There are ten voice mails on my phone right now, and six are from my brother. His message intros are unorthodox but they're a pretty accurate reflection of the often frustrating process of getting me on the phone:
"You suck. So Bad."
"Holy tits! Where are you are?"
"You're call-dodging me, aren't you?"
"Christ on a bike! Callmeloveyoubye."
It's not that I don't want to talk to people, especially my brother, who is easily one of my very favorite people. I love having conversations. I love hearing what's going on in other people's lives. And it's not like I'm always busy either-- in fact, more often than not, I'm lonely and pacing around the house trying to decide whether I should vacuum and dust or just burn the whole place down because, really,when you're this bored and lonely what's the difference? So it would follow that phone calls would be a wonderful thing for me, a convenient and comforting link to a world outside my increasingly cramped and stifling head.
And yet, it is not so. There's something about the phone, both making calls and receiving them, that makes me anxious. Calls from my immediate family mostly don't trigger this response, but sometimes they do. I took a personality test not so long ago that specifically asked how I react when the phone rings, and what surprised me was not that my exact reaction was listed, ("D. I cringe and hope someone else answers, or that it's not for me") but that there were other reactions, reactions like curiosity, excitement, anticipation, a desire to get there first and answer it. I have a friend who even thinks of it as a little victory when she gets a call, like validation.
Pants is one of these people who loves getting, making, and returning calls. We have the same model cell phone, but the "Samsung" on his is worn off to a vague "ung" from his aggressive fondling. It is never far from one of his many, many pockets, and it is always juiced up and ready to go. He returns calls promptly, and periodically calls up friends across the country just to check in. He will never take more than 12 hours to get back to you. This is how accessible he is, even when he spends up to 9 hours a day either studying in a government-secured vault where cell phones must be checked at the door, or in a giant piece of machinery far from cell phone range.
My phone is in mint condition, but takes frequent sabbaticals under the car seat or in the crack behind the bed, and is often found drained of all power after issuing its last, tiny "Battery low!" cries for help. It's little display is always reproachful: "5 missed calls." "9 new messages."
Recently I was talking to my mom (on the phone, lucky woman-- she'll never know how exclusive that club is), and she brought up something I haven't thought about it in years but that might be a clue to my phone anxiety: when we first moved to Saudi Arabia, I was one of 3 new ninth graders in a class of 79. Very few people had cable. The internet was in its infancy. Cell phones were still large enough to bludgeon someone to death with. In other words, kids my age were catastrophically bored and since we lived on a guarded compound in the Middle East, there weren't that many places to go or things to do. I had never before-- and have never since-- been so popular in my life. For an entire year, I got an average of seven phone calls a night. My mother griped about it, my brother rolled his eyes and made faces, and my dad took my picture while I leaned exhausted against the dining room wall, the flesh-colored phone cable stretched around the corner in a feeble attempt at privacy (but from whom??).
And who was it? What did they want? I can barely remember. What I do remember is the way your ear starts to feel all hot and the cartilage starts to go soft after you've been on the phone for so long.
The next year, when I went off to The World's Most Negligent Boarding School, the ringing of phones no longer haunted me. In fact, what began to haunt me was the absence of that ringing. 33 girls on my floor shared one pay phone, and since my family was still back in Saudi Arabia and we traded off having the sun on our side of the planet, there was never really a good time to call or to linger near the phone in hopes of it being unoccupied AND ringing for me. Of the few calls I made that year, none were that satisfying or capable of making me feel any more connected to the people in my life. One in particular was so weighted, and yet so flimsy-- the one where I had to tell my parents that I was getting kicked out of The World's Most Negligent Boarding School-- that if it weren't so damned depressing, the ridiculousness of having to convey so much information, and such bad information, it could have been really funny. In a dark sort of way.
The other way the phone has been a constant in my life is that it's often been the only way I could talk to my dad when he was away at work. In that respect, it represented a frustrating constraint-- it was always such a big deal when he called, and we'd all get excited, but then when it was my turn to talk, I'd realize there wasn't that much to say. How often did I summarize What's Been Going On In My Life and feel deflated at how meager it sounded? How many times did a phone call only sharpen the point of loneliness and longing I felt for someone, and underscore the fact that they're not here?
In a way I sometimes feel like the phone requires a performance from me, and that much of the time I'm not up to it. I skip completely over the point where phone calls help maintain connections with people, and jump directly to worrying about how I'm perceived, and how I perceive myself trying to connect with them, and how I'm inevitably failing at it. The times I feel the lowest are always the most difficult times to call someone who might help me feel better, or pick up when they call me. When I do call people, it's because I've reached a painful tipping point of loneliness and guilt, and I begin to worry that my silence might look an awful lot like negligence or dislike.
I realize how incredibly self involved my phone anxiety is. I also realize how lucky I am to have friends and family who are lenient and patient with my cringing call dodging habits, and have somehow figured out how to not take it personally. I just wish there was some way for me to explain all of this in my voice mail message and not scare off potential employers:
"Hi, you've reached Rachel. I have pronounced phone anxiety. What does that mean? It means that most likely I really need to connect with you, would love to do so, but I'm afraid I'll fail at it and you'll stop liking me. Which is ironic, because the fact that I'm call dodging you will likely achieve the same result. Or I could be busy! Really! Also, if you're calling about a job, I'd love to discuss my resume and how I'm not at all high-strung. I'll probably call you back, but if I don't, please don't take it personally. Have a great day--"
beep
Showing posts with label elaborate justifications. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elaborate justifications. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Scorched Earth
One of my favorite things to do when we move is throw things away. Half empty jars of sauerkraut, holey underwear, unread magazines, molten candle stumps-- all of it, out, out, out! It's a dizzying high for me, a cleansing euphoria. I like to think of the period before the move as a time in which I have to streamline my orbit of stuff, to become as light and aerodynamic as possible so that when I launch into this new situation, there are no fusty old pieces of crap weighing me down.
Pants has a different philosophy, and my recent Kristallnacht on the junk recesses in our house threw him into a panic. It's the beginning of the end!, some dark corner of his mind shouted, and since then he's taken to asking me questions like this when we're lying in bed on the verge of sleep:
"You know that plastic piece that fell off my Storm Trooper model last year?"
"What? No."
"It's gray. That little gray plastic piece. I had it in a pile of buttons and stuff in the spare bedroom. Do you know what happened to it?"
"No." (Half truth-- the whole truth would go, "No, but I'll bet if I came across some random little piece of gray plastic I would have tossed it without a second thought, especially if it was in a pile of buttons.")
The lights go on, and as I lie there groaning and flailing for a pillow to cover my face, he disappears to paw through boxes in the spare bedroom until half an hour later, equally triumphant and guilty, he emerges-- "Found it!"
Great.
Pants and I are at opposite ends of the junk spectrum. He was raised by parents who were themselves raised by survivors of the Great Depression in the Dust Bowl. Echoes of hardship and frugality are pronounced, even the subjects of family jokes and lore, in his parents' (quite comfortable) home. If at any point, the U.S. were the target of nuclear attack, the Pants family homestead would supply and protect its entire neighborhood, and could even set up and rule a bartering system based on canned goods and childhood relics.
Pants's definition of junk, in fact, is quite narrow and applies mostly to anything used exclusively for decorative purposes. Anything else can be saved, repaired, scavenged for parts, or sold on EBay for a ridiculous profit.
Far in the distance, at the vanishing point of the spectrum, is where my definition lives. Junk to me is anything old and easily replaceable, anything unused a year after its purchase date, anything I'm sick of looking at, anything someone else would make better use of.
At a very early age, I learned that anything too old, too small, or too unappreciated was far better off in a giant black plastic bag bound for Goodwill. My mom (Hi, Mom! Honestly, I'm not saying you scarred me!) supervised regular purges of my bedroom-- clothes, books, toys, stuffed animals (whom I fully believed to be sentient and vying constantly for my love, weeping their button eyes out when I chose to sleep with a different one), were all held up mercilessly and robotically to the question, "Keep or give away? Keep or give away? Keeporgiveaway?" Too many "keep"s was bad news. The ratio of "give away"s had to reach some kind of agonizing golden mean to buy time between each raid. Then at the end of the raid, she would always say, "Now, look at this place! Don't you feel better?"
At first, it seemed like she was mocking my pain-- Miss Mousy was suffocating at the bottom of her Hefty bag grave, right underneath my half used sticker collection-- but after the first couple of raids, I did start to feel better in my newly streamlined room.
When my family moved to another town, and then overseas where our whole household had a weight limit, it became kind of comforting to be able to quantify exactly how much stuff tied you to the earth in any one place. The problem, of course, was that eventually that number got dangerously low and was spread thinly over two continents, neither of which felt like it was "home." It's dangerous not to feel just a little tied down.
Now though, after being married to him through several seasons and moves, my definition of "home" is beginning to switch to simply Pants himself. My mom said this would happen, and it's kind of a relief, since getting married and moving out of state with him right away was so thoroughly not-home that it gave me "heartache." But now it's OK. If we could make it work in the tiny, tiny town in South of Everywhere, Texas, surely we can handle California.
That is, if we can get out there with all the JUNK he won't let me throw out. My secret wish list for stuff I'd like to throw out:
*All the empty beer and wine bottles he's been saving since two moves ago, waiting for us to move to climate that's not so scorching hot so he can make wine with the wine-making kit he got in Florida.
*The extra version of the board game Taboo we're inexplicably saving
*All the commemorative beer steins from cool pubs he visited before we were dating
*The yellowish fax machine his folks gave us ("But it works!" Yes, but we'll never be not-cheap enough to buy a land line.)
*The rickety, yellowing, clamp-on desk light with the scruffy rabbit's foot chained to it that he's had since he was a kid (see above, irrelevant defense that it still functions).
*And finally, at the risk of biting the keyboard that feeds me sweet, sweet Internet lifeblood, THIS JANKETY LAPTOP!!
Pants has a different philosophy, and my recent Kristallnacht on the junk recesses in our house threw him into a panic. It's the beginning of the end!, some dark corner of his mind shouted, and since then he's taken to asking me questions like this when we're lying in bed on the verge of sleep:
"You know that plastic piece that fell off my Storm Trooper model last year?"
"What? No."
"It's gray. That little gray plastic piece. I had it in a pile of buttons and stuff in the spare bedroom. Do you know what happened to it?"
"No." (Half truth-- the whole truth would go, "No, but I'll bet if I came across some random little piece of gray plastic I would have tossed it without a second thought, especially if it was in a pile of buttons.")
The lights go on, and as I lie there groaning and flailing for a pillow to cover my face, he disappears to paw through boxes in the spare bedroom until half an hour later, equally triumphant and guilty, he emerges-- "Found it!"
Great.
Pants and I are at opposite ends of the junk spectrum. He was raised by parents who were themselves raised by survivors of the Great Depression in the Dust Bowl. Echoes of hardship and frugality are pronounced, even the subjects of family jokes and lore, in his parents' (quite comfortable) home. If at any point, the U.S. were the target of nuclear attack, the Pants family homestead would supply and protect its entire neighborhood, and could even set up and rule a bartering system based on canned goods and childhood relics.
Pants's definition of junk, in fact, is quite narrow and applies mostly to anything used exclusively for decorative purposes. Anything else can be saved, repaired, scavenged for parts, or sold on EBay for a ridiculous profit.
Far in the distance, at the vanishing point of the spectrum, is where my definition lives. Junk to me is anything old and easily replaceable, anything unused a year after its purchase date, anything I'm sick of looking at, anything someone else would make better use of.
At a very early age, I learned that anything too old, too small, or too unappreciated was far better off in a giant black plastic bag bound for Goodwill. My mom (Hi, Mom! Honestly, I'm not saying you scarred me!) supervised regular purges of my bedroom-- clothes, books, toys, stuffed animals (whom I fully believed to be sentient and vying constantly for my love, weeping their button eyes out when I chose to sleep with a different one), were all held up mercilessly and robotically to the question, "Keep or give away? Keep or give away? Keeporgiveaway?" Too many "keep"s was bad news. The ratio of "give away"s had to reach some kind of agonizing golden mean to buy time between each raid. Then at the end of the raid, she would always say, "Now, look at this place! Don't you feel better?"
At first, it seemed like she was mocking my pain-- Miss Mousy was suffocating at the bottom of her Hefty bag grave, right underneath my half used sticker collection-- but after the first couple of raids, I did start to feel better in my newly streamlined room.
When my family moved to another town, and then overseas where our whole household had a weight limit, it became kind of comforting to be able to quantify exactly how much stuff tied you to the earth in any one place. The problem, of course, was that eventually that number got dangerously low and was spread thinly over two continents, neither of which felt like it was "home." It's dangerous not to feel just a little tied down.
Now though, after being married to him through several seasons and moves, my definition of "home" is beginning to switch to simply Pants himself. My mom said this would happen, and it's kind of a relief, since getting married and moving out of state with him right away was so thoroughly not-home that it gave me "heartache." But now it's OK. If we could make it work in the tiny, tiny town in South of Everywhere, Texas, surely we can handle California.
That is, if we can get out there with all the JUNK he won't let me throw out. My secret wish list for stuff I'd like to throw out:
*All the empty beer and wine bottles he's been saving since two moves ago, waiting for us to move to climate that's not so scorching hot so he can make wine with the wine-making kit he got in Florida.
*The extra version of the board game Taboo we're inexplicably saving
*All the commemorative beer steins from cool pubs he visited before we were dating
*The yellowish fax machine his folks gave us ("But it works!" Yes, but we'll never be not-cheap enough to buy a land line.)
*The rickety, yellowing, clamp-on desk light with the scruffy rabbit's foot chained to it that he's had since he was a kid (see above, irrelevant defense that it still functions).
*And finally, at the risk of biting the keyboard that feeds me sweet, sweet Internet lifeblood, THIS JANKETY LAPTOP!!
Monday, December 04, 2006
Principles of Friendship
Last week I had a student give me a smug little parting shot as she walked out of my class for the last time. This is nothing out of the ordinary, and usually these types of things are far outweighed by the other small gratitudes students cast off at semester's end. But it was the little laugh she made as she walked out, this little "mmm-hmm," which was entirely concealed behind a close-lipped, sphinx-like smile, that stopped me cold.
I remember this laugh because my best friend from elementary school laughed exactly the same way.
You know how there are some relationships that, when you experience them, seem on their surface like one thing, and then in retrospect you realize they were something else entirely? My formative experience of the girlhood Best Friend, the BFF, the one who writes L.Y.L.A.S. ("love you like a sister") at the ends of her complicated folded up notes, the one whose sleep-overs always included a de facto invitation to me, was one of these shape-changing relationships, and the more I reflect on how I actually felt around her, and how she treated me as the years went on, the more I feel this sick sinking sense in my stomach.
In short, bold strokes, our friendship looked like this: we met in the first grade and were friends until the sixth, more or less. She was from a very wealthy family and I was not, and this fact played a larger and larger role in our friendship as we grew up. Her family went to a wealthy Baptist church, and I was not even baptized. What started out as genuine companionship evolved, I think, into more of a complicated patronage. I can recall several poignant moments when A. used her buddy-buddy relationship with Jesus to bring me to tears of shame. I also recall feeling increasingly as though I were some sort of foil, the not-rich heathen kid, by which A. graciously exhibited and then retracted her powers of generosity and grace.
Finally, in the end, she forgot me. I moved to another town 30 miles away and wept myself hoarse at having to leave her, only to find that she could never be bothered to return my phone calls. Two years of silence passed between us before I called her to tell her my family was moving to the Middle East. She seemed shocked, but that was all.
My lasting impression, the one I can still remember as if I were standing there, was her bedroom. It was massive, and always a total wreck. It had its own attached bathroom, and a T.V., VCR, and telephone; her bed was king-sized; her closet spewed clothing in great undulating heaps. Everywhere, everywhere, were toys-- those expensive Breyer horses, Barbies, My Little Ponies, dolls, all with ratted hair and missing pieces, and pile after pile of Sweet Valley High books, which I now recognize as providing the social recipes for cold, viper-like feminine behavior. A.'s room was like an archaeological layer cake of decadent wealth, and every time I saw it I had this horrible, itching urge to clean it all up before she got in trouble, which, of course, she never did. A.'s world didn't work like that.
And yet, I missed her terribly. On some level I still do. If dreams tell the truth about us, then mine say I still wish that I could have held her attention, made her like me even though in so many ways she seemed to find me deficient, even embarrassing. I dream often of being a kid again and desperately trying to make A. laugh, which often seemed like the only thing I could do right, though with diminishing results as we got older.
In the third year of college I saw her again. She worked at the book store where I'd gotten a job, and I hoped, briefly, that she'd offer some satisfying explanation for why she'd dropped me so completely. I even thought about asking her-- perhaps the girl I'd considered her polar opposite, my girlhood foe, J., with whom she later became close friends, had lied to her about me. In the end though, she continued to be lukewarm to me, not even mildly interested in where I'd been in the years since we'd last spoken. She had some boyfriend she was really into, and soon she quit the job.
My last contact with anything having to do with her was brief and bittersweet. I saw her mother at the funeral of one of my other childhood friends. A. couldn't make it. I'd always loved A.'s mom wholeheartedly-- even when A. would go into a snit on some expensive family vacation where I'd been invited to tag along, A.'s mom was always warm and kind to me. She even wrote me letters when I went away to summer camp, though A. did not. At the funeral, A.'s mom hugged me with all the warmth of a long lost friend, and encouraged me enthusiastically to contact A., reconnect, but by then I knew I wouldn't. Some things hurt too much to keep doing them.
I'm writing about this because I'm at a point in my life where I really need my friends, old and new, and I'm starting to look at the structure and scaffolding of friendships with a more critical eye. There are principles of friendship, and I would be wise to understand that not everyone's are the same, even though I've assumed for most of my life that they are.
For instance, in the military, there are ranks and destinations. Someone might not be part of the same working community as you, and they may look at this information with the practical concern of, "how much effort is this friendship worth if we're not going to be stationed in the same city in the near future?" I find this incredibly depressing, but I can see how such a question might have value.
On the other hand, questions of rank and stature absolutely infuriate me because they hearken back to the time when A. used to lord it over me that she had new dresses for church when I had to wear the same one over and over if I spent the night at her house on a Saturday. I realize that's it's not possible, and even potentially unwise, to completely disregard information about a person's military rank, or their spouse's rank, but it grates on me like sand on a sunburn to remember the toadyism required to stay in A.'s good graces.
Despite these limitations, I have managed to cultivate a few good friendships within the community, and often I'm torn between wanting to lean on them and confide about the stresses in my life, or hold them at arm's length and be pleasant because you never know what might come back to bite you in the ass, even seemingly innocuous things, like I found out on two separate occasions this weekend. There are rituals and formalities here, and I'm trying to work up the guts to learn them through trial and error.
Outside the military is another world of equations. I feel much more comfortable interacting on my own terms, (i.e. not worrying if what I say is going to jeopardize my husband's career or standing among his peers) but I run into the same problem there that I do with trying to find work: I'm not going to be here forever. In fact, I may be leaving soon. As such, I feel like there's this discount tag on my friendship, a caveat to potential friends that I have some sort of shelf life. Remembering the cavalier way A. tossed me onto her heap of broken toys without a backward glance, this also gives me pause.
None of this would be a problem if I didn't need friends or gainful employment, but the fact is, I've tested both ideas and the results are drastic slides in my mental health and general tolerability. For now, I'm feeling kind of clueless and vulnerable, which is familiar.
I remember this laugh because my best friend from elementary school laughed exactly the same way.
You know how there are some relationships that, when you experience them, seem on their surface like one thing, and then in retrospect you realize they were something else entirely? My formative experience of the girlhood Best Friend, the BFF, the one who writes L.Y.L.A.S. ("love you like a sister") at the ends of her complicated folded up notes, the one whose sleep-overs always included a de facto invitation to me, was one of these shape-changing relationships, and the more I reflect on how I actually felt around her, and how she treated me as the years went on, the more I feel this sick sinking sense in my stomach.
In short, bold strokes, our friendship looked like this: we met in the first grade and were friends until the sixth, more or less. She was from a very wealthy family and I was not, and this fact played a larger and larger role in our friendship as we grew up. Her family went to a wealthy Baptist church, and I was not even baptized. What started out as genuine companionship evolved, I think, into more of a complicated patronage. I can recall several poignant moments when A. used her buddy-buddy relationship with Jesus to bring me to tears of shame. I also recall feeling increasingly as though I were some sort of foil, the not-rich heathen kid, by which A. graciously exhibited and then retracted her powers of generosity and grace.
Finally, in the end, she forgot me. I moved to another town 30 miles away and wept myself hoarse at having to leave her, only to find that she could never be bothered to return my phone calls. Two years of silence passed between us before I called her to tell her my family was moving to the Middle East. She seemed shocked, but that was all.
My lasting impression, the one I can still remember as if I were standing there, was her bedroom. It was massive, and always a total wreck. It had its own attached bathroom, and a T.V., VCR, and telephone; her bed was king-sized; her closet spewed clothing in great undulating heaps. Everywhere, everywhere, were toys-- those expensive Breyer horses, Barbies, My Little Ponies, dolls, all with ratted hair and missing pieces, and pile after pile of Sweet Valley High books, which I now recognize as providing the social recipes for cold, viper-like feminine behavior. A.'s room was like an archaeological layer cake of decadent wealth, and every time I saw it I had this horrible, itching urge to clean it all up before she got in trouble, which, of course, she never did. A.'s world didn't work like that.
And yet, I missed her terribly. On some level I still do. If dreams tell the truth about us, then mine say I still wish that I could have held her attention, made her like me even though in so many ways she seemed to find me deficient, even embarrassing. I dream often of being a kid again and desperately trying to make A. laugh, which often seemed like the only thing I could do right, though with diminishing results as we got older.
In the third year of college I saw her again. She worked at the book store where I'd gotten a job, and I hoped, briefly, that she'd offer some satisfying explanation for why she'd dropped me so completely. I even thought about asking her-- perhaps the girl I'd considered her polar opposite, my girlhood foe, J., with whom she later became close friends, had lied to her about me. In the end though, she continued to be lukewarm to me, not even mildly interested in where I'd been in the years since we'd last spoken. She had some boyfriend she was really into, and soon she quit the job.
My last contact with anything having to do with her was brief and bittersweet. I saw her mother at the funeral of one of my other childhood friends. A. couldn't make it. I'd always loved A.'s mom wholeheartedly-- even when A. would go into a snit on some expensive family vacation where I'd been invited to tag along, A.'s mom was always warm and kind to me. She even wrote me letters when I went away to summer camp, though A. did not. At the funeral, A.'s mom hugged me with all the warmth of a long lost friend, and encouraged me enthusiastically to contact A., reconnect, but by then I knew I wouldn't. Some things hurt too much to keep doing them.
I'm writing about this because I'm at a point in my life where I really need my friends, old and new, and I'm starting to look at the structure and scaffolding of friendships with a more critical eye. There are principles of friendship, and I would be wise to understand that not everyone's are the same, even though I've assumed for most of my life that they are.
For instance, in the military, there are ranks and destinations. Someone might not be part of the same working community as you, and they may look at this information with the practical concern of, "how much effort is this friendship worth if we're not going to be stationed in the same city in the near future?" I find this incredibly depressing, but I can see how such a question might have value.
On the other hand, questions of rank and stature absolutely infuriate me because they hearken back to the time when A. used to lord it over me that she had new dresses for church when I had to wear the same one over and over if I spent the night at her house on a Saturday. I realize that's it's not possible, and even potentially unwise, to completely disregard information about a person's military rank, or their spouse's rank, but it grates on me like sand on a sunburn to remember the toadyism required to stay in A.'s good graces.
Despite these limitations, I have managed to cultivate a few good friendships within the community, and often I'm torn between wanting to lean on them and confide about the stresses in my life, or hold them at arm's length and be pleasant because you never know what might come back to bite you in the ass, even seemingly innocuous things, like I found out on two separate occasions this weekend. There are rituals and formalities here, and I'm trying to work up the guts to learn them through trial and error.
Outside the military is another world of equations. I feel much more comfortable interacting on my own terms, (i.e. not worrying if what I say is going to jeopardize my husband's career or standing among his peers) but I run into the same problem there that I do with trying to find work: I'm not going to be here forever. In fact, I may be leaving soon. As such, I feel like there's this discount tag on my friendship, a caveat to potential friends that I have some sort of shelf life. Remembering the cavalier way A. tossed me onto her heap of broken toys without a backward glance, this also gives me pause.
None of this would be a problem if I didn't need friends or gainful employment, but the fact is, I've tested both ideas and the results are drastic slides in my mental health and general tolerability. For now, I'm feeling kind of clueless and vulnerable, which is familiar.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Treading water (poorly)
Once when I was about 8 years old I got swept down a waterfall. This was in San Marcos, Texas so we're not talking about a thundering, vertiginous, mist-producing waterfall like the kind you see on screen savers. As waterfalls go, it was more of a water-stumble, but it had enough height, volume, and velocity to give an 8-year-old a rather sudden and unpleasant yank beneath the surface and a few accompanying bruises and scrapes from rocks and glass on the way down, and enough of a current to not let go of a passenger right away.
The experience has since crystallized into one of those Metaphorical Moments, handily foreshadowing things to come-- the fall itself was my fault for bumbling around too close to a water-stumble and losing my balance, but at the time I blamed my dad, who was on the bank nearby exhaling his way into unconsciousness in order to inflate my plastic raft (which would only have carried me over the edge even quicker than my own two legs, come to think of it). I ended up being pulled a ways (a mile! to an 8-year-old, more like 100 yards to an adult) down the river and expending nearly all of my energy frantically fighting the current, and finally catching up, completely exhausted, against a sand bank.
How I felt then, sitting on the sand bank is close to how I feel today, but maybe with less shock. The past two weeks have moved with the speed and treachery of a San Marcos water-stumble, and even though I'm now a much larger and slightly less clumsy adult, I still had my feet knocked out from under me, and treading water has proved only slightly more successful.
I got a look from a student today that pretty much summed it up: it was the kind of bored, slightly patronizing curiosity with which you might look at a dog as it tugged and tugged on something way too large to be moved. This particular student defiantly maintained a pristinely white sheet of paper after I'd been spewing an hour's worth of Things You Need to Know in Order to Pass My Class. Fine, I thought, on your head be it. But it still wears me out and wears me down just that little bit. There are hundreds of her, hundreds for which I am responsible, and every day they wash over me like water and I wonder how much I'm helping and how much I'm just using up more than my fair share of oxygen.
The experience has since crystallized into one of those Metaphorical Moments, handily foreshadowing things to come-- the fall itself was my fault for bumbling around too close to a water-stumble and losing my balance, but at the time I blamed my dad, who was on the bank nearby exhaling his way into unconsciousness in order to inflate my plastic raft (which would only have carried me over the edge even quicker than my own two legs, come to think of it). I ended up being pulled a ways (a mile! to an 8-year-old, more like 100 yards to an adult) down the river and expending nearly all of my energy frantically fighting the current, and finally catching up, completely exhausted, against a sand bank.
How I felt then, sitting on the sand bank is close to how I feel today, but maybe with less shock. The past two weeks have moved with the speed and treachery of a San Marcos water-stumble, and even though I'm now a much larger and slightly less clumsy adult, I still had my feet knocked out from under me, and treading water has proved only slightly more successful.
I got a look from a student today that pretty much summed it up: it was the kind of bored, slightly patronizing curiosity with which you might look at a dog as it tugged and tugged on something way too large to be moved. This particular student defiantly maintained a pristinely white sheet of paper after I'd been spewing an hour's worth of Things You Need to Know in Order to Pass My Class. Fine, I thought, on your head be it. But it still wears me out and wears me down just that little bit. There are hundreds of her, hundreds for which I am responsible, and every day they wash over me like water and I wonder how much I'm helping and how much I'm just using up more than my fair share of oxygen.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Rock throwing punk
I was finishing up my run this morning (which means I was at the point where I felt like hell, was sweating buckets, and had to keep playing the Rocky theme in my head to even keep moving), when I rounded the corner on a bunch of kids waiting for the school bus, about 10 of them. I've seen these kids before. Our town has this dress code for elementary kids where they have to wear khaki pants and green polo shirts with their school logos on them, and thus appear way more harmless and collegiate than they really are.
So there they all are, looking like a Pink Floyd video, waiting in the dark for their bus. The few other times I've seen them, there's always this one pariah kid, a little weird looking, maybe a little too soft in his manners or features, a little weird in his habits, maybe a little too smart for his own good. I don't know. He's always sitting on a curb as far away from the rest of the kids as he can possibly get. Some days I see a car parked there on the street with its headlights on, and I think it may be this kid and his mom, like she's giving him a safe place to wait, but at the same time probably making the others kids that much more pissed off at him.
As I came around the corner today, there was no car and several of the kids were throwing handfuls of gravel and little rocks at this other kid. I had my dog with me, the iPod was blasting, my lungs were exploding, and I had a block to go before I was home and could stop timing myself, but seeing this, I had to slow down. I fixed my most heinous stink eye and the main rock thrower and get this: he didn't stop. He picked up another handful of rocks and pelted this kid right in front of me. I stopped running, yanked out my earphones and amplified the stink eye, walking right towards him and he threw another handful at the kid, some of which hit me in the shin as the other kid ducked and ran.
At this point, any adult would be justified in yelling at this little shit, perhaps addressing him accurately as, "Hey, you little shit," but I was exhausted, breathless, and stunned, and trying to think how to address the kid without profanity and coming up with nothing, and then, THEN I think I hear this, muttered under his breath: "What are you looking at, bitch?" This is possibly the one instance in my life where a hard core dose of happy-feeling endorphins has not served me well, because in that moment I made the decision to let this go because I could already see the bus rounding the corner and I knew that for now at least, the rock throwing had to stop. I gave him an extra dose of glare and memorized his face, but said nothing.
As soon as I picked up running again I regretted it. I should have given that fat little fuck the yell-down hell-ride of his life. I should have humiliated him in front of his peers. I should, at the very least, have gotten his full name and found out which house he came out of. But I did none of that and instead stood in the shower raging and scrubbing and coming up with vicious things to say to a 10-year-old that he would remember for the rest of his life. I even considered making the bus stop a regular installation on my morning routes to head off any more rock throwing and maybe even give my anti-people dog another chance to be scary.
Back when we lived in the last town, my husband gave a kid a yell-down hell-ride for throwing a handful of gravel at our brand new car as he drove down our back alley. He slammed on the brakes, threw it in reverse, and leapt out of the car in his uniform and yelled at the kid, who was trying to mount his bike and escape, to freeze. He then yelled at the kid until he admitted that yes, he'd thrown rocks at the car on purpose, and no his parents wouldn't appreciate that. Then he made the kid ride his bicycle back to his house, and my husband followed him and then told the kid to go inside and get his mom. When she came out, he told the kid, "Either you be a man and tell her why we're here, or I will." The kid fessed up, the mom was embarrassed and apologized and made her kid apologize, and my husband said it was all right, but that if he were a parent, he would want to know if his kid was throwing rocks at people's cars.
Now, I have no idea if the mom then went inside and told her kid, "I'm not mad-- but that's what you get for messing with one of those asshole military guys," and then blew the whole thing off, but I do know that my husband felt a hell of a lot better, and that every time we saw that kid thereafter, he was headed at a full run in the other direction.
Me on the other hand, I'm now thinking about all the times I was bullied, and all the times I did the bullying (mostly to my little brother, which counts double since we'll know each other for the rest of our lives), and I've just got this sick feeling in my stomach for not doing anything. Was it really the exhaustion and disbelief, the hope that surely I'd misheard or misinterpreted the scene I'd stumbled on? Or was is that old kid fear speaking in me, saying that the best way to stay safe was to keep quiet? Either way, I still feel angry and ashamed.
So there they all are, looking like a Pink Floyd video, waiting in the dark for their bus. The few other times I've seen them, there's always this one pariah kid, a little weird looking, maybe a little too soft in his manners or features, a little weird in his habits, maybe a little too smart for his own good. I don't know. He's always sitting on a curb as far away from the rest of the kids as he can possibly get. Some days I see a car parked there on the street with its headlights on, and I think it may be this kid and his mom, like she's giving him a safe place to wait, but at the same time probably making the others kids that much more pissed off at him.
As I came around the corner today, there was no car and several of the kids were throwing handfuls of gravel and little rocks at this other kid. I had my dog with me, the iPod was blasting, my lungs were exploding, and I had a block to go before I was home and could stop timing myself, but seeing this, I had to slow down. I fixed my most heinous stink eye and the main rock thrower and get this: he didn't stop. He picked up another handful of rocks and pelted this kid right in front of me. I stopped running, yanked out my earphones and amplified the stink eye, walking right towards him and he threw another handful at the kid, some of which hit me in the shin as the other kid ducked and ran.
At this point, any adult would be justified in yelling at this little shit, perhaps addressing him accurately as, "Hey, you little shit," but I was exhausted, breathless, and stunned, and trying to think how to address the kid without profanity and coming up with nothing, and then, THEN I think I hear this, muttered under his breath: "What are you looking at, bitch?" This is possibly the one instance in my life where a hard core dose of happy-feeling endorphins has not served me well, because in that moment I made the decision to let this go because I could already see the bus rounding the corner and I knew that for now at least, the rock throwing had to stop. I gave him an extra dose of glare and memorized his face, but said nothing.
As soon as I picked up running again I regretted it. I should have given that fat little fuck the yell-down hell-ride of his life. I should have humiliated him in front of his peers. I should, at the very least, have gotten his full name and found out which house he came out of. But I did none of that and instead stood in the shower raging and scrubbing and coming up with vicious things to say to a 10-year-old that he would remember for the rest of his life. I even considered making the bus stop a regular installation on my morning routes to head off any more rock throwing and maybe even give my anti-people dog another chance to be scary.
Back when we lived in the last town, my husband gave a kid a yell-down hell-ride for throwing a handful of gravel at our brand new car as he drove down our back alley. He slammed on the brakes, threw it in reverse, and leapt out of the car in his uniform and yelled at the kid, who was trying to mount his bike and escape, to freeze. He then yelled at the kid until he admitted that yes, he'd thrown rocks at the car on purpose, and no his parents wouldn't appreciate that. Then he made the kid ride his bicycle back to his house, and my husband followed him and then told the kid to go inside and get his mom. When she came out, he told the kid, "Either you be a man and tell her why we're here, or I will." The kid fessed up, the mom was embarrassed and apologized and made her kid apologize, and my husband said it was all right, but that if he were a parent, he would want to know if his kid was throwing rocks at people's cars.
Now, I have no idea if the mom then went inside and told her kid, "I'm not mad-- but that's what you get for messing with one of those asshole military guys," and then blew the whole thing off, but I do know that my husband felt a hell of a lot better, and that every time we saw that kid thereafter, he was headed at a full run in the other direction.
Me on the other hand, I'm now thinking about all the times I was bullied, and all the times I did the bullying (mostly to my little brother, which counts double since we'll know each other for the rest of our lives), and I've just got this sick feeling in my stomach for not doing anything. Was it really the exhaustion and disbelief, the hope that surely I'd misheard or misinterpreted the scene I'd stumbled on? Or was is that old kid fear speaking in me, saying that the best way to stay safe was to keep quiet? Either way, I still feel angry and ashamed.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Cotton and Crank
Cotton season has just ended and there's at least an inch of false snow tangled in the broken, desiccated stalks of now bare fields and gathered in drifts along the road's edge. It looks like there's been some kind of stuffed animal massacre, the Antietam of the plush toy world. The visual miscues are unsettling-- snow-like patches on the ground, the wintry haze and diffused light of dust storms (once the fields are cleared, the earth loses its mooring and takes off in big swirling clouds for more exciting places), and the uncertain horizons warbling in the silvery heat of mirage. Going on vision alone, it looks like December, but in reality it's just that the world is so hot everyone's given up tending it.
My geraniums are dead. This is just as well-- in life they looked fake, and in death they've taken on a much more believable and interesting shape. Now they look like the dirt-caked fingers of monkeys reaching out of the pot at nothing. The caladiums are going too, and have moved from thick, white heart shapes veined with green to collapsed, yellowed lace. I'm taking a special pleasure in watching the zinnias meet their apocalyptic end, since they were so aggressive and overbearing in their prime. Plus, I always thought their blossoms looked like the fake flowers on some moth-eaten old lady hat.
I watched a documentary on crank last night, which was interesting, but probably for all the wrong reasons. I have this fascination with documentaries that, whether on purpose or by accident, end up capturing someone else's absolute dog days, and then try to make some sense out of them, scrape together some salvageable truth to justify having filmed the whole thing. The wreckage on the screen was compelling in its simple portrayal of human misery and grief, but the truths I got out of it were uncomfortable: this too is rural America, not just my fields and skies and birds and trains. The other disturbing thing was how simple rock bottom can look-- a woman in her kitchen, the kettle on the stove, the embroidered potholders hanging on hooks, the free calendar from the insurance company tacked next to the fridge, and her husband filling a syringe with bubbly liquid the exact same sunny color as the paint on the walls, and then gently pulling her arm to him and flicking the reddish bruise hidden in the crook of her elbow. They're both crying. This is the Worst.
When I was a little kid, my parents used to shop at the first Whole Foods, which was in a small storefront on Lamar Boulevard in Austin. It opened in 1980 and a year later, there was a huge flood, the Memorial Day Flood of 1981, where all the creeks rose from their beds and came downtown to wash away cars, furniture, trash, people, and all the pianos from Strait Music, two of which were never found. On the north corner of the building, near the bicycle racks, an artist later painted two different high water marks, lovely little white-capped waves with scrolly dates. I remember standing next to them as a kid (one was higher than my head), and imagining water all around me and Austin floating by like too many toys at bath time. I was enchanted. (I was also, of course, thinking of the clear blue ocean water of childhood fantasy, not the fetid soup of actual floods).
It would be nice if there was a way to mark life's worst points with pretty painted watermarks, and hope that after the flood recedes (assuming it does and you don't have to go with it) this public monument would give some meaning to your loss. As a nation, we're fumbling with that-- there's still no 9/11 monument, despite all the elegant concept drawings. We can't seem to get a handle on how to represent it-- two giant beams of light? a reflection pool? a remembrance wall? a tree for each person? Or some silly movie (with Nicholas Cage of all people) trimming and wedging the whole mess into an easy cinematic formula with a touching Coldplay song in the background?
I don't think there's a clean answer, a neat way to tie up our low points for future remembering. When it happens, it's mostly a mess, and I say this from personal experience, having tried repeatedly to write an accurate and readable account of my own personal dog days. The past, I've found, is slippery. It means different things on different days, and there's no such thing as a complete inventory of the things you've lost or gained from living it. I've tried, many times, to make such an inventory, as if my life were one big cargo ship and I'm in charge of documenting the manifest for the safety and stability of the whole ship. But containers don't stay put; boxes don't stay packed. Life, for me at least, has a way of rocking the same types of things loose to rattle around in the hold and bash into other things, until I trudge down there and lash it all down again.
My geraniums are dead. This is just as well-- in life they looked fake, and in death they've taken on a much more believable and interesting shape. Now they look like the dirt-caked fingers of monkeys reaching out of the pot at nothing. The caladiums are going too, and have moved from thick, white heart shapes veined with green to collapsed, yellowed lace. I'm taking a special pleasure in watching the zinnias meet their apocalyptic end, since they were so aggressive and overbearing in their prime. Plus, I always thought their blossoms looked like the fake flowers on some moth-eaten old lady hat.
I watched a documentary on crank last night, which was interesting, but probably for all the wrong reasons. I have this fascination with documentaries that, whether on purpose or by accident, end up capturing someone else's absolute dog days, and then try to make some sense out of them, scrape together some salvageable truth to justify having filmed the whole thing. The wreckage on the screen was compelling in its simple portrayal of human misery and grief, but the truths I got out of it were uncomfortable: this too is rural America, not just my fields and skies and birds and trains. The other disturbing thing was how simple rock bottom can look-- a woman in her kitchen, the kettle on the stove, the embroidered potholders hanging on hooks, the free calendar from the insurance company tacked next to the fridge, and her husband filling a syringe with bubbly liquid the exact same sunny color as the paint on the walls, and then gently pulling her arm to him and flicking the reddish bruise hidden in the crook of her elbow. They're both crying. This is the Worst.
When I was a little kid, my parents used to shop at the first Whole Foods, which was in a small storefront on Lamar Boulevard in Austin. It opened in 1980 and a year later, there was a huge flood, the Memorial Day Flood of 1981, where all the creeks rose from their beds and came downtown to wash away cars, furniture, trash, people, and all the pianos from Strait Music, two of which were never found. On the north corner of the building, near the bicycle racks, an artist later painted two different high water marks, lovely little white-capped waves with scrolly dates. I remember standing next to them as a kid (one was higher than my head), and imagining water all around me and Austin floating by like too many toys at bath time. I was enchanted. (I was also, of course, thinking of the clear blue ocean water of childhood fantasy, not the fetid soup of actual floods).
It would be nice if there was a way to mark life's worst points with pretty painted watermarks, and hope that after the flood recedes (assuming it does and you don't have to go with it) this public monument would give some meaning to your loss. As a nation, we're fumbling with that-- there's still no 9/11 monument, despite all the elegant concept drawings. We can't seem to get a handle on how to represent it-- two giant beams of light? a reflection pool? a remembrance wall? a tree for each person? Or some silly movie (with Nicholas Cage of all people) trimming and wedging the whole mess into an easy cinematic formula with a touching Coldplay song in the background?
I don't think there's a clean answer, a neat way to tie up our low points for future remembering. When it happens, it's mostly a mess, and I say this from personal experience, having tried repeatedly to write an accurate and readable account of my own personal dog days. The past, I've found, is slippery. It means different things on different days, and there's no such thing as a complete inventory of the things you've lost or gained from living it. I've tried, many times, to make such an inventory, as if my life were one big cargo ship and I'm in charge of documenting the manifest for the safety and stability of the whole ship. But containers don't stay put; boxes don't stay packed. Life, for me at least, has a way of rocking the same types of things loose to rattle around in the hold and bash into other things, until I trudge down there and lash it all down again.
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