Today on the freeway I collided with a giant bouncing piece of debris. I have no idea what it was, but it was huge and black and cylindrical and very, very hard. My best guess is that it was some kind of planter used in industrial landscaping, but it could just as easily have been some bizarre baptismal font for baby elephants.
It was bouncing and spinning furiously at a diagonal, in the opposite direction of the flow of traffic, and I noticed the cars in front of my weaving wildly, but this is California and they tend to do that with no provocation anyway. So I started my customary lane change to merge with another heavily congested freeway when I noticed the Thing leaping over another car and directly into my lane. I managed to brake lightly and turn so that the Thing and I collided obliquely instead of head-on, but the impact was still loud and sudden.
Miraculously, my car is unscathed-- I can't tell if the scratches on the driver's side are Thing scars or just the result of 11 years of life-- and I didn't cause anyone else to careen into a wall, but the resulting flood of adrenaline made me sick to my stomach.
I relate my debris collision for several reasons, the first of which is that it's the 146th reason (nimble and responsive brakes and steering!) why my 1997 Honda Accord is the Best and Most Loyal Car Ever Made. Second is because it's the perfect metaphor for how things have been going in my work life. Big things are happening all around me, but so far I've managed to duck at just the right moment.
Hope my luck holds.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Rubber Chickens
I'm almost positive that I'm starting to run a fever so maybe that explains why I feel like it's urgent to write about the insight I had on the drive home (early) from work:
One of the biggest reasons I love Pants is because of the way he was looking at rubber chickens last night.
Let me explain. There's supposed to be a Big Loud American fly-over at an air show in San Diego in a couple of weeks and Pants's squadron has been chosen to provide it. In order to sort out who actually gets to fly, though, the CO has arranged a talent show. Pants decided he would juggle rubber chickens while dressed as a mullet-wearing redneck to the tune of "In the Mood" performed by chicken squawks. The chickens themselves were clevered fitted by someone in Taiwan with realistic squawk whistles in their throats, and last night when he was practicing they would let out the occasional strangled "bock."
But the way he was looking at them while they tumbled through the air, that's what got me. It was a total quiet focus, neither harried nor relaxed, but just exactly present and plugged in, even when he occasionally dropped one. It's how he looks at me when I talk to him, and it struck me on the drive home today that he really pays attention, and he makes it look easy. For a guy who's often gone for long periods of time, this is incredibly important.
There's a song by the Killers called "Read My Mind" and when I first heard it I loved it and played it way too many times in a row when I was alone in the car. I feel like Pants is often reading my mind-- but not in the sense that he's predicting my thoughts without my having to vocalize them. (In fact, almost every time he tries to do that he's off.) I feel like he's reading more in the way someone reads a book they're really into. They absorb, they process, they remember and come back looking for more. He remembers things I've said, and even when he's quiet for long periods of time, when he does eventually say something to me it's like my words have been rolling over and over in his head like clothes in a really efficient and really quiet Swedish dryer.
I've also noticed and swooned over the fact that he treats me like an MVP conversation partner when we're hanging out in groups. He often tees up my jokes or stories and clears the field to drive an idea my way. I hope I'm effective at doing the same for him because despite his frequent periods of quietness one-on-one, he's got a very easy social vibe.
And then when I was turning into the street where we live and noticing that all the sunflowers are about to pop out and nod everywhere, a great metaphor came to me: Pants has never treated me like the giant umbrella he accidentally brought along when it's clearly not going to rain.
One of the biggest reasons I love Pants is because of the way he was looking at rubber chickens last night.
Let me explain. There's supposed to be a Big Loud American fly-over at an air show in San Diego in a couple of weeks and Pants's squadron has been chosen to provide it. In order to sort out who actually gets to fly, though, the CO has arranged a talent show. Pants decided he would juggle rubber chickens while dressed as a mullet-wearing redneck to the tune of "In the Mood" performed by chicken squawks. The chickens themselves were clevered fitted by someone in Taiwan with realistic squawk whistles in their throats, and last night when he was practicing they would let out the occasional strangled "bock."
But the way he was looking at them while they tumbled through the air, that's what got me. It was a total quiet focus, neither harried nor relaxed, but just exactly present and plugged in, even when he occasionally dropped one. It's how he looks at me when I talk to him, and it struck me on the drive home today that he really pays attention, and he makes it look easy. For a guy who's often gone for long periods of time, this is incredibly important.
There's a song by the Killers called "Read My Mind" and when I first heard it I loved it and played it way too many times in a row when I was alone in the car. I feel like Pants is often reading my mind-- but not in the sense that he's predicting my thoughts without my having to vocalize them. (In fact, almost every time he tries to do that he's off.) I feel like he's reading more in the way someone reads a book they're really into. They absorb, they process, they remember and come back looking for more. He remembers things I've said, and even when he's quiet for long periods of time, when he does eventually say something to me it's like my words have been rolling over and over in his head like clothes in a really efficient and really quiet Swedish dryer.
I've also noticed and swooned over the fact that he treats me like an MVP conversation partner when we're hanging out in groups. He often tees up my jokes or stories and clears the field to drive an idea my way. I hope I'm effective at doing the same for him because despite his frequent periods of quietness one-on-one, he's got a very easy social vibe.
And then when I was turning into the street where we live and noticing that all the sunflowers are about to pop out and nod everywhere, a great metaphor came to me: Pants has never treated me like the giant umbrella he accidentally brought along when it's clearly not going to rain.
Rock!
I used to periodically steal this gray shirt of my brother's that said in simple white block letters, "I [heart] cops."
I liked wearing it because it seemed to mean two different things depending on who I was around. With grumpy kids my own age, it was sarcastic and passively inflammatory-- the kind of thing worn by someone who would answer authoritative questioning with more smart ass questions. Around older folks, I found that the shirt came off as shockingly sincere, like a bold statement of civic responsibility way before the whole nation had a fetishistic crush on beefy firemen.
I was thinking about that shirt last night on the drive home from class where we'd spent four hours discussing a book defending the merits of 80's hair metal bands like Motley Crue (no umlauts for tools, sorry), Poison, Guns 'N Roses, Ratt, Tesla, and White Lion. A big theme in the book was "rocking," which was loosely defined as stickin' it to the man by getting high on whatever was around, having empty sex with feral women, and collecting legal infractions.
What I realized on this drive home was that I don't rock. I never have. I rebelled, certainly, but I never rocked. I'm living in a time when many people my age are copping to their metal roots while holding up the deflector shield of ironic distance. This is fine, I guess, but I can't join in. My musical roots are embarrassing in a far less ironic Gen X way. When I jammed out alone in my room at night, it was to classical music. Seriously. I had no idea at the time why there wasn't an MTV-like channel that put together long, cinematic videos to "The Planets" or "Appalachian Spring." I laid in bed at night and filmed them myself, long thematic serials where I starred in a variety of roles like Viking queen and female cosmonaut, and whose finales nearly always involved explosions of uncertain origin sparking dramatically behind me as I gazed out at the future from a stormy hilltop.
My frustration with pop music wasn't that it was formulaic or one-dimensional-- it just wasn't long enough or dramatic enough, and the troublesome addition of lyrics always excluded me as a viable hero of the music. No one would have sung about me at the time "she's got the look" or "you give love a bad name." My crushes were secret things of pulverizing intensity, and the openness of pop, of actually naming and (God forbid) professing one's feelings to someone else, was too horrifying to imagine.
Luckily I had a little brother who began demanding Milli Vanilli and MC Hammer cassettes loudly and early in his adolescence, and quickly mastered an acidic disgust for my timpani-rolling finales. He took a bravely self-sufficient shotgun approach to music selection, sampling far and wide from the crowded MTV landscape and developing a startling expertise in the metal/rock/punk arena. "You are such a dork," he would say, and last night for the first time I started to realize how important he was in prying me out of a quickly hardening shell of narrow cerebral isolation. Of course, I didn't see it that way at the time. I suspected that he might be mildly retarded and told him so. I suspected he had no class or taste or appreciation for history or high culture. What I didn't realize was that he was taking a critical step towards culture, and towards engaging people our own age in discussion, thereby connecting, which is a vital part of creating new culture. I was huffing the fumes of very, very old conversations.
Connecting isn't impossible to do with classical music. In fact, it's quite easy and satisfying. I had a great long-distance musical dialog going on with two of my uncles who frequently sent me stellar tapes and broadened my classical horizons, but when you're 11 and the people you'd really like to invite to your fifth grade slumber party are in their forties and live across the country, connection becomes a little more difficult.
A completely different reason that I know I don't rock is that I think I genuinely do have a fondness for cops. I have never once been tempted to be anything other than Southern lady "yes, sir, no, sir" polite to them. Something in me gets a little bit thrilled when I need to explain something to a cop, like why I'm wandering drunk and on foot around a neighborhood with a baseball bat on New Year's Eve (sorry, Mom and Dad, for that and for what follows), or dressed like a pregnant hillbilly with a black eye and driving a compact car with nine people in it (sober, though!). There's a bit of the penitent confessor in me whenever I deal with cops. Immediately I know that I'm either (a) completely in the wrong and probably should have been caught earlier, or (b) simply involved in a misunderstanding, which a polite and respectful explanation will rectify.
Luckily, nothing in my experience has ever made me question this approach. I realize here that I also benefit from the handiness of being white and female, and that I'm now in the possession of an even more potent Golden Ticket, the military ID, but I also still genuinely believe that there is a reason for laws, and that one of the shittiest and least respected jobs in the world goes to the people who have to enforce them.
I hated the book we talked about last night, mostly because it was poorly written and pompous and logically flawed in the way only rock critics can be pompous and logically flawed. But it made me think back to the summer in junior high when I put down the Prokoviev and picked up the (gulp) Van Halen. Maybe it was a slippery slope from there, but when I fell in love with flannel, door-slamming, and Nirvana, I finally figured out what my grandmother meant when she said cryptically every now and then, "a little rebellion is good for the soul." I don't think my rebellion was ever really about "rocking," at least not any more than recessions are about presidencies, but the atmospheric influence of simpler, louder, and angrier music certainly helped.
I liked wearing it because it seemed to mean two different things depending on who I was around. With grumpy kids my own age, it was sarcastic and passively inflammatory-- the kind of thing worn by someone who would answer authoritative questioning with more smart ass questions. Around older folks, I found that the shirt came off as shockingly sincere, like a bold statement of civic responsibility way before the whole nation had a fetishistic crush on beefy firemen.
I was thinking about that shirt last night on the drive home from class where we'd spent four hours discussing a book defending the merits of 80's hair metal bands like Motley Crue (no umlauts for tools, sorry), Poison, Guns 'N Roses, Ratt, Tesla, and White Lion. A big theme in the book was "rocking," which was loosely defined as stickin' it to the man by getting high on whatever was around, having empty sex with feral women, and collecting legal infractions.
What I realized on this drive home was that I don't rock. I never have. I rebelled, certainly, but I never rocked. I'm living in a time when many people my age are copping to their metal roots while holding up the deflector shield of ironic distance. This is fine, I guess, but I can't join in. My musical roots are embarrassing in a far less ironic Gen X way. When I jammed out alone in my room at night, it was to classical music. Seriously. I had no idea at the time why there wasn't an MTV-like channel that put together long, cinematic videos to "The Planets" or "Appalachian Spring." I laid in bed at night and filmed them myself, long thematic serials where I starred in a variety of roles like Viking queen and female cosmonaut, and whose finales nearly always involved explosions of uncertain origin sparking dramatically behind me as I gazed out at the future from a stormy hilltop.
My frustration with pop music wasn't that it was formulaic or one-dimensional-- it just wasn't long enough or dramatic enough, and the troublesome addition of lyrics always excluded me as a viable hero of the music. No one would have sung about me at the time "she's got the look" or "you give love a bad name." My crushes were secret things of pulverizing intensity, and the openness of pop, of actually naming and (God forbid) professing one's feelings to someone else, was too horrifying to imagine.
Luckily I had a little brother who began demanding Milli Vanilli and MC Hammer cassettes loudly and early in his adolescence, and quickly mastered an acidic disgust for my timpani-rolling finales. He took a bravely self-sufficient shotgun approach to music selection, sampling far and wide from the crowded MTV landscape and developing a startling expertise in the metal/rock/punk arena. "You are such a dork," he would say, and last night for the first time I started to realize how important he was in prying me out of a quickly hardening shell of narrow cerebral isolation. Of course, I didn't see it that way at the time. I suspected that he might be mildly retarded and told him so. I suspected he had no class or taste or appreciation for history or high culture. What I didn't realize was that he was taking a critical step towards culture, and towards engaging people our own age in discussion, thereby connecting, which is a vital part of creating new culture. I was huffing the fumes of very, very old conversations.
Connecting isn't impossible to do with classical music. In fact, it's quite easy and satisfying. I had a great long-distance musical dialog going on with two of my uncles who frequently sent me stellar tapes and broadened my classical horizons, but when you're 11 and the people you'd really like to invite to your fifth grade slumber party are in their forties and live across the country, connection becomes a little more difficult.
A completely different reason that I know I don't rock is that I think I genuinely do have a fondness for cops. I have never once been tempted to be anything other than Southern lady "yes, sir, no, sir" polite to them. Something in me gets a little bit thrilled when I need to explain something to a cop, like why I'm wandering drunk and on foot around a neighborhood with a baseball bat on New Year's Eve (sorry, Mom and Dad, for that and for what follows), or dressed like a pregnant hillbilly with a black eye and driving a compact car with nine people in it (sober, though!). There's a bit of the penitent confessor in me whenever I deal with cops. Immediately I know that I'm either (a) completely in the wrong and probably should have been caught earlier, or (b) simply involved in a misunderstanding, which a polite and respectful explanation will rectify.
Luckily, nothing in my experience has ever made me question this approach. I realize here that I also benefit from the handiness of being white and female, and that I'm now in the possession of an even more potent Golden Ticket, the military ID, but I also still genuinely believe that there is a reason for laws, and that one of the shittiest and least respected jobs in the world goes to the people who have to enforce them.
I hated the book we talked about last night, mostly because it was poorly written and pompous and logically flawed in the way only rock critics can be pompous and logically flawed. But it made me think back to the summer in junior high when I put down the Prokoviev and picked up the (gulp) Van Halen. Maybe it was a slippery slope from there, but when I fell in love with flannel, door-slamming, and Nirvana, I finally figured out what my grandmother meant when she said cryptically every now and then, "a little rebellion is good for the soul." I don't think my rebellion was ever really about "rocking," at least not any more than recessions are about presidencies, but the atmospheric influence of simpler, louder, and angrier music certainly helped.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Cheese and Mud
Pants comes home tomorrow, and not a minute too soon. Our tiny, rose-strangled town is hosting a three day pizza festival in recognition of the fact that we are the nation's largest supplier of mozzarella cheese. No shit.* They're building a pizza nine feet in diameter and I plan to be on hand for my own personal slice, not only because I like all kinds of free food but also because I'm anxious to satisfy my curiosity about how you can make a pizza that big and not burn the edges while leaving the center all undercooked.
*If this claim is false, I'm moving.
In the spirit of investigative journalism/nosiness, I'm also going to see if I can't get a tour of the cheese factory downtown and find out what the ominous noises coming from it at night are all about. They recently had a huge cheese-making mural painted on the side of the building, and while it's a lovely work of art and I went several blocks out of my way every morning for two weeks to monitor its progress, it leaves a few questions about cheese-making unanswered for me. More details, hopefully, to come.
Aside from questions of cheese, the other thing occupying my mind is whether or not I should sign myself up for the Marine Mud Run taking place on base in early June. It looks awesome. From what I gather, it's a 10K with regular intervals of slithering around in mud beneath a network of wires, climbing over logs stretched above a waist-high water pit, climbing walls, and swinging on ropes. I hold no illusions that I can do these things quickly or even correctly, but it's been decades since I've been full out coated in mud, and I'm suddenly and acutely feeling that loss.
I just wish I could sign my dog up as well. We could be a team-- her loud, glass-etching bark and maniacal two-tone stare regularly scare me into running through a cramp when we're jogging through town. Pants, sadly, is scheduled to be out of town again when the run takes place, and when I first discovered this I almost gave up on the Mud Run entirely, but then I started thinking about it on the treadmill last night. The workout was boring because I wasn't going anywhere, and it was hot, and stupid things were on TV above my head, and everyone was ignoring each other, and I was worried again that my face was turning purple and my hair was frizzing out... and then I thought how good it feel to be covered in mud, and how the whole point of a Mud Run is that you work really hard, as a group, to become utterly repellent. I'm signing up.
*If this claim is false, I'm moving.
In the spirit of investigative journalism/nosiness, I'm also going to see if I can't get a tour of the cheese factory downtown and find out what the ominous noises coming from it at night are all about. They recently had a huge cheese-making mural painted on the side of the building, and while it's a lovely work of art and I went several blocks out of my way every morning for two weeks to monitor its progress, it leaves a few questions about cheese-making unanswered for me. More details, hopefully, to come.
Aside from questions of cheese, the other thing occupying my mind is whether or not I should sign myself up for the Marine Mud Run taking place on base in early June. It looks awesome. From what I gather, it's a 10K with regular intervals of slithering around in mud beneath a network of wires, climbing over logs stretched above a waist-high water pit, climbing walls, and swinging on ropes. I hold no illusions that I can do these things quickly or even correctly, but it's been decades since I've been full out coated in mud, and I'm suddenly and acutely feeling that loss.
I just wish I could sign my dog up as well. We could be a team-- her loud, glass-etching bark and maniacal two-tone stare regularly scare me into running through a cramp when we're jogging through town. Pants, sadly, is scheduled to be out of town again when the run takes place, and when I first discovered this I almost gave up on the Mud Run entirely, but then I started thinking about it on the treadmill last night. The workout was boring because I wasn't going anywhere, and it was hot, and stupid things were on TV above my head, and everyone was ignoring each other, and I was worried again that my face was turning purple and my hair was frizzing out... and then I thought how good it feel to be covered in mud, and how the whole point of a Mud Run is that you work really hard, as a group, to become utterly repellent. I'm signing up.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Apologies that aren't
Apologies are hard things to make, apparently. I've gotten, and no doubt made, a lot of impartial or mitigated ones, ones that contain the requisite words "I'm sorry," but then contain a lot of different modifiers that cloud contrition or contradict it entirely. "I'm sorry you're unable to see how right I am" is a favorite, or "I'm sorry you reacted that way to [X completely logical stimulus], you crazy, mixed up thing." Mostly they add up to a far truer feeling in the apologizer, which is "I'm sorry to have to be sorry to you."
The Key Thief began his apology five minutes before 5 yesterday afternoon, just enough time to make his interaction with me necessarily brief. Ironically, I was more grateful for his brevity than anything else. He began with, "Are you mad at me?" a thoroughly unnecessary opening that nevertheless gave me a very satisfying opportunity to say, "Yes" in the darkest, coldest growl I could muster. It felt good.
I had resolved not to weave a falsified tale of how my keyless night had gone, replete with stories of breaking into my own house after a long and fruitless search for my missing keys and then contacting glass companies to replace the window at great cost, but the urge to do so was strong, if only to teach him a cautionary lesson about leaving people, especially women at night, with no means of transportation or access to shelter.
Instead I told the truth, that I was able to get home and luckily for us both I managed to find a way to get into my house. His response, however, made me regret it. "Oh," he said, relaxing and smiling, "So it wasn't bad." He even did the little hand wave thing, where you swipe the air in front of you as if to clear away a bad image or smell. "All forgiven, nothing to worry about," the gesture says. "I don't think that's your judgment to make," I told him, at which point he scratched the shallow grave of our acquaintanceship deeper by saying, "But nothing happened. It's not like you were on the street or anything."
There was no point in speaking further, so I let what I hoped was a heinous stink eye show him out. How do you explain to someone what it feels like to be scared by a close call? Ultimately there were too many points he would have argued with, too many facts about the experience of being female, or even the experience of being someone alone in an unfamiliar city late at night with no one close by to call for help, that would have required him to make an empathetic jump, and thus an actual apology. Five minutes wasn't long enough to explain this, and the Key Thief is not valuable enough to me as a person for me to find it worth the effort to help him understand.
The Key Thief began his apology five minutes before 5 yesterday afternoon, just enough time to make his interaction with me necessarily brief. Ironically, I was more grateful for his brevity than anything else. He began with, "Are you mad at me?" a thoroughly unnecessary opening that nevertheless gave me a very satisfying opportunity to say, "Yes" in the darkest, coldest growl I could muster. It felt good.
I had resolved not to weave a falsified tale of how my keyless night had gone, replete with stories of breaking into my own house after a long and fruitless search for my missing keys and then contacting glass companies to replace the window at great cost, but the urge to do so was strong, if only to teach him a cautionary lesson about leaving people, especially women at night, with no means of transportation or access to shelter.
Instead I told the truth, that I was able to get home and luckily for us both I managed to find a way to get into my house. His response, however, made me regret it. "Oh," he said, relaxing and smiling, "So it wasn't bad." He even did the little hand wave thing, where you swipe the air in front of you as if to clear away a bad image or smell. "All forgiven, nothing to worry about," the gesture says. "I don't think that's your judgment to make," I told him, at which point he scratched the shallow grave of our acquaintanceship deeper by saying, "But nothing happened. It's not like you were on the street or anything."
There was no point in speaking further, so I let what I hoped was a heinous stink eye show him out. How do you explain to someone what it feels like to be scared by a close call? Ultimately there were too many points he would have argued with, too many facts about the experience of being female, or even the experience of being someone alone in an unfamiliar city late at night with no one close by to call for help, that would have required him to make an empathetic jump, and thus an actual apology. Five minutes wasn't long enough to explain this, and the Key Thief is not valuable enough to me as a person for me to find it worth the effort to help him understand.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Keyless and Angry
I woke up way too early this morning thinking the other half of angry thoughts I went to bed with way too late last night. My body was lead-heavy and still asleep and I tried for nearly an hour to match my mind to it, but my brain's response was to take what I'd already been thinking and morph it into a kind of half-awake nightmare. My brain is the alto sax jazz musician who can't stop riffing on the same annoying theme, even when the club's patrons get up to leave with their drinks half finished.
Last night I loaned my keys to a classmate during the class's ten-minute evening break so that he could retrieve something he'd left in my office across campus, where he'd lingered way too long while I was trying to work earlier that afternoon. He retrieved his stuff and forgot to return my keys, which apparently spent the night in his pocket. This was a problem for me. I live 70 miles away from the town where I work and go to school. Also, I've been told I have "janitor's syndrome" where I keep too many keys all linked together in one big jangling bunch. To me this is expedient because it means all my keys--car, house, and office-- are together in one big, hard-to-lose ball.
Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you look at it, I was driving Pants' car last night and had his set of keys on me. Pants does not suffer from my syndrome and lives by the theory that keys should live separately according to their tasks, and you just grab the ones you need on your way out the door. This meant that last night I had the keys I needed to drive 70 miles back home and arrive around 10:00 only to realize that all of my other keys were missing, including the one which would let me into my house.
Here's where I get mad-- it's not like I was unable to get into my house. I had the garage door opener, which allowed me access to the (creepy) lock-less kitchen door, and even if I hadn't had that, there's still a key hidden outside, probably already incorporated into the nest of one of the black widows that live all over this part of the state, and I could have found this and gotten inside. But what if I hadn't had these fortuitous options? My classmate took off right when class ended. I don't have (or want) his phone number, and I don't know anyone in town I'd feel comfortable calling and asking if they could come pick me up and let me crash at their place.
Seriously! What if I'd had no way to get off campus last night? I couldn't even have crashed on my office floor because I had no keys.
Anyway, I discovered my keylessness last night shortly after I got home and was getting ready for bed. The situation was doubly vexing because this particular classmate has begun to get on my nerves of late. I feel bad about this. I don't like disliking people these days. I get no pleasure out of it, and in a karmic way I feel bad for thinking things like, "Where's a good case of laryngitis when someone else needs it?" But he visits my office, and lingers and lingers, and I feel like he hits on me in way that doesn't allow me any room to call him on it and ask him to stop. So I laid in bed last night feeling like a broken thermostat-- on and off I stewed and fumed, tried to start over with calming, sleep-inducing thoughts, and ended up stewing and fuming again.
The keys were waiting for me at the reception desk this morning with a note of apology, and I guess this should have made me feel better. My question is this: am I allowed to be pissed off about what could have happened? There's this whole level of vulnerability associated with my situation right now-- my husband's out of town, I live far away from work and school and get out of class late at night-- and being confronted with the question of how easily I could have been truly fucked last night kind of freaks me out. I hate having that vulnerability pointed out because essentially there's very little I can do about it.
I'm obsessed with being fair these days and trying to evaluate situations with a level head, but if I'm being honest, I am straight up battery acid mad at this guy right now.
Last night I loaned my keys to a classmate during the class's ten-minute evening break so that he could retrieve something he'd left in my office across campus, where he'd lingered way too long while I was trying to work earlier that afternoon. He retrieved his stuff and forgot to return my keys, which apparently spent the night in his pocket. This was a problem for me. I live 70 miles away from the town where I work and go to school. Also, I've been told I have "janitor's syndrome" where I keep too many keys all linked together in one big jangling bunch. To me this is expedient because it means all my keys--car, house, and office-- are together in one big, hard-to-lose ball.
Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you look at it, I was driving Pants' car last night and had his set of keys on me. Pants does not suffer from my syndrome and lives by the theory that keys should live separately according to their tasks, and you just grab the ones you need on your way out the door. This meant that last night I had the keys I needed to drive 70 miles back home and arrive around 10:00 only to realize that all of my other keys were missing, including the one which would let me into my house.
Here's where I get mad-- it's not like I was unable to get into my house. I had the garage door opener, which allowed me access to the (creepy) lock-less kitchen door, and even if I hadn't had that, there's still a key hidden outside, probably already incorporated into the nest of one of the black widows that live all over this part of the state, and I could have found this and gotten inside. But what if I hadn't had these fortuitous options? My classmate took off right when class ended. I don't have (or want) his phone number, and I don't know anyone in town I'd feel comfortable calling and asking if they could come pick me up and let me crash at their place.
Seriously! What if I'd had no way to get off campus last night? I couldn't even have crashed on my office floor because I had no keys.
Anyway, I discovered my keylessness last night shortly after I got home and was getting ready for bed. The situation was doubly vexing because this particular classmate has begun to get on my nerves of late. I feel bad about this. I don't like disliking people these days. I get no pleasure out of it, and in a karmic way I feel bad for thinking things like, "Where's a good case of laryngitis when someone else needs it?" But he visits my office, and lingers and lingers, and I feel like he hits on me in way that doesn't allow me any room to call him on it and ask him to stop. So I laid in bed last night feeling like a broken thermostat-- on and off I stewed and fumed, tried to start over with calming, sleep-inducing thoughts, and ended up stewing and fuming again.
The keys were waiting for me at the reception desk this morning with a note of apology, and I guess this should have made me feel better. My question is this: am I allowed to be pissed off about what could have happened? There's this whole level of vulnerability associated with my situation right now-- my husband's out of town, I live far away from work and school and get out of class late at night-- and being confronted with the question of how easily I could have been truly fucked last night kind of freaks me out. I hate having that vulnerability pointed out because essentially there's very little I can do about it.
I'm obsessed with being fair these days and trying to evaluate situations with a level head, but if I'm being honest, I am straight up battery acid mad at this guy right now.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Interviews
At an intersection about a mile from my house, right where the excellent Tigre Del Norte taco truck usually lives, a huge maroon mobile home/tour bus is parked with what I suppose is a converted horse trailer hitched to its rear bumber. The trailer's paint job matches the tour bus, and the back end of the trailer, the end that faces oncoming traffic, has been converted, at some expense, into a department store window display featuring a life size statue of Our Lady of Fatima.
Our Lady's feet are buried in plastic orchids, the kind you usually see weather-faded on the side of the road stapled to white wooden crosses. At her right foot is a painted reminder in English not to climb on her altar; at her left is its Spanish translation. Gentle, unidentifiable music plays from two speakers feeding out from under the altar window, which looks to be about six feet tall. At the bottom of the altar, almost bumper height, is a shelf on which are displayed several boxes of laminated cards with the rosary printed in English on one side and Spanish on the other. They're 50 cents apiece.
On one side of the horse trailer is a tiny door with a little step stool in front of it. On the door is an "OPEN" sign and along its upper edge is a small string of Christmas lights. The space inside the trailer is economically partitioned into a small shop with pegboard walls, and everywhere, jingling and sparkling when someone steps into the trailer and shifts its weight, are little bundles of religious key chains and crosses and rosaries and charms and cards and pamphlets and statuettes in all sizes. A swinging gate whose top edge is a tray with compartments for tiny charms for sale separates the store proper from the small dark corner where the cash register is. There is room for one person to stand here, and his back is directly against the plywood wall that forms Our Lady's stage lit backdrop.
I saw the mobile shrine on my way back from the base gym. I had climbed 1, 930 feet to nowhere, and once I reached that imaginary plateau, I ran an invisible and vanishing line for two and half miles. My legs hurt and I was covered in a sheen of sweat and the embarrassing heart-attack redness of the fair-skinned, but when I reached the taco truck intersection and saw Our Lady instead, I made an elaborate and illegal series of turns to investigate.
I'm supposed to be writing an original piece of "immersion journalism" for my literary journalism class this semester, which sounded like lots of fun until I realized it meant presenting myself to strangers and asking if I could hang out. I have a hard time doing this to people I know who have written down their numbers and emailed me precisely so I would do this, so with strangers it's even harder. Plus I have to explain to them why I'm interested in talking to them, and up until recently I've been under the mistaken impression that one should be honest about this.
That's how I scared off my first subjects. I told people who modeled nude for art classes that I was interested in their subjective experience of artistic nudity-- how's it feel being up there with your business out and people looking at every inch of you? How do you confront the taboo of semi-pubic nudity? How do you feel about exposing the private stories of your visual body? Do make any special grooming preparations? It took me a while to figure out that what I was asking for was precisely what a nude model doesn't exactly want to spend a lot of time thinking about. At least, not the ones I queried.
So when I approached the tiny door of the mobile shrine and found an older couple inside hanging woven leather crosses on pegs, I made a mental note not to start with the admission that I find it hilarious, the vision of Our Lady bombing down the interstate at 80 miles an hour and looking back beatifically on her tailgater with arms outstretched. I should also not mention that the two Harleys parked outside the shrine were funny too in their practicality. After all, you can't drive Our Lady through the Jack in the Box drive-through. Instead, I stuck with the statement that I'd never before seen a mobile shrine and wanted to ask some questions about it for a paper on local culture.
They seemed suspicious of me. When they started talking, I noticed they were foreigners-- Portuguese is my best bet, because after a little Wikipedia research conducted later that day, I found out that Our Lady of Fatima is really just another stage name for the Virgin Mary, only this refers to a vision of her that appeared to three shepherd children in a town called Fatima outside of Lisbon-- and what I was wondering is, of all the versions of Mary you could be hauling around the Central Valley, why this one? Wouldn't the Virgin of Guadelupe make more sense, seeing as how most of the migrant workers around here are from Mexico?
"You can write, but you must write the way we want," the woman told me sternly. "People, they come here and say, oh I saw you off the interstate, and oh, I work for this or that newspaper. And then they write, and people, they come in the middle of the night and knock on the house door and ask for food and clean socks. You can't get socks here. We are not a mission. There are no socks."
"I understand," I told her. "I've just never seen anything like this and I want to learn about what you do. I mean, like, Saint Fatima?" Oops. Again, Wikipedia came later and I didn't realize what a blunder this last part was.
"You were not raised in the church." The was a statement, not a question.
"No, but my mother's family was Catholic. Sort of."
"We will be here a few days. We close at 8 in the night and you can talk to my husband."
This was kind of a relief because her husband seemed nicer. As I stepped out of the trailer, he followed and hoisted a red plastic gas can which he used to top off one of the Harleys and then feed the tour bus.
I'm actually kind of intimidated and not sure I want to go back. What I really want to know is how you get to the point in life where you sink loads of cash into a rig like this and run off taco trucks to spread the Word. I want to know what it's like to disappoint midnight Mexicans with dirty socks who see the Virgin of Guadelupe smiling down at them from a horse trailer while she gently warns against climbing. I want to know what problems and questions people bring to a roadside shrine, and if all those carefully priced key chains and rosaries feel like an answer. What I'm afraid I'll get is a bracing dose of Old World Catholicism with a chaser of judgment and the sense that it's probably already too late for me.
Other options, which again seem less scary as they're in their conceptual infancy and not yet at the "Hi, I'm Rachel and I want to write about you" stage:
1) Mutton busting at the Laton Rodeo this weekend. I'm going to see this anyway because one of my best long distance friendships was formed over an uncontrollable giggling fit over whether or not this event is fictional. The debate led to Google image wars, and then to printed out pictures of kids in bike helmets clinging bareback to wild-eyed sheep tearing around a dirt arena. I may place bets and holler critiques from the bleachers. Maybe the kids or their parents will talk to me.
2) Interviewing the bartender at the Officer's Club on base. He's a nice guy, one of the few gray-haired dudes I see on our curiously old-people-less base, and I think talking to him would be fascinating because he basically runs the adult version of a "No Girls Allowed" tree house. Technically, women are allowed, but it's such a bizarre, macho pilot world that it always feels like I'm trespassing in an Elk's Lodge or something. Plus, he's got to remember all these rules about whose personalized mug is whose, and that the new guy always gets the "FNG" mug, for "Fucking New Guy." I wonder what he's seen.
Our Lady's feet are buried in plastic orchids, the kind you usually see weather-faded on the side of the road stapled to white wooden crosses. At her right foot is a painted reminder in English not to climb on her altar; at her left is its Spanish translation. Gentle, unidentifiable music plays from two speakers feeding out from under the altar window, which looks to be about six feet tall. At the bottom of the altar, almost bumper height, is a shelf on which are displayed several boxes of laminated cards with the rosary printed in English on one side and Spanish on the other. They're 50 cents apiece.
On one side of the horse trailer is a tiny door with a little step stool in front of it. On the door is an "OPEN" sign and along its upper edge is a small string of Christmas lights. The space inside the trailer is economically partitioned into a small shop with pegboard walls, and everywhere, jingling and sparkling when someone steps into the trailer and shifts its weight, are little bundles of religious key chains and crosses and rosaries and charms and cards and pamphlets and statuettes in all sizes. A swinging gate whose top edge is a tray with compartments for tiny charms for sale separates the store proper from the small dark corner where the cash register is. There is room for one person to stand here, and his back is directly against the plywood wall that forms Our Lady's stage lit backdrop.
I saw the mobile shrine on my way back from the base gym. I had climbed 1, 930 feet to nowhere, and once I reached that imaginary plateau, I ran an invisible and vanishing line for two and half miles. My legs hurt and I was covered in a sheen of sweat and the embarrassing heart-attack redness of the fair-skinned, but when I reached the taco truck intersection and saw Our Lady instead, I made an elaborate and illegal series of turns to investigate.
I'm supposed to be writing an original piece of "immersion journalism" for my literary journalism class this semester, which sounded like lots of fun until I realized it meant presenting myself to strangers and asking if I could hang out. I have a hard time doing this to people I know who have written down their numbers and emailed me precisely so I would do this, so with strangers it's even harder. Plus I have to explain to them why I'm interested in talking to them, and up until recently I've been under the mistaken impression that one should be honest about this.
That's how I scared off my first subjects. I told people who modeled nude for art classes that I was interested in their subjective experience of artistic nudity-- how's it feel being up there with your business out and people looking at every inch of you? How do you confront the taboo of semi-pubic nudity? How do you feel about exposing the private stories of your visual body? Do make any special grooming preparations? It took me a while to figure out that what I was asking for was precisely what a nude model doesn't exactly want to spend a lot of time thinking about. At least, not the ones I queried.
So when I approached the tiny door of the mobile shrine and found an older couple inside hanging woven leather crosses on pegs, I made a mental note not to start with the admission that I find it hilarious, the vision of Our Lady bombing down the interstate at 80 miles an hour and looking back beatifically on her tailgater with arms outstretched. I should also not mention that the two Harleys parked outside the shrine were funny too in their practicality. After all, you can't drive Our Lady through the Jack in the Box drive-through. Instead, I stuck with the statement that I'd never before seen a mobile shrine and wanted to ask some questions about it for a paper on local culture.
They seemed suspicious of me. When they started talking, I noticed they were foreigners-- Portuguese is my best bet, because after a little Wikipedia research conducted later that day, I found out that Our Lady of Fatima is really just another stage name for the Virgin Mary, only this refers to a vision of her that appeared to three shepherd children in a town called Fatima outside of Lisbon-- and what I was wondering is, of all the versions of Mary you could be hauling around the Central Valley, why this one? Wouldn't the Virgin of Guadelupe make more sense, seeing as how most of the migrant workers around here are from Mexico?
"You can write, but you must write the way we want," the woman told me sternly. "People, they come here and say, oh I saw you off the interstate, and oh, I work for this or that newspaper. And then they write, and people, they come in the middle of the night and knock on the house door and ask for food and clean socks. You can't get socks here. We are not a mission. There are no socks."
"I understand," I told her. "I've just never seen anything like this and I want to learn about what you do. I mean, like, Saint Fatima?" Oops. Again, Wikipedia came later and I didn't realize what a blunder this last part was.
"You were not raised in the church." The was a statement, not a question.
"No, but my mother's family was Catholic. Sort of."
"We will be here a few days. We close at 8 in the night and you can talk to my husband."
This was kind of a relief because her husband seemed nicer. As I stepped out of the trailer, he followed and hoisted a red plastic gas can which he used to top off one of the Harleys and then feed the tour bus.
I'm actually kind of intimidated and not sure I want to go back. What I really want to know is how you get to the point in life where you sink loads of cash into a rig like this and run off taco trucks to spread the Word. I want to know what it's like to disappoint midnight Mexicans with dirty socks who see the Virgin of Guadelupe smiling down at them from a horse trailer while she gently warns against climbing. I want to know what problems and questions people bring to a roadside shrine, and if all those carefully priced key chains and rosaries feel like an answer. What I'm afraid I'll get is a bracing dose of Old World Catholicism with a chaser of judgment and the sense that it's probably already too late for me.
Other options, which again seem less scary as they're in their conceptual infancy and not yet at the "Hi, I'm Rachel and I want to write about you" stage:
1) Mutton busting at the Laton Rodeo this weekend. I'm going to see this anyway because one of my best long distance friendships was formed over an uncontrollable giggling fit over whether or not this event is fictional. The debate led to Google image wars, and then to printed out pictures of kids in bike helmets clinging bareback to wild-eyed sheep tearing around a dirt arena. I may place bets and holler critiques from the bleachers. Maybe the kids or their parents will talk to me.
2) Interviewing the bartender at the Officer's Club on base. He's a nice guy, one of the few gray-haired dudes I see on our curiously old-people-less base, and I think talking to him would be fascinating because he basically runs the adult version of a "No Girls Allowed" tree house. Technically, women are allowed, but it's such a bizarre, macho pilot world that it always feels like I'm trespassing in an Elk's Lodge or something. Plus, he's got to remember all these rules about whose personalized mug is whose, and that the new guy always gets the "FNG" mug, for "Fucking New Guy." I wonder what he's seen.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Pantsless
I've opened a blog post window without knowing what I want to write about. Usually I have only a vague notion-- some minor irritation, a persistent image, a fraction of a story-- but today I thought, hey, why not treat the blog like my brother, who I call with no provocation and often with nothing to say.
Hi!
I'm driving the rally car today and made a special cd for the occasion full of shifting, clutch popping music only to find that of all the super souped-up features Subaru included, like the silly button to spray cold water somewhere in the engine with a button in the cabin, compatibility with MP3 cds was not one of them. So instead I listened to Talk of the Nation on NPR. It's just as well, I suppose. I passed four highway patrol cars on the way to work. Apparently April Fool's Day brings out the Bandit in all of us, and Smokey needed to flex his preventative might.
Pants is gone for a month to the Edge of Nowhere, Nevada. I've almost forgotten to be sad to see him go, I've been so happy about getting to stay in California. The morning he left I performed my now-traditional complete femme-ing of the house. I cleaned the place. That gets italics because it included dusting the baseboards and the top of the fridge and using the special pain in the ass marble cleaner on the bathroom and kitchen countertops, which necessitates ruining a cleaning rag and then polishing my way dangerously close to tendonitis.
Then I went out in the front yard and harvested massive, beautiful roses for a table arrangement from the only bush the previous tenants didn't dig up and haul away with them. The complete deforestation of what once must have been pretty extensive landscaping has left our yard with a weird topography. There are pits and dents everywhere that make mowing hazardous. The fact that it looks level is an illusion accomplished by overgrown grass, sort of like if you had a really lumpy head and managed to disguise it with an uneven haircut. The blisters on my hands attest to this obnoxious terrain. I mowed the lawn the day before Pants left in order to head off any claims that he needed to be doing that instead of drinking Cuba Libres with me and blasting the stereo, and it worked until he asked me which gas I put in the mower.
"You used the premium, right? The one I labeled for you?"
"I used one you labeled, but it didn't say premium, it said 'mixed'."
Pause.
"I broke the mower, didn't I?"
"No, but you didn't do it any favors."
"Can I make it up to the mower?"
The answer to this, thankfully, was yes, but only after a long lecture on how the mower and edger differ and therefore need different fuels. I now know way too much about two-cycle engines. Pants' rationale, and I vaguely remember a discussion about this with much pointing and explaining, was that if he labeled the cans and put the big can next to the big yard apparatus and the little can next to the little yard apparatus, I would surely remember which apparatus took which fuel. Since he usually mows and edges, though, the instructions got filed away in the file for "Important things I'll ask about again later." I've now done him one better-- I've drawn a mower on the mower gas and an edger on the edger gas.
This is one instance in the long list of things we're trying to figure out for how things will be when he deploys. Easily the biggest and most pressing is where the hell we're going to live, and we're still slow dancing with that one, its monstrous sweaty hands grabbing us both a little too low and a little too tight, but we'll figure it out. There are any number of lovely little houses in our town and the town nearby, but most of them are foreclosures, and there's something vulture-y about looking at those. I also wonder, deep in my hippie heart, about the bad mojo such a place might harbor. Here are people who dipped beneath the surface of the fiscal waters and couldn't flail their way back up. I understand our financial situation for the most part, and have seen firsthand that much of our stinginess is in the interest of avoiding debt and saving for retirement, but I can't help but feel that if their situation was an inner tube, ours is little more than a survival raft. One good jab and we're in the water too. Does it make sense now to commit to a mortgage? Does it ever?
I've also met wives, finally, for Pants' new squadron and it's like finding water in the desert, or learning to fish termites out of a giant rock-like mound. Not that they bear any resemblance to insects or mud-- it just feels like such a victory to finally be in a position to find people to introduce myself to. I'm trying not to seem too home-schooled about it ("HI! I'M SO GLAD TO MEET YOU! I LIKE BOOKS!"), but it takes some of the anxiety out of the idea of being (ha!) Pantsless for so long.
Hi!
I'm driving the rally car today and made a special cd for the occasion full of shifting, clutch popping music only to find that of all the super souped-up features Subaru included, like the silly button to spray cold water somewhere in the engine with a button in the cabin, compatibility with MP3 cds was not one of them. So instead I listened to Talk of the Nation on NPR. It's just as well, I suppose. I passed four highway patrol cars on the way to work. Apparently April Fool's Day brings out the Bandit in all of us, and Smokey needed to flex his preventative might.
Pants is gone for a month to the Edge of Nowhere, Nevada. I've almost forgotten to be sad to see him go, I've been so happy about getting to stay in California. The morning he left I performed my now-traditional complete femme-ing of the house. I cleaned the place. That gets italics because it included dusting the baseboards and the top of the fridge and using the special pain in the ass marble cleaner on the bathroom and kitchen countertops, which necessitates ruining a cleaning rag and then polishing my way dangerously close to tendonitis.
Then I went out in the front yard and harvested massive, beautiful roses for a table arrangement from the only bush the previous tenants didn't dig up and haul away with them. The complete deforestation of what once must have been pretty extensive landscaping has left our yard with a weird topography. There are pits and dents everywhere that make mowing hazardous. The fact that it looks level is an illusion accomplished by overgrown grass, sort of like if you had a really lumpy head and managed to disguise it with an uneven haircut. The blisters on my hands attest to this obnoxious terrain. I mowed the lawn the day before Pants left in order to head off any claims that he needed to be doing that instead of drinking Cuba Libres with me and blasting the stereo, and it worked until he asked me which gas I put in the mower.
"You used the premium, right? The one I labeled for you?"
"I used one you labeled, but it didn't say premium, it said 'mixed'."
Pause.
"I broke the mower, didn't I?"
"No, but you didn't do it any favors."
"Can I make it up to the mower?"
The answer to this, thankfully, was yes, but only after a long lecture on how the mower and edger differ and therefore need different fuels. I now know way too much about two-cycle engines. Pants' rationale, and I vaguely remember a discussion about this with much pointing and explaining, was that if he labeled the cans and put the big can next to the big yard apparatus and the little can next to the little yard apparatus, I would surely remember which apparatus took which fuel. Since he usually mows and edges, though, the instructions got filed away in the file for "Important things I'll ask about again later." I've now done him one better-- I've drawn a mower on the mower gas and an edger on the edger gas.
This is one instance in the long list of things we're trying to figure out for how things will be when he deploys. Easily the biggest and most pressing is where the hell we're going to live, and we're still slow dancing with that one, its monstrous sweaty hands grabbing us both a little too low and a little too tight, but we'll figure it out. There are any number of lovely little houses in our town and the town nearby, but most of them are foreclosures, and there's something vulture-y about looking at those. I also wonder, deep in my hippie heart, about the bad mojo such a place might harbor. Here are people who dipped beneath the surface of the fiscal waters and couldn't flail their way back up. I understand our financial situation for the most part, and have seen firsthand that much of our stinginess is in the interest of avoiding debt and saving for retirement, but I can't help but feel that if their situation was an inner tube, ours is little more than a survival raft. One good jab and we're in the water too. Does it make sense now to commit to a mortgage? Does it ever?
I've also met wives, finally, for Pants' new squadron and it's like finding water in the desert, or learning to fish termites out of a giant rock-like mound. Not that they bear any resemblance to insects or mud-- it just feels like such a victory to finally be in a position to find people to introduce myself to. I'm trying not to seem too home-schooled about it ("HI! I'M SO GLAD TO MEET YOU! I LIKE BOOKS!"), but it takes some of the anxiety out of the idea of being (ha!) Pantsless for so long.
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