Once, when we were in grade school, my brother inexplicably covered himself in bandaids one night-- he was fascinated with war stories and it may have been yet another of his attempts to simulate realistic wounds, (other attempts involved my help and lots of my mom's expensive make-up)-- and in the morning when my mother discovered what he'd done, she had to rip them off. You can't have a kid going to school wearing a whole box of bandaids. Of course, the bandaid adhesive had plenty of time to bond with his sleep-softened skin, so when the ripping commenced, he screamed and screamed. My mom responded with what she usually said when one of us was howling, which was, "My God, pipe down-- the neighborhood's going to think I'm beating you over here."
I'm remembering this story because Pants has said something similar to me several times in the past few days. I don't know what it is about cold weather, but something about it gets me all screamy. We keep the house at a chilly, economical 65 degrees (which is way better than the last place which HAD NO HEAT), and I find myself usually in one of two modes: slack-jawed reptilian torpor or banshee. Both are strategies to stay warm.
The reptilian torpor involves a book, a steaming cup of something or other (I've stupidly gone on another caffeine embargo), and a giant blanket, and then I'm set for about three hours, or until my bladder fills and Pants's camping logic kicks in-- "If you hold your pee when you're cold, more of your body's energy goes to heating the pee than to heating you."
Banshee is entirely different. Banshee mode is what's kept me going for runs even though it's hatefully cold outside and I have to wear a hat and gloves and sniffle out all my body's moisture through my raw, red nose. Banshee mode also involves frenetic, in-house movement, usually of little purpose. I chase the cat and then the dog and then the cat again. I yell at them both, usually nonsense shouts meant to imitate their own animal sounds, and then I chase Pants and try to hug him and stick my freezing fingers into the lining of his pants. If he's trying to get something done on the computer, I cling to his back and make zombie sounds and threaten to chomp on his delicious brains. This would be cute maybe once, but I do it a lot.
A while ago, Pants took me to the flight line to watch Hornets take off. They have to sit there in line on the runway for a while and let their engines run up to a whine that's both piercing and thunderous, and meanwhile the pilot is doing all of his take-off checklists and the lineman is running around underneath him and signaling all of his checks. It's a big production, getting ready to move. And then the jet taxis to the top of the runway and crouches there, waiting, whining, an electric chromatic scale of anticipation sizzling out all around it, and then it starts to roll and in a ridiculously short moment it goes from being still to being a streak, an explosion, and then a dot on the horizon.
This is how I justify my horrifically annoying winter movement dichotomy-- I'm either parked in the hangar, all buckled down in my spot, or I'm spooling up for mach speed. This probably also goes a long way towards explaining what's the matter with my chest and shoulders right now.
As a Christmas present to one another, Pants and I finally decided to purchase a Satisfactory Bed to replace our torture-iffic Stearns & Foster newlywed bed. Despite buying "top of the line" before and being so thoroughly bitch-slapped for it, we decided to go all out and buy a Tempurpedic bed, and despite the fact that I'm in exceptional pain right now, I still give the bed a confident thumbs up.
The literature accompanying our new, debt-enhancing bed promises that though we may experience some initial discomfort, we should give the bed a full month as our bodies slowly adjust to a more salubrious sleeping alignment. I feel like I'm being made into something out of the X-Men. Every night I lay down feeling pretty OK, and then I feel the foam slowly heating and morphing to my stooped shoulders and my virtually table-flat lumbar curve (I've seen it in an X-ray) and then-- is it possible?-- slowly putting a nice warm, foamy knee into my lower back and oh so slowly jacking me right in the kidneys. Then it moves up to my shoulders, and it's like a giant foam fist punching me in a frame-by-frame shot between the shoulder blades, snapping my neck back into something resembling its correct, standing up straight position. Who knew postural alignment could be so sneakily violent? I comfort myself with the thought that in a month's time, I will be a full inch taller and capable of jumping over a car from a standstill.
But then there's the pet chasing and the zombie chomping and the random shouting of song lyrics, and who knows-- maybe the extra energy is from the deeper sleep I'm supposed to be getting-- but all of that torques up my new posture all over again and I feel like I do now. Like I'm wearing big iron football shoulder pads that are secured to my frame by two iron railroad spikes right below my collar bones.
Apparently something similar is happening to Pants, but, as is typical with him, he's chosen one pithy phrase to express it rather than my opera of moans: "It's lots of Tempur and not much pedic so far."
Monday, December 10, 2007
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
What is it with you, Elvis?
How did you manage to steal the hearts of all holiday-loving office mavens? You are the king of their file cabinet magnets, smirking slyly above a Nevada-shaped cornfield and a wallet-sized photos of stunned infants. On days like this, when the staff is reduced to its macabre-sounding "skeleton crew," your Greatest Hits claim the small c.d. player by the fish bowl, and you croon with a syrupy sexuality, both quaint and obscene, over a full-orchestra track. You don't lower your voice for phone calls, and your throaty warble reaches out into the empty, clay-colored halls, rustles gently under past due reminders tacked to the walls.
Do you whisper to them at night, Elvis, your slim, pre-Vegas hips gyrating soothingly by bedside tables and digital alarm clocks? Do you promise they'll get to use all that accrued comp time? Do you mutter huskily of balanced spreadsheets and a supervisor who stops, pauses, and looks down with relief and wonder to say, "Thank you, thank you very much"?
I'll wondering about this, Elvis, long after we've all finally left the building.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Stranger Rants
Wow.
Here's something scary: what if I become one of those people who places long, rambling, overly emotional phone calls to service personnel? I have to ask because there's a guy doing it right now to one of my coworkers, and it started as a request to make an appointment with someone else. He's persistent, unstoppable, immune to polite coughing and "excuse me, sir"s and now, God bless him, he's on speaker phone. The three of us, my two coworkers and I, are being pulled along on a trip to a mysterious parade, an episode that the caller promises "explains it all" though it does anything but. PTSD is mentioned in an off-hand way, as is bipolar disorder, and I'm struggling to find some kind of frame to put this in, some way to think about the fact that we're all listening to this man and he's not aware of his expanded audience, even though he's the one who called, and who continues to ramble. Now someone's pissed on his floor at a house party, though he does a polite detour around the word-- "something not polite, something wet"-- and we can only assume. Surely this means he's at least partially aware that he has commandeered an audience...
This has happened to me before. I used to work at a bookstore that was a regular stop on the crazy/lonely call tree. A woman I'll call Phyllis used to call regularly from a halfway house to chat about her theories on particle physics, and then to whisper about how she was sure her roommate was stealing her medication. A man I'll call Walter used to call and order obscure war books he never came in to pick up, and then launch into lectures about battle strategies and how no one appreciates a genius.
Back then, I liked to think I lived in a rich stew of found art, and that if I just stopped and listened hard enough, I'd be rewarded with some small nugget of truth. So I listened to bums at bus stops, I let callers to my various jobs ramble on and on, I even suffered through a pancake dinner with a guy who claimed that ever since he was little, he'd been trained every summer by a secret paramilitary governmental organization-- he looked at me sadly at one point, while I drizzled syrup in a giant X over my blueberry short stack and said, "Do you know how alienating it is to me, knowing that I could kill you right now with my bare hands?" I was so bored and hungry by that point that I shoved a huge wad of pancake in my mouth and dared him to try it.
I wonder about being the crazy person on the phone for two reasons: 1) I am now 29 and my capacity for starry-eyed wonder at all the fascinating sub-species of crazy in other people has proportionately dwindled, and 2) my relative passion about my own obsessions and opinions has risen. Simplified, the equation looks like this: Your Crazy = Not As Interesting As Mine. This is an interesting shift in the balance of power between me and the outside world. I'm finding myself much more likely to commandeer conversations with elaborate metaphors taken from BBC nature programs, or to hold forth on the edicts of obscure dead dictators (Turkmenbashi), and less likely to listen politely to the glazed-over rants of strangers I meet in passing.
Which is not to say that I tune out the glazed-over rants of my loved ones. No, no. Pants can chant a string of military acronyms and profanity for nigh on twenty minutes and I will nod sweetly and absorb.
I'm just less interested in the stranger-rant as an art form these days. It takes more to impress me, frankly. Props, maybe. A sock puppet holding forth on the conspiracy of the flu shot and how it makes him sicker and sicker every year might hold my attention better than the slouchy looking dude in line ahead of me at the K-Mart. Otherwise, I'm finding myself closer and closer to pulling on my face and stamping my feet like a kid while I whine, "Shuuuuuutttt uuuuuuppppp!"
The inherent insensitivity in wanting to do this comes from not wanting to be a listener at that particular moment. But here's the rub: I think anybody who rants isn't interested in listening in the first place, and I worry sometimes that the urge to write is close to the urge to say exactly what you mean with no interruptions. Does being a writer make me more susceptible to rant-thinking, or bad listening? It can, sure. (Like just then, where I posed a question and then answered it myself). Since I've got the mike, I'll expand my thinking on this:
Writing is often necessarily a solitary pursuit, and a certain amount of talking to oneself is, in fact, occupational therapy. But when you do that to the exclusion of others, and when you stop really listening to the conversations around you, you get a closed feedback loop, and all the thinking goes stale. This, I believe is when people rant. When they get an idea, like a dead squirrel up in the ventilation, and instead of calling in someone for help on it, they shut all the windows and simmer.
With that pleasant image, I think I'll step back and hope someone else chimes in.
Here's something scary: what if I become one of those people who places long, rambling, overly emotional phone calls to service personnel? I have to ask because there's a guy doing it right now to one of my coworkers, and it started as a request to make an appointment with someone else. He's persistent, unstoppable, immune to polite coughing and "excuse me, sir"s and now, God bless him, he's on speaker phone. The three of us, my two coworkers and I, are being pulled along on a trip to a mysterious parade, an episode that the caller promises "explains it all" though it does anything but. PTSD is mentioned in an off-hand way, as is bipolar disorder, and I'm struggling to find some kind of frame to put this in, some way to think about the fact that we're all listening to this man and he's not aware of his expanded audience, even though he's the one who called, and who continues to ramble. Now someone's pissed on his floor at a house party, though he does a polite detour around the word-- "something not polite, something wet"-- and we can only assume. Surely this means he's at least partially aware that he has commandeered an audience...
This has happened to me before. I used to work at a bookstore that was a regular stop on the crazy/lonely call tree. A woman I'll call Phyllis used to call regularly from a halfway house to chat about her theories on particle physics, and then to whisper about how she was sure her roommate was stealing her medication. A man I'll call Walter used to call and order obscure war books he never came in to pick up, and then launch into lectures about battle strategies and how no one appreciates a genius.
Back then, I liked to think I lived in a rich stew of found art, and that if I just stopped and listened hard enough, I'd be rewarded with some small nugget of truth. So I listened to bums at bus stops, I let callers to my various jobs ramble on and on, I even suffered through a pancake dinner with a guy who claimed that ever since he was little, he'd been trained every summer by a secret paramilitary governmental organization-- he looked at me sadly at one point, while I drizzled syrup in a giant X over my blueberry short stack and said, "Do you know how alienating it is to me, knowing that I could kill you right now with my bare hands?" I was so bored and hungry by that point that I shoved a huge wad of pancake in my mouth and dared him to try it.
I wonder about being the crazy person on the phone for two reasons: 1) I am now 29 and my capacity for starry-eyed wonder at all the fascinating sub-species of crazy in other people has proportionately dwindled, and 2) my relative passion about my own obsessions and opinions has risen. Simplified, the equation looks like this: Your Crazy = Not As Interesting As Mine. This is an interesting shift in the balance of power between me and the outside world. I'm finding myself much more likely to commandeer conversations with elaborate metaphors taken from BBC nature programs, or to hold forth on the edicts of obscure dead dictators (Turkmenbashi), and less likely to listen politely to the glazed-over rants of strangers I meet in passing.
Which is not to say that I tune out the glazed-over rants of my loved ones. No, no. Pants can chant a string of military acronyms and profanity for nigh on twenty minutes and I will nod sweetly and absorb.
I'm just less interested in the stranger-rant as an art form these days. It takes more to impress me, frankly. Props, maybe. A sock puppet holding forth on the conspiracy of the flu shot and how it makes him sicker and sicker every year might hold my attention better than the slouchy looking dude in line ahead of me at the K-Mart. Otherwise, I'm finding myself closer and closer to pulling on my face and stamping my feet like a kid while I whine, "Shuuuuuutttt uuuuuuppppp!"
The inherent insensitivity in wanting to do this comes from not wanting to be a listener at that particular moment. But here's the rub: I think anybody who rants isn't interested in listening in the first place, and I worry sometimes that the urge to write is close to the urge to say exactly what you mean with no interruptions. Does being a writer make me more susceptible to rant-thinking, or bad listening? It can, sure. (Like just then, where I posed a question and then answered it myself). Since I've got the mike, I'll expand my thinking on this:
Writing is often necessarily a solitary pursuit, and a certain amount of talking to oneself is, in fact, occupational therapy. But when you do that to the exclusion of others, and when you stop really listening to the conversations around you, you get a closed feedback loop, and all the thinking goes stale. This, I believe is when people rant. When they get an idea, like a dead squirrel up in the ventilation, and instead of calling in someone for help on it, they shut all the windows and simmer.
With that pleasant image, I think I'll step back and hope someone else chimes in.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Crush
Watch this first.
(It's beautiful, and it's the reason I've decided that whenever I have to start reading my work in public, I will use a sock puppet to do it. Animation and puppetry-- and I firmly believe this-- allow us to be more honest about our emotions, and have more fun doing being that way. So the next time you have something difficult to say to your significant other, consider letting one of your socks or a stuffed animal do it.)
Significant/gruesome crushes:
First through sixth grade. His last name was Funk. Yes, Funk. He broke my ruler one day and then wrote me a note promising to get me a new one, "a see-through yellow one if I can find it. But if not, I will get you a pretty one!" At the end of the note, he suggested that I ask my mom if I can come over to his house some time. It never happened. In sixth grade he and this wretched girl Julia drew horns and warts on the school picture I'd given to Julia because we were still pretending to be friends at that point. I cried and thought about stabbing them both with my compass.
Seventh grade. My crush on Jason peters out when he starts to exhibit some of the gayness that will eventually lead him to tanning a Playboy bunny logo onto his hip in a tanning bed in college. I didn't recognize gayness at that point, just knew very clearly one day as I stared at his profile on the school bus that he would never love me. This was after I'd told all my friends that I was pretty sure what our kids would look like.
Eleventh grade (there's a big jump here because for some reason, in the 9th and 10th grades I ended up dating a few of my crushes, and the reality never lived up to the fantasy). I am enamored of a certain very, very hairy boy. I will later marry one of his best friends after having caught the bouquet at this boy's wedding. The sheer magnitude of behind-the-scenes seventeen-year-old angst is such that I am convinced the boy, and all of his friends, are capable of reading my thoughts scrolling across my forehead like a stock ticker. This enrages me, and so I scowl and retreat whenever he comes near. Wonder why it never worked out?
College. My Spanish Lit T.A. He had googly blue eyes, and, in the style of broke grad students everywhere, he never changed his jeans the whole semester. He made jokes in Spanish about eating only macaroni and raumen noodles, and so for a while, I thought of him whenever I ate raumen and imagined us sharing our high-sodium, low-cost feasts over guttering candlelight.
Post-college. I endure a killer three-week crush on a guy who tells me a great story about helping out at a gruesome wreck late at night on a flooded road. I try the patience of one of my best friends in all the world as I ask, over and over, if he's heard anything from this guy, and suggest whacky, creepy ways in which he could help me find information about the guy. In the end, the guy calls me once, stands me up, and then explains a month later that he got a job at a goat farm.
Pants. Wrenching. My brother's best friend. I think of him so much he shows up in my dreams, and in them, he refers to other dreams I've had over the years, like he's been in on it the whole time. I climb a 900 foot cliff to impress him, and the experience is so terrifying that I drop killer, acidic farts that waft up to him and make him wonder aloud if there's a dead animal nearby. He marries me.
(It's beautiful, and it's the reason I've decided that whenever I have to start reading my work in public, I will use a sock puppet to do it. Animation and puppetry-- and I firmly believe this-- allow us to be more honest about our emotions, and have more fun doing being that way. So the next time you have something difficult to say to your significant other, consider letting one of your socks or a stuffed animal do it.)
Significant/gruesome crushes:
First through sixth grade. His last name was Funk. Yes, Funk. He broke my ruler one day and then wrote me a note promising to get me a new one, "a see-through yellow one if I can find it. But if not, I will get you a pretty one!" At the end of the note, he suggested that I ask my mom if I can come over to his house some time. It never happened. In sixth grade he and this wretched girl Julia drew horns and warts on the school picture I'd given to Julia because we were still pretending to be friends at that point. I cried and thought about stabbing them both with my compass.
Seventh grade. My crush on Jason peters out when he starts to exhibit some of the gayness that will eventually lead him to tanning a Playboy bunny logo onto his hip in a tanning bed in college. I didn't recognize gayness at that point, just knew very clearly one day as I stared at his profile on the school bus that he would never love me. This was after I'd told all my friends that I was pretty sure what our kids would look like.
Eleventh grade (there's a big jump here because for some reason, in the 9th and 10th grades I ended up dating a few of my crushes, and the reality never lived up to the fantasy). I am enamored of a certain very, very hairy boy. I will later marry one of his best friends after having caught the bouquet at this boy's wedding. The sheer magnitude of behind-the-scenes seventeen-year-old angst is such that I am convinced the boy, and all of his friends, are capable of reading my thoughts scrolling across my forehead like a stock ticker. This enrages me, and so I scowl and retreat whenever he comes near. Wonder why it never worked out?
College. My Spanish Lit T.A. He had googly blue eyes, and, in the style of broke grad students everywhere, he never changed his jeans the whole semester. He made jokes in Spanish about eating only macaroni and raumen noodles, and so for a while, I thought of him whenever I ate raumen and imagined us sharing our high-sodium, low-cost feasts over guttering candlelight.
Post-college. I endure a killer three-week crush on a guy who tells me a great story about helping out at a gruesome wreck late at night on a flooded road. I try the patience of one of my best friends in all the world as I ask, over and over, if he's heard anything from this guy, and suggest whacky, creepy ways in which he could help me find information about the guy. In the end, the guy calls me once, stands me up, and then explains a month later that he got a job at a goat farm.
Pants. Wrenching. My brother's best friend. I think of him so much he shows up in my dreams, and in them, he refers to other dreams I've had over the years, like he's been in on it the whole time. I climb a 900 foot cliff to impress him, and the experience is so terrifying that I drop killer, acidic farts that waft up to him and make him wonder aloud if there's a dead animal nearby. He marries me.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Low, Waiting
For the last two weeks I blasted iTunes on random when I showered in morning, barely filled a bag of trash, ran one load in the dishwasher, and became so thoroughly predictable to the dog that she met me in advance at each stop through the house. I watched lots of anime movies and ate meatball subs. I talked to myself in the house and brought the ladder clattering out from the garage so I could climb up on the roof and look at the stars, and while I was up there, I rigged up a wiring system for our perpetually flaccid climbing rose bush. It was nice. It was quiet. It was a series of decisions made without asking. I worry that I could get used to it.
I picked up Pants and two of his buddies at the base airport Sunday night. They came in on a breeze of jet fuel fumes and talked shop for fifteen minutes-- a spray of acronyms and profanity I stopped trying to keep up with ("I busted joker in the tail chase and my wizzo totally flipped the fuck out")-- before a collective sigh silenced them and one asked, "So. How've you been?"
"Busy," I said, "Good." And I was so good, so tired-but-satisfied that I left it at that and let the silence spread in the car until the acronyms picked up again. I worry about this, though, this nothing to say. It's not like nothing happened. I met and talked to a really cool author and pulled off a good event at work, I hung out with three friends, I went to the opening of the new REI, and I started work on my epic essay about my years of globe-trotting teenage ennui. It's just that I couldn't imagine making those things as interesting or important as they were to me to the people in my car, Pants included.
Before he left, Pants and I had a difficult discussion about the need for me to develop a support network outside of him. I felt that in my first month of work and school I had been doing that, but evidently not enough. We talked about the Cave Every Man Must Be Allowed to Retreat To (see Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, an extremely helpful but perhaps too frequently quoted text in our discussions). Yes, yes, the CAVE. Unfortunately, the cave was not where he got to go for the past two weeks-- instead he had to endure the perpetual Spring Break revelries of a decidedly non-cave environment.
I risk treading into marital areas here, and that's not my intention. I just wish that it was possible for me to perhaps share some of the solitude and time for self-reflection that I've had in such abundant quantities. You know, in the spirit of giving. And in turn, I'd love to take over some of that crazy-busy-following-my-dreams time.
I'm nervous, too. January is another approaching deadline for his work, one that gives us a 1 in 3 chance of staying on this coast, and even though I know there's next to nothing he can do to influence that decision, I am feeling less and less inclined to drop everything all over again.
Mostly though, I am worried about the bruised feeling right in the middle of my solar plexus, the one that hasn't really gone away since our discussion two weeks ago. I am awash in hormones and low on blood sugar, sleep, and groceries, so it's probably not the best time for me to pop open the sutures on that one yet, so I will wait.
I picked up Pants and two of his buddies at the base airport Sunday night. They came in on a breeze of jet fuel fumes and talked shop for fifteen minutes-- a spray of acronyms and profanity I stopped trying to keep up with ("I busted joker in the tail chase and my wizzo totally flipped the fuck out")-- before a collective sigh silenced them and one asked, "So. How've you been?"
"Busy," I said, "Good." And I was so good, so tired-but-satisfied that I left it at that and let the silence spread in the car until the acronyms picked up again. I worry about this, though, this nothing to say. It's not like nothing happened. I met and talked to a really cool author and pulled off a good event at work, I hung out with three friends, I went to the opening of the new REI, and I started work on my epic essay about my years of globe-trotting teenage ennui. It's just that I couldn't imagine making those things as interesting or important as they were to me to the people in my car, Pants included.
Before he left, Pants and I had a difficult discussion about the need for me to develop a support network outside of him. I felt that in my first month of work and school I had been doing that, but evidently not enough. We talked about the Cave Every Man Must Be Allowed to Retreat To (see Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, an extremely helpful but perhaps too frequently quoted text in our discussions). Yes, yes, the CAVE. Unfortunately, the cave was not where he got to go for the past two weeks-- instead he had to endure the perpetual Spring Break revelries of a decidedly non-cave environment.
I risk treading into marital areas here, and that's not my intention. I just wish that it was possible for me to perhaps share some of the solitude and time for self-reflection that I've had in such abundant quantities. You know, in the spirit of giving. And in turn, I'd love to take over some of that crazy-busy-following-my-dreams time.
I'm nervous, too. January is another approaching deadline for his work, one that gives us a 1 in 3 chance of staying on this coast, and even though I know there's next to nothing he can do to influence that decision, I am feeling less and less inclined to drop everything all over again.
Mostly though, I am worried about the bruised feeling right in the middle of my solar plexus, the one that hasn't really gone away since our discussion two weeks ago. I am awash in hormones and low on blood sugar, sleep, and groceries, so it's probably not the best time for me to pop open the sutures on that one yet, so I will wait.
Sunday, September 09, 2007
Off he goes...
Pants left this morning in high spirits for a two-week detachment in Key West, home of the permanent spring break. I drove M. and him to the base early, when the air was still cool and promising fall and the light hadn't yet graduated from tender pink to the flat, bright tan we've had lately, muffled by the haze from nearby forest fires. The air when it's like this stings the eyes in a constant low grade irritation that your brain just filters out, but the faint smell of smoke still rings an alarm deep in the brain stem each time you step outside. Things have been like that for us too, lately-- a constant, low grade irritation with each other that occasionally strikes us as upsetting.
So maybe it's not polite, and maybe it's not exactly the most supportive way to put it, but... Thank God he's gone for a while.
Back when we first got married and I quit my job so we could move cross-country together to a newly flattened disaster zone where everyone's roof was a blue tarp and hideous, phlegm-triggering pink mold grew behind the walls everywhere, I found moving in together, co-mingling all our stuff and drawing no boundaries in money or furnishings, to be a huge, jangling shock. Maybe it was for him, too. I can remember a big goopy joy at standing in our new closet and seeing all our clothes hanging together and being able to reach out and touch his T-shirts with my left hand and mine with my right, and seeing all our shoes lined up together, but soon that mingling lost its marvel and I found myself taking long showers in the little room off the master bedroom vanity, the closet-like one with the toilet and the shower hunched together in kind of a gross paradox. This was the only room that was mine. Pants preferred the guest bathroom with its larger and more traditional layout, and shuttled his manly gray and blue shampoo bottles over there.
Mine. I'd lock the door and read in there, or soak in baths until the water turned tepid, not fully understanding why this was the only room in the house I didn't feel panicked in.
We really need our own space, "we" in the larger, universal sense, and "we" in the particular Pants and me sense. Before he left it felt like the air in the house was getting hazy with smoke of some dull alarm. We'd collide into each other and retreat with the same phrases, the same limp embrace, like ions losing their charge. Farts, Pants's signature joie de vive song, even became tiresome and unfunny.* The fact that I was spending less and less time at home and more time at work or reading or writing for school seemed to help, but then we'd lose touch on some trivial/crucial daily living detail, like how many minutes there were left on the cell phones, and we'd have to come back together again and feel the awful limpness and static in our communication. Jokes were heard as barbs, silences as accusations, and a ten minute conversation would drag out into a 40 minute, grating ordeal with tears and tangents on my part, defeated hand gestures on his.
*Once when my brother and I were falling asleep on the roll-away beds on my grandmother's screened in back porch over the Christmas holidays, I farted and after a silent minute, crumbled into hysterical, muffled giggles. He was depressed, mooning over some girl, and said acidly, "Oh, Rachel, grow up." I responded with a declaration I've held to firmly ever since: "I don't want to live in a world where farts aren't funny."
Further complicating matters are my neck muscles, which have again decided to out my simmering anxieties by knotting themselves into bloodless rocks and farming out aches and numbness to my arms and scalp. Fucking thanks. The Sears mattress from hell (the embodiment of a complex ethical dilemma about not encouraging the bad business practices of others by continuing to do business with them) has once again become untenable for me, and so for the past week I've moved into the guest bedroom to sleep on the king-size hand-me-down from my parents. Our bed situation is embarrassingly intermeshed with our communication difficulties, as it turns out: the queen-sized bed we bought together at great expense is a dud, a painful crippling dud which amplifies my already jacked up muscle situation to an excruciating volume. The king-sized bed, however, is too large. We lose each other on it and fall into a restless search-and-retreat pattern that keeps both of us from sleeping.
So a combination of new job/new school/off-balance relationship binds my shoulders, neck, and arms, the bed makes them worse, I retreat to the other bed, and Pants refuses to follow because he's already comfortable, the fan's in here and he doesn't want to move it, he doesn't sleep well on the other bed. We're in separate bedrooms one night and then the next it gets easier and easier, and pretty soon we run out of cell phone minutes, argue, and I move my alarm clock. And then the detachment.
Ironically, I think this is just what we needed. A change in the wind or a front is what it will take to blow the smoke out of town, and for us, a detachment now does almost the same thing. We can get clear, and then figure out what started the fire, maybe.
It wasn't always like this-- in fact, this is the first detachment I've actively welcomed. Before it seemed like me getting beached somewhere while he cruised out to a new horizon. Financially, that feeling was pretty accurate, since as with all things expense-wise, the military deficit spends-- you front your living costs out of pocket and then a couple of months later on, God willing, your paperwork will get approved and now-unfamiliar chunk of cash will descend like manna. But this time I'm thankful. I have a lot to concentrate on, and I can make my own retreat here, to whit:
Today's completed tasks:
1) Launched husband and husband's friend. Took their coffee cups home and dumped them upside down in dishwasher. We may have just acquired a new mug.
2) Picked up a few cleaning supplies and some decidedly hippie groceries, and spent two hours scouring the house, knowing that for the next two weeks, I will be the author of my own messes, and not the editor of someone else's.
3) Spent all day reading a delicious book for school devoted to the science and poetry of the senses (A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman). Underlined copiously and commented out loud. Filled margins with semi-obscene marginalia and doodles to help me connect themes. Loved it.
4) Embarked on a luxurious and purposeful enjoyment of more Netflix anime: "Kiki's Delivery Service," another Murakami film. Teared up and laughed, without embarrassment.
I can feel things clearing already, and I hope the same is happening in Key West.
So maybe it's not polite, and maybe it's not exactly the most supportive way to put it, but... Thank God he's gone for a while.
Back when we first got married and I quit my job so we could move cross-country together to a newly flattened disaster zone where everyone's roof was a blue tarp and hideous, phlegm-triggering pink mold grew behind the walls everywhere, I found moving in together, co-mingling all our stuff and drawing no boundaries in money or furnishings, to be a huge, jangling shock. Maybe it was for him, too. I can remember a big goopy joy at standing in our new closet and seeing all our clothes hanging together and being able to reach out and touch his T-shirts with my left hand and mine with my right, and seeing all our shoes lined up together, but soon that mingling lost its marvel and I found myself taking long showers in the little room off the master bedroom vanity, the closet-like one with the toilet and the shower hunched together in kind of a gross paradox. This was the only room that was mine. Pants preferred the guest bathroom with its larger and more traditional layout, and shuttled his manly gray and blue shampoo bottles over there.
Mine. I'd lock the door and read in there, or soak in baths until the water turned tepid, not fully understanding why this was the only room in the house I didn't feel panicked in.
We really need our own space, "we" in the larger, universal sense, and "we" in the particular Pants and me sense. Before he left it felt like the air in the house was getting hazy with smoke of some dull alarm. We'd collide into each other and retreat with the same phrases, the same limp embrace, like ions losing their charge. Farts, Pants's signature joie de vive song, even became tiresome and unfunny.* The fact that I was spending less and less time at home and more time at work or reading or writing for school seemed to help, but then we'd lose touch on some trivial/crucial daily living detail, like how many minutes there were left on the cell phones, and we'd have to come back together again and feel the awful limpness and static in our communication. Jokes were heard as barbs, silences as accusations, and a ten minute conversation would drag out into a 40 minute, grating ordeal with tears and tangents on my part, defeated hand gestures on his.
*Once when my brother and I were falling asleep on the roll-away beds on my grandmother's screened in back porch over the Christmas holidays, I farted and after a silent minute, crumbled into hysterical, muffled giggles. He was depressed, mooning over some girl, and said acidly, "Oh, Rachel, grow up." I responded with a declaration I've held to firmly ever since: "I don't want to live in a world where farts aren't funny."
Further complicating matters are my neck muscles, which have again decided to out my simmering anxieties by knotting themselves into bloodless rocks and farming out aches and numbness to my arms and scalp. Fucking thanks. The Sears mattress from hell (the embodiment of a complex ethical dilemma about not encouraging the bad business practices of others by continuing to do business with them) has once again become untenable for me, and so for the past week I've moved into the guest bedroom to sleep on the king-size hand-me-down from my parents. Our bed situation is embarrassingly intermeshed with our communication difficulties, as it turns out: the queen-sized bed we bought together at great expense is a dud, a painful crippling dud which amplifies my already jacked up muscle situation to an excruciating volume. The king-sized bed, however, is too large. We lose each other on it and fall into a restless search-and-retreat pattern that keeps both of us from sleeping.
So a combination of new job/new school/off-balance relationship binds my shoulders, neck, and arms, the bed makes them worse, I retreat to the other bed, and Pants refuses to follow because he's already comfortable, the fan's in here and he doesn't want to move it, he doesn't sleep well on the other bed. We're in separate bedrooms one night and then the next it gets easier and easier, and pretty soon we run out of cell phone minutes, argue, and I move my alarm clock. And then the detachment.
Ironically, I think this is just what we needed. A change in the wind or a front is what it will take to blow the smoke out of town, and for us, a detachment now does almost the same thing. We can get clear, and then figure out what started the fire, maybe.
It wasn't always like this-- in fact, this is the first detachment I've actively welcomed. Before it seemed like me getting beached somewhere while he cruised out to a new horizon. Financially, that feeling was pretty accurate, since as with all things expense-wise, the military deficit spends-- you front your living costs out of pocket and then a couple of months later on, God willing, your paperwork will get approved and now-unfamiliar chunk of cash will descend like manna. But this time I'm thankful. I have a lot to concentrate on, and I can make my own retreat here, to whit:
Today's completed tasks:
1) Launched husband and husband's friend. Took their coffee cups home and dumped them upside down in dishwasher. We may have just acquired a new mug.
2) Picked up a few cleaning supplies and some decidedly hippie groceries, and spent two hours scouring the house, knowing that for the next two weeks, I will be the author of my own messes, and not the editor of someone else's.
3) Spent all day reading a delicious book for school devoted to the science and poetry of the senses (A Natural History of the Senses, by Diane Ackerman). Underlined copiously and commented out loud. Filled margins with semi-obscene marginalia and doodles to help me connect themes. Loved it.
4) Embarked on a luxurious and purposeful enjoyment of more Netflix anime: "Kiki's Delivery Service," another Murakami film. Teared up and laughed, without embarrassment.
I can feel things clearing already, and I hope the same is happening in Key West.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Scrapped Plans
For the past two weeks I've been taking a good long look at the molars and gums of my gift horse (free admission to graduate school) and have concluded that there is a direct genetic link between Napoleon and my graduate admissions counselor. The withholding of a simple signature on an otherwise complete application merely because my maiden name does not match my married name (a fairly common scenario, I would guess, in people who try to avoid inbreeding) gave this woman such powerful shudders of pleasure, I almost felt bad for having to sick a dean on her. This woman, incidentally, went the hyphenation route with her own married name, despite the fact that it makes addressing her fully a nine-syllable nightmare. Perhaps it does make finding her undergraduate transcripts a bit easier, but let's see who's laughing when there's a foreign invasion, and evacuees must be called by name to the Hueys waiting on the roof.
It was 108 degrees outside today, and now that I know a whole lot more about the physiological effects of heat on the brain thanks to reading Devil's Highway, I'm going to forgive myself for wanting to karate chop Pants in the throat for criticizing my driving one time too many. See, we had this whole plan to go camping in the mountains for three days, packing all of our stuff in on the trails starting in Yosemite and then driving through the pass at the top of the Sierras to Mono Lake on the other side of the mountain range. But then Abby developed blisters on her paws from a day hike last weekend, my shoulder and neck muscles again turned to tightly packed burning rocks from the stress of dealing with She-of-the-9-syllable-name, and Pants's flight schedule ate way too far into Friday for us to get a good start on the road. So we scrapped the idea of camping and now all three of us are compensating for it in separate corners: Abby has some mysterious bowl affliction and hunches in the backyard with a look of panic on her face, Pants is napping, face down and sweating with the effort, and I've just pulled the last tray of a double batch of chocolate chip cookies from the oven. My gut aches from cookie dough and bourbon.
I should clarify here, too that not only did we scrap camping plans, we also spent the day in Fresno running errands, two of which forced us into a giant, teeming mall. If there is an experience more opposite to hiking in the mountains than walking through a Saturday afternoon mall, I don't know what it is. There's something awful about seeing in the almost the same instance a totally classy and perfect Anne Taylor outfit that's way out of your budget, and a clot of teenage girls with flat-ironed, two-toned hair, sucking down foamy Starbuck's drinks and shuffling vacantly down the main thoroughfare wearing tiny shorts with "kiss, kiss" printed directly across the ass cheeks and discussing loudly how "that one chick was a total c*nt."
Later, in the Apple store, where I'd gone to have the letter "d" restored to my laptop's keyboard, I waited in queue for my "genius" appointment (seriously, I know corporations are trying to make their employees feel like something more than paid drones-- after all, I was a "sandwich artist" at Subway-- but "genius"?) behind a chubby thirteen-year-old boy we'll call J. whose iPod was "overheating and making funny noises." Turns out, the giant dent in the back of the iPod from where J. supposedly dropped it off his dresser (and deflected a bullet on the way down??) may have had something to do with this, but the genius was feeling generous, and offered to exchange it for a new one under warranty if J. would pay the $30 Apple recycling fee. At this point, J.'s father, a bespectacled man in a Berkeley shirt, asked peevishly, "Recycling fee? Why is that my problem? Why doesn't Apple pay that?" Father of J. proceeded to make a genuine scene, despite his wife's efforts at mollification, until the offending fee was waived and J. was given a brand new iPod, sans bullet-wound, to which the warranty of the old iPod was transferred. This too offended him-- "Why can't his warranty start over?" and when the genius disappeared again to consult higher powers, the man leaned forward and urged his son to tell the genius that he was a share-holder. Finally, the injustice of the whole situation, and perhaps the poorly concealed laughter of Pants and I, got to be too much for the man and he stomped off in a huff, leaving J. to apply his hard-won lessons of white entitlement.
Other than hating my fellow citizens, things are fine. I've been to my first week of classes and have set about joyfully researching the not-so-rare occurrence of human horn growth (most would be horns these days are nipped in the bud way early at a routine dermatologist appointment, but back in the day, it wasn't unheard of to develop a large, keratinous growth at the sight of an excised sebacious cyst, or other scar. More often than not, the horns were brownish in color, and would curl inward like a ram's. Understandably, this caused considerable anguish for the patient and led to all manner of religious interpretations). I have thus decided that our long-delayed honeymoon should feature a stop at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, where one can find all kinds of evidence that Nature is fallible, and thus way more lovable.
And then again, maybe if I spent a little more time in malls and a little less time in mountains, I'd learn to appreciate garden variety human foibles all on my own...
It was 108 degrees outside today, and now that I know a whole lot more about the physiological effects of heat on the brain thanks to reading Devil's Highway, I'm going to forgive myself for wanting to karate chop Pants in the throat for criticizing my driving one time too many. See, we had this whole plan to go camping in the mountains for three days, packing all of our stuff in on the trails starting in Yosemite and then driving through the pass at the top of the Sierras to Mono Lake on the other side of the mountain range. But then Abby developed blisters on her paws from a day hike last weekend, my shoulder and neck muscles again turned to tightly packed burning rocks from the stress of dealing with She-of-the-9-syllable-name, and Pants's flight schedule ate way too far into Friday for us to get a good start on the road. So we scrapped the idea of camping and now all three of us are compensating for it in separate corners: Abby has some mysterious bowl affliction and hunches in the backyard with a look of panic on her face, Pants is napping, face down and sweating with the effort, and I've just pulled the last tray of a double batch of chocolate chip cookies from the oven. My gut aches from cookie dough and bourbon.
I should clarify here, too that not only did we scrap camping plans, we also spent the day in Fresno running errands, two of which forced us into a giant, teeming mall. If there is an experience more opposite to hiking in the mountains than walking through a Saturday afternoon mall, I don't know what it is. There's something awful about seeing in the almost the same instance a totally classy and perfect Anne Taylor outfit that's way out of your budget, and a clot of teenage girls with flat-ironed, two-toned hair, sucking down foamy Starbuck's drinks and shuffling vacantly down the main thoroughfare wearing tiny shorts with "kiss, kiss" printed directly across the ass cheeks and discussing loudly how "that one chick was a total c*nt."
Later, in the Apple store, where I'd gone to have the letter "d" restored to my laptop's keyboard, I waited in queue for my "genius" appointment (seriously, I know corporations are trying to make their employees feel like something more than paid drones-- after all, I was a "sandwich artist" at Subway-- but "genius"?) behind a chubby thirteen-year-old boy we'll call J. whose iPod was "overheating and making funny noises." Turns out, the giant dent in the back of the iPod from where J. supposedly dropped it off his dresser (and deflected a bullet on the way down??) may have had something to do with this, but the genius was feeling generous, and offered to exchange it for a new one under warranty if J. would pay the $30 Apple recycling fee. At this point, J.'s father, a bespectacled man in a Berkeley shirt, asked peevishly, "Recycling fee? Why is that my problem? Why doesn't Apple pay that?" Father of J. proceeded to make a genuine scene, despite his wife's efforts at mollification, until the offending fee was waived and J. was given a brand new iPod, sans bullet-wound, to which the warranty of the old iPod was transferred. This too offended him-- "Why can't his warranty start over?" and when the genius disappeared again to consult higher powers, the man leaned forward and urged his son to tell the genius that he was a share-holder. Finally, the injustice of the whole situation, and perhaps the poorly concealed laughter of Pants and I, got to be too much for the man and he stomped off in a huff, leaving J. to apply his hard-won lessons of white entitlement.
Other than hating my fellow citizens, things are fine. I've been to my first week of classes and have set about joyfully researching the not-so-rare occurrence of human horn growth (most would be horns these days are nipped in the bud way early at a routine dermatologist appointment, but back in the day, it wasn't unheard of to develop a large, keratinous growth at the sight of an excised sebacious cyst, or other scar. More often than not, the horns were brownish in color, and would curl inward like a ram's. Understandably, this caused considerable anguish for the patient and led to all manner of religious interpretations). I have thus decided that our long-delayed honeymoon should feature a stop at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, where one can find all kinds of evidence that Nature is fallible, and thus way more lovable.
And then again, maybe if I spent a little more time in malls and a little less time in mountains, I'd learn to appreciate garden variety human foibles all on my own...
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Quiz Time
OK, in all honesty, the first time I took this quiz, I was The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, but I think it's unfair to have to be a book I haven't read yet. It'll unduly influence me when I actually do get around to reading it. So I went back and took the quiz faster, more reflexively, and ironically I think I got a little closer. Funny though, that in six short little questions, both times came out with me obsessed with war and travel.
You're Cry, the Beloved Country!
by Alan Paton
Life is exceedingly difficult right now, especially when you put more
miles between yourself and your hometown. But with all sorts of personal and profound
convictions, you are able to keep a level head and still try to help folks, no matter
how much they harm you. You walk through a land of natural beauty and daily horror. In
the end, far too much is a matter of black and white.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
The Love Camel Browses the Bookstore
It happened in the bookstore, I think.
The campus bookstore of my new school is entirely different from the one at my undergrad school, which was really more of an underground warehouse, the upper floor having been reserved entirely for flashy alumni merchandise-- the bone handled letter openers and mother of pearl bar sets reserved for those who'd long since "made it" and then grown nostalgic for simpler, budget-noodle-and-beer-bong times. Underground were the books, and an infestation of panicked students decimating the place like wood lice. I always ran smack into the Asians, who burrowed from aisle to aisle with their heads down and their overflowing hand baskets thrust forward like a train's cattle guard. I would dodge, duck, and then dig in the back corners of the shelves for the shittiest copies of the books I needed, the "used" sticker meaning a slightly less astronomical price and occasionally some good research leads scribbled in the margins, or the found poetry of boredom and sleep deprivation. I could never get all of my books at once-- low stock, late orders, a freak rush of English majors, or my own pre-semester, crowd-induced panic attacks ensured that.
But yesterday I went to the bookstore to check out what books I would need for my semester of graduate school. I alloted an hour for this task, and was done in 15 minutes. I walked in, followed the signs upstairs, and found the far wall (not the southeast corner of a massive room) devoted to English, and of that wall, two bookcases devoted to graduate English. The stacks of books were clearly labeled and well stocked, even though school starts next week. I quickly found my two classes and wrote down the titles and authors I needed as well as the bookstore's best price, so that I could later calculate my savings from buying them all used online, and then I straightened up and looked around.
No one was crying. Parents were there. I walked outside, where it was not thirty feet to where I had parked my car for free feeling bemused and optimistic.
Work has gone well. I feel like skills of mine that I like are being put to use-- my eye for graphic design rather than my freakish mastery of alphabetizing-- and my office has a window through which I can check on a mother pigeon who sits cooing softly in her nest of feathers, dried grass, and trash. My morning commute, about an hour each way, allows me to plug in to NPR again and guiltlessly pound coffee as I keep tabs on the all crops (some things in my life have a way of repeating themselves. I had a theory in high school, when I moved a lot and burnt bridges much the way farmers will burn a crop to keep the bugs from spreading, that there were 20 people in my life, they just kept switching bodies and names).
I've been unreasonably excited about work and school recently, and it's not a feeling I'm familiar with. Yesterday, as I was leaving the bookstore, it caught up with me. There's a good possibility that Pants will deploy as soon as late December. If the first semester of grad school goes like any of the semesters I spent in undergrad, I'll put my head down and concentrate and when I next look up, it'll feel like two weeks have passed, but in reality it'll be Thanksgiving, and then in another blink, Christmas.
A very wise friend has continued to harp on me about my concepts of scarcity and abundance in life and love. According to her, I often live like I have savings accounts with finite balances of time, love, and attention, like I think spending love or time on one thing means I necessarily have less to give to another. The idea was so deeply entrenched, and so logical, that it's taken me years and my friend a lot of time and breath, to begin to be suspicious of it.
After all, how does it make sense that if I give a lot of enthusiasm and passion and time to my work and grad school, I won't have less to give to Pants before he deploys? But that's how it works-- even if I was home all day, which we tried with weird and stilted results, the time we'd have together when he came home would still be hemmed in on all sides with whiffs of dissatisfaction and resentment and pressure because that's all I'd be doing: waiting for him.
Looking at it another way, it's also not like I can "save up" on being close to him before he leaves. He'll still be gone either way and it'll hurt either way and neither of us will get any sex for six months either way. You can't be a love camel, in other words, which is such a damned shame I can't even articulate it.
So even as I'm getting all antsy and excited about starting school and going to work, this other cold current is coming under the door, where I feel weird and guilty and sad that another huge thing is coming up, maybe sooner rather than later, and it will not be fun at all. My brother said it best this morning, on the phone from Indiana while his work walkie-talkie crackled in the background: "All you can do is try to be present for all of it, even the suck parts."
The campus bookstore of my new school is entirely different from the one at my undergrad school, which was really more of an underground warehouse, the upper floor having been reserved entirely for flashy alumni merchandise-- the bone handled letter openers and mother of pearl bar sets reserved for those who'd long since "made it" and then grown nostalgic for simpler, budget-noodle-and-beer-bong times. Underground were the books, and an infestation of panicked students decimating the place like wood lice. I always ran smack into the Asians, who burrowed from aisle to aisle with their heads down and their overflowing hand baskets thrust forward like a train's cattle guard. I would dodge, duck, and then dig in the back corners of the shelves for the shittiest copies of the books I needed, the "used" sticker meaning a slightly less astronomical price and occasionally some good research leads scribbled in the margins, or the found poetry of boredom and sleep deprivation. I could never get all of my books at once-- low stock, late orders, a freak rush of English majors, or my own pre-semester, crowd-induced panic attacks ensured that.
But yesterday I went to the bookstore to check out what books I would need for my semester of graduate school. I alloted an hour for this task, and was done in 15 minutes. I walked in, followed the signs upstairs, and found the far wall (not the southeast corner of a massive room) devoted to English, and of that wall, two bookcases devoted to graduate English. The stacks of books were clearly labeled and well stocked, even though school starts next week. I quickly found my two classes and wrote down the titles and authors I needed as well as the bookstore's best price, so that I could later calculate my savings from buying them all used online, and then I straightened up and looked around.
No one was crying. Parents were there. I walked outside, where it was not thirty feet to where I had parked my car for free feeling bemused and optimistic.
Work has gone well. I feel like skills of mine that I like are being put to use-- my eye for graphic design rather than my freakish mastery of alphabetizing-- and my office has a window through which I can check on a mother pigeon who sits cooing softly in her nest of feathers, dried grass, and trash. My morning commute, about an hour each way, allows me to plug in to NPR again and guiltlessly pound coffee as I keep tabs on the all crops (some things in my life have a way of repeating themselves. I had a theory in high school, when I moved a lot and burnt bridges much the way farmers will burn a crop to keep the bugs from spreading, that there were 20 people in my life, they just kept switching bodies and names).
I've been unreasonably excited about work and school recently, and it's not a feeling I'm familiar with. Yesterday, as I was leaving the bookstore, it caught up with me. There's a good possibility that Pants will deploy as soon as late December. If the first semester of grad school goes like any of the semesters I spent in undergrad, I'll put my head down and concentrate and when I next look up, it'll feel like two weeks have passed, but in reality it'll be Thanksgiving, and then in another blink, Christmas.
A very wise friend has continued to harp on me about my concepts of scarcity and abundance in life and love. According to her, I often live like I have savings accounts with finite balances of time, love, and attention, like I think spending love or time on one thing means I necessarily have less to give to another. The idea was so deeply entrenched, and so logical, that it's taken me years and my friend a lot of time and breath, to begin to be suspicious of it.
After all, how does it make sense that if I give a lot of enthusiasm and passion and time to my work and grad school, I won't have less to give to Pants before he deploys? But that's how it works-- even if I was home all day, which we tried with weird and stilted results, the time we'd have together when he came home would still be hemmed in on all sides with whiffs of dissatisfaction and resentment and pressure because that's all I'd be doing: waiting for him.
Looking at it another way, it's also not like I can "save up" on being close to him before he leaves. He'll still be gone either way and it'll hurt either way and neither of us will get any sex for six months either way. You can't be a love camel, in other words, which is such a damned shame I can't even articulate it.
So even as I'm getting all antsy and excited about starting school and going to work, this other cold current is coming under the door, where I feel weird and guilty and sad that another huge thing is coming up, maybe sooner rather than later, and it will not be fun at all. My brother said it best this morning, on the phone from Indiana while his work walkie-talkie crackled in the background: "All you can do is try to be present for all of it, even the suck parts."
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Yay! Back to school! (snort!)
Fate has smiled on me. Dimpled cherubs call down to me with their verdict: "Thou shalt work!" I complete a circuit of ballet leaps on my slick wooden floor and make extravagant promises to Pants about what we'll do with my future scratch. But the cherubs are not finished. They hover ever lower, suppressing giggles while flashing cheeky angel ass from beneath their weightless loin cloths, and just when they reach head height, they whisper the newest news: "Thou shalt enter graduate school, too. For FREE!"
I can't remember if I was excited for first grade or not-- the photo's kind of unclear on that. I'm standing on the porch with my yellow Muppets lunch box, wearing a white jersey dress with a rainbow ribbon belt (apparently I supported the gay rights even then), my hair in a ponytail and my bangs combed neat and straight over my eyebrows. My chin is tucked and I'm smiling, but it looks more like a smile of embarrassment because my mother is bent down next to me in her faded yellow bathrobe, hands on her knees, bed-head curls tumbling everywhere, and a giant, theatrical wocka-wocka smile on her face.
Re-imagining that morning is the closest I can get to an analogous feeling to starting grad school. It's been six years since I finished college, and I never stopped wanting to get an advanced degree, but my reasons have changed kind of like a stream clears the further it gets from a silt deposit, or dead, bloated deer carcass. At first I wanted to go back to avoid the (entirely necessary) shit-eating phase of entry-level work. Then I wanted to go back to do penance for the mistake of getting a liberal arts degree-- make me a butcher, a baker a candlestick maker (read: a lawyer)! Then I wanted to go back and throw caution and earning potential to the wind and become a whacked out studio artist compiling huge murals out of dried beans or something, because why the hell not? I've always loved art! And then I just gave up and admitted that I wanted to go back to English, to writing, to the thing that's hurt the most and been the most disappointing and challenging, to the thing I can't help but do because it's how I make sense of things.
The stream's not entirely clear now, but at least I know what I want to study. Other factors: I want to finish an advanced degree before we have children (cringe at the June Cleaver traditionalism) so I can give my full focus to school, and so that if I take some time off from working, the credential will shore up my resume (cringe at the Working Girl smarminess). (Wow, did you catch that? I've managed to cringe at both ends of the spectrum of womanhood in one sentence! My parenthetical self-consciousness knows no bounds!) I've also got to admit that it'll be a delicious role reversal to tell Pants, "Sorry, I can't do [insert fun thing]-- I've got to study." Ha-ha! But now I'm important too! Look at all my books! Look at the scholarly way I pinch the bridge of my nose in concentration-- this is all so fascinating, and yet, the burden of my knowledge...
Clearly, I've been preparing for this role.
Things converge even further-- I'm entering an MFA program, which, prior to this opportunity falling into my lap, seemed ridiculously self serving. I'd been content to pursue an MA in Composition Theory, which would take less time and still allow me to teach community college and do my creepy story-vulture thing where I take secret notes on the personal dramas and mannerisms of my students. But then I got the job working for this MFA program and like the Communist Domino Theory, one thing just led inexorably to another and before I knew it, they were wiping out deadlines, waiving fees, skipping committees, parting seas and inviting me to tiptoe across the exposed briny floor into GRAD SCHOOL. Be still, my nerdy heart.
Classes start the week after next and Pants has already been teasing me and threatening to buy me a Batman lunch box and a trapper keeper. I've been trying to drop delicate hints that what I could really use is a laptop bag and a coffee thermos. And Lasik surgery, because I've discovered from one week of graphic design software that I have the piercing visual acuity of a fruit bat...
I can't remember if I was excited for first grade or not-- the photo's kind of unclear on that. I'm standing on the porch with my yellow Muppets lunch box, wearing a white jersey dress with a rainbow ribbon belt (apparently I supported the gay rights even then), my hair in a ponytail and my bangs combed neat and straight over my eyebrows. My chin is tucked and I'm smiling, but it looks more like a smile of embarrassment because my mother is bent down next to me in her faded yellow bathrobe, hands on her knees, bed-head curls tumbling everywhere, and a giant, theatrical wocka-wocka smile on her face.
Re-imagining that morning is the closest I can get to an analogous feeling to starting grad school. It's been six years since I finished college, and I never stopped wanting to get an advanced degree, but my reasons have changed kind of like a stream clears the further it gets from a silt deposit, or dead, bloated deer carcass. At first I wanted to go back to avoid the (entirely necessary) shit-eating phase of entry-level work. Then I wanted to go back to do penance for the mistake of getting a liberal arts degree-- make me a butcher, a baker a candlestick maker (read: a lawyer)! Then I wanted to go back and throw caution and earning potential to the wind and become a whacked out studio artist compiling huge murals out of dried beans or something, because why the hell not? I've always loved art! And then I just gave up and admitted that I wanted to go back to English, to writing, to the thing that's hurt the most and been the most disappointing and challenging, to the thing I can't help but do because it's how I make sense of things.
The stream's not entirely clear now, but at least I know what I want to study. Other factors: I want to finish an advanced degree before we have children (cringe at the June Cleaver traditionalism) so I can give my full focus to school, and so that if I take some time off from working, the credential will shore up my resume (cringe at the Working Girl smarminess). (Wow, did you catch that? I've managed to cringe at both ends of the spectrum of womanhood in one sentence! My parenthetical self-consciousness knows no bounds!) I've also got to admit that it'll be a delicious role reversal to tell Pants, "Sorry, I can't do [insert fun thing]-- I've got to study." Ha-ha! But now I'm important too! Look at all my books! Look at the scholarly way I pinch the bridge of my nose in concentration-- this is all so fascinating, and yet, the burden of my knowledge...
Clearly, I've been preparing for this role.
Things converge even further-- I'm entering an MFA program, which, prior to this opportunity falling into my lap, seemed ridiculously self serving. I'd been content to pursue an MA in Composition Theory, which would take less time and still allow me to teach community college and do my creepy story-vulture thing where I take secret notes on the personal dramas and mannerisms of my students. But then I got the job working for this MFA program and like the Communist Domino Theory, one thing just led inexorably to another and before I knew it, they were wiping out deadlines, waiving fees, skipping committees, parting seas and inviting me to tiptoe across the exposed briny floor into GRAD SCHOOL. Be still, my nerdy heart.
Classes start the week after next and Pants has already been teasing me and threatening to buy me a Batman lunch box and a trapper keeper. I've been trying to drop delicate hints that what I could really use is a laptop bag and a coffee thermos. And Lasik surgery, because I've discovered from one week of graphic design software that I have the piercing visual acuity of a fruit bat...
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Navigating Loss
It's another paralyzingly quiet moment during Pants's parents' visit. The only sound is the humming of the air conditioner and Pants's mother, R.'s, occasional labored coughs. R. has had pneumonia three times this year, an has now invested in a nebulizer, a machine I remember from childhood because my brother had to use one for his asthma. It makes you look like the smoking worm from Alice in Wonderland, and it almost makes me wish I had rumble lungs just so I could sit around and puff vapor from a machine twice a day. When I smoked as a teenager I think it was this, the fascination with gadgetry and slow, contemplative process of puffing little clouds out of my mouth that formed the bulk of my habit, and not an addiction to nicotine. Addicts are much more conscientious-- I kept forgetting to smoke, and thus had to stifle the highly uncool reflex to cough.
I'm feeling like a bad hostess. When one of your guests has very little short term memory left, the lapse into boredom for them is quick and steep. I am left wishing we had invested in cable, or even had a toddler dashing around to liven things up. As it stands, Pants and I are some of the least stimulating people you'll ever meet. I read, he naps, in the evenings we watch BBC nature programs, and then we call it a night. This seems to suit R. just fine, who, for the first time in ages, is catching up on her reading (World War II espionage and the flora and fauna of Yosemite, which we visited mostly by car yesterday) but for Pants's father...
There's so much I can't imagine about Alzheimer's, especially this strain of it which has set in so early in his life and taken so much so quickly. Every time D. has gotten to visit us in the past three years, we've lived somewhere different, and the struggle to map the interiors of each of our new living spaces as a guest has provided one of the ways I can see the progress of the disease.
Yesterday we drove out to Yosemite. Pants's family has always been big into the national park thing, and they've been almost everywhere. Some of my earliest conversations with D., back when the disease only meant he couldn't work and sometimes lost his train of thought, and back when I was only the new girlfriend, a tenuous experiment after the unmitigated disaster of the college paramour, were about the beauties and memories in various parks. We formed our friendship over maps and snapshots. D. was an avid and capable outdoors man, and taught Pants the wildly attractive art of homemaking in the wilderness. It was a treat to take D. to such an iconic park, even if the static of logistics often got in the way. The road trip was long, so Pants brought along a nostalgic surprise-- two c.d.'s of classic Western songs, to which his parents laughingly sang along. D. has always been tone deaf, and R. sings pitch-perfect but in a high, warbling soprano, so they've always made a funny duet. Pants and his older brother used to snicker through church hymns at their parents' mismatched but enthusiastic performances.
The park, unfortunately, was packed. Frenetic Japanese teenagers, languid Spaniards, and grim-faced, athletic Germans in those awful gardening sandals clogged the walkways and taxed D.'s limited navigational resources. Several beautiful pictures hold D. drifting in their frames, gazing unfocused at the hordes of gabbling foreigners disgorging from nearby tour buses. "Look at me!" I'd call, "Smile!" and more than once it seemed that he humored me out of a reflexive polite obedience, and not because he recognized me or understood that he was part of a picture. This morning we reviewed the pictures on my computer screen, and he seemed shocked and pleased to hear that we'd taken a trip the day before. Each image fired a new synapse that reminded him of fragments of past trips, activities he'd led with his boys, things he'd done as a scout leader, and each new story started with a few confident words and then faded. Conversations now draw on all my reserves of constructing narratives and viewpoints. I told him what he'd seen at each stop, what sounds we'd noticed.
D. and R. have a touching kind of teamwork going, and I think it's ironic and amazing that even though the disease has wrought such merciless and swift subtraction, the two of them are still teaching me about what a relationship builds up over the years. I've read that Alzheimer's can change its victims' personalities, and that the frustrations of forgetting can fray nerves on both sides of the equation, patient and caretaker. But D. and R. are both scientists, and both Christians, a protective (and somehow not contradictory) combination that allows them to draw on reserves of scientific logic and religious faith depending on the situation. They hold hands everywhere they go these days-- her ankles aren't strong and recently she's been short of breath so she leans on him. He depends on her as both rudder and anchor in the chaos of crowds. She has a frank, no-nonsense way of assessing a situation, and he is gentle and humbly accepting of each instruction.
I don't think this symbiotic give-and-take is built in. I think it's a product of negotiation and experimentation under the most extreme of pressures, and the most unstable circumstances. I think it comes from years of planning, and years of coping when plans erode, and a commitment whose strength has held even as so much else has crumbled. I'm humbled by watching them, even as they sometimes drive Pants and me nuts with their nightly phlegm chorus and quirky fascination with roadside weeds. It's helped to remind me what I signed up for that night in December when I sniffled my way through the vows and felt electric and jittery from all the benevolent eyes watching us. Through moves, job searches, endless road trips with impatient pets, meager bank balances, bizarre military subcultures, hurricanes, mountains of flight manuals to be memorized, loneliness and perpetual upheaval, I have a hand to hold.
I'm feeling like a bad hostess. When one of your guests has very little short term memory left, the lapse into boredom for them is quick and steep. I am left wishing we had invested in cable, or even had a toddler dashing around to liven things up. As it stands, Pants and I are some of the least stimulating people you'll ever meet. I read, he naps, in the evenings we watch BBC nature programs, and then we call it a night. This seems to suit R. just fine, who, for the first time in ages, is catching up on her reading (World War II espionage and the flora and fauna of Yosemite, which we visited mostly by car yesterday) but for Pants's father...
There's so much I can't imagine about Alzheimer's, especially this strain of it which has set in so early in his life and taken so much so quickly. Every time D. has gotten to visit us in the past three years, we've lived somewhere different, and the struggle to map the interiors of each of our new living spaces as a guest has provided one of the ways I can see the progress of the disease.
Yesterday we drove out to Yosemite. Pants's family has always been big into the national park thing, and they've been almost everywhere. Some of my earliest conversations with D., back when the disease only meant he couldn't work and sometimes lost his train of thought, and back when I was only the new girlfriend, a tenuous experiment after the unmitigated disaster of the college paramour, were about the beauties and memories in various parks. We formed our friendship over maps and snapshots. D. was an avid and capable outdoors man, and taught Pants the wildly attractive art of homemaking in the wilderness. It was a treat to take D. to such an iconic park, even if the static of logistics often got in the way. The road trip was long, so Pants brought along a nostalgic surprise-- two c.d.'s of classic Western songs, to which his parents laughingly sang along. D. has always been tone deaf, and R. sings pitch-perfect but in a high, warbling soprano, so they've always made a funny duet. Pants and his older brother used to snicker through church hymns at their parents' mismatched but enthusiastic performances.
The park, unfortunately, was packed. Frenetic Japanese teenagers, languid Spaniards, and grim-faced, athletic Germans in those awful gardening sandals clogged the walkways and taxed D.'s limited navigational resources. Several beautiful pictures hold D. drifting in their frames, gazing unfocused at the hordes of gabbling foreigners disgorging from nearby tour buses. "Look at me!" I'd call, "Smile!" and more than once it seemed that he humored me out of a reflexive polite obedience, and not because he recognized me or understood that he was part of a picture. This morning we reviewed the pictures on my computer screen, and he seemed shocked and pleased to hear that we'd taken a trip the day before. Each image fired a new synapse that reminded him of fragments of past trips, activities he'd led with his boys, things he'd done as a scout leader, and each new story started with a few confident words and then faded. Conversations now draw on all my reserves of constructing narratives and viewpoints. I told him what he'd seen at each stop, what sounds we'd noticed.
D. and R. have a touching kind of teamwork going, and I think it's ironic and amazing that even though the disease has wrought such merciless and swift subtraction, the two of them are still teaching me about what a relationship builds up over the years. I've read that Alzheimer's can change its victims' personalities, and that the frustrations of forgetting can fray nerves on both sides of the equation, patient and caretaker. But D. and R. are both scientists, and both Christians, a protective (and somehow not contradictory) combination that allows them to draw on reserves of scientific logic and religious faith depending on the situation. They hold hands everywhere they go these days-- her ankles aren't strong and recently she's been short of breath so she leans on him. He depends on her as both rudder and anchor in the chaos of crowds. She has a frank, no-nonsense way of assessing a situation, and he is gentle and humbly accepting of each instruction.
I don't think this symbiotic give-and-take is built in. I think it's a product of negotiation and experimentation under the most extreme of pressures, and the most unstable circumstances. I think it comes from years of planning, and years of coping when plans erode, and a commitment whose strength has held even as so much else has crumbled. I'm humbled by watching them, even as they sometimes drive Pants and me nuts with their nightly phlegm chorus and quirky fascination with roadside weeds. It's helped to remind me what I signed up for that night in December when I sniffled my way through the vows and felt electric and jittery from all the benevolent eyes watching us. Through moves, job searches, endless road trips with impatient pets, meager bank balances, bizarre military subcultures, hurricanes, mountains of flight manuals to be memorized, loneliness and perpetual upheaval, I have a hand to hold.
Friday, July 27, 2007
The Friggin' Angel Gabriel
Pants's parents are in town for a week long visit. Right now, his mother snores with blessed regularity on our living room couch (she's not had a break from being a full time caretaker in weeks), his dad is flipping through an Adventure magazine, Pants is tearing over Death Valley at 400 knots, and Abby is twitching her paws in dream-sleep at my feet. My epic job search has entered a twilight period where one offer is in the works and another languishes in the realm of possibility. Things are quietly waiting for change.
I haven't written much about it before because the experience hardly seems mine to talk about, but Pants's father is in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease. He's recently moved into an assisted living unit, but Pants's mother and brother and sister-in-law visit him regularly and take him out to go swimming and take day trips with the family and his two small grandsons.
State-hopping with the military has been especially frustrating for me because Pants and I are separated from this loop and often powerless to help when things get overwhelming. Pants's mother is directly descended from iron-willed plainswomen, the kind who will reach fearlessly into the womb of a bellowing cow in labor to untangle the calf, and getting her to admit that working full-time as a public school teacher and a caretaker for Pants's father has been an epic struggle. When I ask her on the phone how things are going, she says, "Oh, fine!" in a strident tone that makes me believe they are anything but. The assisted living arrangement has seemed a blessing all around, but it's been long in coming and has required several tipping points.
Luckily, there is Gabe. Gabe is an 8-year-old cocker spaniel who is Pants's father's best friend and constant companion. As the disease has advanced and the concept of time has fallen away, Gabe has been the one rock solid constant whose presence is reliably uncomplicated. He has been allowed to move into the assisted living facility, and when Pants's father occasionally becomes confused or upset, turning the conversation to Gabe seems to set the world right again.
If only we were all so fond of Gabe.
The cocker spaniel is a mysterious breed. They look so loving and innocent with their huge, wet eyes and their curly, mud-flap ears. But every cocker spaniel I've known has been completely immune to any concept of discipline or reason, and Gabe is no exception. His penchant for overturning trashcans and spreading their contents throughout the house has led Pants's folks to purchase large, industrial metal canisters for their home, the kind you'd imagine for biohazard facilities. Gabe also has a charming habit of urinating all over the feet of visitors, charging at the door with one long scream-bark whenever the doorbell sounds, and leaping back up on to the couch with maddening persistence after being pushed off repeatedly and told "no." His hunger is insatiable, the tragic result of some thyroid malfunction, and anything mildly edible, even if stored on high shelves or tabletops or meant for another pet unlucky enough to share space with Gabe, is in danger. Finally, he's rather blase about appropriate places to relieve himself, as he enjoys full diplomatic immunity from Pants's father, who defends Gabe's every transgression with unfailing filial allegiance.
It feels almost sacrosanct to badmouth this dog, but it's a favorite topic among Pants and I and his brother and sister-in-law. We do it with great creativity and profanity, and usually dissolve into near hysterical giggles with imitations. It's almost as if in skewering Gabe and the domestic chaos he wreaks we can vent a few of our frustrations about the ravages of Alzheimer's and the helplessness we all feel in the face of it.
Gabe has been an especially painful issue this week since he wasn't allowed to make the plane trip out to California. I'm still unclear whether this was because of the cost associated with shipping him or because, in his habit of focusing on annoyances that are not the main issue, Pants vetoed his presence, and I suspect the reason may be a combination of the two. Whatever is was, I spent the week prior to the visit worrying that a Gabe-less week in a totally foreign city would deeply upset Pants's father, and at least the first two days seemed to have borne this out, but yesterday was a little better. The explanation of temporary situations and distances and vacations and "next week" didn't seem to convince Pants's father that Gabe was neither dead nor had he been taken away for good. At first he constructed sad narratives about the course of Gabe's life and his gentle personality and the tragedy of his death, and when I tried repeatedly to correct this story alone with him in the local Starbucks, Pants's father broke down into tears and said, "Bless you, if only that were true." It was almost too much for me, but I figured that if I broke down into tears too, that would only undermine my story about Gabe's being alive but in another state.
The local flower nursery failed as a distraction. Pants's father is an avid gardener and usually enjoys showing me all of his plants and their blossoms, even occasionally plucking some off their stems and putting them in my hair, which makes us both laugh, but our local nursery owner has an apparently limitless pack of dogs, and they sleep quietly in the shadows of the tomato vines and citrus bushes for sale. Soon the flowers lost all attraction and he paced the aisles quickly whistling and patting his leg for Gabe.
I don't often have to handle Pants's father on my own these days. It's a tag team activity for anyone but his mother, whose presence he automatically takes as evidence that things are OK. My fondest hope for this visit, though, has been to give his mom some time to herself to rest, but it's been hard. Not helping things at all is Pants's flight schedule, which has allowed an iron-clad series of excuses for him to disappear for up to 12 hours every day, sometimes flying, sometimes studying in a secure vault. When he comes home, he disappears into the study or into a nap. It's not fair for me to be frustrated by this but I am, and my most persistent visual fantasy today has been of my fingers closing gently and then with increasing pressure over his throat. This is not the kind of stuff I should write about my husband, but I figure it's better to write about it than do it.
Yesterday was better. We swam at the base lap pool and went to the local farmer's market and the activity seems to rinse some of the lingering Gabe anxiety out of the air. Abby has also been helpful in her own way. Her herding instincts have kicked in and she makes laps during the slow, quiet hours during the oppressive heat of the day, like now, her claws clicking on the wood floor as she visits first me, then Pants's mother, and then his father, sniffing each of us and licking our feet. If only Gabe were so subtle...
I haven't written much about it before because the experience hardly seems mine to talk about, but Pants's father is in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease. He's recently moved into an assisted living unit, but Pants's mother and brother and sister-in-law visit him regularly and take him out to go swimming and take day trips with the family and his two small grandsons.
State-hopping with the military has been especially frustrating for me because Pants and I are separated from this loop and often powerless to help when things get overwhelming. Pants's mother is directly descended from iron-willed plainswomen, the kind who will reach fearlessly into the womb of a bellowing cow in labor to untangle the calf, and getting her to admit that working full-time as a public school teacher and a caretaker for Pants's father has been an epic struggle. When I ask her on the phone how things are going, she says, "Oh, fine!" in a strident tone that makes me believe they are anything but. The assisted living arrangement has seemed a blessing all around, but it's been long in coming and has required several tipping points.
Luckily, there is Gabe. Gabe is an 8-year-old cocker spaniel who is Pants's father's best friend and constant companion. As the disease has advanced and the concept of time has fallen away, Gabe has been the one rock solid constant whose presence is reliably uncomplicated. He has been allowed to move into the assisted living facility, and when Pants's father occasionally becomes confused or upset, turning the conversation to Gabe seems to set the world right again.
If only we were all so fond of Gabe.
The cocker spaniel is a mysterious breed. They look so loving and innocent with their huge, wet eyes and their curly, mud-flap ears. But every cocker spaniel I've known has been completely immune to any concept of discipline or reason, and Gabe is no exception. His penchant for overturning trashcans and spreading their contents throughout the house has led Pants's folks to purchase large, industrial metal canisters for their home, the kind you'd imagine for biohazard facilities. Gabe also has a charming habit of urinating all over the feet of visitors, charging at the door with one long scream-bark whenever the doorbell sounds, and leaping back up on to the couch with maddening persistence after being pushed off repeatedly and told "no." His hunger is insatiable, the tragic result of some thyroid malfunction, and anything mildly edible, even if stored on high shelves or tabletops or meant for another pet unlucky enough to share space with Gabe, is in danger. Finally, he's rather blase about appropriate places to relieve himself, as he enjoys full diplomatic immunity from Pants's father, who defends Gabe's every transgression with unfailing filial allegiance.
It feels almost sacrosanct to badmouth this dog, but it's a favorite topic among Pants and I and his brother and sister-in-law. We do it with great creativity and profanity, and usually dissolve into near hysterical giggles with imitations. It's almost as if in skewering Gabe and the domestic chaos he wreaks we can vent a few of our frustrations about the ravages of Alzheimer's and the helplessness we all feel in the face of it.
Gabe has been an especially painful issue this week since he wasn't allowed to make the plane trip out to California. I'm still unclear whether this was because of the cost associated with shipping him or because, in his habit of focusing on annoyances that are not the main issue, Pants vetoed his presence, and I suspect the reason may be a combination of the two. Whatever is was, I spent the week prior to the visit worrying that a Gabe-less week in a totally foreign city would deeply upset Pants's father, and at least the first two days seemed to have borne this out, but yesterday was a little better. The explanation of temporary situations and distances and vacations and "next week" didn't seem to convince Pants's father that Gabe was neither dead nor had he been taken away for good. At first he constructed sad narratives about the course of Gabe's life and his gentle personality and the tragedy of his death, and when I tried repeatedly to correct this story alone with him in the local Starbucks, Pants's father broke down into tears and said, "Bless you, if only that were true." It was almost too much for me, but I figured that if I broke down into tears too, that would only undermine my story about Gabe's being alive but in another state.
The local flower nursery failed as a distraction. Pants's father is an avid gardener and usually enjoys showing me all of his plants and their blossoms, even occasionally plucking some off their stems and putting them in my hair, which makes us both laugh, but our local nursery owner has an apparently limitless pack of dogs, and they sleep quietly in the shadows of the tomato vines and citrus bushes for sale. Soon the flowers lost all attraction and he paced the aisles quickly whistling and patting his leg for Gabe.
I don't often have to handle Pants's father on my own these days. It's a tag team activity for anyone but his mother, whose presence he automatically takes as evidence that things are OK. My fondest hope for this visit, though, has been to give his mom some time to herself to rest, but it's been hard. Not helping things at all is Pants's flight schedule, which has allowed an iron-clad series of excuses for him to disappear for up to 12 hours every day, sometimes flying, sometimes studying in a secure vault. When he comes home, he disappears into the study or into a nap. It's not fair for me to be frustrated by this but I am, and my most persistent visual fantasy today has been of my fingers closing gently and then with increasing pressure over his throat. This is not the kind of stuff I should write about my husband, but I figure it's better to write about it than do it.
Yesterday was better. We swam at the base lap pool and went to the local farmer's market and the activity seems to rinse some of the lingering Gabe anxiety out of the air. Abby has also been helpful in her own way. Her herding instincts have kicked in and she makes laps during the slow, quiet hours during the oppressive heat of the day, like now, her claws clicking on the wood floor as she visits first me, then Pants's mother, and then his father, sniffing each of us and licking our feet. If only Gabe were so subtle...
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Disenchanted
Things are going wrong in our little rental house.
Just in the past week, the air conditioning unit revealed itself to be older than Pants and me put together and far too small for the house since its various add-ons. Then the breakers kept popping, randomly, and various outlets and appliances, most notably the refrigerator, would lapse into eery, silent death. It's weird to have to keep checking things when the place seems too quiet. Then yesterday the thermo-coupling (??) on the water heater went out and Pants and I had to take angry cold showers in preparation for work/interviews.
At each new and irritating event, we called our property manager, who has a wispy princess voice and a talent for seeming perpetually bewildered. I picture her sitting in a bower of trees, shaded from the harsh light of the sun and weaving garlands of daisies for her hair. Occasionally a blue bird or a butterfly will light upon her outstretched finger and she'll sing it a little song. Then, from somewhere deep in the patch of clover by her side, a phone rings. Startled, she drops the garland, and the blue bird cocks its head in curiosity and perches on her shoulder as she gently lifts the receiver and says, breathlessly, "Hello...? [Our Town] Real Estate?"
And on the other end is me, sweating in the dark and constantly yanking open the refrigerator door to make sure my lunch meat isn't going bad. Luckily, Pants has no qualms about using the No Bullshit voice with this woman, so while my attempts to garner her empathy ("I have an interview in two hours and no hot water to take a shower") inevitably fail, his implicit threat to burn down her magical unicorn grove somehow gets through. We now have an new air conditioner, a replaced breaker, and in another 30 to 40 minutes, hot water.
Tomorrow I have another interview, a second one for a job I really, really want. My task is to prepare a five minute presentation on anything in the world, and be interesting, memorable, and engaging. In theory, this sounds doable, but when I started to scroll through my list of possible topics-- Tupac, crazy dictators, infectious skin diseases, and famous people eaten by bears-- I started to realize how very much time I've spent alone in the past few weeks. Where was I when they were teaching charming skills like napkin folding?
So today is for cramming and hyperventilating and self doubt. Then tomorrow morning I will run another 4.5 miles and ride the tide of endorphins into the presentation reminding myself that it's only five minutes, it's only a job, it's only... Christ, it's only a job?
Still, there are other options. Downtown there's a bright orange sphere on wheels from which a bored, sweaty college kid sells orange-flavored chipped ice. The hinges on the orange open at the middle and he sits inside with little more room than a golf cart's interior would offer. Throughout the afternoon, he periodically gets out of his orange ball and rotates the stand so that the sun is partially blocked by the top half of the orange. But in order to stay completely in the shade, he'd have to turn his stand's back to the street, so there's a good hour and a half there where he sits in his orange, squinting and baking and possibly hating God. So there's always that.
Back to cramming...
Just in the past week, the air conditioning unit revealed itself to be older than Pants and me put together and far too small for the house since its various add-ons. Then the breakers kept popping, randomly, and various outlets and appliances, most notably the refrigerator, would lapse into eery, silent death. It's weird to have to keep checking things when the place seems too quiet. Then yesterday the thermo-coupling (??) on the water heater went out and Pants and I had to take angry cold showers in preparation for work/interviews.
At each new and irritating event, we called our property manager, who has a wispy princess voice and a talent for seeming perpetually bewildered. I picture her sitting in a bower of trees, shaded from the harsh light of the sun and weaving garlands of daisies for her hair. Occasionally a blue bird or a butterfly will light upon her outstretched finger and she'll sing it a little song. Then, from somewhere deep in the patch of clover by her side, a phone rings. Startled, she drops the garland, and the blue bird cocks its head in curiosity and perches on her shoulder as she gently lifts the receiver and says, breathlessly, "Hello...? [Our Town] Real Estate?"
And on the other end is me, sweating in the dark and constantly yanking open the refrigerator door to make sure my lunch meat isn't going bad. Luckily, Pants has no qualms about using the No Bullshit voice with this woman, so while my attempts to garner her empathy ("I have an interview in two hours and no hot water to take a shower") inevitably fail, his implicit threat to burn down her magical unicorn grove somehow gets through. We now have an new air conditioner, a replaced breaker, and in another 30 to 40 minutes, hot water.
Tomorrow I have another interview, a second one for a job I really, really want. My task is to prepare a five minute presentation on anything in the world, and be interesting, memorable, and engaging. In theory, this sounds doable, but when I started to scroll through my list of possible topics-- Tupac, crazy dictators, infectious skin diseases, and famous people eaten by bears-- I started to realize how very much time I've spent alone in the past few weeks. Where was I when they were teaching charming skills like napkin folding?
So today is for cramming and hyperventilating and self doubt. Then tomorrow morning I will run another 4.5 miles and ride the tide of endorphins into the presentation reminding myself that it's only five minutes, it's only a job, it's only... Christ, it's only a job?
Still, there are other options. Downtown there's a bright orange sphere on wheels from which a bored, sweaty college kid sells orange-flavored chipped ice. The hinges on the orange open at the middle and he sits inside with little more room than a golf cart's interior would offer. Throughout the afternoon, he periodically gets out of his orange ball and rotates the stand so that the sun is partially blocked by the top half of the orange. But in order to stay completely in the shade, he'd have to turn his stand's back to the street, so there's a good hour and a half there where he sits in his orange, squinting and baking and possibly hating God. So there's always that.
Back to cramming...
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Lights, candy, and baby pygmy goats
In the past when I've left you, blog, I've always come crawling back with confessions that I did nothing, had no fun, had in fact been lying on my back picking at my navel and watching the shadows leak across the ceiling and thinking nothing of consequence. This time it's different. I did things! I talked to people! I went places and held infants of another species!
My friend A. came to visit from Texas. I'm not sure why I'm abbreviating her name since she's not running from the law or anything, but it does give her a certain air of mystery that seems to suit her so I'm going with it. A. arrives periodically in my life at each of our new postings like a much needed rain, a very polite rain that leaves no puddles but graciously nurtures everything and cleans off the dust. This time was no different.
I picked her up at the airport in Oakland (which was an adventure in itself because apparently no one in south Oakland trusts credit cards as a means to pay for gas. In fact, they laugh at them and say, "Nah, honey, you got to have actual money.") Then we drove the three long hours back to the Central Valley, a trip which is only interesting if you challenge yourself to make a whole crushed salad with your tires.
California's Central Valley is like the produce section in the grocery store of America (South Texas is the discount beer section, and the Florida Panhandle is the religious greeting card section), and the land is laid out like a giant food quilt stretched flat and tucked in at each horizon with roads for seams. Right now is the tomato harvest, and the whole way out to Oakland I shared the road with double-trailer trucks piled high with small rosy tomatoes. Full trucks going north, empty ones going south. Occasionally I'd pass a truck full of yellow or purple onions, and even more rarely, a garlic truck shedding its garlic dandruff all over my windshield. The best parts are the on and off ramps and the odd bump or curve in the road, where these trucks lose some of their load. It seems so incredibly wasteful, like there's a perfectly good set of ingredients for a simple spaghetti sauce, but whee!-- there it goes. Lettuce season was earlier in the spring, and it was fun to see the leaves take to the wind like little green wings.
Anyway, A. and I managed to find a few things to do in the Central Valley despite her San Francisco friend's warning, "There's nothing out there!" We went to a Portuguese bakery, found good Thai food in Fresno, saw an old Taoist temple and Chinese boarding house, visited an art museum hidden way out in a corn field, and went to a county fair where we got to hold baby pygmy goats. Beat that, Most Gorgeous City in America.
I'd never been to a county fair before, so the whole animal husbandry element was a real novelty. I mean, I've seen my share of sketchy carnivals where the games of chance are as rigged as real life and the carnies make me suddenly remember every cautionary threat my parents made about eating vegetables and staying in school, not to mention that weird undercurrent of popular fatalism it takes for people to get on the rides knowing that they were assembled only hours ago and will be gone tomorrow regardless of whether or not you've still got all your limbs. I'm not a fan of carnivals-- at least, not for the usual reasons. I like them because of their tawdriness, because of all the pretty lights, and because there's always at least one kid there who's having so much frantic, over-stimulated fun that he pukes, fantastically, athletically, all over something.
But a fair? That's apparently a whole different thing. It wraps a carnival in a folksy cloak of legitimacy because it gets people to bring out the things they're proud of-- their quilts, their glossy, angular dairy cows, their fat and sleepy rabbits, their buttermilk pie, their giant zucchini, their pygmy goats, their 800 pound pig. The 800 pound pig, by the way, was named Sean. Just Sean. Lots of the animals had funny names like Little Paris Hilton or Ricky Bobby or honorary titles reflecting the family who raised them or the farm they were raised on, but this monster pig was just Sean, like maybe he chose it and everyone was too afraid to argue.
I went on a photo binge in the rooster tent (which, come to think of it, has got to be one of the weirdest sentences I've ever written) because they were all so beautiful, so ceremonial and war-like, and yet so tourettic and jerky that it was almost impossible to tell which of the four poses they hit during the time it took my camera lens to open and shut would be the one in the picture. Plus, it was evening light, all slanted and golden, and it hit the roosters' combs from behind and made them look even more like weird little dinosaurs with flame faces.
While I was on my photojournalist kick I took a few artsy shots of the lights and the rides and all the shitty prizes, and I'd gotten into that mode where I was seeing things only for form and color and negative space when this short little man with a spiky blond mullet and apparently a raging eye infection came up and asked me who I worked for. When I gave him a blank look, he clarified:
"Like, are you with the newspaper? A big newspaper? Are you going to publish those?"
"Oh. No. I just take pictures for fun."
He seemed greatly relieved. A. suggested later that perhaps the terms of his parole stipulated that he not be in contact with children, which was how I photographed him from 30 feet away, surrounded by kiddies. Or maybe he was on the run. Or maybe he believed that a published photo stole some of his soul. So that was a little bit of the carnival aspect peaking through. That and the little girl who became a fountain of half-digested funnel cake in the middle of the women's restroom and then promptly burst into tears.
We rounded out the night by stopping by to see some very out of place lions yowling and pacing around in cages on the back of an 18-wheeler, waiting to get fed hunks of ground beef. They were supposed to perform the next day in some show called "Walking With Lions," which frankly didn't sound too demanding or stimulating from a lion's point of view. What struck me was that they acted exactly like Linus when he's hungry and pissed off-- lots of throaty moans, slit-eyed glares, and swipes at nearby people. I was invigorated by them and went on another photo binge, but they depressed A., and she stood against the wall in the shadows their cages made. I guess that's the British Imperialist in me-- "Look at these magnificent beasts! Let's hold them up for scrutiny and ignore the question of how they got to be here!"
The highlights of the night for me were holding the baby pygmy goat and seeing the lions, which is ironic when you consider that one highlight could have been fed directly to the other.
My laptop is getting suspiciously hot and Blogger has refused my last 9 attempts at uploading pictures even though they would clearly add so much more to your experience of this post, so I think I may give up for today and take another whack at explaining my fun-filled absence tomorrow.
My friend A. came to visit from Texas. I'm not sure why I'm abbreviating her name since she's not running from the law or anything, but it does give her a certain air of mystery that seems to suit her so I'm going with it. A. arrives periodically in my life at each of our new postings like a much needed rain, a very polite rain that leaves no puddles but graciously nurtures everything and cleans off the dust. This time was no different.
I picked her up at the airport in Oakland (which was an adventure in itself because apparently no one in south Oakland trusts credit cards as a means to pay for gas. In fact, they laugh at them and say, "Nah, honey, you got to have actual money.") Then we drove the three long hours back to the Central Valley, a trip which is only interesting if you challenge yourself to make a whole crushed salad with your tires.
California's Central Valley is like the produce section in the grocery store of America (South Texas is the discount beer section, and the Florida Panhandle is the religious greeting card section), and the land is laid out like a giant food quilt stretched flat and tucked in at each horizon with roads for seams. Right now is the tomato harvest, and the whole way out to Oakland I shared the road with double-trailer trucks piled high with small rosy tomatoes. Full trucks going north, empty ones going south. Occasionally I'd pass a truck full of yellow or purple onions, and even more rarely, a garlic truck shedding its garlic dandruff all over my windshield. The best parts are the on and off ramps and the odd bump or curve in the road, where these trucks lose some of their load. It seems so incredibly wasteful, like there's a perfectly good set of ingredients for a simple spaghetti sauce, but whee!-- there it goes. Lettuce season was earlier in the spring, and it was fun to see the leaves take to the wind like little green wings.
Anyway, A. and I managed to find a few things to do in the Central Valley despite her San Francisco friend's warning, "There's nothing out there!" We went to a Portuguese bakery, found good Thai food in Fresno, saw an old Taoist temple and Chinese boarding house, visited an art museum hidden way out in a corn field, and went to a county fair where we got to hold baby pygmy goats. Beat that, Most Gorgeous City in America.
I'd never been to a county fair before, so the whole animal husbandry element was a real novelty. I mean, I've seen my share of sketchy carnivals where the games of chance are as rigged as real life and the carnies make me suddenly remember every cautionary threat my parents made about eating vegetables and staying in school, not to mention that weird undercurrent of popular fatalism it takes for people to get on the rides knowing that they were assembled only hours ago and will be gone tomorrow regardless of whether or not you've still got all your limbs. I'm not a fan of carnivals-- at least, not for the usual reasons. I like them because of their tawdriness, because of all the pretty lights, and because there's always at least one kid there who's having so much frantic, over-stimulated fun that he pukes, fantastically, athletically, all over something.
But a fair? That's apparently a whole different thing. It wraps a carnival in a folksy cloak of legitimacy because it gets people to bring out the things they're proud of-- their quilts, their glossy, angular dairy cows, their fat and sleepy rabbits, their buttermilk pie, their giant zucchini, their pygmy goats, their 800 pound pig. The 800 pound pig, by the way, was named Sean. Just Sean. Lots of the animals had funny names like Little Paris Hilton or Ricky Bobby or honorary titles reflecting the family who raised them or the farm they were raised on, but this monster pig was just Sean, like maybe he chose it and everyone was too afraid to argue.
I went on a photo binge in the rooster tent (which, come to think of it, has got to be one of the weirdest sentences I've ever written) because they were all so beautiful, so ceremonial and war-like, and yet so tourettic and jerky that it was almost impossible to tell which of the four poses they hit during the time it took my camera lens to open and shut would be the one in the picture. Plus, it was evening light, all slanted and golden, and it hit the roosters' combs from behind and made them look even more like weird little dinosaurs with flame faces.
While I was on my photojournalist kick I took a few artsy shots of the lights and the rides and all the shitty prizes, and I'd gotten into that mode where I was seeing things only for form and color and negative space when this short little man with a spiky blond mullet and apparently a raging eye infection came up and asked me who I worked for. When I gave him a blank look, he clarified:
"Like, are you with the newspaper? A big newspaper? Are you going to publish those?"
"Oh. No. I just take pictures for fun."
He seemed greatly relieved. A. suggested later that perhaps the terms of his parole stipulated that he not be in contact with children, which was how I photographed him from 30 feet away, surrounded by kiddies. Or maybe he was on the run. Or maybe he believed that a published photo stole some of his soul. So that was a little bit of the carnival aspect peaking through. That and the little girl who became a fountain of half-digested funnel cake in the middle of the women's restroom and then promptly burst into tears.
We rounded out the night by stopping by to see some very out of place lions yowling and pacing around in cages on the back of an 18-wheeler, waiting to get fed hunks of ground beef. They were supposed to perform the next day in some show called "Walking With Lions," which frankly didn't sound too demanding or stimulating from a lion's point of view. What struck me was that they acted exactly like Linus when he's hungry and pissed off-- lots of throaty moans, slit-eyed glares, and swipes at nearby people. I was invigorated by them and went on another photo binge, but they depressed A., and she stood against the wall in the shadows their cages made. I guess that's the British Imperialist in me-- "Look at these magnificent beasts! Let's hold them up for scrutiny and ignore the question of how they got to be here!"
The highlights of the night for me were holding the baby pygmy goat and seeing the lions, which is ironic when you consider that one highlight could have been fed directly to the other.
My laptop is getting suspiciously hot and Blogger has refused my last 9 attempts at uploading pictures even though they would clearly add so much more to your experience of this post, so I think I may give up for today and take another whack at explaining my fun-filled absence tomorrow.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Whole Lot of Not Much Going On
I'll be up front about it-- I've been doing nothing of substance. With the exception of applying for a few more jobs and (yay!) scheduling an interview for one, my days have been remarkably full of not much. I've learned to shrink my economic footprint by burrowing deeper into library books, but even the unhealthy amount of reading I do has ceased being productive.
I'm currently locked into a war of attrition with the novel Snow by Orham Pamuk. According to the book jacket prose, which I read like a literary nutrition label, this one is supposed to be beefing up my knowledge of the conflicts between secular and religious Turkish society, but unfortunately my main character is a poet, and wanders through the novel like someone heavily dosed on valium, commenting mostly on his boredom, the beauty of the snow, and his unquenchable lust for a woman about whom he appears to know nothing, whose only interesting feature appears to be her stubbornly zipped fly. All around this guy a military coup is unfolding, a teenager zealot has been shot right through the eye and abandoned in the morgue, and countless officials and henchmen from both sides of the conflict have taken an inexplicable interest in monitoring our protagonist's movements. So far the book has inspired in me a fervent wish for some kind of narrative megaphone with which I could address all the characters: "Ka (the main character) is a retard. Stop encouraging him. Go about your coup."
A friend is coming from Texas to visit me next week and already I'm nervous about how to explain to her the normal trajectory of my day:
6:00 Run 4.5 miles with dog who won't stop pulling on the leash. Look like a sadist trying to remedy this situation.
7:00 Return to front yard, try to conceal dry-heaving from last ill-advised sprint. Dunk purplish face under kitchen faucet and lie prone on tile floor trying to fend off dog licks for at least half an hour.
8:00 Check internet for signs of latest Britney Spears meltdown. Click sheepishly over to the BBC when Pants walks into study.
9:00-2:00 Do something or other. Options include staging Swiffer battles against mounting snowdrifts of pet fur, collecting-- grudgingly-- the little trails of dishes, clothing, trash that mark Pants's journeys through the house, read, search for jobs, embark on random internet searches for exotic diseases and cool music videos.
2:00-5:00 Lament heat. (Close all window coverings, close A/C vents in all rooms but the living room, devour ice from recycled Super Big Gulp cup, lie prone on tile floor, periodically check the totally ineffective thermostat. When inside temperature reaches 92, resort to nakedness and whimpering).
5:00-midnight Attempt to cool down by cajoling various friends with better A/C to invite you over. Bring beer to express your gratitude.
Yeah, she's going to love that.
Recently my mom hooked Pants and I up with a three-month subscription to NetFlix (my mom subsidizes easily 90% of our "fun" budget, which, when you consider what a little shit I was for much of my teenage years, is nothing short of amazing) and we've also been on an obscure movie kick. Our first three were Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, a Miyazaki movie I still hadn't seen, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Gaslight.
"Nausicca" was thematically rich and engaging, but since Pants finds my obsession with Miyazaki sometimes tedious-- never ask him about My Neighbor Totoro; his review is, "Everything sucked but the cat bus."-- I let him sit this one out. When it became clear that the movie included extended scenes of pilots being eaten by giant bugs, a horrifying combination tailored to Pants's specific neuroses, I was glad I'd exempted him. Still, the environmentalism message was impressively complex-- not just "Fuck you, Humanity, for sullying this treasured earth" but more of a measured look at complex biological interdependencies that aren't immediately obvious, and the value of a non-reactionary approach to conflict.
"Sierra Madre" was excellent but for the part where the DVD shat the bed two scenes from the end. All I was able to figure out is that Humphrey Bogart gets whacked by some peasants who take his shoes and scatter his hard-earned gold dust and then somehow his compatriots ride laughing into the sunset. Thanks, NetFlix. Watching Bogart go slowly crazy was better than I'd predicted. I expected a lot of progressively whackier monologues delivered in that same machine gun-paced hard-boiled detective delivery he perfected so well in "The Maltese Falcon," but he managed to keep that in check and appear genuinely unhinged.
"Gaslight" was great, even though the mystery bad guy is obvious from the beginning-- those sleazy continental Europeans with their long cigarettes!-- but I found myself wondering yet again how actors in old movies could stand delivering their lines in such close facial proximity. Seriously, could Ingrid Bergman really have focused on anything but Charles Boyer's nose hairs when she delivers all those lines in crushing face-to-face embraces? She also employs some of my least favorite female lead conventions of the time period-- the rushed, passionately delivered line immediately followed by a shaking half swoon into the nearest doorway-- but thankfully the Punch Kiss wasn't in there. Pants and I named this phenomenon after watching "Casablanca" about a thousand times. It's where the female lead gets all hysterical, as women tend to do, and the only recourse is to shake her and then plant a kiss on her mouth that would break any mortal's incisors. Pants and I actually tried this at half speed and still managed to come perilously close to one fat lip apiece. All of this is to say that I admire Ingrid Bergman's acting for all the reasons any normal person would suspect, but also for the fact that she endured an incredible number of Punch Kisses and eye-crossing embrace monologues.
Pants has just come home and informed me that we're due at a 90's costume party tonight. If I'm true to my 90's self, I'll go in baggy jeans, a flannel shirt with a Nirvana T-shirt under it, black Converse All-Stars with purposefully obscure Kurt Vonnegut quotes written on them, and a surly scowl hidden behind a curtain of reddish-dyed hair. I'll be damn near intolerable with my sarcasm and ennui and will answer questions with angry song lyrics. Charming!
I'm currently locked into a war of attrition with the novel Snow by Orham Pamuk. According to the book jacket prose, which I read like a literary nutrition label, this one is supposed to be beefing up my knowledge of the conflicts between secular and religious Turkish society, but unfortunately my main character is a poet, and wanders through the novel like someone heavily dosed on valium, commenting mostly on his boredom, the beauty of the snow, and his unquenchable lust for a woman about whom he appears to know nothing, whose only interesting feature appears to be her stubbornly zipped fly. All around this guy a military coup is unfolding, a teenager zealot has been shot right through the eye and abandoned in the morgue, and countless officials and henchmen from both sides of the conflict have taken an inexplicable interest in monitoring our protagonist's movements. So far the book has inspired in me a fervent wish for some kind of narrative megaphone with which I could address all the characters: "Ka (the main character) is a retard. Stop encouraging him. Go about your coup."
A friend is coming from Texas to visit me next week and already I'm nervous about how to explain to her the normal trajectory of my day:
6:00 Run 4.5 miles with dog who won't stop pulling on the leash. Look like a sadist trying to remedy this situation.
7:00 Return to front yard, try to conceal dry-heaving from last ill-advised sprint. Dunk purplish face under kitchen faucet and lie prone on tile floor trying to fend off dog licks for at least half an hour.
8:00 Check internet for signs of latest Britney Spears meltdown. Click sheepishly over to the BBC when Pants walks into study.
9:00-2:00 Do something or other. Options include staging Swiffer battles against mounting snowdrifts of pet fur, collecting-- grudgingly-- the little trails of dishes, clothing, trash that mark Pants's journeys through the house, read, search for jobs, embark on random internet searches for exotic diseases and cool music videos.
2:00-5:00 Lament heat. (Close all window coverings, close A/C vents in all rooms but the living room, devour ice from recycled Super Big Gulp cup, lie prone on tile floor, periodically check the totally ineffective thermostat. When inside temperature reaches 92, resort to nakedness and whimpering).
5:00-midnight Attempt to cool down by cajoling various friends with better A/C to invite you over. Bring beer to express your gratitude.
Yeah, she's going to love that.
Recently my mom hooked Pants and I up with a three-month subscription to NetFlix (my mom subsidizes easily 90% of our "fun" budget, which, when you consider what a little shit I was for much of my teenage years, is nothing short of amazing) and we've also been on an obscure movie kick. Our first three were Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, a Miyazaki movie I still hadn't seen, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Gaslight.
"Nausicca" was thematically rich and engaging, but since Pants finds my obsession with Miyazaki sometimes tedious-- never ask him about My Neighbor Totoro; his review is, "Everything sucked but the cat bus."-- I let him sit this one out. When it became clear that the movie included extended scenes of pilots being eaten by giant bugs, a horrifying combination tailored to Pants's specific neuroses, I was glad I'd exempted him. Still, the environmentalism message was impressively complex-- not just "Fuck you, Humanity, for sullying this treasured earth" but more of a measured look at complex biological interdependencies that aren't immediately obvious, and the value of a non-reactionary approach to conflict.
"Sierra Madre" was excellent but for the part where the DVD shat the bed two scenes from the end. All I was able to figure out is that Humphrey Bogart gets whacked by some peasants who take his shoes and scatter his hard-earned gold dust and then somehow his compatriots ride laughing into the sunset. Thanks, NetFlix. Watching Bogart go slowly crazy was better than I'd predicted. I expected a lot of progressively whackier monologues delivered in that same machine gun-paced hard-boiled detective delivery he perfected so well in "The Maltese Falcon," but he managed to keep that in check and appear genuinely unhinged.
"Gaslight" was great, even though the mystery bad guy is obvious from the beginning-- those sleazy continental Europeans with their long cigarettes!-- but I found myself wondering yet again how actors in old movies could stand delivering their lines in such close facial proximity. Seriously, could Ingrid Bergman really have focused on anything but Charles Boyer's nose hairs when she delivers all those lines in crushing face-to-face embraces? She also employs some of my least favorite female lead conventions of the time period-- the rushed, passionately delivered line immediately followed by a shaking half swoon into the nearest doorway-- but thankfully the Punch Kiss wasn't in there. Pants and I named this phenomenon after watching "Casablanca" about a thousand times. It's where the female lead gets all hysterical, as women tend to do, and the only recourse is to shake her and then plant a kiss on her mouth that would break any mortal's incisors. Pants and I actually tried this at half speed and still managed to come perilously close to one fat lip apiece. All of this is to say that I admire Ingrid Bergman's acting for all the reasons any normal person would suspect, but also for the fact that she endured an incredible number of Punch Kisses and eye-crossing embrace monologues.
Pants has just come home and informed me that we're due at a 90's costume party tonight. If I'm true to my 90's self, I'll go in baggy jeans, a flannel shirt with a Nirvana T-shirt under it, black Converse All-Stars with purposefully obscure Kurt Vonnegut quotes written on them, and a surly scowl hidden behind a curtain of reddish-dyed hair. I'll be damn near intolerable with my sarcasm and ennui and will answer questions with angry song lyrics. Charming!
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Email, opened
If it were late, late on a Tuesday night and you were my brother, you would be getting, which only a few minor changes, this email from me. You might be sitting up in your hotel room, with your dog and your bike and your laptop, all included in the orbit that has followed you on your extended business trip, and you might be checking your email. Or more likely, given that he is two time zones further east, you would be sleeping and it would be too cold, or too hot, as hotel rooms always are. And I would be here, writing to you.
I try not to crib from emails when I blog-- it just seems like bad form-- but tonight I sat down fully feeling like I had only tiny little bit of something to share, and lo, it became more and made me feel as though I'd actually been Doing Things in recent days, and that feeling was just too delicious and rare to pass up. So here, like some scribbly found art, like one of Paris Hilton's silly letters from prison, is most of that email:
Pants is on duty tonight and it's too late to call, but I wanted to share some good news-- I finally got a call back about one of the jobs I've applied for. It's part-time at the nearby library and doesn't pay a whole hell of a lot, but it's something and if the interview goes well, I'll have a means of getting out of the house and talking to people. Like more than, "Plastic is fine" and "thank you."
I'm supposed to call the woman back tomorrow to set up an interview time. I actually just now got her message because I've gotten deeply out of the habit of checking my phone for messages-- I'm here almost all the time except for when I go out to run, so it's stopped seeming like a good idea to check for missed calls.
Also, my (one) friend J. says that her podiatrist's office (where she works as a medical assistant) is hiring a receptionist this week. I'm not so keen on that avenue because a) it's reception work, and I feel like at least at this juncture, I'd only like to be a receptionist for places where I could conceivably work higher up in the food chain once they get to know me, and b) because I worry that working with my (one) friend J. might put undue strain on the friendship were we to get sick of one another. How to say this though without offending her? Any suggestions?
Yesterday and today I applied for more jobs-- Monday was devoted to paring and shaping my resume and experience to make it seem like I'd be a good sexual health educator. I actually believe this-- penis! dental dam!-- and was excited when they immediately sent me (an admittedly stock) email confirming receipt of my application and letting me know they'd be reviewing it.
I talked to a lady today who works at a company that provides social services so several sovereign Native American nations. They're looking for an adult literacy instructor, but since their internet connection is down, she's mailing me the application. Could be interesting, though relying on the postal service to communicate seems like a bad omen.
Today I also applied for another position at the university, this time as a Library Assistant. Despite what it sounds like, it actually pays quite well. The not-so-great part is that it looks to be for many closing shifts, including weekends, which would take me right out of the partying/possibly meeting people scene. Since that scene has yielded little besides my (one) friend J. so far, and has predictably evolved into a bland and recurring series of "Let's drink and watch a movie" nights, perhaps this isn't a bad thing.
Side note, minor irritation: there's apparently a TV hierarchy in effect now-- N. (one of Pants's buddy M.'s two roommates) bought this massive fucking TV and now everyone refuses to watch movies on anything smaller, like our own silly little 19 incher with the now-antiquated convex front. N.'s TV, if laid facedown on the ground, would cover enough surface area so that underneath one could dig a grave for a child easily into the fourth grade. When you consider the modest size of their living room, it feels like the TV constitutes an extra wall, and like anything you watch on it automatically becomes that much more overbearing, like what we watched Monday-- "Caddyshack." (Avoid that one when you're in a funk.) It makes me want to trade in our tube for a smaller one, maybe with a clacking turn dial and rabbit ears.
Anyway. Tomorrow I may or may not drop off my resume at the podiatrist. There's also a grant writer position for a civil and environmental engineering firm that I may apply for. That one's frustrating-- website's under construction so I can't research the specific company, and I have only the barest Wikipedia-augmented knowledge of environmental engineering. All I know is that the Central Valley could use a lot of it.
Love you and hope all's going well-- hug your dog for me,
Rachel
I try not to crib from emails when I blog-- it just seems like bad form-- but tonight I sat down fully feeling like I had only tiny little bit of something to share, and lo, it became more and made me feel as though I'd actually been Doing Things in recent days, and that feeling was just too delicious and rare to pass up. So here, like some scribbly found art, like one of Paris Hilton's silly letters from prison, is most of that email:
Pants is on duty tonight and it's too late to call, but I wanted to share some good news-- I finally got a call back about one of the jobs I've applied for. It's part-time at the nearby library and doesn't pay a whole hell of a lot, but it's something and if the interview goes well, I'll have a means of getting out of the house and talking to people. Like more than, "Plastic is fine" and "thank you."
I'm supposed to call the woman back tomorrow to set up an interview time. I actually just now got her message because I've gotten deeply out of the habit of checking my phone for messages-- I'm here almost all the time except for when I go out to run, so it's stopped seeming like a good idea to check for missed calls.
Also, my (one) friend J. says that her podiatrist's office (where she works as a medical assistant) is hiring a receptionist this week. I'm not so keen on that avenue because a) it's reception work, and I feel like at least at this juncture, I'd only like to be a receptionist for places where I could conceivably work higher up in the food chain once they get to know me, and b) because I worry that working with my (one) friend J. might put undue strain on the friendship were we to get sick of one another. How to say this though without offending her? Any suggestions?
Yesterday and today I applied for more jobs-- Monday was devoted to paring and shaping my resume and experience to make it seem like I'd be a good sexual health educator. I actually believe this-- penis! dental dam!-- and was excited when they immediately sent me (an admittedly stock) email confirming receipt of my application and letting me know they'd be reviewing it.
I talked to a lady today who works at a company that provides social services so several sovereign Native American nations. They're looking for an adult literacy instructor, but since their internet connection is down, she's mailing me the application. Could be interesting, though relying on the postal service to communicate seems like a bad omen.
Today I also applied for another position at the university, this time as a Library Assistant. Despite what it sounds like, it actually pays quite well. The not-so-great part is that it looks to be for many closing shifts, including weekends, which would take me right out of the partying/possibly meeting people scene. Since that scene has yielded little besides my (one) friend J. so far, and has predictably evolved into a bland and recurring series of "Let's drink and watch a movie" nights, perhaps this isn't a bad thing.
Side note, minor irritation: there's apparently a TV hierarchy in effect now-- N. (one of Pants's buddy M.'s two roommates) bought this massive fucking TV and now everyone refuses to watch movies on anything smaller, like our own silly little 19 incher with the now-antiquated convex front. N.'s TV, if laid facedown on the ground, would cover enough surface area so that underneath one could dig a grave for a child easily into the fourth grade. When you consider the modest size of their living room, it feels like the TV constitutes an extra wall, and like anything you watch on it automatically becomes that much more overbearing, like what we watched Monday-- "Caddyshack." (Avoid that one when you're in a funk.) It makes me want to trade in our tube for a smaller one, maybe with a clacking turn dial and rabbit ears.
Anyway. Tomorrow I may or may not drop off my resume at the podiatrist. There's also a grant writer position for a civil and environmental engineering firm that I may apply for. That one's frustrating-- website's under construction so I can't research the specific company, and I have only the barest Wikipedia-augmented knowledge of environmental engineering. All I know is that the Central Valley could use a lot of it.
Love you and hope all's going well-- hug your dog for me,
Rachel
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Lies I've told Salespeople
I just got an email from a friend about unsolicited sales pitches from acquaintances, which should really be counted as the 8th Deadly Sin-- "Thou shalt not fowl thine own social nest by pitching to thy friends." I got so hot and bothered by the sheer effrontery of such an experience that I began recommending techniques to discourage it from ever happening again, and in so doing, I remembered a brimming double-handful of times I've been outright Bad to other people simply because they tried to sell me something.
Commerce, in itself, is not a sin-- I know this. People must somehow be persuaded to purchase things, even things they hadn't previously considered purchasing. But there are limits, I say, limits on when you can pitch, and ruining things like a little hard-won peace at home or out walking is just unforgivable.
See, I got burned once, really bad, on a magazine subscription service who called me at work-- where my JOB was to answer the phones, so no fair-- and the woman mumbled her pitch at me while I was distracted with three other phone lines and RECORDED me agreeing to a four-year subscription to Jane. I would write their company name here in all caps on the blog and take pains to mention it many times so that it might ping a search engine or two, but I can't because I entered the checks I wrote to them into my register under the name "Motherfucking Charlatans" every time. Anyway, I tried to appeal on the grounds of entrapment or something, but the head service representative got on the phone and, very professionally, gave me a yell-down ebonics hell-ride. This company and I went back and forth several times until my genetically-programmed nice girlness failed spectacularly and I yelled an expletive and paid them off in full.
Since then, I've had absolutely no compunction about telling great big fabulous lies to people who try to ensnare me with an unsolicited pitch. I take a special joy in it, tempered only by the smallest draught of guilt, and fully expect to see it on the itemized receipt Hell will give me for my soul come Judgment Day:
1) Two skeezy dudes with patchy facial hair showed up at my apartment in Austin, which CLEARLY forbids solicitation, and tried to sell me magazines because they could win a trip to Panama or something. I told them that just that afternoon I had been fired from my job and then I cried, openly, right there on my doorstep. They were stunned, and then one awkwardly shook my hand and told me it would be OK. For a few seconds after they left I stood behind my closed front door and thought, "What the fuck was that?" And then I gave myself a mental high five and regretted not getting a nose and boob job and acting in soaps.
2) Back when I had a land line (oh, the folly) I used to get solicitation calls all the time, even though I'd put myself on Texas's "Do Not Call" list, which I'm convinced was little more than a cunning fiction. I've been told by a former phone solicitor that it's best to just hang up right off the bat, so the solicitor can get on to the next number on the list and hopefully make some money, but first, that's just too much of a leap for my manners (lying, apparently, isn't), and second, if it allows phone solicitors to make more money, isn't that just perpetuating an unmitigated evil? So I told one once, "Look, I have these seizures, and it totally feels like I might be about to get one, so I have to go lie down down." IT worked so well that I actually started answering the calls Caller ID identified as ANONYMOUS and developed some good standby lines: "My kids just set something on fire", [in an all purpose European accent] "I'm visiting in this house and will put the phone back now" and for irony, "I have to go-- there's a solicitor at my door!"
3) People on Guadelupe Street, the main drag in front of the University of Texas, solicit to students all the time and I definitely had my share. I was much nicer then, and often waited for the end of a complete sentence to fit in my "No, thank you, I'm not interested," but then I realized that most of them talk in run-ons, and that there's an unspoken buy-in involved in just listening. Obligation grows on you like some fast-acting fungus if you don't snap out your disinterest right at the beginning. "I'm broke!" was surprisingly ineffective, and even worse once the credit card companies started in on you, so I moved on to "I don't believe in money-lending," but by far the most effective was the Crushingly Personal Non-Sequitar. I stumbled upon this one by accident, but it's like Round-up on a converastional weed:
"Hi, did you know you can save 15 percent on all your lingerie purchases by opening a free account with--"
"I am so depressed right now I don't think I can stand it anymore. I honestly don't."
"Oh. OK."
Why won't a simple, forceful, "No" do? I don't know. Truthfully, I don't think I've given myself much opportunity to practice those, and many painful, pointless, and embarassing chapters of my life could explained just that simply. In fact, I once took this stellar self defense class that taught that the best thing to yell in an attack isn't "help!" or "aaaaauugh!" which both feed the attacker's power jones, but rather, "NO!" And we practiced this a lot-- a whole big room full of women shouting "NO" over and over again-- and I swear it was the weirdest feeling. Soon I will write a whole blog post on the "NO" and my difficult relationship with it, but for now, just know that it's so sticky and uncomfortable for me that elaborate, soul-damning lies come to me easier than that one little syllable.
Commerce, in itself, is not a sin-- I know this. People must somehow be persuaded to purchase things, even things they hadn't previously considered purchasing. But there are limits, I say, limits on when you can pitch, and ruining things like a little hard-won peace at home or out walking is just unforgivable.
See, I got burned once, really bad, on a magazine subscription service who called me at work-- where my JOB was to answer the phones, so no fair-- and the woman mumbled her pitch at me while I was distracted with three other phone lines and RECORDED me agreeing to a four-year subscription to Jane. I would write their company name here in all caps on the blog and take pains to mention it many times so that it might ping a search engine or two, but I can't because I entered the checks I wrote to them into my register under the name "Motherfucking Charlatans" every time. Anyway, I tried to appeal on the grounds of entrapment or something, but the head service representative got on the phone and, very professionally, gave me a yell-down ebonics hell-ride. This company and I went back and forth several times until my genetically-programmed nice girlness failed spectacularly and I yelled an expletive and paid them off in full.
Since then, I've had absolutely no compunction about telling great big fabulous lies to people who try to ensnare me with an unsolicited pitch. I take a special joy in it, tempered only by the smallest draught of guilt, and fully expect to see it on the itemized receipt Hell will give me for my soul come Judgment Day:
1) Two skeezy dudes with patchy facial hair showed up at my apartment in Austin, which CLEARLY forbids solicitation, and tried to sell me magazines because they could win a trip to Panama or something. I told them that just that afternoon I had been fired from my job and then I cried, openly, right there on my doorstep. They were stunned, and then one awkwardly shook my hand and told me it would be OK. For a few seconds after they left I stood behind my closed front door and thought, "What the fuck was that?" And then I gave myself a mental high five and regretted not getting a nose and boob job and acting in soaps.
2) Back when I had a land line (oh, the folly) I used to get solicitation calls all the time, even though I'd put myself on Texas's "Do Not Call" list, which I'm convinced was little more than a cunning fiction. I've been told by a former phone solicitor that it's best to just hang up right off the bat, so the solicitor can get on to the next number on the list and hopefully make some money, but first, that's just too much of a leap for my manners (lying, apparently, isn't), and second, if it allows phone solicitors to make more money, isn't that just perpetuating an unmitigated evil? So I told one once, "Look, I have these seizures, and it totally feels like I might be about to get one, so I have to go lie down down." IT worked so well that I actually started answering the calls Caller ID identified as ANONYMOUS and developed some good standby lines: "My kids just set something on fire", [in an all purpose European accent] "I'm visiting in this house and will put the phone back now" and for irony, "I have to go-- there's a solicitor at my door!"
3) People on Guadelupe Street, the main drag in front of the University of Texas, solicit to students all the time and I definitely had my share. I was much nicer then, and often waited for the end of a complete sentence to fit in my "No, thank you, I'm not interested," but then I realized that most of them talk in run-ons, and that there's an unspoken buy-in involved in just listening. Obligation grows on you like some fast-acting fungus if you don't snap out your disinterest right at the beginning. "I'm broke!" was surprisingly ineffective, and even worse once the credit card companies started in on you, so I moved on to "I don't believe in money-lending," but by far the most effective was the Crushingly Personal Non-Sequitar. I stumbled upon this one by accident, but it's like Round-up on a converastional weed:
"Hi, did you know you can save 15 percent on all your lingerie purchases by opening a free account with--"
"I am so depressed right now I don't think I can stand it anymore. I honestly don't."
"Oh. OK."
Why won't a simple, forceful, "No" do? I don't know. Truthfully, I don't think I've given myself much opportunity to practice those, and many painful, pointless, and embarassing chapters of my life could explained just that simply. In fact, I once took this stellar self defense class that taught that the best thing to yell in an attack isn't "help!" or "aaaaauugh!" which both feed the attacker's power jones, but rather, "NO!" And we practiced this a lot-- a whole big room full of women shouting "NO" over and over again-- and I swear it was the weirdest feeling. Soon I will write a whole blog post on the "NO" and my difficult relationship with it, but for now, just know that it's so sticky and uncomfortable for me that elaborate, soul-damning lies come to me easier than that one little syllable.
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