It's Been a Shitty Week (wait for it...)

Today is Friday, September 13 (as I write, not as you read), so I suppose this is an appropriate thing to be writing today. Though it may turn out to be that today is the best day of the week, to a certain extent. But we'll get to that in a moment. Before we do, though, let's go back to last weekend...

Sunday night (that would be the 8th), my daughter took a shower. She didn't tell anyone that the shower didn't drain, but I discovered it a little while after she was finished when I found the water from her shower in the other bathtub in the house. Or half of it, anyway, since, when I looked, her tub still had standing water, too. Verdict: a clogged sewer line. All of the water in the house, therefore, was draining up into the bathtubs.

I could go into some depth with the details of what happened next, but we'd be here all day, so I'll skip to the part where, the next morning, I got in touch with a plumber friend (seriously, he came out to fix my hot water heater last year and we bonded over politics (not that we hang out or anything, but we exchange text messages every once in a while)) who came out to fix the issue. Which he did but only after seeing how kind of fucked up my house is due to all of the DIY stuff the previous owners did to it. Specifically, he got to see up close how they screwed up the plumbing.

Seriously, my house has some things in it that there is no other way to say than, "That's fucked up."

So he unclogged the sewer line but caused a leak in the bathroom sink because it didn't quite go back together correctly because the sink had been one of those DIY projects of the previous owners. Of course, we didn't know there was a leak...

...until Wednesday morning (which, by the way, was after (of course) I'd cleaned the tub in the master bathroom of all of  the... stuff... that had come up into it on Monday (I say "stuff" because I'm not sure what some of it was) and is some of what I skipped over telling you because Monday, in comparison, turned out to be a mild day), when the sewer line clogged up again. I discovered this after going to the bathroom because, when I flushed the toilet, water came up in the bathtub and the toilet didn't flush. So I texted my plumber friend and cleaned the stuff out from the cabinet under the sink so that he could run his snake thing in there again. Which is when I discovered that the pipes there were leaking and the towels were damp from the water.

However, before he could get to my house, the sewer line cleared itself, so the plumber said he'd come by later in the day to look at the sink since there was no longer an emergency. He did have other jobs already lined up despite the fact that he had been about to push them off till later in the day to come and fix my problem, which is what he had done on Monday. See, he's a good friend. Remember that when we get to later in the week.

But he didn't make it by on Wednesday. It got late enough that I needed to start cooking dinner, so I called him and told him not to worry about it and that he could work the sink in on Thursday if he had time. It was just a little drip, so I wasn't worried about getting it fixed on an emergency basis. His main concern was that he had caused the leak and didn't want to leave it like that, so he told me he'd come by first thing Thursday morning.

Thursday...

The only thing I can think is that Thursday decided that Friday the 13th gets too much attention and that it was going to give the 13th a run for its money.

Here's the thing with Thursday:
Thursday night (which would be last night) was the first opera of the season for my wife and me. I had a lot to do on Thursday, which included doing laundry and taking a shower, not to mention some errands to run outside the house. Thursday was already going to be a busy day.

When my wife got out of the shower on Thursday morning, she told me that it had drained slowly but, when I went into the bathroom to use the toilet, the tub was clear so I shrugged it off and sat down to do my business. What else was I supposed to do?
And let me be clear: Yes, I was taking a shit.
Yes, it's important for you to know that.
[And just as an aside here, you should know that I have what my plumber referred to as "healthy turds," and, if you look up a chart of what a healthy turd is as opposed to unhealthy turds, mine, actually, do fall into the range of "healthy." At any rate, as a plumber, he's in the somewhat unique position of seeing lots of turds, and he was impressed with mine because he doesn't see a lot of what would be considered "healthy" turds.]
Anyway... I flushed the toilet when I completed my business, and... it didn't flush. In fact, a little bit of water gurgled up in the bathtub. I sighed and, hoping, grabbed the plunger and tried to get the toilet to flush, but just a little more water gurgled up into the bathtub. Clear water, just so you know, and it wasn't all that much, just up around the drain.

As I was trying to decide what to do, my phone rang; it was my plumber letting me know that he was on his way over to deal with the sink... I got to let him know that the sewer line was, for really reals, clogged up again...

And, you know what? I'm out of time and this is getting beyond the length that people like to read in a... sitting...? Do people read blog posts while on the toilet? Like my dad used to read the newspaper almost exclusively in the bathroom? Huh, I wonder.
And you will have to keep wondering what happened, too. Until tomorrow, anyway...

Practicing

Generally speaking, there are two professions that we speak of as a "practice": law and medicine. Lawyers practice law and doctors practice medicine. The whole practicing thing was something that really bothered me when I was younger. I mean much younger. It was just one of those thoughts in my head that wouldn't go away, "Why would I want to go to a doctor that's only practicing?" I wanted to go to one that was through practicing, if you get what I mean. It just wasn't something that inspired confidence.

And here is why I learned not to rely on my parents for information: I asked my mom why doctors only practiced (see, that's how young I was), and her answer left me feeling more dubious about the whole situation. Something about how it was medicine and you could only ever practice it. Sort of like that time my brother (who is six years younger than me) came out to eat with some of my college friends to a Chinese restaurant and he felt compelled to ask the server, "What's curry?" Of course, the real issue was that the server answered completely seriously, "Curry is curry." And that is why doctors only practice medicine.

Anyway, this whole thing about what is a practice and what's not crept into my thoughts recently. I mean, I suppose there was a time when a mechanic was just a mechanic. A mechanic could land at the top of his field and literally (or close enough) know everything there was to know about engines. That's probably not true anymore. You can't even find out what's wrong with a car these days without a computer to tell you. A plumber... well, plumbers probably still can know everything there is about plumbing, but in this age I wouldn't feel confident that things will stay that way.

But all of that's kind of beside the point, whatever the point it. No, wait, I do have a point! My point is that I want to be a practicing writer. Of course, my wife is telling me that this is not what this means, but, you know what, I looked this up in several different places, and none of them had a good definition of what it means to have a practice or why it's called a practice or anything. The only clear thing is that to have a practice, you have to be doing it. So I've decided I want to be a practicing writer.

I like the sound of it, and I am doing it, so I'm claiming it. The thing is, anyone can be an author. Okay, well, that's not true. It is true; anyone could be an author if that person decided to write something. But it only takes one book or short story or whatever to be an author. You can call yourself an author the rest of your life off of just the one thing even though you never write anything again. However, you have to be writing to call yourself a "practicing writer." If you're not doing it, you can't claim to be it. At best, you could say "I used to be a practicing writer," but that just doesn't carry the same implication, now, does it?

Of course, once you've become a doctor or a lawyer you can always say you are those things. I mean, you never hear anyone saying "I used to be a doctor." No, that person is still a doctor, just not practicing anymore. And I'm pretty sure lawyers never say "I used to be a lawyer" they've been disbarred or something. No, they're just not practicing anymore if they've gone on to other things.

So, yeah, I'm a "practicing writer." It's what I'm doing right now. Don't start on me about clients or patients or whatever; I'm calling it what I want to call it. We'll call it poetic license, and, since I'm a practicing writer, I get to do that.

Now... I just need to figure out how to implement this whole idea...

Note:
A winner has been established from the comments left on Monday's

The Merry Christmas To All (e)Book A Day Traveling Blogathon (of Doom!)

post, and that winner is... um, wait... those winners... Well, it's the guys from A Beer for the Shower. I guess they can cut it in half? Can you do that to a digital copy? Maybe they can just fight over it? Yeah, I'm for that. Let's dig a hole in  the ground and toss in one beer. The one that makes it out gets a copy of The House on the Corner. How does that sound?