Decorate

This afternoon I had occasion to go for a long walking tour of my campus running various paperwork-related errands, and the experience was far more pleasant and utterly necessary than I expected it to be.

First of all, the leaves are turning. This means that fall is coming to a part of the country where I've never experienced it, and it's incredible how stealthy and beautiful it is. As agricultural regions go, the central valley is ridiculously, flamboyantly abundant in what it produces. Oranges and lemons are popping out now like Christmas tree ornaments, and soon I'm told the shaker trucks will come around and wrap big rubber belts around the trunks of the almond trees and shake the bejeezus out of them till all the nuts fly out. I can't wait to see this, and in fact I've already spotted a company drawing its name and logo from a strange (and not entirely appetizing) combination of nuts and jets: Top Gun Almond Shaking.

The parking lot where I abandon my car daily (and comically close to my office, considering I used to hike in from sorority row at my last university job, handily displacing the Greek sisters who chose to shack up the night before from their free street parking) is sheltered by trees that shake down ember-colored leaves all over my windshield. Some frantic species of bird is attracted to these particular trees, and I can hear their big screaming families when I lock my car, but thankfully these birds are either too stressed out to shit or they do it somewhere else, because my car remains mercifully clean in addition to being festively decorated with fall foliage.

Which makes a nice segue for the other reason my little walkabout was so enjoyable: I've discovered further evidence of a new psychological/decorative disorder! I say further evidence because I've already seen a frightening number of sufferers in my various tenures as an office employee. The affliction in question is marked by a tendency in the sufferer to latch on to a particular object or theme, and then spend easily a quarter of each paycheck over-decorating their workspace with as many examples of this object or theme as they can find. Selection has no purpose-- this is a sickness of volume.

Today I met a nice woman, L., who works in a rather isolated wing of a large administration building. It is perhaps a function of her isolation that her obsession with all things poodle has gotten as far as it has. There is an entire bookcase, office furniture, whose sole purpose is to shoulder the mighty weight of part of her collection of poodle figurines. This is addition to the poodle calendar, the poodle desktop image, the many stuffed, plastic, glass, and ceramic poodles that threaten to obscure her monitor and keyboard, and the novelty license plate that says "Oy, with the poodles already!" L. is Asian, with a pleasant face and triangular wedges for eyebrows, and her hair is suspiciously permed in tight poodley rings.

She was friendly, quick, efficient, and helpful, but I couldn't help feel sad and kind of panicked as I waited in her office for her to step out and make a copy of my paper. Along with the copious poodle crap, there were also several framed certificates testifying to the fact that L. has been cheerfully efficient at this particular job for two and a half decades. I can picture 25 office Christmases, and as many neatly wrapped little poodles.

(Side note: I find poodles personally horrifying because I myself am a dog owner and have to come to terms with the fact that on any given day, I am covered in a light haze of dog hair visible to my coworkers. Fine. Poodle hair, though, could easily be mistaken for something far sketchier than dog hair, thus causing people to wonder just what exactly goes on at my house if I'm constantly covered in... See what I mean?)

I've worked with a woman who was into animal prints and safari themed decorations, whose tightly packed and notoriously disorganized office would seem positively spartan if you removed every zebra-print candle, wooden mask, faux leopard skin throw, and ethnic wire statue-- in other words, if you insisted that only work-related things be in an office. I've known a woman who collected Smurfs, and another who collected Celtic things. I've known another who adored all things Elvis, and another who made my life a living, breathing, straight-out-of-Dante ring of lower hell with her mania for the color purple-- anything at all, as long as it was purple, including specially ordered office supplies, children's stickers, and squeaky dog toys, to which she would attach various storeroom keys in order to thoroughly humiliate anyone who asked to borrow them. (It was my mission for the years I worked with this woman to find the perfect purple parting gift-- something truly horrifying, like anal beads or a bedpan, but alas I was so happy to find a new job that I completely forgot. Just as well, really-- have you seen how much anal beads cost?)

The hording and displaying of various surface level obsessions is sad to me because it seems like a reinforcement of the shallowness of office relationships. To be known only as the Garfield woman? Or that guy with all the Simpsons stuff? It pretty much guarantees that if anyone wanted to do something nice for you, like have a little on-the-clock birthday party with dried out cake icing and plastic cups, the quick on-the-clock run for a card and a little gift requires virtually no guessing or thought at all-- "find something with a poodle," the office assistant will be told. The other reason I guess I find this hording thing sad is that it obviously takes time to build a collection like that. In some ways, it strikes me as another way of ticking off the days on a cell wall with a piece of chalk.

In my first job, I collected something. I collected rubber bands from the twice daily mail sorting routine that marked the beginning and end of my day like a big, pointless goalpost. This was when I was fresh out of college with a silly degree and all my dot com buddies were being laid off and fighting to wait tables, so the job was even worse because I had to be grateful for it every day. My main tasks were refilling the candy basket (ostensibly for students and visitors, but mainly visited by theatrically guilty staff cheating on Weight Watchers), sorting the mail, answering calls, and paying bills. I learned a lot from the job, despite my tone here, but one of the things I ended up spending lots of time doing was perfecting this eventually massive rubber band ball.

Imagine this thing with me: three years, eight to ten rubber bands a day, plus about a five-year head start on the collection by the previous girl, who'd just thrown the rubber bands into a bottom drawer. It was bigger than my head by the time I left, and on days when my supervisors stepped out early, the student assistant and I would play brief soccer matches with it and see how far it would bounce if dropped from the top of the third floor stairwell (answer: over 7 feet, but about ten of the outer bands popped off on impact). During one particularly grueling week of underemployment, I displayed the rubber band ball on my desk, next to the phone, but my boss quickly objected on the grounds that it gave the wrong impression about "the work we do here."

By far, though, the best story I have about the sickness of decorating offices concerns a lovely woman named Vicki, who was actually one of four Vicki's in our department (different from the rubber band ball job), thus necessitating a different spelling for each of them so everyone could at least tell them apart in print: Vicki, Vicky, Vikki, and Vicci (which I think is technically pronounced "veechy"). Vicki was a seasonal decorator, meaning the entire environment of her cubicle would change every month or so-- Fall! Halloween! Turkey Day (a seasonal decorator never calls it Thanksgiving)! Christmas! and on and on and ON AND ON. Plush toys, banners, candles, little wooden signs, the works.

The problem here, the compelling narrative conflict, as we say in MFA programs, is that there was a perpetually malfunctioning men's room on the floor directly above Vicki's desk. According to maintenance, a T-shirt had long ago been flushed somehow into a urinal, and the various labrythine pipes and valves and drains had never quite exorcised the T-shirt. Hence, about once a month, puddles of human waste would drip through the ceiling and patter down onto Vicki's desk, chair, phone, and computer. Sometimes this would happen during the day, sometimes over night, but it was a standing policy that Vicki would be relieved of her duties when her working area was sprayed with urine and the hazmat janitors had to be called, and sadly, the event was traumatic for her every time.

I remember a particular Christmas when a whole family of cotton ball snowmen went into the biohazard bag along with a singing wreath and a huge cinnamon-scented candle. I wish I were making this up. But each time it happened, Vicki's computer and phone would be sent off to be disinfected (come to think of it, who on campus specialized in cleaning the urine and feces off of Macs?) and back she'd come the next day with a whole new set of decorations, shored up by assurances almost comical in their certainty that this was for sure the last time it would happen.

Third Person

I'm exhausted. I really am. I'm going to bed at 8:00 when I can swing it, and sleeping till an extravagant 8 a.m. whenever possible. Unfortunately, those two times never coincide to allow me a full 12 hours of sleep, a magic number I'm convinced will heal me.

I think the problem is that I'm turning my head on like high beams during class and homework, and then what I've been doing at my job is utterly numbing and repetitive. Thankfully, that part ended yesterday, so hopefully I'll have some spare wattage of personality to wring into my writing and my life in general.

Which brings me to the problem: I'm trying to write about Saudi Arabia, specifically my time there as an angsty teen, and I'm having trouble doing it. The age-old Method acting theory that you must first try to access how you felt at the time in order to express it now? Totally not working. I can remember how I felt, or how I think I felt, and the problem is that stunned disorientation only works for a couple of pages. Plus I get stuck in the sadness of what eventually happened, how I got kicked out of boarding school and went into a deep depression and cut off almost all ties with the people I knew at that time in my life.

I'm learning that what's needed is my eye on these things from the vantage point of Now, but I've let the whole story cauterize itself off into this separate memory-tumor inside me. For many years, I believed it was a bad omen, the whole thing, the whole story, and that if I allowed myself to organically process it, to connect back to some of those people and those memories, it would infect all the rest of my life. It's hard not to see it that way because so much of the story coincides with adolescence, which is painful period most of us would like to separate ourselves from anyway. I felt like I had a grip on who I was before we moved there, and then for this period of two or three years I completely lost my hold on it and was stuck being this girl I didn't recognize. And then I slowly got me back as I finished high school and went into college. In many ways, I feel closer now to my 12-year-old self than I do to my 16-year-old self. They're wildly different people.

So this is what I'm thinking now-- I may write the story third person about my 16-year-old self and see if I can't muster some emotion for her beyond sadness and pity, because the way I write it now everything reads like a bad emo song.

As an exercise, things I liked about 16-year-old me:

1) She learned her way around airports really quickly and figured out that "douche" meant "shower" in the Amsterdam airport. She loved airports. They had more signage than any other place.

2) She was blissfully unaware of her own ass and of the width of her hips.

3) She read "Slaughterhouse Five" and quoted it very briefly and simply-- "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt"-- in her high school yearbook in the place reserved for lists of stupid inside jokes.

4) She had a great friend that she walked to school with every day. These walks started out from convenience, I guess-- he went the same way-- but eventually they waited for each other and often this was the only time in the day when she said what she really meant.

5) She loved the noon prayer call. She would hear it walking to and from lunch break at school with this friend, and it always struck her as beautiful. I googled it a few years ago and when I heard it, it brought tears to my eyes.

6) She adjusted to the heat. She learned a way of breathing it in with her body and radiating it back. She would go rollerblading for miles in the heat of the day, slicing through the wall of it like a wire through clay.

7) She had a sober way of sitting and thinking about things, turning them over and over in her mind. This later developed into something that was a source of joy and peace, but initially it was almost grimly meditative and slow. The only thing I can compare it to is how Zen Buddhists talk about sitting zazen, and how awkward and difficult it is at first to be still for 15 minutes at a time.

8) She knew then that she was a good artist. It was one of her few certainties. She was always confident with her hands.

9) She learned to function without corrective lenses. This was a dumb compromise-- her gas permeable contact lenses were always getting eyelashes and grains of sand in them and she got tired of her face suddenly torquing up like Popeye's when her eyes went all stabby painful. She had glasses, but they magically changed her back into her 8th grade dork self, so she never bothered to get the prescription updated. Hence, she developed the remarkable ability to recognize people by their walks, and thus to predict with a certain degree of accuracy which fuzzy colored blobs she should wave at. (This skill also helped her become a great auditory note taker later on.)

10) I go back and forth on whether or not I liked this last thing about her, so that's why it's last. She developed the habit of keeping her mouth shut. Initially she hoped this would allow her to escape detection in social situations, but unfortunately all it did was lend her an air of mystery and encourage people around her to project ideas onto her even more vigorously. Keeping her mouth shut taught her, though, the extent to which someone will reveal what it is they want and what it is they fear if they are presented with enough silences. The problem, of course, is taking this mouth shutting thing too far-- not speaking up when the occasion cries out for it, not asking for help. Not telling the truth mostly, but not because she meant to lie, just because she was so far removed from telling, and from connecting to someone else through the telling, that she didn't know how to start.

My mom, bless her, is sending a giant box of crap 16-year-old me saved, a kind of time capsule, perhaps, for occasions just like this-- when I care about telling and getting it right, when I finally feel like giving her a voice.