If you watch The Amazing Race, you’re quite familiar with “Roadblocks.” Quick explanation: teams of two people get clues at various points around the world and try to make it to designated finish lines. Usually the last team to the “pit stop” is eliminated. This goes on until the last episode when the final three duke it out for a million dollars. Anyway, a “Roadblock” is a task that one of the team members has to complete before they’re allowed to move on.
The Amazing Race is notorious for designing ridiculous tasks for people to perform like eating a pound of exotic meat, unrolling giant hay bails in a 10 acre field to search for an envelope with a clue in it, or knocking down suits of armor with watermelon slingshots (if you haven’t seen this video, your life really isn’t complete). Watching people freak out while doing this stuff is of course part of the fun. And it’s so easy to sit on your couch and say, “Why are you getting so stressed? Stop yelling at each other? Don’t be such a baby,” after someone’s tried her key in 3,000 ancient padlocks on a Chinese bridge.
Today I officially determined that I never want to go on The Amazing Race. I mean, I never really thought I would. I’m in terrible shape. Long airplane rides make me feel like a truck’s hit me (actually, I just generally feel like a truck’s hit me, so my baseline isn’t so good). And I’m completely heat/cold intolerant (tonight I was shivering while wearing a sweater and scarf in the house when it was 68 degrees).
But here’s the kicker: when I can’t figure something out, I assume I’m losing my mind. Take today when I was getting our taxes together. After going through a foot-high stack of papers that we’ve put off filing away for the past six months, I started realizing that I couldn’t find a bunch of crucial forms that I needed. Like 1099’s. And the thing that says how much mortgage interest we paid. So I start rifling through papers. And as I’m sifting and sifting and finding nothing, I start convincing myself that I’ve thrown everything away while tossing out junk mail. Then I concoct a story about the letter carrier deliberately losing all of our important stuff due to the fact that he hates us because we never pick up our mail so he has to stuff it into our box all the time. And then I decide I’ve actually opened all the supposedly lost mail, put it somewhere, and just can’t find it because my brain is so fogged out.
I should explain here that I really am unnaturally foggy due to the fact that I: 1) am in pain all the time, 2) have some stupid condition called fibromyalgia that apparently makes you kind of foggy at times, and 3) take a bunch of medication that is apparently in great demand on street corners but doesn’t particularly make me feel all that spunky.
But back to the hunt. As time passes, I become more and more stressed out. Am I going to have to call every single one of these companies? Should my husband, Tenzin, start calling people? We see our accountant on Friday. I’m going to lose my frickin’ mind.
Tenzin and I decide to have him go pick up the kids from school while I keep working on finding everything. To the naked eye we probably looked fine. But the tension was brewing. He was working that night. And coaching our son’s first soccer practice. And we needed to make an early dinner. And my head, by this point, was way past “ouch” because I’d been blowing it off.
As it turns out, Tenzin, who is “organizationally challenged,” actually made a “Taxes 2010” file and forgot about it. I found it on the floor next to his desk. I was basically sitting on it the entire time I was filing papers away and having a nervous breakdown. If we were on The Amazing Race, people would’ve been rolling their eyes or screaming at the television because we were so stupid.
The end result was me having to take a pain pill, put on some sad music, and cry for about five minutes. It was like that scene out of Broadcast News. All things considered, I guess it wouldn’t have made for particularly high-ratings TV. I raced around, got totally exhausted, and cried. Tenzin and I didn’t kill each other. And we eventually got where we needed to go.
What can you say. Just another ordinary day on the not-so-amazing race.
Tammy Soong is a writer, wife, and mom from Reno, Nevada. She takes an absurd amount of pain medication, but not enough to have actually named her children "Newt" and "Elfie." She spends most days stressing out over clutter, writing stuff for this place, and working on podcasts with her gal pals, the Blogging Betties.