There was a sci-fi story I read in high school that I always remembered called The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin. In short, it was the story about a guy who was piloting a supply ship through space, to deliver medical supplies to a mining colony on another planet. However, unbeknownst to him, a young girl, hoping to hitch a ride to the colony where her brother was located, had stowed away and was discovered after the ship had launched and was already in route. She thought the punishment for her discretion would merely be a fine, but quickly learned that the ship had only enough fuel to make it to the planet and did not account for the weight she had added to the ship.
In other words, her stowing away jeopardized the lives of herself, the pilot and the colonists depending on the medical supplies because the ship didn’t have enough fuel to haul the extra weight and would fall short of its destination and crash.
Initially, the pilot was callously instructed by his superiors to jettison the girl off the ship and continue the journey, and naturally he showed tremendous reluctance at the thought of having to kill someone; but it was a matter of kill one person to save the many people who needed the medical supplies, or jettison the medical supplies in order to save the girl.
Spoiler alert: they deliberate for so long that it doesn’t even matter; after jettisoning the medical supplies, it turns out that a little thing called physics had already come into play, and they’d been flying overweight for long enough to where the girl needed to be unloaded anyway, due to fuel constraints. The pilot is mentally murdered by having to push the button on someone’s life, the colonists on the planet do not get the medical supplies, and he is arrested and imprisoned for insubordination.
Everyone loses.
The above picture is of a field that technically classifies as my property, or at least half of it does. When I first moved into my house, I didn’t realize that it was my responsibility to maintain it, and I had neglected it and assumed the county would take care of it, as it sat underneath tension power lines. I didn’t learn that it was my responsibility until someone in my community (thought they) anonymously reported me to the county and I came home to find an official notice on my door about it, and tracked down who reported me, went to their door and had some words with them. That woman is dead now (seriously, died of asthma).
Since learning it was my responsibility, I’ve been pretty dutiful throughout the years of at the very least, making sure it remains cut and not high enough to become a rodent and snake haven. No matter how much I’ve hated the task of cutting the grass of an area that serves no real functional use and has very little potential due to its positioning underneath tension lines.
Obviously since I’ve had a child, yard work in general has become one of those things that has shifted lower in priority. However, it is still one of those things that requires to be done occasionally; despite the fact that the woman who reported may be dead, according to her, prior to the reporting, my property was a hot topic between her and the other gossipy yentas in the neighborhood, so it stands to believe that someone else would probably do it in the future if warranted. So, I still carve out time in the very little amount of it I actually have for myself, to cut the fucking grass every now and then.
And this field is the fucking worst. In addition to serving no real value to my property, it’s horribly full of slopes and dips and weird divots, so running any sort of lawnmower over it is always an adventure. Furthermore, the longer it grows, the less moisture wicks away and it creates his perpetual cycle of it growing fast because it’s retaining so much nutrient-rich moisture, and is always the part of my property that grows the fastest. And when it gets long enough, it becomes a beast to actually cut, and my mower often times clogs, leading me to blow my gasket and ultimately raise the height of my shit in order to pre-cut the fucking space, before ultimately needing to go over it again, just to buy myself 2-3 more days off of the next cut.
That being said, you can imagine how hard it is to be motivated to cut it, and it’s one of my least favorite things in the world to have to do. And if not for the field, I’d have an amount of land that would be more cost-manageable to hire landscapers to do the shit for me, but since they’re all-or-nothing companies, it’s either pay them an egregious amount of money to maintain all of my yard, or do it all myself.
The takeaway from these paragraphs is that in many cases, the longer that things are put off, the worse things become. It’s a sentiment that I’m feeling quite frequently these days in my life, as I have so little time where I’m not physically caring for a baby that things are falling behind everywhere else, and when I try and get to them, they’re way more difficult than they ordinarily should be, and then I get dejected, frustrated and miserable.
I know that things should settle down one day, but sometimes it definitely feels like I just want to throw my hands up and exasperatingly ask, when?
