Fashionably Late to Existentialists' Ball

Last week I ended up in a situation that's become all too familiar to me over the years. The setting and particulars are always different, but the basic concept is that I'm somehow duped into a set-up where very expensive things I know nothing about (but should) are laid out for my perusal with the effect that I leave feeling worse than I've felt about myself in ages.

This one was a fashion show at a store frequented by my most perplexingly stylish friends. I say "perplexingly" because I would never in a million years put together the ensembles they do-- separately each individual piece makes me wrinkle my nose and think, Seriously?-- but they end up looking very sophisticated and creative and, well, expensive. Is it irony that they all manage to accomplish this by shopping at the same store? Possibly. Do I still feel very frumpy around them all the time, like every day is laundry day? YES.

So I went to this thing hoping to understand how "fashion" happens, how one manages to assemble a whole look that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts, age-appropriate, and flattering to the individual body, and I left feeling like "fashion" will always be Dutch to me. I am blind to its syntax and grammar, and I wish so much that I worked in a profession like my husband's where I could get away with wearing the same onesie in varying colors every fucking day. This realization took approximately 30 seconds, and the fashion show lasted three hours. Fortunately, there was free wine.

What that meant, though, was when it was time for me to follow my fashion-conscious friend around the store weighing the merits of this fifty dollar hat over that seventy dollar blouse, I had to pitch my voice extra high and say things like, "Oh, cute!" when really I was playing a game in my head that my brother and I used to play in the supermarket called "How would I tear this place up?" The rules of the game state that you must come up with creative and entertaining ways to destroy everything in sight, like "I would take a hockey stick and slash that bin of grapes apart" or "I would lay all the cereal boxes down like tiles on a road and run crunching sprints over them." I spent most of Tuesday night last week imagining hauling a fire hose loaded with bleach into one of Fresno's trendiest women's boutiques.

In unrelated news (or perhaps it's related under the general category of "poor attitude"), I'm pretty sure I've been friend-broken-up-with by the wronged combatant I mentioned in the previous post for a poorly timed crack about how fights are often thinly disguised attempts at establishing "alpha male-dom." In retrospect, you'd think I would have seen that coming, but I'm also the same a-hole who once commented to a friend that her failing relationship was like a mosquito biting a mannequin-- it looked like she should be getting what she needed, but the whole premise was wrong. In defense of these totally insensitive, bone-headed remarks, I can only offer that mosquito girl ended up being a total flake who burned me with a $600 hot check and my alpha male friend... well, who likes a hitter anyway?

Latest disturbing dream: I am the head of some sort of poorly-funded UN operation cleaning up after a massacre on an African beach. There is nowhere to step that isn't compressed human remains, and often I find I'm stepping on faces. My job is to sort human remains, and I'm already well into the task of loading up three separate trucks when the dream begins, but I can no longer remember my criteria-- whole bodies over here? Identifiable remains here? State of decay/probably time of death over here? In the middle of sorting this out, I am called over by the mother of a girl I went to junior high with. She wants me to pose with my arm around her daughter, who is wearing her typical weirdo-Fundamentalist long, denim dress, and tilting her head towards me with a fake smile. The sun is too bright and my hands get all tangled in the girl's waist-length permed hair, and I can't pretend to smile when I'm crying. The mother can't get the light exposure right on her camera and is taking picture after picture and scowling at us, and the girl eventually gets disgusted with me and stomps off.

All-too related: This American Life (I love you, Ira Glass, even if your delivery is marred by the neat smack of your lips) has an episode called "Fear of Sleep" in which people tell stories of why they've come to fear sleep. They range from a dopamine-deficient sleep disorder in which the sufferer does whacky shit like jump out of a window, to a family with a roach infestation so bad that roaches routinely end up in their ears, to this extended riff on how nightmares are essentially revealing of the loneliness of the human condition and how we're all just waiting to die and the fear you feel in a nightmare is the inescapable truth. I usually listen to this podcast while I'm walking a horribly predictable route around the perimeter of the base, so it was more than a little awkward when I burst into tears halfway through. Plus, I found a dead cat laid out in the grass beside the road, all careful and neat like someone was sorry they hit it. Its eyes were open and it took me a long time to figure out it was fully dead and not just dying while I watched, not knowing what to do.

So what do you do in this situation, when you're confronted with the undeniable hopelessness of existence while you walk for the 60th time around the perimeter of a world that feels like it grows smaller and more ridiculous every day? You cue up mindless synth rock on the iPod and run the rest of the way home like you're being chased, which, in a sense, you are. Did I mention I'm turning 31 soon?

Nose Rings, Fights, and Tiny Portable Circus

The fog is settling in today and our dog is unreasonably, cracked-out excited to be home from the Dog Jail (the weekend kennel to which we've become something more than regulars-- maybe more like benefactors, like the Medicis of pet boarding) when she's usually kind of glum about having to hang out with us again. The place we take her has random peacocks wandering around loose and a horse and chickens and a really sleazy looking tailless outdoor cat, so Abby has more than enough to stare at and sniff on her regular jaunts into the "socializing corral," but I think she may have reached her threshold with the whole natural stimulus thing. I imagine her yawning like a bored New York hipster and complaining that she's so over the MOMA.

I, however, am so not over all the wandering around we've been doing. Every trip out of Lemoore, with the exception of my work commute which only really registers in my mind when the traffic is gummed up because someone's plowed off into an orchard again out of fatigue or boredom, is thrilling like a tiny escape. This last weekend we went to a music festival in San Francisco where I got to feel thoroughly old. Fashion has cycled around again to where I recognize outfits I wore and loved as a six-year-old being sported by people who can drink legally. It's unnerving, and most of them are deeply unflattering to adult bodies, but I suspect thirty-somethings were grumping about belly shirts and lowrider jeans when I was wearing them, so we'll call it a draw.

I also made the unpleasant discovery that if you rounded up all the chicks with tiny nose rings like mine, we'd fill a parking lot. A Wal-Mart parking lot. Turns out there are a lot of women to whom the teeniest of trendy rebellions appeals. If I was being really hard on myself, I'd point out that the whole thing hurt less than some zits I've squeezed, and that my brief forays into piercings (I had a tongue ring in college), point to a lack of commitment since they can and have been removed as soon as I get tired of them (or bite down really, hard hard on them and think for brief panicked moment that I've cracked my molar).

But if I'm being easy on myself, I would also point out that for someone with as powerful a needle phobia as I have (it's got a name in the DSM-V! BIITS phobia!), getting pierced every now and then is an important exercise in choice and self control. Both times I've gotten pierced I've managed to avoid fainting (though it was a struggle with the tongue-- have you seen the SIZE of one of those needles? It has a sheared off point, for Christ's sake), and both times I've been obnoxiously diligent about following the after-care routine* and avoiding any kind of infection or complication.

*I'm suspicious of the phrase "after-care." Like I didn't care before? I suppose it's better than "professionally-inflicted wound management."

So 9,000 hipster chicks have the same piercing as me. Fine. So there's also some part of me that likes to imagine jamming an ornately carved bone through my nose for a Navy ball. Also fine, though juvenile. I'm coming to realize that I'm not immune to that most human of urges to believe that we're still young even as evidence to the contrary piles up. Maybe recognizing this will keep me from doing the truly grievous shit, like getting bolt-on boobs and botoxing myself into an expressionless rictus. Or buying a Hummer.

But I do have to admit that there's a deep frustration here too, one I've played over in my head so many times that I bore myself every time I think it but I still can't seem to stop: I want to have kids, and the time window for this is not endless. I could go on all day about how wrong-headed it is to assume that popping out a kid will somehow change how you feel about your life or yourself, or how women have so much more to contribute than just more little humans, and what about having a career and having the time to write great books... but then something else just says "Yeah, but..." and I stall out in the silence that follows.

Meanwhile, nothing's gotten done on my thesis/book zygote. And I'm supposed to come up with something profound and professional to say about Faulkner's early novels, something that I can expand upon for thirty pages when really I'd just like to say, "He's incredibly spotty and I think it had to do with the booze, but holy shit, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury changed my life. The End. P.S. I think only male authors can get away with that kind of megalomania in letters to their editors."

On a not at all related note, I went to a party last week at which there was a fight, though as fights go it was more of a stiff, shuffling hug with a lingering pin-down and no real licks exchanged. What I noticed about the whole thing was how charged the whole atmosphere got, and how no one could avoid engaging with the experience afterward. Everyone had to choose a side and comment and exclaim, and the whole sequence of events was retold ad nauseum. In fact, we're still retelling it this week. It seemed like the one impossible thing to do afterwards was take another slug of beer, shrug, and pick up with the conversation. Maybe this is because we're writers and we feel like we have an obligation to embroider direct experience into something more meaningful, but I suspect it's an animal level phermone thing. I even found myself being disgustingly solicitous of the wronged combatant, who, if we're being honest, probably did as much baiting as the officially crowned Douche Bag Instigator.

So, game plan for the next fight I witness: immediately dart out to refresh my beverage and thus miss the main event, and then return with juggling balls and sparklers and an accordion. Plus more beer and a genuine freak if I can find one. I think a small, portable circus midway would be a convenient thing to have on any number of occasions, and would also make a nice, not-so-subtle statement.