DIANE MAKAR MURPHY As for being a slob, I seem to be doing a great job

This column was inspired by my drive to work, during which I ate an apple and a peanut butter sandwich -- no jelly, thank heaven. I started eating and promptly dropped a piece of apple onto my beige V-neck T-shirt. When I fumbled to remove it, the wet spot it left grew.
On my next bite, I dropped a second chunk of apple onto the middle of my chest. Great. I needed a napkin and some water.
I parked and looked around my formerly precious Dodge Stratus. I bought it because it was a sun-roofed, dark-windowed beauty, a head turner. Now, it was a trash can.
An empty Taco Bell cup sat in the front seat holder, next to an empty yogurt cup and a metal spoon. Papers were underfoot. A big red towel that supposedly protects the car from dog hair lay crumpled on the back seat. There on the floor, amidst two pencils, a Taco Bell hot sauce packet and an expired parking pass, was my lunch bag from another day.
The awful truth
I took out a near-empty plastic bottle and drained two drops of Evian onto a Burger King napkin I dug out of the crack between the driver's seat and the console. I arrived at my destination intact and stainless, but I knew the truth. I had become a slob.
By midafternoon, after working at The Vindicator and YSU, I'd be wearing a chalk glaze with ink stains on my hands and possibly on my pants as well. What the heck had happened to me?
It's true, I've had slob moments my entire life. I remember the first day of Army basic training when Saadia Ali, a New Yorker who was definitely all that and a cup of soup, grabbed my hand and said, scowling, "What's with those fingernails? You look like an auto mechanic."
Years earlier, the fingernails had been clean, but the skin was not. I don't know how I did it, but I always wore ink from a leaky pen.
I went to high school in the early '70's when T-shirts and jeans were the uniform of choice, and that suited me just fine.
But when did I become Oscar Madison? When did the woman who used to chastise her husband for not vacuuming under the lamp learn to live with jelly on the counters and crumbs on the floor?
School daze
Just the other day, I arrived at school and glanced at my pants. SOMEONE had drawn a 2-inch ink line across them! Imagine that! I don't even know how I accomplished it.
When I teach, I am the teacher you used to mock in high school. I turn from the board and am dusted in chalk. I brush my hands together and a cloud descends on the first two rows.
If it's a dry erase board, I manage, at least once a day, to forget I've written with marker and try to erase the writing with my hand. Blue smudges cover my formerly ink-stained paws.
When I eat, I have a tendency to talk with my mouth full, and the older I get, the worse I am about it. While I admonish my children, "You'll never have tea with the queen if you eat like that!" I admit to myself that I will NEVER have tea with any dignitaries. Not the queen, not the governor, not the guy who cleans the parking lot at city hall. Not more than once anyway.
Beer and bath?
And I would certainly never invite any of them to my home. Just the other day, I went into the upstairs bathroom and found an empty beer can in the wastebasket. A beer can? My mother never even allowed trash in the bathroom wastebasket! We had to carry it to another location. Have I completely fallen off the neatness index?
I may not be able to do much about my penchant for wearing chalk dust, but tonight, I stop at the self-serve carwash, then buy a new vacuum cleaner bag and some Mr. Clean. And whoever put that beer can in the bathroom trash basket had better watch out!
murphy@vindy.com