TV, people talking, music, etc. What she wasn't able to warn me about is the thundering quiet I experienced going from sharing a room with another person to living by myself. She gets up around 5:30, is out by 7ish. I wake up around 8. She's home and in her room when I get home. She leaves me notes about what goes where, and yesterday there was a note with a bag of day-old pastries and some fruit she couldn't eat. So dinner was strawberries. And I'm not complaining, because I'm not looking to do girl-talk bonding with anybody right now. I'm glad of the space to think. It's just odd to think of how many less words I'm using daily, simply by virtue of not having anyone around the house.

**That's another odd thing about no longer living together. Permit me the digression, but I took K to Target day before yesterday. Since he doesn't have a car, if I'm going somewhere I'll sometimes offer him a ride. I found myself yakking his ear off on the trip over, and stopped myself. It felt weird. It wasn't nervous chatter, I wasn't hiding a feeling of discomfort. I simply had so much to say. I hadn't had a chance to engage with him in a while. Naturally, a lot of our conversations lately have been centered on how we're handling the situation. On Wednesday, I felt okay, and I wanted to talk to my friend. So I did. And I realized how much I had to say because we hadn't just gabbed in a week.
All the little things you see or experience in your day, the neat articles or stories from your professors, when you get home, you share with your partner. Like filling up a bucket with seashells while you're at the beach, and bringing them home to spill out on the counter for your partner to enjoy. But that's not how it works anymore.**

Anyway. I like my room, quiet though it is. My classes end at 2 today, so I'll come back here and start to put stuff away. And I'm looking forward to that. There's nobody here to say "I like it when the dresser is over here, and the 'whatever' goes there." I'm setting up shop the way I like it, and I don't have to appease anybody else's sensibilities. Gotta find those silver linings.
One of the biggest realizations I've had since last Tuesday is how to value myself. I know this seems like a non sequitur, but bear with me.
I've had low self-esteem for a while. I recognized it, but didn't know what to do. Possibly I didn't care. Doesn't matter. I didn't value myself as I should have. "What do I do" the thought would go "that is valuable?"
Since K and I split last Tuesday, I have found myself a new home, signed a lease, moved my shit, paid my bills, gone to work and done my schoolwork. I value myself because even though I'm in pain, even though sometimes I wish I could turn back time and erase everything that's happened since the night of the 13th, I'm still going. And all the things we did together, which were difficult, I'm doing by myself, often for the first time in my sheltered 28 years.
I value my strength. I value that I'm still laughing, and crying when the occasion warrants it. I value what sometimes feels like phantom limb pain, when I reach out to touch a relationship that no longer exists.
I think I can be happy here, in this room in PG. I've always been fiercely independent, and this room is a reminder of what I can accomplish, all by my self. It is, if I'm honest, rather exhilarating.

I realized that a lot was going on in my little world that I wanted to share, and explore in text, and have a permanent record of, and not overwhelm my Facebook feed. So I started a blog. I'd been thinking about doing this for a while, but it seemed unnecessary. I didn't feel like I had a lot to say. But things change. Huge life changes happen, and I get to thinking, and hopefully something good will come out of this whole process.
But not all my FB friends need my meandering, maundering, sometimes maudlin screeds clogging up their feeds. Those of you who are interested are welcome to take a peek occasionally, or comment if I get too involved in self-pitying. Or, ya know, whatever. Here we go.
My partner and I split up on the 14th. We'd been together about a year. We had plans. We love(ed?) each other. But that's not what this blog is-mostly-about.
I have never lived by myself. I've been married, I lived with my husband for several years. I lived with my most recent partner for almost 10 months. But I've never done this grown up shit by myself. And I am, quite frankly, terrified.
So I'm writing this. It's a log of my mysterious voyage into (dun dun dun) Adulthood.
How do we define ourselves as adults? Where is the threshold, and who gets to decide when we've passed it?
Hopefully this blog will be a record of my attempts-failed, successful, and ongoing-at convincing myself and others that I've breached the Adult Threshold. And because I have been making these attempts in concert with a partner, up until 2 weeks ago, there may be a fair amount of "wow this is different when I'm lonely/single" navel gazing.
But I promise to steer clear of as much self-indulgent emo-ness as is humanly possible.
That about wraps it up for tonight.