Tonight I must read something for four minutes in front of strangers in an art gallery. I'm trying to find something of mine that I like, and that makes me appear likable and not as neurotic as I usually feel, and since I've left this until the last minute on a day when I have a ton of other crap to be doing-- and I'm blogging instead of applying myself to the task of finding something to read-- the odds of achieving this non-neurotic sheen are plummeting.
Not helping things: I didn't get much sleep last night because Pants came in from two late flights and stayed up late watching movies to ramp down his adrenaline output before crawling in bed with me, at which point he felt like talking, and playing with the cat, and poking me, and muttering about P. the Roomie's tempestuous girlfriend who had just called P. moments before to start a fight. This was hours ago, but my time line has smeared together with a late, rushed shower and bad coffee and a morning commute through a muffling curtain of the valley's famous fog.
Also: I'm disturbed that Hillary Clinton's getting a bad rap, and that I waited too long to apply for absentee voting in Texas. I'm also a little befuddled at being so obviously out of step with my demographic, who talk about Barak Obama in messianic tones. I like the guy, and I'll vote for whomever the Democrats nominate, but I can't help feeling like this is one of those cultural moments for my generation that's just going to pass me by. Like that show "Saved By the Bell"? Everyone my age watched that show and loved it, and I never saw an episode until I was in my 20's and to say that I couldn't understand its appeal is way undershooting it. As I get older I get more boring. I know this. I just read a whole book about the American way of compartmentalizing nature and how it contributed to the history of nuclear testing in Nevada, and there were looooong passages of historical and scientific digression. But I'm starting to like reading the fine print and teasing apart an issue's convergent factors and seeing what's pulling on what. I feel like Clinton's speeches reward that kind of digging and Obama's not so much, though I've got to love his from the writer's love of language perspective.
Speaking of digging and making plans and not getting distracted by pretty words, I need to fins something to read tonight...
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Weekending
Much is afoot these days. Let's go back a week and take a peek at where it all started, shall we?
K. is one of my best friends from college. Actually, scratch that. She's the only person I met during my college days with whom I regularly keep up, and whose doings continue to fascinate me to no end. Like few other people in my life, K. has mastered that confident sense of adventure that leads me to imagine her sitting down at a dinner table surrounded by talking animals and aliens and calmly interjecting something insightful into the conversation. As for me, I'd be under that same table, gripping my head and rocking. When all else in my life has seemed off-kilter and barely under control, K. is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder that it's all going to work out and that I can go ahead and remove my head from ass.
So into our tiny, cow-smelling town came K. in her car packed with all-purpose surprises and armed with fresh bread longer than my arm, and the reassuring promise that she was down for "whatev." Pants and I bundled her off to Sequoia National Park where we all sank our feet into deep banks of fresh snow and took pictures with foreigners and big Latino families lacing the borders. I bitched about French people having interfered with my awkward first attempts at snowboarding, and in one of those rare instances of instant karma, the log I was posing on in front of the giant General Sherman sequoia gave way and dumped me into the hard packed snow, right in front of more French people, who, being more cultured than me, understood my English griping perfectly and then laughed at my misfortune with their nasally, "honh, honh, honh!"
The next day K. and I went to an art museum to see a big exhibit on "Peace Calligraphy," which was really incredible. Being only semi-aware of the prohibition against photography, I snapped a few shots, and if I had my camera handy right now, I would totally post them in defiance of the artist, the museum, and karma once again, but words will have to suffice. It was a whole room of long sheets of paper suspended vertically from fishing line screwed into the ceiling tiles, and each sheet had a different decorative quote or message about peace. There were also origami cranes of different colors and sizes interspersed among the sheets, and the whole thing was lit from various angles so as to create a wonderful variety of shadows and silent fluttery movement. It inspired another weird goal of mine: I will learn to make paper cranes, and will undertake the folding of 1,000 of them as a meditative act when Pants deploys. [side note: when I told Pants of this goal, he said that when he was a little boy, he learned to make cranes and sent some off to a museum in Hiroshima as part of a project to memorialize the victims of the bomb.]
K. and I then spent a quiet afternoon at a tea shop in Fresno's most earnest attempt at a hipster neighborhood. She sketched her hand for an art class and I read about Frank Sinatra having a cold for my journalism class, and for a while it was calm and easy and the afternoon seemed to stretch out forever, like when we were roommates years ago and had nothing to do but eat fried chicken and watch HBO on a Sunday. I was sad to see her go the next day. When we have guests, our dog goes through cycles of amnesia where she periodically forgets that someone has stayed the night, and then goes into spasms of floor-scraping delight when a surprise someone emerges, sleepy-eyed in the morning, and unsuspecting of her crotch-sniffing agenda. Abby's fall into abject depression when guests leave is equally extreme, and when K. left I almost couldn't bear being in the same room with Abby, so accurately did her sudden sadness mirror my own.
The work week in between then and this past weekend was unremarkable. The constancy of minor emergencies wore me down to a quiet nub, and Pants, P. the Roomie, and I always seemed to miss each other, with the odd result of living alone in a crowded house.
We planned to go snowboarding for the weekend, and early Friday morning I went to the base to rent the scraped up snowboard that would end up ferrying me smoothly and reliably through ridiculously deep drifts of light, powdery snow. But I didn't know that morning how nice the board would end up riding-- all I saw were its chipped edges and the deep scars where prior users had scraped over rocks or tree limbs or something.
As I was getting ready to leave the base, Pants called and asked if I would like to go hang out in the LSO shack right next to the runway and watch bounces, which is a rare opportunity and one that I missed out on at our previous posting, so I immediately jumped on it. The experience deserves a whole post on its own, but for now I'll simply explain that it means sitting in a tiny greenhouse-like building, really no bigger than a plexi-glass-walled outhouse a scant ten feet from the runway, where a box is painted to approximate the size of an aircraft carrier's deck. The LSO, Landing Signals Officer, sits inside the shack with a radio, some phones, and a "pickle stick," which is a control stick he uses to alter the configuration of lights guiding the pilots in. Over and over again, the pilots do touch and goes, kissing their tires down as close as possible to a place on the runway right outside the shack's door that represents where the wires would be to catch the tailhook on the boat. The entire experience was amazing and intimidating, but also comforting in that I can see a little better what it is Pants is trying to do and how hard the Navy is trying to prepare him for it a second time. Plus it's undeniable proof for the skeptic in me that Pants is actually a pilot, and not just playing dress up to go hang out at the library all day. Believe it or not, this is only the second time I've seen him actually flying a plane.
On to the weekend. We hit the road in my 11 year old Honda Accord mid-afternoon on Friday loaded down with gear, boards, boots, and a dizzying array of electronic toys for four people-- Pants and myself plus two other Navy guys I didn't know very well. One of them was the source of the fountain of gadgets, and over the next six hours he kept up a constant engagement with one or the other of them. At one point, he actually called a cell phone company representative to discuss at length the merits of one service over the other. I was under the mistaken impression that most people would rather punch themselves repeatedly in the crotch than voluntarily call a cell phone rep, but apparently I'm wrong. The trip was long.
All the way up to Tahoe, now in darkness, we heard weather warnings about a winter storm approaching, but since none of us was from a mountain state, we were confused-- isn't a snowstorm the perfect time for snowboarding? Don't winter sports depend for their very existence on winter storms? The answer is yes and no, apparently. Yes, storms provide great soft powder to slide around on, and yes that powder makes falling a much more attractive prospect than when the weather is lovely and sunny and the snow turns to ass-bruising hard-packed ice. But everything tends to get stuck, including you, face down with a board strapping both feet into useless immobility. Actually getting to and from the mountain, or even out of a parking lot where your car's been stationary for two hours, is an epic struggle against wind, ice, sleet, slushy spray from plows and other cars, and the muffling white blanket of snow that never let up the whole time we were there. Two feet of the stuff fell Saturday night alone, and that was when the world was already covered over in what looked like an extravagant coat of shaving cream and sugar. Out the window of our (crowded) hotel room Sunday morning, I saw where the empty pool was supposed to be instead a high, lumpy mountain of white at least four feet over and above the level of the pool's edge. I got caught up in a fantasy of jumping into it that quickly turned into a claustrophobic nightmare.
On Sunday, I chose to read about World War II nuclear physicists inside a wet-floored Starbucks rather than brave the slopes again. We showed up at a different resort, and as lift tickets were free for the guys but expensive for me, I figured it was a safer bet to do homework rather than get out there only to discover that my boots had still not broken in, and that the previous day's numbness and bruising included swelling as a bonus, thus making the second day twice as uncomfortable. So bombs and depleted uranium over Nevada instead. I recommend the book if you accept that a certain amount of heavy-handed activism comes with it.
The trip home on Sunday started out with a creepy two hours atop Donner Pass in near white-out conditions with pick-ups and SUVs sliding and spinning all around us in slow motion. There is no creepier sign to see half buried in snow and ice than one that calls to mind cannibalism and desolation. The Honda's buzzing heater and new set of snow chains seemed paltry little tokens against disaster, and I was acutely aware that all we had in the way of provisions was a box of Jujubees and some stale onion bagels. But the fact that we made it, chugging along as far pricier and heftier vehicles struggled and whined, further proves my theory that there is no better car than mine, no finer or more loyal vehicle, and I will lovingly polish its scraped up hub caps and its scarred rear bumper until it falls completely apart.
Kiss, kiss, Honda.
K. is one of my best friends from college. Actually, scratch that. She's the only person I met during my college days with whom I regularly keep up, and whose doings continue to fascinate me to no end. Like few other people in my life, K. has mastered that confident sense of adventure that leads me to imagine her sitting down at a dinner table surrounded by talking animals and aliens and calmly interjecting something insightful into the conversation. As for me, I'd be under that same table, gripping my head and rocking. When all else in my life has seemed off-kilter and barely under control, K. is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder that it's all going to work out and that I can go ahead and remove my head from ass.
So into our tiny, cow-smelling town came K. in her car packed with all-purpose surprises and armed with fresh bread longer than my arm, and the reassuring promise that she was down for "whatev." Pants and I bundled her off to Sequoia National Park where we all sank our feet into deep banks of fresh snow and took pictures with foreigners and big Latino families lacing the borders. I bitched about French people having interfered with my awkward first attempts at snowboarding, and in one of those rare instances of instant karma, the log I was posing on in front of the giant General Sherman sequoia gave way and dumped me into the hard packed snow, right in front of more French people, who, being more cultured than me, understood my English griping perfectly and then laughed at my misfortune with their nasally, "honh, honh, honh!"
The next day K. and I went to an art museum to see a big exhibit on "Peace Calligraphy," which was really incredible. Being only semi-aware of the prohibition against photography, I snapped a few shots, and if I had my camera handy right now, I would totally post them in defiance of the artist, the museum, and karma once again, but words will have to suffice. It was a whole room of long sheets of paper suspended vertically from fishing line screwed into the ceiling tiles, and each sheet had a different decorative quote or message about peace. There were also origami cranes of different colors and sizes interspersed among the sheets, and the whole thing was lit from various angles so as to create a wonderful variety of shadows and silent fluttery movement. It inspired another weird goal of mine: I will learn to make paper cranes, and will undertake the folding of 1,000 of them as a meditative act when Pants deploys. [side note: when I told Pants of this goal, he said that when he was a little boy, he learned to make cranes and sent some off to a museum in Hiroshima as part of a project to memorialize the victims of the bomb.]
K. and I then spent a quiet afternoon at a tea shop in Fresno's most earnest attempt at a hipster neighborhood. She sketched her hand for an art class and I read about Frank Sinatra having a cold for my journalism class, and for a while it was calm and easy and the afternoon seemed to stretch out forever, like when we were roommates years ago and had nothing to do but eat fried chicken and watch HBO on a Sunday. I was sad to see her go the next day. When we have guests, our dog goes through cycles of amnesia where she periodically forgets that someone has stayed the night, and then goes into spasms of floor-scraping delight when a surprise someone emerges, sleepy-eyed in the morning, and unsuspecting of her crotch-sniffing agenda. Abby's fall into abject depression when guests leave is equally extreme, and when K. left I almost couldn't bear being in the same room with Abby, so accurately did her sudden sadness mirror my own.
The work week in between then and this past weekend was unremarkable. The constancy of minor emergencies wore me down to a quiet nub, and Pants, P. the Roomie, and I always seemed to miss each other, with the odd result of living alone in a crowded house.
We planned to go snowboarding for the weekend, and early Friday morning I went to the base to rent the scraped up snowboard that would end up ferrying me smoothly and reliably through ridiculously deep drifts of light, powdery snow. But I didn't know that morning how nice the board would end up riding-- all I saw were its chipped edges and the deep scars where prior users had scraped over rocks or tree limbs or something.
As I was getting ready to leave the base, Pants called and asked if I would like to go hang out in the LSO shack right next to the runway and watch bounces, which is a rare opportunity and one that I missed out on at our previous posting, so I immediately jumped on it. The experience deserves a whole post on its own, but for now I'll simply explain that it means sitting in a tiny greenhouse-like building, really no bigger than a plexi-glass-walled outhouse a scant ten feet from the runway, where a box is painted to approximate the size of an aircraft carrier's deck. The LSO, Landing Signals Officer, sits inside the shack with a radio, some phones, and a "pickle stick," which is a control stick he uses to alter the configuration of lights guiding the pilots in. Over and over again, the pilots do touch and goes, kissing their tires down as close as possible to a place on the runway right outside the shack's door that represents where the wires would be to catch the tailhook on the boat. The entire experience was amazing and intimidating, but also comforting in that I can see a little better what it is Pants is trying to do and how hard the Navy is trying to prepare him for it a second time. Plus it's undeniable proof for the skeptic in me that Pants is actually a pilot, and not just playing dress up to go hang out at the library all day. Believe it or not, this is only the second time I've seen him actually flying a plane.
On to the weekend. We hit the road in my 11 year old Honda Accord mid-afternoon on Friday loaded down with gear, boards, boots, and a dizzying array of electronic toys for four people-- Pants and myself plus two other Navy guys I didn't know very well. One of them was the source of the fountain of gadgets, and over the next six hours he kept up a constant engagement with one or the other of them. At one point, he actually called a cell phone company representative to discuss at length the merits of one service over the other. I was under the mistaken impression that most people would rather punch themselves repeatedly in the crotch than voluntarily call a cell phone rep, but apparently I'm wrong. The trip was long.
All the way up to Tahoe, now in darkness, we heard weather warnings about a winter storm approaching, but since none of us was from a mountain state, we were confused-- isn't a snowstorm the perfect time for snowboarding? Don't winter sports depend for their very existence on winter storms? The answer is yes and no, apparently. Yes, storms provide great soft powder to slide around on, and yes that powder makes falling a much more attractive prospect than when the weather is lovely and sunny and the snow turns to ass-bruising hard-packed ice. But everything tends to get stuck, including you, face down with a board strapping both feet into useless immobility. Actually getting to and from the mountain, or even out of a parking lot where your car's been stationary for two hours, is an epic struggle against wind, ice, sleet, slushy spray from plows and other cars, and the muffling white blanket of snow that never let up the whole time we were there. Two feet of the stuff fell Saturday night alone, and that was when the world was already covered over in what looked like an extravagant coat of shaving cream and sugar. Out the window of our (crowded) hotel room Sunday morning, I saw where the empty pool was supposed to be instead a high, lumpy mountain of white at least four feet over and above the level of the pool's edge. I got caught up in a fantasy of jumping into it that quickly turned into a claustrophobic nightmare.
On Sunday, I chose to read about World War II nuclear physicists inside a wet-floored Starbucks rather than brave the slopes again. We showed up at a different resort, and as lift tickets were free for the guys but expensive for me, I figured it was a safer bet to do homework rather than get out there only to discover that my boots had still not broken in, and that the previous day's numbness and bruising included swelling as a bonus, thus making the second day twice as uncomfortable. So bombs and depleted uranium over Nevada instead. I recommend the book if you accept that a certain amount of heavy-handed activism comes with it.
The trip home on Sunday started out with a creepy two hours atop Donner Pass in near white-out conditions with pick-ups and SUVs sliding and spinning all around us in slow motion. There is no creepier sign to see half buried in snow and ice than one that calls to mind cannibalism and desolation. The Honda's buzzing heater and new set of snow chains seemed paltry little tokens against disaster, and I was acutely aware that all we had in the way of provisions was a box of Jujubees and some stale onion bagels. But the fact that we made it, chugging along as far pricier and heftier vehicles struggled and whined, further proves my theory that there is no better car than mine, no finer or more loyal vehicle, and I will lovingly polish its scraped up hub caps and its scarred rear bumper until it falls completely apart.
Kiss, kiss, Honda.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
6 Parts of a Thursday
1.) The trees are beginning to put out blossoms. There is a winter storm warning and I can see the Sierras getting a snow-hell smack down about an hour off to the east, but I'm looking across cherry orchards in early bloom to see it.
2.) Last night I pulled over in an empty soccer field parking lot to watch the lunar eclipse, because there's not going to be another until 2010! Two whole years in which my jones for naked eye astronomy will go unquenched! The fact that the eclipse was a lot slower and less visually showy than I expected left me feeling very American. I kept glancing over at the Honda's digital clock and mentally adjusting the evening's calculus of work-out, dinner, reading for school, and Netflix HBO series until I finally annoyed myself so much that I said fuck it and headed for the gym, where I felt my hour and a half better spent by running to nowhere and lifting weights which have no other purpose than to weigh exactly so much and fit in my hand. (I'm just saying, it's not like I traveled from one place to another or built a brick wall or stacked firewood. The existential pointlessness of what I was doing was somehow unusually clear last night.)
3.) We're going snowboarding this weekend. Originally, I pictured Pants and I having two days of semi-skilled snowplay and then cuddling up at night in our hotel room to watch bad cable movies and create charming moments, but it turns out we're splitting a hotel room with P. the Roomie and Some Other Dude, whose name I know, but that's about it. This is kind of deflating, but as Pants pointed out, it makes good economic sense. I'm not sure how long I can maintain this modified, shared-space version of myself. I'm tired of holding in farts, for one. I'm also tired of appearing way more emotionally stable than I really am-- there's generally something off-putting and unnerving about people who cry as easily and often as I do, and I haven't figured out yet how to explain it quickly to strangers.
4.) I'm making plans to go visit my brother in Indianapolis, and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is the plane trip. I love airports. I love the idea of them-- big, clearly labeled public spaces devoted to mobility and flux-- and I love the reality of them-- all the nervous people, all the different accents, the announcements, all our paths crossing. There's something so invigorating about it. It's also one of the only places I can manage to pull off nearly complete insouciance. It's an act, surely, but it's one I perform with intense and secret glee: "I know where I'm going." I love traveling alone.
a. I don't really know how to explain this very well. Here's an example: once I was flying cross-country from Texas to Georgia with my boyfriend at the time. Our plane got struck by lightning somewhere over New Orleans (big pink flash of light, nervous stewardesses chirping, "Everything's fine! Please stay seated!"), and our whole trip from then on was routed through various airports ridiculously tangential to our actual destination. I loved it. I loved navigating through all the gates and foraging for food and staking out good nap corners. The only miserable part was that my traveling companion came completely unwound ("I just did the math and we could have been fifty miles closer to Georgia if we'd taken a bus this morning!") and it took all my concentration not to reach over and smack him.
[NB: Pants is a delightful traveling companion. Though a bit grumpy with delays, he makes up for lapses in demeanor by narrating a fascinating blow-by-blow account of what the pilots are probably doing right now.]
5.) I don't know what's up with the numbered format of this post. I can only guess that I've been reading too much David Foster Wallace lately. Or maybe I lack the energy for transitions today.
6.) I despise Alicia Keys's new song, whatever the hell it is. There's something about sanctioned workplace radio stations that makes me want to murder everyone and paint the walls in blood warnings. The song pool is so very small, like a fish tank that's not cleaned regularly enough. Or ever. Nearly every job I've ever had has involved short repeating loops of music, and there are songs I can't listen to anymore because they immediately call up the stale onion smell of the Subway Sandwich shop where I had my first job, or the musty, moldy smell of the hurricane wrecked Barnes & Noble where I worked briefly in Pensacola. Even teaching had its songs-- my students had awful ringtones on their phones, but the good part about that was I got to kick the offender out of class. I try here to combat the wretched little workplace stereo by occasionally blasting Buena Vista Social Club or Wu Tang Clan out of iTunes, but my otherwise ridiculously pimped out computer didn't come with speakers, so the music gets muffled under my desk and hits my feet. Plus, it doesn't seem fair that I'm so ornery about the music when I have my own separate office (albeit with an always open door) and everyone else has to share a communal space. Right now Matchbox 20 (Crotchpox 20 to me) is wailing again about how I should "give [them] my heart, make it real, or else forget about it." If only.
2.) Last night I pulled over in an empty soccer field parking lot to watch the lunar eclipse, because there's not going to be another until 2010! Two whole years in which my jones for naked eye astronomy will go unquenched! The fact that the eclipse was a lot slower and less visually showy than I expected left me feeling very American. I kept glancing over at the Honda's digital clock and mentally adjusting the evening's calculus of work-out, dinner, reading for school, and Netflix HBO series until I finally annoyed myself so much that I said fuck it and headed for the gym, where I felt my hour and a half better spent by running to nowhere and lifting weights which have no other purpose than to weigh exactly so much and fit in my hand. (I'm just saying, it's not like I traveled from one place to another or built a brick wall or stacked firewood. The existential pointlessness of what I was doing was somehow unusually clear last night.)
3.) We're going snowboarding this weekend. Originally, I pictured Pants and I having two days of semi-skilled snowplay and then cuddling up at night in our hotel room to watch bad cable movies and create charming moments, but it turns out we're splitting a hotel room with P. the Roomie and Some Other Dude, whose name I know, but that's about it. This is kind of deflating, but as Pants pointed out, it makes good economic sense. I'm not sure how long I can maintain this modified, shared-space version of myself. I'm tired of holding in farts, for one. I'm also tired of appearing way more emotionally stable than I really am-- there's generally something off-putting and unnerving about people who cry as easily and often as I do, and I haven't figured out yet how to explain it quickly to strangers.
4.) I'm making plans to go visit my brother in Indianapolis, and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is the plane trip. I love airports. I love the idea of them-- big, clearly labeled public spaces devoted to mobility and flux-- and I love the reality of them-- all the nervous people, all the different accents, the announcements, all our paths crossing. There's something so invigorating about it. It's also one of the only places I can manage to pull off nearly complete insouciance. It's an act, surely, but it's one I perform with intense and secret glee: "I know where I'm going." I love traveling alone.
a. I don't really know how to explain this very well. Here's an example: once I was flying cross-country from Texas to Georgia with my boyfriend at the time. Our plane got struck by lightning somewhere over New Orleans (big pink flash of light, nervous stewardesses chirping, "Everything's fine! Please stay seated!"), and our whole trip from then on was routed through various airports ridiculously tangential to our actual destination. I loved it. I loved navigating through all the gates and foraging for food and staking out good nap corners. The only miserable part was that my traveling companion came completely unwound ("I just did the math and we could have been fifty miles closer to Georgia if we'd taken a bus this morning!") and it took all my concentration not to reach over and smack him.
[NB: Pants is a delightful traveling companion. Though a bit grumpy with delays, he makes up for lapses in demeanor by narrating a fascinating blow-by-blow account of what the pilots are probably doing right now.]
5.) I don't know what's up with the numbered format of this post. I can only guess that I've been reading too much David Foster Wallace lately. Or maybe I lack the energy for transitions today.
6.) I despise Alicia Keys's new song, whatever the hell it is. There's something about sanctioned workplace radio stations that makes me want to murder everyone and paint the walls in blood warnings. The song pool is so very small, like a fish tank that's not cleaned regularly enough. Or ever. Nearly every job I've ever had has involved short repeating loops of music, and there are songs I can't listen to anymore because they immediately call up the stale onion smell of the Subway Sandwich shop where I had my first job, or the musty, moldy smell of the hurricane wrecked Barnes & Noble where I worked briefly in Pensacola. Even teaching had its songs-- my students had awful ringtones on their phones, but the good part about that was I got to kick the offender out of class. I try here to combat the wretched little workplace stereo by occasionally blasting Buena Vista Social Club or Wu Tang Clan out of iTunes, but my otherwise ridiculously pimped out computer didn't come with speakers, so the music gets muffled under my desk and hits my feet. Plus, it doesn't seem fair that I'm so ornery about the music when I have my own separate office (albeit with an always open door) and everyone else has to share a communal space. Right now Matchbox 20 (Crotchpox 20 to me) is wailing again about how I should "give [them] my heart, make it real, or else forget about it." If only.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Roomie
"Oh fuck! Good morning!"
These were my first words today as I encountered our new roommate in the dark hall of our house. I was fresh out of the shower with Medusa hair and a towel wrapped around me and the previous night's underwear balled up in my hand and I had totally forgotten that through yet another absurdly routine Navy planning fuck-up, P. had found himself homeless yesterday with only a toothbrush and a duffel bag of underwear to his name.
All of his wordly goods are en route to a storage shed on the opposite coast, and his new home, a steel cabin on an aircraft carrier somewhere near the Middle East, is not yet ready to welcome him until he makes a few more practice launches and landings on a training boat off California. This boat doesn't show up for another month. This seems like the kind of thing that could have been foreseen by someone, somewhere, with access to the kinds of papers that might eventually make it back to California in time to notify P. and prevent him from packing his life away and signing out of his lease.
Not that I mind having a roomie. As roomies go, P. is delightful so far-- cordial, neat, someone with whom I've had the privilege of sharing many a late-night conversation at parties. But in another way he's a walking reminder of how fragile this whole arrangement with the Navy really is. The "whoops!" is quite close and disturbingly frequent, and points to a network of communication gaps and scheduling mishaps that unnerves me.
Up until recently, I was enormously comforted by what I called an "Ender's Game" faith in the Navy. If you've read the book, you remember the story of Ender, a child genius plucked from his family to train as a super-skilled space pilot. He's put through a grinding and traumatic training regime, and seemingly random, awful, and unfair things keep happening to him, but occasionally you, the reader, get a chapter written from the viewpoint of these shady, omnipotent officials, who are staging and monitoring everything that happens to Ender. Each occurrence is a test with an objective and a purpose. At the end of the story [if you're actually planning on reading it, skip to the next paragraph] we find out that even Ender's battle simulations have all been real, and he's been tricked into killing a whole alien species because he thought he was just training, and didn't know what was at stake. The officials maintain that that was the only way he could have been so successful-- if he was unaware of what he was really doing.
So, since the start of flight school for Pants, I've had this book in the back of my mind and have modeled my comforting, wifely feedback on the assumption that everything that happened was happening for a reason, that someone was watching and making sure it all worked out safely. I've had many occasions to say, "There's got to be some reason for why [insert whacky, possibly dangerous event here] happened. Just think what useful skills you're learning from this."
This, of course, is leaving out the whole question of the moral culpability involved in following orders. I figure I'll leave that whole freak-out for after Pants has left on the boat so he doesn't have to witness what will likely be a difficult and dramatic foray into the very edges of my value landscape. (Whee! What does one pack for such a trip?)
Now, though? Now I'm not so sure, and now is exactly when this kind of faith in the system would really be nice. Instead, I've got this eery, creepy hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling, like if I look around a little more carefully I'll catch a glimpse of one of these yawning gaps just beneath my feet. It feels like walking along on railroad tracks on a high suspension bridge. I've been watching the horizon for the disasters I expect (the train bearing down on me from in front or behind), but I've been completely ignorant of the spaces underneath each step.
There's another way I could look at this, of course-- maybe P. the Roomie is going to be a necessary stabilizing force. This weekend I could already feel myself gearing up for Emotional Camel Mode, where every moment with Pants takes on this echoing significance, and my goal is to wring out every last little drop of connectedness on the theory that I can build up a store of it in my hump and live out the coming drought with little to no discomfort. I was ambushing him around corners and hugging him too tight in the wrong places, like right across the throat or the stomach, and barely stifling an animal-like whimper when he'd pick up the keys and announce he was off on some errand-- "You mean spark plugs are more important than spending this twenty minutes here on the couch with me staring at you?"
We've got a month. He goes back to try to qualify on the boat in a month, and then from there I start looking for the train on the horizon again. There's got to be some way of doing this. I know there is a way to do this, even if no one in officaildom watching or guiding us or even giving a shit...
These were my first words today as I encountered our new roommate in the dark hall of our house. I was fresh out of the shower with Medusa hair and a towel wrapped around me and the previous night's underwear balled up in my hand and I had totally forgotten that through yet another absurdly routine Navy planning fuck-up, P. had found himself homeless yesterday with only a toothbrush and a duffel bag of underwear to his name.
All of his wordly goods are en route to a storage shed on the opposite coast, and his new home, a steel cabin on an aircraft carrier somewhere near the Middle East, is not yet ready to welcome him until he makes a few more practice launches and landings on a training boat off California. This boat doesn't show up for another month. This seems like the kind of thing that could have been foreseen by someone, somewhere, with access to the kinds of papers that might eventually make it back to California in time to notify P. and prevent him from packing his life away and signing out of his lease.
Not that I mind having a roomie. As roomies go, P. is delightful so far-- cordial, neat, someone with whom I've had the privilege of sharing many a late-night conversation at parties. But in another way he's a walking reminder of how fragile this whole arrangement with the Navy really is. The "whoops!" is quite close and disturbingly frequent, and points to a network of communication gaps and scheduling mishaps that unnerves me.
Up until recently, I was enormously comforted by what I called an "Ender's Game" faith in the Navy. If you've read the book, you remember the story of Ender, a child genius plucked from his family to train as a super-skilled space pilot. He's put through a grinding and traumatic training regime, and seemingly random, awful, and unfair things keep happening to him, but occasionally you, the reader, get a chapter written from the viewpoint of these shady, omnipotent officials, who are staging and monitoring everything that happens to Ender. Each occurrence is a test with an objective and a purpose. At the end of the story [if you're actually planning on reading it, skip to the next paragraph] we find out that even Ender's battle simulations have all been real, and he's been tricked into killing a whole alien species because he thought he was just training, and didn't know what was at stake. The officials maintain that that was the only way he could have been so successful-- if he was unaware of what he was really doing.
So, since the start of flight school for Pants, I've had this book in the back of my mind and have modeled my comforting, wifely feedback on the assumption that everything that happened was happening for a reason, that someone was watching and making sure it all worked out safely. I've had many occasions to say, "There's got to be some reason for why [insert whacky, possibly dangerous event here] happened. Just think what useful skills you're learning from this."
This, of course, is leaving out the whole question of the moral culpability involved in following orders. I figure I'll leave that whole freak-out for after Pants has left on the boat so he doesn't have to witness what will likely be a difficult and dramatic foray into the very edges of my value landscape. (Whee! What does one pack for such a trip?)
Now, though? Now I'm not so sure, and now is exactly when this kind of faith in the system would really be nice. Instead, I've got this eery, creepy hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling, like if I look around a little more carefully I'll catch a glimpse of one of these yawning gaps just beneath my feet. It feels like walking along on railroad tracks on a high suspension bridge. I've been watching the horizon for the disasters I expect (the train bearing down on me from in front or behind), but I've been completely ignorant of the spaces underneath each step.
There's another way I could look at this, of course-- maybe P. the Roomie is going to be a necessary stabilizing force. This weekend I could already feel myself gearing up for Emotional Camel Mode, where every moment with Pants takes on this echoing significance, and my goal is to wring out every last little drop of connectedness on the theory that I can build up a store of it in my hump and live out the coming drought with little to no discomfort. I was ambushing him around corners and hugging him too tight in the wrong places, like right across the throat or the stomach, and barely stifling an animal-like whimper when he'd pick up the keys and announce he was off on some errand-- "You mean spark plugs are more important than spending this twenty minutes here on the couch with me staring at you?"
We've got a month. He goes back to try to qualify on the boat in a month, and then from there I start looking for the train on the horizon again. There's got to be some way of doing this. I know there is a way to do this, even if no one in officaildom watching or guiding us or even giving a shit...
Monday, February 04, 2008
Coming Back Around Again
Last week I was all prepared to get another one of those phone calls from Pants that signals that everything is going to change again. Pants was finishing up his trip out to the carrier to do his first ever landing qualifications in the big, honkin' jet, and this was the last step in a long dance that would end in us being slotted somewhere for Three Whole Years, which for us is an unimaginably long time full of forbidden, delicious stability.
"Hey Tooth," he'd say, calling me by my [inexplicable] nickname in an effort to diffuse the natural tension of the situation. "Are you ready for it?" It being the decision the Navy's made about where we're going to be stationed next, and by extension whether or not I'm going to be able to keep my job and stay in school (a one in three chance), and by extension when Pants is headed off to this stupid war. I was waiting on that call, and my body had responded to the anticipation by locking down its natural processes of elimination, a condition I'm lovingly calling "Navy butt," and revving up production from the adrenal glands so that I was doing cracked out things at three in the morning like rolling up excerpts of my printed prose into tampon-sized tubes to be dispensed from a converted tampon machine called the Vend-O-Prose machine at a conference I wasn't going to in New York. The pets were understandably nervous, and I kept talking to them in truncated non-sequiturs, like "Even if it's Japan, we'd find some way around the quarantine..."
And then a different call came, one that in my fevered calculation of all possible outcomes, I had never even considered: "I disqualified."
One thing I've always been able to count on in all the various tests and qualifications and schools and experiments is that Pants would always finish at the top, no matter what. This wasn't a pride thing, it was just reality. And every time he would come home and tell me this or that result, he'd be all surprised, like "guess what?" and I'd play along and strain my voice into the upper octaves, trying for authentic surprise. Now I know, finally, how my dad felt when I kept bouncing into his study with my grades from college, doing my little "guess what?" tap dance. Bemused, I think, is the word for it. Not that we aren't happy for you-- we are-- but really, honey, what did you think was going to happen after all that work?
But this time, it didn't come out like that. He was doing well, he was concentrating, he was getting traps, and then... not. The magic, the muse, the thing, whatever it is, just left him, and he couldn't pull out enough successful landings to move on to the next step. For Pants, the blow has been stunning. Shaming, for a big part of it, which is just hard for me to watch because what he's doing is so incredibly hard and weird and against every survival instinct that I think someone ought to show up at the squadron with balloons and cookies, every day, for anybody even brave enough to try it. But I know how he feels, I think. I know that awful feeling of having to incorporate Mistake, or Fail, into your vocabulary of yourself and how it feels like carrying around big rocks in your pockets everywhere you go.
The thing is, I think failing at something every now and then is absolutely essential. Not only does it keep you humble, it keeps you alive and interesting. Too much of anything, even success, wears you into uninteresting shapes and dull patterns.
Here are some things I've failed at:
* Softball: I was the worst left fielder ever. I dropped the game-winning ball in the only game that my whole family attended, with out-of-town guests no less. If there had been the supplies, I would have self-immolated in the dug-out, yowling "I'm SOOOOORRRRRYYYYYYYYYYY!" to everyone in attendance.
* High school trig: I made a C in high school trig, and that C was more strained over, more desperately clawed out than the whole regiment of A's I'd made in English ever since I learned to read.
* Being a model in college: ha ha ha! So silly-- I fell for this scam where a friend and I showed up almost every weekend for a semester to be photographed for free by a series of sketchy weirdos, who then gave us free prints for our "portfolios." It should have been obvious after we saw the first set that these men had no idea how to use their cameras for anything other than an awkward, peep show prop, but instead we dutifully compiled the pictures into binders and started showing up to auditions for fashion shows. I did two bridal shows for no pay and then never got another call; my friend was more successful, and ended up in a show where the make-up artist snarled sticks in her hair and shaved off her eyebrows before sending her down the runway in a giant pink sack shaped like a heart.
* Pottery: best thing I've ever sucked at. I could never spin a vessel off the wheel that was any taller than four inches or any thinner than half an inch, but I swear I got close to nirvana trying. In the end, I was one of the most prolific makers of tiny, sturdy little bowls in the class. It would take quite a pitching arm to break one of my pots against a wall (coincidentally, another fortunate thing resulting from my failure at softball!).
* 10K races: this is a failing thing I'm committed to, purely for the process because I've really got nothing results-wise to brag about. I've finished one of these things at something like an hour and ten minutes. I walked much of the time. In the end, my goals were so scaled back that I considered it a victory to beat the girl in the South Dakota shorts who actually stopped off in a restaurant and waited in line to pee. Yeah! Take that! But I've signed up for another one on the fifteenth of this month, with fucking Marines running it, no less, and I'm doing it because it's good to suck sometimes. It's good to put in an honest-to-God top effort, with no expectation of success, but still refusing to just mail it in, and still suck, but still love myself for sucking.
Why?
So I can back it up when I tell Pants, "It's OK not to be perfect. There's something to learn from this."
And the fact that we've got another month or so before this question of if and when we're moving comes up again? Well, I can't see that as anything but the first unintended benefit of an instance of sucking...
"Hey Tooth," he'd say, calling me by my [inexplicable] nickname in an effort to diffuse the natural tension of the situation. "Are you ready for it?" It being the decision the Navy's made about where we're going to be stationed next, and by extension whether or not I'm going to be able to keep my job and stay in school (a one in three chance), and by extension when Pants is headed off to this stupid war. I was waiting on that call, and my body had responded to the anticipation by locking down its natural processes of elimination, a condition I'm lovingly calling "Navy butt," and revving up production from the adrenal glands so that I was doing cracked out things at three in the morning like rolling up excerpts of my printed prose into tampon-sized tubes to be dispensed from a converted tampon machine called the Vend-O-Prose machine at a conference I wasn't going to in New York. The pets were understandably nervous, and I kept talking to them in truncated non-sequiturs, like "Even if it's Japan, we'd find some way around the quarantine..."
And then a different call came, one that in my fevered calculation of all possible outcomes, I had never even considered: "I disqualified."
One thing I've always been able to count on in all the various tests and qualifications and schools and experiments is that Pants would always finish at the top, no matter what. This wasn't a pride thing, it was just reality. And every time he would come home and tell me this or that result, he'd be all surprised, like "guess what?" and I'd play along and strain my voice into the upper octaves, trying for authentic surprise. Now I know, finally, how my dad felt when I kept bouncing into his study with my grades from college, doing my little "guess what?" tap dance. Bemused, I think, is the word for it. Not that we aren't happy for you-- we are-- but really, honey, what did you think was going to happen after all that work?
But this time, it didn't come out like that. He was doing well, he was concentrating, he was getting traps, and then... not. The magic, the muse, the thing, whatever it is, just left him, and he couldn't pull out enough successful landings to move on to the next step. For Pants, the blow has been stunning. Shaming, for a big part of it, which is just hard for me to watch because what he's doing is so incredibly hard and weird and against every survival instinct that I think someone ought to show up at the squadron with balloons and cookies, every day, for anybody even brave enough to try it. But I know how he feels, I think. I know that awful feeling of having to incorporate Mistake, or Fail, into your vocabulary of yourself and how it feels like carrying around big rocks in your pockets everywhere you go.
The thing is, I think failing at something every now and then is absolutely essential. Not only does it keep you humble, it keeps you alive and interesting. Too much of anything, even success, wears you into uninteresting shapes and dull patterns.
Here are some things I've failed at:
* Softball: I was the worst left fielder ever. I dropped the game-winning ball in the only game that my whole family attended, with out-of-town guests no less. If there had been the supplies, I would have self-immolated in the dug-out, yowling "I'm SOOOOORRRRRYYYYYYYYYYY!" to everyone in attendance.
* High school trig: I made a C in high school trig, and that C was more strained over, more desperately clawed out than the whole regiment of A's I'd made in English ever since I learned to read.
* Being a model in college: ha ha ha! So silly-- I fell for this scam where a friend and I showed up almost every weekend for a semester to be photographed for free by a series of sketchy weirdos, who then gave us free prints for our "portfolios." It should have been obvious after we saw the first set that these men had no idea how to use their cameras for anything other than an awkward, peep show prop, but instead we dutifully compiled the pictures into binders and started showing up to auditions for fashion shows. I did two bridal shows for no pay and then never got another call; my friend was more successful, and ended up in a show where the make-up artist snarled sticks in her hair and shaved off her eyebrows before sending her down the runway in a giant pink sack shaped like a heart.
* Pottery: best thing I've ever sucked at. I could never spin a vessel off the wheel that was any taller than four inches or any thinner than half an inch, but I swear I got close to nirvana trying. In the end, I was one of the most prolific makers of tiny, sturdy little bowls in the class. It would take quite a pitching arm to break one of my pots against a wall (coincidentally, another fortunate thing resulting from my failure at softball!).
* 10K races: this is a failing thing I'm committed to, purely for the process because I've really got nothing results-wise to brag about. I've finished one of these things at something like an hour and ten minutes. I walked much of the time. In the end, my goals were so scaled back that I considered it a victory to beat the girl in the South Dakota shorts who actually stopped off in a restaurant and waited in line to pee. Yeah! Take that! But I've signed up for another one on the fifteenth of this month, with fucking Marines running it, no less, and I'm doing it because it's good to suck sometimes. It's good to put in an honest-to-God top effort, with no expectation of success, but still refusing to just mail it in, and still suck, but still love myself for sucking.
Why?
So I can back it up when I tell Pants, "It's OK not to be perfect. There's something to learn from this."
And the fact that we've got another month or so before this question of if and when we're moving comes up again? Well, I can't see that as anything but the first unintended benefit of an instance of sucking...
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Tattoo You
I've got this whole entry to write on my trip last weekend to the San Diego Zoo and the fight between Pants and I that almost kept it from happening, and then ended up causing the weekend to be so much better and brighter, like how water droplets in the air will catch light and make a rainbow where there would otherwise have just been light, but something far more urgent has come up.
My little brother is thinking seriously about getting a tattoo.
I have much to say about tattoos, having lived in a virtual swarm of them since I was sixteen years old. Our generation is an inky one, to be sure. While the Baby Boomers will be breaking in (or breaking) the Social Security system and forging new pathways in elder care, my generation will blazing the trail of how to explain Grandma's ass crack tattoo or Granddad's heinously stretched earlobes, or what the hell prompted all of us to start confessing things over the internet.
From my own experience in the tattooed jungle, I offer these brief artifacts:
* The beautiful, sad-eyed, and probably slow-witted girl at my boarding school whose tanned little ankle bore a three-and-a-half inch horizontal tribal design. Hours of sophomore study hall were devoted to speculation about how Lindsay, at 15, had managed to get herself tattooed before she showed up among us, slouched behind a curtain of light brown hair, giggling dreamily at our impossibly handsome, hungover English teacher as he scrubbed his eyes and moaned for a full five minutes before starting class. When asked to respond to our reading of Beowulf, she answered, "it's so, like, violent, or something." Oh, the glamor!
* Tall Wendy in high school with her Grateful Dead bears, dancing along beneath the waistline of her faded jeans. I met a girl in college, Terah, with the exact same tattoo. I thought I was happy and free in those years, but now, looking back, I remember how much of them were spent waiting around waiting for the high to wear off, or for someone to change the channel, or for that god damned Pink Floyd song to end. Wendy, Terah, how do you like those bears now?
* My first college boyfriend, the only unquestionably evil person I've ever met, was an aspiring tattoo artist whose tattoo gun was purchased for $500 over the internet. He immediately commenced scribbling on his friends, a tight-knit group of squatters, scammers, and addicts, who offered up their skin for permanent branding. I can draw beautifully-- it's one of the only things I will claim immediately and without reservation-- so I was often drafted to design these tattoos, which went onto transfer paper and then directly into someone's hide. My art is out there. A gay man has an armband of monkeys copulating; a young woman has etched into her calf a (tragically simple) square maze leading from a palm tree at one end to her heart at the other; another young woman has a vertical representation of all the stages of the moon down her spine, but she was lying on her side on a couch while the tattoo was being down, having dosed herself liberally with Valium, and the resulting tattoo veers sharply left as it approaches her lower back. When she stood up at the end, no one told her. And a guitar player who called himself Mikey Fiction has the Devil's face (ironically, my ex's best work) on the inside of his left forearm, so people would see Satan when he was playing his guitar. Night after night, my evil boyfriend (I recognized him as a terrible person even then), would trace designs on my back while I slept, and he pestered me often about when I would let him put one on me. I told him I couldn't decide what I wanted, but I knew that I never wanted any mark of his on me.
* Another ex-boyfriend, the poor guy who got stuck cleaning up the toxic oil spill left from the tattoo artist, once made a joke about pterodactyls that made me fall off a chair crying with laughter. I can't remember the joke, but nearly a year after we broke up, he decided to get a pterodactyl tattooed across the width of his shoulders. I went with him. I remembered thinking the artist could have done a better job, made the thing look a little more dignified and exotic, and less cartoony.
* I've heard tell that a former friend of mine tattooed the name of her transgender lover across her pubic bone (of all places) scant weeks before they broke up and never spoke again. A name? There?
Looking back at this entry, it seems that most of my tattoo stories are not happy ones, and this worries me because the urge to find a design and commit it to flesh is still very strong with me. I've had a few ideas over the years-- the Golden Gate Bridge across my lower back as a symbol of crossing over and the changes I made in how I thought about life when I went to a particularly powerful seminar in San Francisco. But then I read an article about how the Golden Gate is the most popular suicide bridge in the nation, how it's like this irresistibly symbolic magnet for the utterly hopeless, and how people have been trying for years to make the bridge suicide-proof while still maintaining its character and beauty. I'd hate to think that right after I got something inked into me, its meaning would change completely for me. For a person who holds grudges against particular shirts for the shitty things that have happened to me while I was wearing them, this seems a very real danger.
My current idea, one I've been kicking around for at least three years, is a small black ink drawing, its lines characteristic of the old woodcuts printers used to put in the beginnings of books, or as chapter leads. It would be a girl in some kind of traveling attire, maybe a cloak, maybe boots, who's on the move, hiking upwards. Her face would be three-quarters turned away, looking off to the horizon, and she might be holding a walking stick of some sort, and possibly a book. I can't decide if the book is in her hand open, or just tucked under her arm, but it's meant to be some kind of map-- something that in equal parts guides her and acts as a record of her experiences. She might have a small pack. The image is meant to convey an explorer and the act of seeking, but also independence and contentment. Its style is meant to recall old books, and great stories, and epic journeys.
The thing is, I don't know where I'd put it. Butt tattoos are supposed to hurt the least, and I like the idea of a tattoo's visibility being voluntary, something people have to earn, but putting such a symbolic and important image on my butt seems to negate the whole idea. Plus, it might look like the explorer is making the epic journey up the slope of my butt, and that the trip is so arduous she might not make it. Anywhere else though... I know Angelina Jolie can manage to pull off the evening dress-with-tats look, but I haven't seen anyone else do it successfully...
Nuances, decisions-- this is why I'm still unmarked.
My little brother is thinking seriously about getting a tattoo.
I have much to say about tattoos, having lived in a virtual swarm of them since I was sixteen years old. Our generation is an inky one, to be sure. While the Baby Boomers will be breaking in (or breaking) the Social Security system and forging new pathways in elder care, my generation will blazing the trail of how to explain Grandma's ass crack tattoo or Granddad's heinously stretched earlobes, or what the hell prompted all of us to start confessing things over the internet.
From my own experience in the tattooed jungle, I offer these brief artifacts:
* The beautiful, sad-eyed, and probably slow-witted girl at my boarding school whose tanned little ankle bore a three-and-a-half inch horizontal tribal design. Hours of sophomore study hall were devoted to speculation about how Lindsay, at 15, had managed to get herself tattooed before she showed up among us, slouched behind a curtain of light brown hair, giggling dreamily at our impossibly handsome, hungover English teacher as he scrubbed his eyes and moaned for a full five minutes before starting class. When asked to respond to our reading of Beowulf, she answered, "it's so, like, violent, or something." Oh, the glamor!
* Tall Wendy in high school with her Grateful Dead bears, dancing along beneath the waistline of her faded jeans. I met a girl in college, Terah, with the exact same tattoo. I thought I was happy and free in those years, but now, looking back, I remember how much of them were spent waiting around waiting for the high to wear off, or for someone to change the channel, or for that god damned Pink Floyd song to end. Wendy, Terah, how do you like those bears now?
* My first college boyfriend, the only unquestionably evil person I've ever met, was an aspiring tattoo artist whose tattoo gun was purchased for $500 over the internet. He immediately commenced scribbling on his friends, a tight-knit group of squatters, scammers, and addicts, who offered up their skin for permanent branding. I can draw beautifully-- it's one of the only things I will claim immediately and without reservation-- so I was often drafted to design these tattoos, which went onto transfer paper and then directly into someone's hide. My art is out there. A gay man has an armband of monkeys copulating; a young woman has etched into her calf a (tragically simple) square maze leading from a palm tree at one end to her heart at the other; another young woman has a vertical representation of all the stages of the moon down her spine, but she was lying on her side on a couch while the tattoo was being down, having dosed herself liberally with Valium, and the resulting tattoo veers sharply left as it approaches her lower back. When she stood up at the end, no one told her. And a guitar player who called himself Mikey Fiction has the Devil's face (ironically, my ex's best work) on the inside of his left forearm, so people would see Satan when he was playing his guitar. Night after night, my evil boyfriend (I recognized him as a terrible person even then), would trace designs on my back while I slept, and he pestered me often about when I would let him put one on me. I told him I couldn't decide what I wanted, but I knew that I never wanted any mark of his on me.
* Another ex-boyfriend, the poor guy who got stuck cleaning up the toxic oil spill left from the tattoo artist, once made a joke about pterodactyls that made me fall off a chair crying with laughter. I can't remember the joke, but nearly a year after we broke up, he decided to get a pterodactyl tattooed across the width of his shoulders. I went with him. I remembered thinking the artist could have done a better job, made the thing look a little more dignified and exotic, and less cartoony.
* I've heard tell that a former friend of mine tattooed the name of her transgender lover across her pubic bone (of all places) scant weeks before they broke up and never spoke again. A name? There?
Looking back at this entry, it seems that most of my tattoo stories are not happy ones, and this worries me because the urge to find a design and commit it to flesh is still very strong with me. I've had a few ideas over the years-- the Golden Gate Bridge across my lower back as a symbol of crossing over and the changes I made in how I thought about life when I went to a particularly powerful seminar in San Francisco. But then I read an article about how the Golden Gate is the most popular suicide bridge in the nation, how it's like this irresistibly symbolic magnet for the utterly hopeless, and how people have been trying for years to make the bridge suicide-proof while still maintaining its character and beauty. I'd hate to think that right after I got something inked into me, its meaning would change completely for me. For a person who holds grudges against particular shirts for the shitty things that have happened to me while I was wearing them, this seems a very real danger.
My current idea, one I've been kicking around for at least three years, is a small black ink drawing, its lines characteristic of the old woodcuts printers used to put in the beginnings of books, or as chapter leads. It would be a girl in some kind of traveling attire, maybe a cloak, maybe boots, who's on the move, hiking upwards. Her face would be three-quarters turned away, looking off to the horizon, and she might be holding a walking stick of some sort, and possibly a book. I can't decide if the book is in her hand open, or just tucked under her arm, but it's meant to be some kind of map-- something that in equal parts guides her and acts as a record of her experiences. She might have a small pack. The image is meant to convey an explorer and the act of seeking, but also independence and contentment. Its style is meant to recall old books, and great stories, and epic journeys.
The thing is, I don't know where I'd put it. Butt tattoos are supposed to hurt the least, and I like the idea of a tattoo's visibility being voluntary, something people have to earn, but putting such a symbolic and important image on my butt seems to negate the whole idea. Plus, it might look like the explorer is making the epic journey up the slope of my butt, and that the trip is so arduous she might not make it. Anywhere else though... I know Angelina Jolie can manage to pull off the evening dress-with-tats look, but I haven't seen anyone else do it successfully...
Nuances, decisions-- this is why I'm still unmarked.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Trapdoor Spider has plans for the study
You know trapdoor spiders? That's how my depression acts these days. There will be the brushy, twiggy landscape of my normal life and then along comes the vibration of stress, and for a tense little while, nothing happens. And then BAM! The Crazy jumps out and starts devouring things.
This time, the Crazy looks like this: me stomping from room to room in my house and corner to corner in my office, hating all the little piles of things that don't have a place in which to fit neatly. In my house, it's the study. I hate sharing a study with Pants.
There, I said it.
He's a wonderful man, and he's good and kind to me, and in return I hate sharing a workspace with him because as mechanically tick-tock perfect and organized as he is mentally, he is just as chaotic and clutter-prone in his physical space. Used tissues, scraps of labels, outdated and completely useless aviation maps-- it's all part of the geologically stratified layers of a crap mountain that I can't seem to conquer. And he freaks out when I get near it.
Initially, we shared my college desk, a huge behemoth of a thing with two long wings that fits into a corner and comes with a rolling file cabinet. But the sprawling PC (extraordinary discipline being exercised here not to leap off on the PC hate tangent) and Pants's little foothills of cherished odds and ends rapidly co-opted the whole desk. And the study closet. And the perimeters of the room. And under the desk.
So as he gets ready to take off tomorrow for three weeks to do incredibly dangerous things, and learn whether or not we'll have to move again, and get posted to a fleet which will take him away for half a year to fight a war to which I am fundamentally opposed, my focus is the fucking study. That much I can change.
This time, the Crazy looks like this: me stomping from room to room in my house and corner to corner in my office, hating all the little piles of things that don't have a place in which to fit neatly. In my house, it's the study. I hate sharing a study with Pants.
There, I said it.
He's a wonderful man, and he's good and kind to me, and in return I hate sharing a workspace with him because as mechanically tick-tock perfect and organized as he is mentally, he is just as chaotic and clutter-prone in his physical space. Used tissues, scraps of labels, outdated and completely useless aviation maps-- it's all part of the geologically stratified layers of a crap mountain that I can't seem to conquer. And he freaks out when I get near it.
Initially, we shared my college desk, a huge behemoth of a thing with two long wings that fits into a corner and comes with a rolling file cabinet. But the sprawling PC (extraordinary discipline being exercised here not to leap off on the PC hate tangent) and Pants's little foothills of cherished odds and ends rapidly co-opted the whole desk. And the study closet. And the perimeters of the room. And under the desk.
So as he gets ready to take off tomorrow for three weeks to do incredibly dangerous things, and learn whether or not we'll have to move again, and get posted to a fleet which will take him away for half a year to fight a war to which I am fundamentally opposed, my focus is the fucking study. That much I can change.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Call the Ball
Our computer screen is black, and no sound comes through the speakers except for occasional radio transmissions, the low whine of electrical instruments and wind, and the jagged, irregular sound of someone trying not to hyperventilate.
"513, four miles. You're left of course, correcting." Still nothing but blackness. Pants sits quietly beside me, and takes a sip of his water.
An acknowledgment comes over the speakers, "513."
"I don't see shit," I say. A small, wry smile crosses Pants's lips. He's going to have to do this in less than three weeks-- land a jet on an aircraft carrier at night.
Seconds later:
"513, two miles, slightly below, slightly right."
"513." And now a slight flicker, like a dying firefly. Barely four pixels across, I confuse it at first with lint on the computer screen, so I reach out and wipe at it. It wobbles uncertainly and refuses to resolve into a shape.
"That's the tower lights," says Pants.
"Two miles??" I ask. "That's all he fucking s--" and before I can finish, a warning tone is blaring. "What's that?" The tone sounds like a tiny British ambulance, like the kind of sound Nintendo games make when Mario accidentally leaps into a flaming pit.
Pants says, "His altimeter. It's an automatic warning when you break a certain altitude."
More transmissions: "514, four miles, call needles."
"Now they're talking to the guy behind him," Pants says. This seems unfair-- why should 513 have to hear about everyone stacking up behind him? What if he gets confused about which message is for him? The breathing speeds up, shudders between breaths.
"513, approaching the ball, slightly low. 513 call the ball."
"513 callingtheballsixonezero." 513 is smashing his words together and breathing hard, but his voice is pitched low and even. He sounds like someone quietly trying to alert you that there's a rattle snake in his lap.
"513, roger ball. Little low." Whoever is talking to 513 sounds like he's sitting in front of a nice fireplace with a snifter of brandy. His voice is rich and deep and calm. "Little low" sounds like a minor condition, something completely expected and within the normal course of nature and the world, and not a warning that 513 might want to correct his course in order not to smash into the back of the boat in a giant fireball.
The one wobbling dot becomes two, one brighter, one dimmer and off to the lower left, and then a third light appears above the first two, like a strange constellation whose configuration means everything. This is still not the runway-- merely a reference to indicate that the runway is nearby, lower and to the left.
The breathing is fast and jagged and all of a sudden, there it is! Like a highway lit up at night with small dashed lines reflecting the center line. The whole thing wavers uncertainly, racing towards 513, and us, and Pants points to the far left of the screen, "There's the ball," just as it disappears. I can't tell how far above the highway we are and everything is speeding up and getting louder.
"Come a little left." It's Lord Calm Voice in his parlor again, and 513, now sounding like he's in the middle of an asthma attack, dutifully points the nose of the jet slightly left milliseconds before all the lights leap and scatter over the screen, the engines roar in protest, and a long, rasping breath is punched out of 513's chest. Radio chatter continues, but I can't hear any of it-- I find myself hanging forward from my perch on the kitchen stool (we still don't have a desk chair in the study), my nails digging into the fabric of my running pants.
The screen's gone black again and now I can hear someone called 710 being told to set himself up for the approach. More tiny dim lights appear and rotate slowly along the bottom of the screen-- 513 is regaining control of his breathing, though it's still shuddery-sounding like someone about to cry, and he's apparently got the wherewithal to start thinking about moving off the runway and parking his jet. This seems like asking someone to steer a flaming 18-wheeler at top speed through a garden gate, stop within 10 feet, and then neatly parallel park because other flaming 18-wheelers are right behind.
Pants is laughing now-- apparently this is exciting, or motivating or something-- and all I can say is, "Fuck all that."
(Watch it on Youtube.)
***
"Backed up"
My world is somewhat simpler. Today, the topic of conversation at work was a woman who bought herself new tits for the holidays, and stopped by to regale us with the gory details of her recovery. My coworkers were equally congratulatory and consumer-savvy, and the conversation, minus a few nouns, might lead one to believe that the woman had personally achieved something both physically demanding and technologically superior, like giving birth to a brand new baby Mercedes.
I was unimpressed and unsympathetic, but then again, I am 29 and obsessed with other, equally facetious things (more on that to come). Interestingly, though, the most entertaining part of the woman's story was not the clever ruse she concocted to make her new titiness a surprise for her husband and family, but rather the utter surprise and angst she went through when she discovered that pain meds can cause severe constipation. Who knew? I've seen her maybe three times in my life, and she had a genuine come-to-Jesus moment with us describing the ordeal of passing her first post-op turd.
***
Resolutions
I have two New Year's resolutions. The first is to return all calls and check my voicemail every day. I have this weird resentment relationship with my cell phone where I feel like it promises more from me than I'm able to provide, like it's somehow this bait-and-switch picture of Rachel-- "I'm available and conscientious!"-- when the reality is that I frequently lose the thing or let its batteries run down or go days without checking my messages. Consequently, the phone feels like a measuring stick that keeps a dutiful record of all the ways in which I fall short or can't keep commitments. So I resolve to stop seeing the phone as a measure of my own failures as wife, daughter, and friend, and just check my fucking voicemail and return calls like normal people do.
Ah, "normal." This brings me to resolution number 2: I will drastically reduce the brain power I devote to worrying about Britney Spears. Seriously. I'm abreast of her whole situation as of 1:00 PST today. She's in LA. She's no longer hanging out with the one night stand, married tabloid photographer from Afghanistan, and has instead retreated to the loving arms of her dubious adviser and friend, Osama Lufti.
The fact that I know this, and that I could break down for you month by month the past year in her downward-spiraling life, is deeply embarrassing. Who am I to be a spectator in this whole mess? It's not that I wish her ill, or think her downfall is funny (I mean, maybe I did at first, when she was first showing her trailer roots and getting knocked up with her first kid) I'm honestly worried and a little obsessed. Why can't she ask for help? Is she really that rich that no one can tell her a few hard truths and help her get to a safe place?
And why is the whole thing such a riveting spectacle? What does it say about me that a regular part of my day involves internet-based hand-wringing on behalf of a floundering multi-millionaire? I've even got planned out what I would say to her if we got a minute alone among the crush of photographers in a crowded Starbucks: "Britney, I know you're going through a tough time, but I think it would help if you'd take out those awful extensions. You'd look really cute and sophisticated and even a little mom-like, which can only help in the coming custody battles. Also, I got you this day planner is which I've entered all the dates and times of your various drug tests and depositions so you can actually show up to them."
The brain wattage I devote to Britney Spears' circus of a life could light a small house, and I resolve to stop this. From now on, my Britney Brain Drain will only represent the wattage needs of a standard toaster.
"513, four miles. You're left of course, correcting." Still nothing but blackness. Pants sits quietly beside me, and takes a sip of his water.
An acknowledgment comes over the speakers, "513."
"I don't see shit," I say. A small, wry smile crosses Pants's lips. He's going to have to do this in less than three weeks-- land a jet on an aircraft carrier at night.
Seconds later:
"513, two miles, slightly below, slightly right."
"513." And now a slight flicker, like a dying firefly. Barely four pixels across, I confuse it at first with lint on the computer screen, so I reach out and wipe at it. It wobbles uncertainly and refuses to resolve into a shape.
"That's the tower lights," says Pants.
"Two miles??" I ask. "That's all he fucking s--" and before I can finish, a warning tone is blaring. "What's that?" The tone sounds like a tiny British ambulance, like the kind of sound Nintendo games make when Mario accidentally leaps into a flaming pit.
Pants says, "His altimeter. It's an automatic warning when you break a certain altitude."
More transmissions: "514, four miles, call needles."
"Now they're talking to the guy behind him," Pants says. This seems unfair-- why should 513 have to hear about everyone stacking up behind him? What if he gets confused about which message is for him? The breathing speeds up, shudders between breaths.
"513, approaching the ball, slightly low. 513 call the ball."
"513 callingtheballsixonezero." 513 is smashing his words together and breathing hard, but his voice is pitched low and even. He sounds like someone quietly trying to alert you that there's a rattle snake in his lap.
"513, roger ball. Little low." Whoever is talking to 513 sounds like he's sitting in front of a nice fireplace with a snifter of brandy. His voice is rich and deep and calm. "Little low" sounds like a minor condition, something completely expected and within the normal course of nature and the world, and not a warning that 513 might want to correct his course in order not to smash into the back of the boat in a giant fireball.
The one wobbling dot becomes two, one brighter, one dimmer and off to the lower left, and then a third light appears above the first two, like a strange constellation whose configuration means everything. This is still not the runway-- merely a reference to indicate that the runway is nearby, lower and to the left.
The breathing is fast and jagged and all of a sudden, there it is! Like a highway lit up at night with small dashed lines reflecting the center line. The whole thing wavers uncertainly, racing towards 513, and us, and Pants points to the far left of the screen, "There's the ball," just as it disappears. I can't tell how far above the highway we are and everything is speeding up and getting louder.
"Come a little left." It's Lord Calm Voice in his parlor again, and 513, now sounding like he's in the middle of an asthma attack, dutifully points the nose of the jet slightly left milliseconds before all the lights leap and scatter over the screen, the engines roar in protest, and a long, rasping breath is punched out of 513's chest. Radio chatter continues, but I can't hear any of it-- I find myself hanging forward from my perch on the kitchen stool (we still don't have a desk chair in the study), my nails digging into the fabric of my running pants.
The screen's gone black again and now I can hear someone called 710 being told to set himself up for the approach. More tiny dim lights appear and rotate slowly along the bottom of the screen-- 513 is regaining control of his breathing, though it's still shuddery-sounding like someone about to cry, and he's apparently got the wherewithal to start thinking about moving off the runway and parking his jet. This seems like asking someone to steer a flaming 18-wheeler at top speed through a garden gate, stop within 10 feet, and then neatly parallel park because other flaming 18-wheelers are right behind.
Pants is laughing now-- apparently this is exciting, or motivating or something-- and all I can say is, "Fuck all that."
(Watch it on Youtube.)
***
"Backed up"
My world is somewhat simpler. Today, the topic of conversation at work was a woman who bought herself new tits for the holidays, and stopped by to regale us with the gory details of her recovery. My coworkers were equally congratulatory and consumer-savvy, and the conversation, minus a few nouns, might lead one to believe that the woman had personally achieved something both physically demanding and technologically superior, like giving birth to a brand new baby Mercedes.
I was unimpressed and unsympathetic, but then again, I am 29 and obsessed with other, equally facetious things (more on that to come). Interestingly, though, the most entertaining part of the woman's story was not the clever ruse she concocted to make her new titiness a surprise for her husband and family, but rather the utter surprise and angst she went through when she discovered that pain meds can cause severe constipation. Who knew? I've seen her maybe three times in my life, and she had a genuine come-to-Jesus moment with us describing the ordeal of passing her first post-op turd.
***
Resolutions
I have two New Year's resolutions. The first is to return all calls and check my voicemail every day. I have this weird resentment relationship with my cell phone where I feel like it promises more from me than I'm able to provide, like it's somehow this bait-and-switch picture of Rachel-- "I'm available and conscientious!"-- when the reality is that I frequently lose the thing or let its batteries run down or go days without checking my messages. Consequently, the phone feels like a measuring stick that keeps a dutiful record of all the ways in which I fall short or can't keep commitments. So I resolve to stop seeing the phone as a measure of my own failures as wife, daughter, and friend, and just check my fucking voicemail and return calls like normal people do.
Ah, "normal." This brings me to resolution number 2: I will drastically reduce the brain power I devote to worrying about Britney Spears. Seriously. I'm abreast of her whole situation as of 1:00 PST today. She's in LA. She's no longer hanging out with the one night stand, married tabloid photographer from Afghanistan, and has instead retreated to the loving arms of her dubious adviser and friend, Osama Lufti.
The fact that I know this, and that I could break down for you month by month the past year in her downward-spiraling life, is deeply embarrassing. Who am I to be a spectator in this whole mess? It's not that I wish her ill, or think her downfall is funny (I mean, maybe I did at first, when she was first showing her trailer roots and getting knocked up with her first kid) I'm honestly worried and a little obsessed. Why can't she ask for help? Is she really that rich that no one can tell her a few hard truths and help her get to a safe place?
And why is the whole thing such a riveting spectacle? What does it say about me that a regular part of my day involves internet-based hand-wringing on behalf of a floundering multi-millionaire? I've even got planned out what I would say to her if we got a minute alone among the crush of photographers in a crowded Starbucks: "Britney, I know you're going through a tough time, but I think it would help if you'd take out those awful extensions. You'd look really cute and sophisticated and even a little mom-like, which can only help in the coming custody battles. Also, I got you this day planner is which I've entered all the dates and times of your various drug tests and depositions so you can actually show up to them."
The brain wattage I devote to Britney Spears' circus of a life could light a small house, and I resolve to stop this. From now on, my Britney Brain Drain will only represent the wattage needs of a standard toaster.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Burly, Brah
My officemates are talking passionately about Lost, the TV series. Kate is apparently a slut, everyone's met Jack's dad, no one's sure what the deal is with Lock or Sawyer and there's some psychic kid running around having visions. I'm just as caught up in another fiction, the Philip Pullman book series His Dark Materials upon which the new movie The Golden Compass is based, but I have no one here to talk to about armored talking polar bears or world-cutting knives. Such is life.
Over the break, Pants and I went to Lake Tahoe with another couple who came to visit from Texas and I learned to snowboard. I recommend snowboarding if you hate your tail bone and wrists and you're curious about what snow tastes like when your face whips through deep piles of it at ninety miles an hour. I recommend it if you like using words like "sick" and "burly" to mean "really cool" and not "ill" or "large-statured," and if you refer to everyone, male or female as "Brah." And also if you like fun. Despite wracking full-body pain and bruises measured by hand-widths, I had incredible, unreasonable amounts of fun.
Usually this is not the case for me-- I don't like things that hurt. Pants is much the opposite. Jalapenos, hot sauce, wasabi, and anything circled in little illustrated flames on the menu please me not, and yet he is drawn to them happily and willingly. He likes hiking fast and hard through vertical terrain and gazes longingly out the window when the weather is sleety and iron cold and says sad, crazy things like, "I wish I were camping." His showers are lukewarm and brutally short. My biological make-up covets subtlety, variety, and long, contemplative observation-- at least, that's how I've learned to reframe the term "sissy."
So it was a total shock to both us when I strapped into a snowboard and began the long process of learning to stand up in that weird, heel-heavy cro-magnon stance that lets you scrape slowly broadside down the mountain, and after the first sixty ass-plants I was still jovial and cooperative. Mostly it was the snow, which has magically retained its ability to delight me, even when I meet it face first and find shovel-fulls of it crammed into the back of my pants.
[Holy crap, now they're talking about Super Nanny. And getting worked up about it.]
Anyway, I learned to scrape broadside on my heels and my toes, and then to glide from side to side like a falling leaf (I found it actually helped to say "falling leaf! falling leaf!" to my feet and lean with arms outstretched in my intended direction, like I was casting spells, or giving the "hands in the air, like you just don't care" to a large rap audience) and then to point the nose of my board down the mountain, pick up speed, and then sweep my back forward again to slow down, which was called making garlands. I fell again and again and tiny children whizzed fearlessly past on tiny skies. And then I learned to turn, and everything else make way more sense, like the moment in The Miracle Worker when Annie Sullivan splashes Helen Keller's hands with water, only much more frivolous.
Everything was going great until I hit the tree. Actually, it was more like a sapling, or even a sapling-ette because it was less that I hit it and more that I sliced it from the earth with the back edge of my board. Still, I was riding very purposefully on the front edge of the board (snowboarding, evidently, is a lot about declared intentions, which feels cool until the terrain disagrees with you) and hitting the sapling-ette with the back edge entirely flipped my center of gravity whipped me over onto my back, where I became a spectacular fountain of ice and powder and popped off my beanie and my goggles before coming to a halt under the line of skiers on the lift high above me. I saw them, and some red stars, and took a long moment to watch a plane scratch out a contrail across the palest blue part of the sky. Then I started a slow and methodical inventory of my extremities-- wiggle the toes, good, fingers, good, creak both knees, twist hips, now elbows, still good, and finally head, side to side, good. A loud scrape and a "holy shit, are you OK?" beside me and there's Pants, who helps me up and looks perplexed as I try to work out whether I want to laugh hysterically or cry hysterically and decide on both as I pack my snowy hat and goggles back on and revert to "falling leaf! falling leaf!" back down the mountain.
The wrist was later on, and less spectacular. The fall itself was pretty weak, but I landed on ice and caught myself mostly with that hand, even though I'd been hearing all day, "land on your knees!" Right now it's wrapped in a ratty white bandage, which provides little support but is supposed to remind me to open doors and twist keys in locks with my other hand.
Despite this and an additional ten spectacular falls from the lift, which I never mastered, I jumped at the chance to buy good snowboarding boots on sale at REI and clomp around in them at home to break them in even though my ankles are still all bruised and puffy. I can't explain this, but I can't wait to do it all again.
Over the break, Pants and I went to Lake Tahoe with another couple who came to visit from Texas and I learned to snowboard. I recommend snowboarding if you hate your tail bone and wrists and you're curious about what snow tastes like when your face whips through deep piles of it at ninety miles an hour. I recommend it if you like using words like "sick" and "burly" to mean "really cool" and not "ill" or "large-statured," and if you refer to everyone, male or female as "Brah." And also if you like fun. Despite wracking full-body pain and bruises measured by hand-widths, I had incredible, unreasonable amounts of fun.
Usually this is not the case for me-- I don't like things that hurt. Pants is much the opposite. Jalapenos, hot sauce, wasabi, and anything circled in little illustrated flames on the menu please me not, and yet he is drawn to them happily and willingly. He likes hiking fast and hard through vertical terrain and gazes longingly out the window when the weather is sleety and iron cold and says sad, crazy things like, "I wish I were camping." His showers are lukewarm and brutally short. My biological make-up covets subtlety, variety, and long, contemplative observation-- at least, that's how I've learned to reframe the term "sissy."
So it was a total shock to both us when I strapped into a snowboard and began the long process of learning to stand up in that weird, heel-heavy cro-magnon stance that lets you scrape slowly broadside down the mountain, and after the first sixty ass-plants I was still jovial and cooperative. Mostly it was the snow, which has magically retained its ability to delight me, even when I meet it face first and find shovel-fulls of it crammed into the back of my pants.
[Holy crap, now they're talking about Super Nanny. And getting worked up about it.]
Anyway, I learned to scrape broadside on my heels and my toes, and then to glide from side to side like a falling leaf (I found it actually helped to say "falling leaf! falling leaf!" to my feet and lean with arms outstretched in my intended direction, like I was casting spells, or giving the "hands in the air, like you just don't care" to a large rap audience) and then to point the nose of my board down the mountain, pick up speed, and then sweep my back forward again to slow down, which was called making garlands. I fell again and again and tiny children whizzed fearlessly past on tiny skies. And then I learned to turn, and everything else make way more sense, like the moment in The Miracle Worker when Annie Sullivan splashes Helen Keller's hands with water, only much more frivolous.
Everything was going great until I hit the tree. Actually, it was more like a sapling, or even a sapling-ette because it was less that I hit it and more that I sliced it from the earth with the back edge of my board. Still, I was riding very purposefully on the front edge of the board (snowboarding, evidently, is a lot about declared intentions, which feels cool until the terrain disagrees with you) and hitting the sapling-ette with the back edge entirely flipped my center of gravity whipped me over onto my back, where I became a spectacular fountain of ice and powder and popped off my beanie and my goggles before coming to a halt under the line of skiers on the lift high above me. I saw them, and some red stars, and took a long moment to watch a plane scratch out a contrail across the palest blue part of the sky. Then I started a slow and methodical inventory of my extremities-- wiggle the toes, good, fingers, good, creak both knees, twist hips, now elbows, still good, and finally head, side to side, good. A loud scrape and a "holy shit, are you OK?" beside me and there's Pants, who helps me up and looks perplexed as I try to work out whether I want to laugh hysterically or cry hysterically and decide on both as I pack my snowy hat and goggles back on and revert to "falling leaf! falling leaf!" back down the mountain.
The wrist was later on, and less spectacular. The fall itself was pretty weak, but I landed on ice and caught myself mostly with that hand, even though I'd been hearing all day, "land on your knees!" Right now it's wrapped in a ratty white bandage, which provides little support but is supposed to remind me to open doors and twist keys in locks with my other hand.
Despite this and an additional ten spectacular falls from the lift, which I never mastered, I jumped at the chance to buy good snowboarding boots on sale at REI and clomp around in them at home to break them in even though my ankles are still all bruised and puffy. I can't explain this, but I can't wait to do it all again.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Reptilian Torpor vs Banshee
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."
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."
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...
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