Well, this is what I get for declaring I'll write a new blog post when an African-American is sworn in as president of the United States of America. Thought I was safe with that one. Thankfully, no. And I guess that, like everyone else, I got a little something to say about it.
Everyone has their election stories. Like a lot of people, mine begins on the evening of the Democratic National Convention in 2004. I was driving home from Wisconsin, and I turned on the radio, which happened to be tuned to NPR. Barack Obama was in the middle of delivering the speech that would somehow, unfathomably then, lead directly to the events of today. I didn't know who he was or why he had been chosen to speak, but I stopped my car and I listened. There was something undeniably compelling about his words and his tone. For a moment, I was roused from my 20-something cynicism by a stir of emotion I would have been ashamed to admit to then. And I thought, "I wish I could vote for him in November." I also thought, "I wish I had an Oreo Blizzard." The latter of my wishes was easily addressed, as I had conveniently stopped my car in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen. As to the former, I tucked that hope away with my desires to have an Olympic gold medal, an Academy Award, and my own show on the Travel Channel.
On election night, I was devastated not at John Kerry's loss but at George Bush's win, and I made what was, at the time, an idle oath to do whatever I could personally to make sure that my candidate won next time.
Never would I have imagined I'd be knocking on strangers' doors in the cold Minnesota Februrary, asking them to consider caucusing for Barack Obama. I don't even like knocking on my friends' doors. Or using "caucus" as a verb. I may be visiting a friend I've known for years, been explicitly invited to arrive at an appointed time, and yet, my hand will hover, knuckles poised for knocking, while I worry over whether this is exactly the right moment for me to announce my presence. "Oh, I hope I'm not bothering them. Maybe I'll just go home." Imagine my horror at announcing my presence and my political stance to people I'd never met, people who, until the moment of my knocking, might have been peacefully reading a book, having just found the most comfortable position in which to sit, that perfect balancing act of relaxation and poise for page-turning. Ugh! It gives me shivers just to think about it. But I did it.
People have definitely used the word "hope" almost to the point of bleeding all its meaning over the past couple of years, but I really started to feel it. On the night of the Minnesota caucus, I voted at a school in one of the oldest and fanciest neighborhoods in Saint Paul. I had to park several blocks away and walk through the slushy snow and past Victorian era mansions to get to my polling place. At one point, I fell in pace with a middle-aged man and we both wondered at the crowds of people streaming towards the school. "I went to school here," he said. "Nice neighborhood," I replied, trying not to sound too impressed. He said he couldn't believe the crowds of people lining up to vote. He cast a quick glance around us and adopted the tone of an anthropologist, "I've never been to one of your people's gatherings before." I wondered what he meant by "my" people: Polish? Sci-Fi fans? Vegetarians? How could he know all that about me? Who was this guy? He looked around again and lowered his voice: "I'm a Republican."
"Can I ask what brought you out here tonight?" Then he caught my eye and simply said, "Obama," and I lost him in the crowd.
And then I found myself in another crowd in June. This time, I was in a line of thousands that snaked through the streets of downtown Saint Paul. Obama would be speaking in a few hours at the Xcel Energy Center, and he was expected to clinch the Democratic nomination. I'd gone alone, but I spent the entire evening talking to people, listening to their stories and their thoughts on social issues, on the environment, on the unique political and historical moment we seemed to be experiencing. I spent most of the time with a couple from South America, he from Venezuela, she from Colombia. They were so excited, so engaged in the American political process, so inspired by Obama's campaign and his message. Never mind they couldn't vote.
A lot of people who wouldn't be able to vote in the election in November stood in that line. One particularly lively group of teenagers took it upon themselves to remove what had become a hazardous roadblock as people finally started moving toward the Xcel. Minnesotans are a rule-following bunch, and when the police put one of those wooden horse-type barricades along the sidewalk, people kept away from the area it was blocking. But as more and more people crushed toward the Xcel, many found themselves pushed up against the barricade and unable to move safely beyond it. On reaching the barricade and finding themselves stuck, several people expressed a wish for the thing to be gone. It was a group of teenagers who embraced the activist message of the campaign and hoisted the thing above their heads, crowd surfing it up and away with chants of, "Yes, we can! Yes, we can!"
It had been threatening rain all day, and many of the people in line had brought umbrellas. Sure, we were a hopeful bunch, but we were still in the Midwest, and weather awareness and preparedness is a way of life. We could hope the rain would stay away, but, you know, just in case it didn't...
Our umbrellas were, however, a security risk and would not be allowed through the doors, we were told once we finally got to the Xcel. This explained the scores of umbrellas that littered the lawns around the building. As I approached the entrance, I chucked mine under a bush and counted the number of trees to the door, hoping I'd remember and be able to retrieve it after witnessing history or whatever. And even though I was in the nosebleeds, it was electrifying inside the arena. At the center of it all was this man whose steady voice I'd listened to since that day in the Dairy Queen parking lot and whose tone and message was just as compelling four years later, all the more so for its now being so clearly a real possibility. At the end of the night, Barack Obama bumped his fist into his wife's and walked off stage, but the energy of possibility lingered and radiated through the crowd, into the nosebleeds, out onto the streets--where thousands more people who hadn't made it through the security checks in time had watched on the jumbo screen outside--past the silent vigil of our our abandoned umbrellas, through the city, the state, the country, the world.
It was dark by the time I got outside, and I joined the throngs of people hunched over in the bushes, pulling back branches, holding up umbrellas and examining them in the light of their cell phone displays; black umbrella after black umbrella tossed back into the bushes in search of the exact one they had come with. I ran into people I knew, people I hadn't seen in five years, and perfect strangers. It was one of those completely surreal moments of odd community. "Is this it?" a woman asked to my right. "No," answered her friend. "Well, where did you leave it?" "Right here, I thought." "Well, what color is it?" "Camouflage." Good luck, I thought.
For those couple of hours in the Xcel, we'd been forced to abandon our cautiousness and our umbrellas; but we were also practical, and we fished our umbrellas out of the bushes and forced ourselves to consider the possibility that John McCain could have been standing at that podium today. But today I gathered with coworkers around the television in our break room and listened to that steady voice and those compelling words once more, and I'm just so glad to find myself in the happy majority of Americans. Also, I find myself craving an Oreo Blizzard.
Showing posts with label neighborhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neighborhood. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Monday, July 28, 2008
Things Get Hairy
"Ladies in their sensitivities, my lord,
have a fragile sensibility.
When a girl's emergent,
probably it's urgent
you defer to her gentility, my lord."
-- Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
A friend of mine at work said something surprising to me this morning. "Your hair looks really nice today." We had passed each other in the hallway, and my hand instinctively went to my head. "Really?" I asked, genuinely surprised. I ran my fingers through the tangled mess. "Thanks." As we parted ways, my mind raced: "Quick, what did I do to my hair? Took a shower last night...let it dry for about an hour before taking the blow dryer to it...fell asleep on my right side..." I went into the bathroom and checked my look in the mirror.
I guess it did look kind of nice. And the Barber had shouted at me again. You'll recall, perhaps, that there is a barber shop on the next block over from my office. It faces the park across the street, where I had retreated this morning when it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn't look at my computer for one more second without clawing at the monitor. "Right. Time for a walk," I thought, and I headed out into the sweltering air. The man who had shouted at me as I walked home a few weeks ago was outside the shop again, this time in the middle of the morning.
"Hey!" he shouted. Hmm. He must work there. "Hey, hey!" He probably doesn't own the place; I can't imagine that the owner would shout at people like that from his place of business. "Yo! You! Hey!" He's probably a barber. "Hey! You!" Must be nice not to have to stare at a computer all day. "Hey!" At least there are trees between us this time.
Flattering as his cat calls are, I wondered if I should maybe wear a sports bra to work tomorrow, just in case I took another walk. But now my friend had introduced another possibility. I much preferred the idea that the barber's eye had been caught by my bouncing curls, so I considered his a professional endorsement and winked at my reflection before returning to my desk.
My hair has been a constant source of frustration. I've never been able to wrangle it into anything approaching a current style. In middle school, when my 634th attempt at constructing a lasting wall of bangs failed, I parted my hair down the middle and bought a pair of silver earrings in the shapes of little peace signs. "This Gulf War is just--well, it can't be good," I declared. "Peace, man."
My politics and my hair haven't really changed since then, though perhaps now there is less of a causal relationship between the two. Recently enraged over an email that was forwarded to me about the looming threat to the use of English in America, I glanced over the long list of addressees and felt the need to somehow balance the karmic scales. I enrolled in a class to train as an English tutor for recent immigrants and found myself in a room full of middle-aged do-gooders all gazing reverently at our instructor, who I despised within roughly ten seconds of her speaking.
She wrote her name on the white board at the front of the room but informed us that it would soon be changing, as she would be marrying a man I would come to picture as a large cat. That was the only way I could reconcile her engagement with the evidence before me. Any human man wouldn't have lasted with the wide eyes and the over-annunciating, the gesturing, and the constant reminders of her graduate degree in linguistics.
But, oh, how the rest of the class loved her. Imagine an Oprah audience as she interviews Deepak Chopra. Do you see them? With the knowing nods and the gentle "mm-hmm"s after every independent clause he speaks? There were four classes that were three hours long, with a 15-minute break every night just before the tip of my pencil reached my eyeball. I would spring from my chair and head to the soda machine down the hall. Without fail, someone would catch my stride down the long hallway. "Isn't she amazing?" they'd say. I quickly learned it was best not to hesitate the slightest bit in my answer. If I didn't produce a quick and hearty, "Absolutely!" there would be an inevitable, "Well, I would sure like to learn English from her; I can tell you that much," after which the devotee's pace would quicken and I'd be forced to wait behind them as they dawdled for a suspiciously long time in front of the Pepsi machine.
Much of the class concerned basic lessons in basic English that recent immigrants to this country would find very useful. It wasn't glamorous; that's for sure. There were lessons in how to read a phone bill, a prescription bottle, how to make an appointment at the doctor's office, the dentist, the barber. There were never any lessons that gave my prospective immigrant students the necessary vocabulary to construct effusive exclamations of gratitude: we were limited to ideas that could be communicated through gestures and pictures, and there were no pictures to go along with phrases like "word bringer," "she who shares meaning," or "there are many English words, and while you have taught me more of them than I ever dreamed possible, I do not now--nor will I ever--have the words to express my thanks."
No, the most we could reasonably hope for by way of communication largely involved pointing. "Does your arm hurt?" the instructor asked in one demonstration about a hypothetical visit to the doctor. In this scenario, we were supposed to communicate that we had a headache. She pointed to her arm. "No," we all answered. "Does your leg hurt?" She touched her finger to her thigh. "No," we said, waiting. "Does your..." her hand moved toward her head, and the class' breath caught in their throats. "...head hurt?" "Yes!" we all cried.
I've always ended up being friendly with the people from faraway lands. They're just so much more interesting than me. "So do you dream in Japanese?" I'll ask. "Tell me again about the time the monkey slapped your friend," I'll say. "What's Spanish for 'stalker'?" When I simultaneously got a perm and new coat with a fur collar in high school, a friend who had recently moved to America searched for the word to describe my new look. "You know," he said, "like a gangster's girlfriend." "A moll?" I asked, "A dame?" He looked confused, so finally I went there. "A hooker?" He denied that was the word, but I swear I detected the glimmer of understanding that comes when an idea finally matches a word you've heard but didn't understand until now.
And so no small amount of preparation went into the exchange I shared with a Middle Eastern woman in the health and beauty section of Super Target this evening. I had gone there for razors, yes, but mostly for the air-conditioning. It was more than 90 degrees in my apartment, and I grasped at any excuse to get into the cool air of consumerism. Yet here was this woman, swathed in layers of cloth: a floor-length dress and long scarf that covered her hair and fell down her back. I sweat just looking past her at the shaving gel.
I caught her eye, and she held up a bottle of Veet and pointed to the illustration of smooth legs on the label. "Is this for whole body?" she asked. Here was my chance! My mind raced through all my English tutoring classes. "No," I said, shaking my head. Crap! I remembered that shaking your head means different things in different cultures. I pointed to the drawing. "Just legs."
The woman's shoulders sank, and she heaved a sigh. I noticed then that she was pregnant. "I need whole body hair off," she said, pleadingly. Okay, I was surprised to be having this conversation in Target, but that wasn't going to stop me from showing this woman the beauty of America. You want all the hair removed from your body? We've got something for that, I'm sure. I pulled bottle after bottle off the shelf and read the labels carefully. "No, this one is just for legs," I would say. She looked a little confused, so I touched my finger to my leg. "Only legs." She picked up another bottle and handed it to me.
Warning: do not use on face, head, breasts, or genitals. Bottle after bottle contained this warning. I shook my head at her, and she raised her eyebrows. "Not whole body." But she was after specific information. With each bottle I put back, she wanted more details, and I got the feeling that unless I told her she couldn't specifically use it on whatever part of her body she was concerned about, she would be sold. And I hated my tutoring instructor all the more, because I knew she was right; I would have to point.
I raised my head to my face. "No face." She gave me a dismissive look, so I went on. "No head," and I ran my fingers through my hair. Still she looked expectantly. "No...chest," I said, congratulating myself on the quick substitution of "chest" for "breast," though I had to gesture toward my chest all the same. "Uh-huh..." her eyes said.
I grew a little desperate. "Not whole body," I tried again. But my eyes fell on her enormous belly under all those drapes of clothing. We were talking about the application of chemicals to her body, and I decided that it was unfair to this hairy woman's unborn baby to allow my puritanical aversion to gesturing toward my crotch in public interfere with the clear communication of this product's warning label.
I glanced around me; the coast was relatively clear. There were two other women at the other end of the aisle. "You can't use it..." The woman's eager eyes followed my hand. "Not..." Her breath caught in her throat. And it suddenly occurred to me that I was going about this all wrong. All I had to do was point to every other part of my body and nod. "Toes: yes!" "Legs: yes!" "Arms: yes!" But as I formulated my new plan of attack, a Target employee reached between the woman and I to place an item on the shelf. The woman seized the opportunity, turning to the employee and thrusting a bottle of Veet before her eyes. "I need whole body hair off!" she said. The employee sighed. "You're, like, the sixth person to ask me that today."
Here was someone infinitely more qualified to deal with this woman's hair removal questions, so I quickly replaced the bottle on the shelf and slid quietly around the end cap and out of sight. There would be plenty of other opportunities, I assured myself, to connect across the barriers of language with interesting people from foreign lands. Anyway, I had to get home and shower, let my hair dry for an hour, blow-dry it, and fall asleep on my right side.
have a fragile sensibility.
When a girl's emergent,
probably it's urgent
you defer to her gentility, my lord."
-- Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
A friend of mine at work said something surprising to me this morning. "Your hair looks really nice today." We had passed each other in the hallway, and my hand instinctively went to my head. "Really?" I asked, genuinely surprised. I ran my fingers through the tangled mess. "Thanks." As we parted ways, my mind raced: "Quick, what did I do to my hair? Took a shower last night...let it dry for about an hour before taking the blow dryer to it...fell asleep on my right side..." I went into the bathroom and checked my look in the mirror.
I guess it did look kind of nice. And the Barber had shouted at me again. You'll recall, perhaps, that there is a barber shop on the next block over from my office. It faces the park across the street, where I had retreated this morning when it suddenly occurred to me that I couldn't look at my computer for one more second without clawing at the monitor. "Right. Time for a walk," I thought, and I headed out into the sweltering air. The man who had shouted at me as I walked home a few weeks ago was outside the shop again, this time in the middle of the morning.
"Hey!" he shouted. Hmm. He must work there. "Hey, hey!" He probably doesn't own the place; I can't imagine that the owner would shout at people like that from his place of business. "Yo! You! Hey!" He's probably a barber. "Hey! You!" Must be nice not to have to stare at a computer all day. "Hey!" At least there are trees between us this time.
Flattering as his cat calls are, I wondered if I should maybe wear a sports bra to work tomorrow, just in case I took another walk. But now my friend had introduced another possibility. I much preferred the idea that the barber's eye had been caught by my bouncing curls, so I considered his a professional endorsement and winked at my reflection before returning to my desk.
My hair has been a constant source of frustration. I've never been able to wrangle it into anything approaching a current style. In middle school, when my 634th attempt at constructing a lasting wall of bangs failed, I parted my hair down the middle and bought a pair of silver earrings in the shapes of little peace signs. "This Gulf War is just--well, it can't be good," I declared. "Peace, man."
My politics and my hair haven't really changed since then, though perhaps now there is less of a causal relationship between the two. Recently enraged over an email that was forwarded to me about the looming threat to the use of English in America, I glanced over the long list of addressees and felt the need to somehow balance the karmic scales. I enrolled in a class to train as an English tutor for recent immigrants and found myself in a room full of middle-aged do-gooders all gazing reverently at our instructor, who I despised within roughly ten seconds of her speaking.
She wrote her name on the white board at the front of the room but informed us that it would soon be changing, as she would be marrying a man I would come to picture as a large cat. That was the only way I could reconcile her engagement with the evidence before me. Any human man wouldn't have lasted with the wide eyes and the over-annunciating, the gesturing, and the constant reminders of her graduate degree in linguistics.
But, oh, how the rest of the class loved her. Imagine an Oprah audience as she interviews Deepak Chopra. Do you see them? With the knowing nods and the gentle "mm-hmm"s after every independent clause he speaks? There were four classes that were three hours long, with a 15-minute break every night just before the tip of my pencil reached my eyeball. I would spring from my chair and head to the soda machine down the hall. Without fail, someone would catch my stride down the long hallway. "Isn't she amazing?" they'd say. I quickly learned it was best not to hesitate the slightest bit in my answer. If I didn't produce a quick and hearty, "Absolutely!" there would be an inevitable, "Well, I would sure like to learn English from her; I can tell you that much," after which the devotee's pace would quicken and I'd be forced to wait behind them as they dawdled for a suspiciously long time in front of the Pepsi machine.
Much of the class concerned basic lessons in basic English that recent immigrants to this country would find very useful. It wasn't glamorous; that's for sure. There were lessons in how to read a phone bill, a prescription bottle, how to make an appointment at the doctor's office, the dentist, the barber. There were never any lessons that gave my prospective immigrant students the necessary vocabulary to construct effusive exclamations of gratitude: we were limited to ideas that could be communicated through gestures and pictures, and there were no pictures to go along with phrases like "word bringer," "she who shares meaning," or "there are many English words, and while you have taught me more of them than I ever dreamed possible, I do not now--nor will I ever--have the words to express my thanks."
No, the most we could reasonably hope for by way of communication largely involved pointing. "Does your arm hurt?" the instructor asked in one demonstration about a hypothetical visit to the doctor. In this scenario, we were supposed to communicate that we had a headache. She pointed to her arm. "No," we all answered. "Does your leg hurt?" She touched her finger to her thigh. "No," we said, waiting. "Does your..." her hand moved toward her head, and the class' breath caught in their throats. "...head hurt?" "Yes!" we all cried.
I've always ended up being friendly with the people from faraway lands. They're just so much more interesting than me. "So do you dream in Japanese?" I'll ask. "Tell me again about the time the monkey slapped your friend," I'll say. "What's Spanish for 'stalker'?" When I simultaneously got a perm and new coat with a fur collar in high school, a friend who had recently moved to America searched for the word to describe my new look. "You know," he said, "like a gangster's girlfriend." "A moll?" I asked, "A dame?" He looked confused, so finally I went there. "A hooker?" He denied that was the word, but I swear I detected the glimmer of understanding that comes when an idea finally matches a word you've heard but didn't understand until now.
And so no small amount of preparation went into the exchange I shared with a Middle Eastern woman in the health and beauty section of Super Target this evening. I had gone there for razors, yes, but mostly for the air-conditioning. It was more than 90 degrees in my apartment, and I grasped at any excuse to get into the cool air of consumerism. Yet here was this woman, swathed in layers of cloth: a floor-length dress and long scarf that covered her hair and fell down her back. I sweat just looking past her at the shaving gel.
I caught her eye, and she held up a bottle of Veet and pointed to the illustration of smooth legs on the label. "Is this for whole body?" she asked. Here was my chance! My mind raced through all my English tutoring classes. "No," I said, shaking my head. Crap! I remembered that shaking your head means different things in different cultures. I pointed to the drawing. "Just legs."
The woman's shoulders sank, and she heaved a sigh. I noticed then that she was pregnant. "I need whole body hair off," she said, pleadingly. Okay, I was surprised to be having this conversation in Target, but that wasn't going to stop me from showing this woman the beauty of America. You want all the hair removed from your body? We've got something for that, I'm sure. I pulled bottle after bottle off the shelf and read the labels carefully. "No, this one is just for legs," I would say. She looked a little confused, so I touched my finger to my leg. "Only legs." She picked up another bottle and handed it to me.
Warning: do not use on face, head, breasts, or genitals. Bottle after bottle contained this warning. I shook my head at her, and she raised her eyebrows. "Not whole body." But she was after specific information. With each bottle I put back, she wanted more details, and I got the feeling that unless I told her she couldn't specifically use it on whatever part of her body she was concerned about, she would be sold. And I hated my tutoring instructor all the more, because I knew she was right; I would have to point.
I raised my head to my face. "No face." She gave me a dismissive look, so I went on. "No head," and I ran my fingers through my hair. Still she looked expectantly. "No...chest," I said, congratulating myself on the quick substitution of "chest" for "breast," though I had to gesture toward my chest all the same. "Uh-huh..." her eyes said.
I grew a little desperate. "Not whole body," I tried again. But my eyes fell on her enormous belly under all those drapes of clothing. We were talking about the application of chemicals to her body, and I decided that it was unfair to this hairy woman's unborn baby to allow my puritanical aversion to gesturing toward my crotch in public interfere with the clear communication of this product's warning label.
I glanced around me; the coast was relatively clear. There were two other women at the other end of the aisle. "You can't use it..." The woman's eager eyes followed my hand. "Not..." Her breath caught in her throat. And it suddenly occurred to me that I was going about this all wrong. All I had to do was point to every other part of my body and nod. "Toes: yes!" "Legs: yes!" "Arms: yes!" But as I formulated my new plan of attack, a Target employee reached between the woman and I to place an item on the shelf. The woman seized the opportunity, turning to the employee and thrusting a bottle of Veet before her eyes. "I need whole body hair off!" she said. The employee sighed. "You're, like, the sixth person to ask me that today."
Here was someone infinitely more qualified to deal with this woman's hair removal questions, so I quickly replaced the bottle on the shelf and slid quietly around the end cap and out of sight. There would be plenty of other opportunities, I assured myself, to connect across the barriers of language with interesting people from foreign lands. Anyway, I had to get home and shower, let my hair dry for an hour, blow-dry it, and fall asleep on my right side.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Thursday Night
You know, technology robs correspondence of certain tonal elements. For instance, the script in this message is very even and measured, and the backspace key allows me to erase any hint that my hand is anything but steady as I type this. If this were, say, 1908, I fear my shaking pen could produce nothing but characters only sometimes recognizable as letters in the English language. "Was something wrong with my pal Jess when she wrote this?" you might wonder in your old-timey inner voice. "I can't make hide nor hair of this chicken scratch, see." And you would be rightly interpreting my halting handwriting, for I have just had an encounter. . . WITH LIGHTNING.
So I was on my way home from watching the mind-blowing season finale of Lost at my friends' house, and it was raining pretty good. I'd seen some lightning earlier and even made some stupid comment about standing too close to the metal drainpipe on the side of their house. Oh, how blithely I snarked at mortality!
I drove through the rain squinting for the lines on the road, knowing they must be somewhere under all the reflected city light on the wet pavement. My mind raced with island theories and the first tentative thoughts I'd allow myself to think about the structure of Lost next season.
Fleetwood Mac's Say You Love Me was playing as I pulled up to my place and looked in vain for a parking spot. I think they must be sweeping the next street over tomorrow, because there are twice as many cars on my street tonight. So I circled around and decided to park by the back of the house and try my keys in the back door for the first time since I moved in.
I parked under a big tree and actually thought, "Oh, man, this is so one of those fateful decisions. I'm totally getting struck by lightning." I considered going around to the front door, but it was pouring rain, so I made a quick dash for the back door.
The chorus I'd cut off in the car continued in my head. "'Cause when the lovin' starts and the lights go down and there's not another livin' soul around..." I made it to the back gate and clasped the metal latch. And then every molecule of the air was positively rent with the loudest crack of thunder I've ever heard; at the exact same moment, the night was suddenly white. There was no counting the seconds between the lightning and thunder to determine the distance in miles from from the storm. It was closer than the idea of the word "Mississippi." When I tell you the ground shook, I mean it shook hard enough to set off a car alarm on the street.
"Holy shit!" I shouted, completely disregarding my earlier resolve to be a courteous neighbor and approach to the back entrance quietly. I shoved my metal key into the metal lock and hurried inside, where I stood in my kitchen and shook for a minute. Eventually, I put one foot in front of the other and went to my couch, where I sat and shook for a minute.
My ears have just stopped ringing, and one thing is clear to me tonight: we never know how long we have on Earth. We do, however, know that there are only two more seasons of Lost. Do you know how much that would have sucked if I had gotten struck by fucking lightning before finding out what the hell is going on with that island?
So I was on my way home from watching the mind-blowing season finale of Lost at my friends' house, and it was raining pretty good. I'd seen some lightning earlier and even made some stupid comment about standing too close to the metal drainpipe on the side of their house. Oh, how blithely I snarked at mortality!
I drove through the rain squinting for the lines on the road, knowing they must be somewhere under all the reflected city light on the wet pavement. My mind raced with island theories and the first tentative thoughts I'd allow myself to think about the structure of Lost next season.
Fleetwood Mac's Say You Love Me was playing as I pulled up to my place and looked in vain for a parking spot. I think they must be sweeping the next street over tomorrow, because there are twice as many cars on my street tonight. So I circled around and decided to park by the back of the house and try my keys in the back door for the first time since I moved in.
I parked under a big tree and actually thought, "Oh, man, this is so one of those fateful decisions. I'm totally getting struck by lightning." I considered going around to the front door, but it was pouring rain, so I made a quick dash for the back door.
The chorus I'd cut off in the car continued in my head. "'Cause when the lovin' starts and the lights go down and there's not another livin' soul around..." I made it to the back gate and clasped the metal latch. And then every molecule of the air was positively rent with the loudest crack of thunder I've ever heard; at the exact same moment, the night was suddenly white. There was no counting the seconds between the lightning and thunder to determine the distance in miles from from the storm. It was closer than the idea of the word "Mississippi." When I tell you the ground shook, I mean it shook hard enough to set off a car alarm on the street.
"Holy shit!" I shouted, completely disregarding my earlier resolve to be a courteous neighbor and approach to the back entrance quietly. I shoved my metal key into the metal lock and hurried inside, where I stood in my kitchen and shook for a minute. Eventually, I put one foot in front of the other and went to my couch, where I sat and shook for a minute.
My ears have just stopped ringing, and one thing is clear to me tonight: we never know how long we have on Earth. We do, however, know that there are only two more seasons of Lost. Do you know how much that would have sucked if I had gotten struck by fucking lightning before finding out what the hell is going on with that island?
Monday, May 12, 2008
Born to Hobble
Ouch.
Well, I made it. I offer as proof this video documentation (which is also proof of how little I value cleaning the lens of a video camera).
I've just returned from a hobbling trip to the medicine cabinet at the back of the house, where I popped three ibuprofen in anticipation of the soreness in my legs worsening as the night goes on. It'll be fine, I'm sure. But damn! I feel really old right now. Old and angry at Sir Mix-a-Lot, whose joint-smiting rhythms haunt me in my moment of victory.
As for the walk, I'd say it's a pretty good one for the city. It begins with concrete sidewalks in my St. Paul neighborhood. Then comes what I believe is called a "casual path" in hiking circles, where the sidewalk oddly ends and I am forced to walk in a dirt trench carved in the grass by generations of bikers and pedestrians whose voices still echo in the rustle of the wind through the leaves of the low-hanging trees: "What the hell? Where the fuck is the sidewalk?" Then comes the bridge, and over it a bike and pedestrian path all along the Mississippi, until I veer inland for about six blocks of a storied Minneapolis hippie neighborhood, where I work.
I have to be at work at 7:00 a.m., so I reasoned that I should leave at 6:00. Really, there wasn't a lot of reason involved, just my fuck-that attitude about leaving in the 5:00 a.m. hour. I managed to get out the door by 6:03, and I was sort of panicked that I would be late, so I walked really, really quickly all the way there, and I made it at exactly 7:00.
When I do anything requiring even the mildest physical exertion, my face turns roughly the color of a cartoon face that has become overheated due to, say, falling into a vat of boiling water or pounding one's cartoon hand with a hammer. So my first stop at work was the ladies' room, where I splashed some cold water on my face to no avail. I took my seat and attempted to enter my alphanumeric, case-sensitive log-in password with the sausage fingers I get after walking a few miles. I was on my third try when a coworker arrived and said good morning. He regarded my lobster face. "Did you get a bunch of sun this weekend?"
I managed to gasp a reply. "No...I walked...to work...really fast." And then he asked the question my knees were screaming: "What's wrong with your car?"
I learned today that when you are dreading a physically taxing commute home, the workday just flies by. Come 3:30, I slung my backpack over my shoulder, told the receptionist that she should look for me in the street if I don't show up tomorrow, and made for the river.
But as soon as I opened the outside door, I breathed springtime in deep, and I was happy to be alive and walking home. I was enjoying the sun and the perfect breeze and, yes, the playful shouts of children in Matthews Park. I know! It was like something out of a movie.
"'Sup?" Came a voice from the barber shop across the street. A man was sitting on a bench underneath the barber pole. I glanced around me and found no one else he could have been reasonably addressing. "Hi!" I shouted back with a wave.
"You coming from chorus?"
Huh? I was utterly unable to account for what would make him think I could sing. "What?" I shouted.
"You coming from class?"
Still confused, I hitched up my backpack and realized that it was what he was referring to.
"Oh, no! Work." I said with a jerk of my thumb to the west. Was this guy trying to gauge if I was legal?
"What you gonna do the rest of the day?"
I fumbled a little. I didn't know what I was going to do for the rest of the day, and for some reason, I felt I owed this guy an explanation that didn't involve any more hints about where I lived or worked. Stupidly, I looked to his example. "Probably just sit outside."
Damn it! Why did I say that? That's not anywhere near what I had planned on doing, but I felt pressured, and I couldn't very well have said, "Go home and lie on the couch until I regain feeling in my left leg.
"Well, you decide you want to sit out here, you just come on back anytime."
My spirits bolstered by shouted propositions from a shady guy on a bench in Minneapolis, I made it to the river in no time. I shed my sweatshirt and got my iPod out of my backpack. "Coming from class," I said to myself. "That's sweet."
There was only one thing I wanted to listen to, and it was all because I couldn't sleep last night. Probably against my best fiscal interest, I decided to get cable at my new place. When I couldn't sleep last night, of course, I turned to my friend cable. There are about 150 movies you can watch On Demand for free, ranging from Immortal Beloved to Demonlover to Blue Velvet. And while I enjoy a good movie as much as the next girl (I've got The African Queen on right now), last night I only had eyes for Eddie and the Cruisers II.
Which brings me to a little experiment you can try if you like. So Arcade Fire is brilliant. I loved Funeral and bought Neon Bible sight unseen. But listen to Keep the Car Running and tell me it isn't reminiscent of Eddie and the Cruisers' signature song, On the Dark Side. And, of course, Eddie's fake band is mimicking Bruce Springsteen and his E Street comrades, who give us the real deal: She's the One. Follow the links to see for yourself, dude. Bruce Springsteen is a freaking genius, and Born to Run carried me home today. Thanks, Bruce.
Well, I made it. I offer as proof this video documentation (which is also proof of how little I value cleaning the lens of a video camera).
I've just returned from a hobbling trip to the medicine cabinet at the back of the house, where I popped three ibuprofen in anticipation of the soreness in my legs worsening as the night goes on. It'll be fine, I'm sure. But damn! I feel really old right now. Old and angry at Sir Mix-a-Lot, whose joint-smiting rhythms haunt me in my moment of victory.
As for the walk, I'd say it's a pretty good one for the city. It begins with concrete sidewalks in my St. Paul neighborhood. Then comes what I believe is called a "casual path" in hiking circles, where the sidewalk oddly ends and I am forced to walk in a dirt trench carved in the grass by generations of bikers and pedestrians whose voices still echo in the rustle of the wind through the leaves of the low-hanging trees: "What the hell? Where the fuck is the sidewalk?" Then comes the bridge, and over it a bike and pedestrian path all along the Mississippi, until I veer inland for about six blocks of a storied Minneapolis hippie neighborhood, where I work.
I have to be at work at 7:00 a.m., so I reasoned that I should leave at 6:00. Really, there wasn't a lot of reason involved, just my fuck-that attitude about leaving in the 5:00 a.m. hour. I managed to get out the door by 6:03, and I was sort of panicked that I would be late, so I walked really, really quickly all the way there, and I made it at exactly 7:00.
When I do anything requiring even the mildest physical exertion, my face turns roughly the color of a cartoon face that has become overheated due to, say, falling into a vat of boiling water or pounding one's cartoon hand with a hammer. So my first stop at work was the ladies' room, where I splashed some cold water on my face to no avail. I took my seat and attempted to enter my alphanumeric, case-sensitive log-in password with the sausage fingers I get after walking a few miles. I was on my third try when a coworker arrived and said good morning. He regarded my lobster face. "Did you get a bunch of sun this weekend?"
I managed to gasp a reply. "No...I walked...to work...really fast." And then he asked the question my knees were screaming: "What's wrong with your car?"
I learned today that when you are dreading a physically taxing commute home, the workday just flies by. Come 3:30, I slung my backpack over my shoulder, told the receptionist that she should look for me in the street if I don't show up tomorrow, and made for the river.
But as soon as I opened the outside door, I breathed springtime in deep, and I was happy to be alive and walking home. I was enjoying the sun and the perfect breeze and, yes, the playful shouts of children in Matthews Park. I know! It was like something out of a movie.
"'Sup?" Came a voice from the barber shop across the street. A man was sitting on a bench underneath the barber pole. I glanced around me and found no one else he could have been reasonably addressing. "Hi!" I shouted back with a wave.
"You coming from chorus?"
Huh? I was utterly unable to account for what would make him think I could sing. "What?" I shouted.
"You coming from class?"
Still confused, I hitched up my backpack and realized that it was what he was referring to.
"Oh, no! Work." I said with a jerk of my thumb to the west. Was this guy trying to gauge if I was legal?
"What you gonna do the rest of the day?"
I fumbled a little. I didn't know what I was going to do for the rest of the day, and for some reason, I felt I owed this guy an explanation that didn't involve any more hints about where I lived or worked. Stupidly, I looked to his example. "Probably just sit outside."
Damn it! Why did I say that? That's not anywhere near what I had planned on doing, but I felt pressured, and I couldn't very well have said, "Go home and lie on the couch until I regain feeling in my left leg.
"Well, you decide you want to sit out here, you just come on back anytime."
My spirits bolstered by shouted propositions from a shady guy on a bench in Minneapolis, I made it to the river in no time. I shed my sweatshirt and got my iPod out of my backpack. "Coming from class," I said to myself. "That's sweet."
There was only one thing I wanted to listen to, and it was all because I couldn't sleep last night. Probably against my best fiscal interest, I decided to get cable at my new place. When I couldn't sleep last night, of course, I turned to my friend cable. There are about 150 movies you can watch On Demand for free, ranging from Immortal Beloved to Demonlover to Blue Velvet. And while I enjoy a good movie as much as the next girl (I've got The African Queen on right now), last night I only had eyes for Eddie and the Cruisers II.
Which brings me to a little experiment you can try if you like. So Arcade Fire is brilliant. I loved Funeral and bought Neon Bible sight unseen. But listen to Keep the Car Running and tell me it isn't reminiscent of Eddie and the Cruisers' signature song, On the Dark Side. And, of course, Eddie's fake band is mimicking Bruce Springsteen and his E Street comrades, who give us the real deal: She's the One. Follow the links to see for yourself, dude. Bruce Springsteen is a freaking genius, and Born to Run carried me home today. Thanks, Bruce.
By the Time You Read This...
...Well, I'll probably be at home, watching The Daily Show or something. But by the time this is posted, I'll be walking--wait for it--to work! There are those who say it can't be done, and at least one of them is sometimes me, but I am going from zero to six miles in one day, baby, and there ain't nothin' gonna break-a my stride.
Thus begins what I think I'll call my Summer of Doing Shit I Said I Would. Even if I only do it once before my genetically faulty knees buckle under the pressure of not being a jerk to the environment, that's fine.
I'll set this to post at 6:27 a.m. tomorrow, when I hope to be exactly halfway across the bridge over the Mighty Mississippi, which is exactly halfway to work. Here goes!
Thus begins what I think I'll call my Summer of Doing Shit I Said I Would. Even if I only do it once before my genetically faulty knees buckle under the pressure of not being a jerk to the environment, that's fine.
I'll set this to post at 6:27 a.m. tomorrow, when I hope to be exactly halfway across the bridge over the Mighty Mississippi, which is exactly halfway to work. Here goes!
Saturday, May 3, 2008
How will you make it on your own?
How will you make it on your own?
This world is awfully big, girl; this time you're all alone.
But it's time you started living.
It's time you let someone else do some giving.
Love is all around; no need to waste it.
You can have a town; why don't you take it?
You're gonna make it after all!
You're gonna make it after all!
--Paul Williams, "Love Is All Around" (theme from The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
Well, I tried to move away from you, blog. But you've followed me to my new apartment, so I guess I will tell you about how I've gone crazy living on my own.
Don't get me wrong; I really do think this was the right move for me. This is the first time I've lived without a roommate of any kind, and I'm learning a lot about the "real" world and the real me, who is apparently insane.
The layout of my new place is what the owner refers to as a "rail car" design, and I've also seen it referred to as a "shotgun" apartment. You enter through the living room, there is a set of French doors into the bedroom, then another door into the kitchen, and finally the bathroom is at the very back of the house. See, you move between the rooms much like you would move between the cars of a train...or much like buckshot would move unabated from the barrel of a shotgun in my living room through my bedroom and kitchen before lodging in the porcelain bowl of my toilet. (I do have a bathroom door; I'm just assuming it's open for metaphorical purposes.)
So it has worked out that my bed is about--let me measure--46 inches from my stove. And by way of a transition, I'd like to note that when I just went back there to measure, I smelled a faint odor of natural gas.
The same thing happened a week ago when I was about to go to bed. It was Sunday night, and I was exhausted from cleaning the old place on the heels of a week of marathon moving activities. Because of its proximity to my bed, I've been using the light above the stove as my night-night light...you know, the last one you turn off before you go to bed. When I went to douse the night-night light, I caught a whiff of gas from the stove. I turned off the light and laid down and immediately started to worry.
Are natural gas and carbon monoxide related? Should I be worried about gas filling my apartment and killing me in my sleep? When would anybody notice I was dead? I'm really tired, but is it because I'm physically exhausted or is it because I'm being slowly poisoned by the very air I'm breathing???
I thought that maybe I should crack a window. It was pretty cold outside, but piling on another blanket wouldn't be difficult, and it seemed a small price to pay for the chance to live to see another day. So I got up and opened a window in the kitchen and climbed back into bed. I visualized the gas moving toward the open window and realized that was silly. Why would the gas go all the way across the kitchen when it could just move 46 inches into my nostrils? I mean, it would have to fight NOT to get sucked into my lungs by my constant breathing.
I could just see the local news coverage: "A St. Paul woman was found dead in her awesome new apartment this morning, apparently poisoned by the very air she was breathing. Police on the scene say she had almost saved herself by opening a kitchen window. Had she been a little more motivated, she might have gotten out from under her four blankets and opened a bedroom window, letting fresh air into the room where she was sleeping, a mere 46 inches from her deadly stove, and giving herself a fighting chance at traveling more, writing a novel, and seeing what will surely be the exciting conclusion of the TV series "Battlestar Galactica," which may very well have been her goals, judging by the contents of her truly awesome new apartment in which she had barely begun to live. As it is, she leaves a project half done at work, but someone else can probably just finish that today."
Fine!
I got up and opened a bedroom window and listened to the real sounds of the city and the imaginary sounds of gas whooshing out of the window for another few hours until, finally, I fell asleep around 3:30 a.m. By that time, I figured that if the gas was going to kill me, it would have done so hours ago, and I allowed myself to drift off to the reassuring strains of: "You're gonna make it after all!"
And so I have turned into a crazy person. Maybe that will make for more interesting blog entries. Stay tuned...
This world is awfully big, girl; this time you're all alone.
But it's time you started living.
It's time you let someone else do some giving.
Love is all around; no need to waste it.
You can have a town; why don't you take it?
You're gonna make it after all!
You're gonna make it after all!
--Paul Williams, "Love Is All Around" (theme from The Mary Tyler Moore Show)
Well, I tried to move away from you, blog. But you've followed me to my new apartment, so I guess I will tell you about how I've gone crazy living on my own.
Don't get me wrong; I really do think this was the right move for me. This is the first time I've lived without a roommate of any kind, and I'm learning a lot about the "real" world and the real me, who is apparently insane.
The layout of my new place is what the owner refers to as a "rail car" design, and I've also seen it referred to as a "shotgun" apartment. You enter through the living room, there is a set of French doors into the bedroom, then another door into the kitchen, and finally the bathroom is at the very back of the house. See, you move between the rooms much like you would move between the cars of a train...or much like buckshot would move unabated from the barrel of a shotgun in my living room through my bedroom and kitchen before lodging in the porcelain bowl of my toilet. (I do have a bathroom door; I'm just assuming it's open for metaphorical purposes.)
So it has worked out that my bed is about--let me measure--46 inches from my stove. And by way of a transition, I'd like to note that when I just went back there to measure, I smelled a faint odor of natural gas.
The same thing happened a week ago when I was about to go to bed. It was Sunday night, and I was exhausted from cleaning the old place on the heels of a week of marathon moving activities. Because of its proximity to my bed, I've been using the light above the stove as my night-night light...you know, the last one you turn off before you go to bed. When I went to douse the night-night light, I caught a whiff of gas from the stove. I turned off the light and laid down and immediately started to worry.
Are natural gas and carbon monoxide related? Should I be worried about gas filling my apartment and killing me in my sleep? When would anybody notice I was dead? I'm really tired, but is it because I'm physically exhausted or is it because I'm being slowly poisoned by the very air I'm breathing???
I thought that maybe I should crack a window. It was pretty cold outside, but piling on another blanket wouldn't be difficult, and it seemed a small price to pay for the chance to live to see another day. So I got up and opened a window in the kitchen and climbed back into bed. I visualized the gas moving toward the open window and realized that was silly. Why would the gas go all the way across the kitchen when it could just move 46 inches into my nostrils? I mean, it would have to fight NOT to get sucked into my lungs by my constant breathing.
I could just see the local news coverage: "A St. Paul woman was found dead in her awesome new apartment this morning, apparently poisoned by the very air she was breathing. Police on the scene say she had almost saved herself by opening a kitchen window. Had she been a little more motivated, she might have gotten out from under her four blankets and opened a bedroom window, letting fresh air into the room where she was sleeping, a mere 46 inches from her deadly stove, and giving herself a fighting chance at traveling more, writing a novel, and seeing what will surely be the exciting conclusion of the TV series "Battlestar Galactica," which may very well have been her goals, judging by the contents of her truly awesome new apartment in which she had barely begun to live. As it is, she leaves a project half done at work, but someone else can probably just finish that today."
Fine!
I got up and opened a bedroom window and listened to the real sounds of the city and the imaginary sounds of gas whooshing out of the window for another few hours until, finally, I fell asleep around 3:30 a.m. By that time, I figured that if the gas was going to kill me, it would have done so hours ago, and I allowed myself to drift off to the reassuring strains of: "You're gonna make it after all!"
And so I have turned into a crazy person. Maybe that will make for more interesting blog entries. Stay tuned...
Friday, August 31, 2007
Moon Men and Earth Mothers: a Tale of Endless Love…and Hate…and Love…
“And, love,
I’ll be that fool for you,
I’m sure.
You know I don’t mind.
Oh, you know I don’t mind.
And, yes, you’ll be the only one,
‘cause no one can deny
this love I have inside.
And I’ll give it all to you,
my love, my love, my love,
my endless love.”
--Lionel Richie and Diana Ross
I’m standing in the self-checkout lane at Cub. Because this is the Cub on University Avenue in St. Paul, two of the registers are covered with quickly written magic marker signs that read “Out of Order.” This leaves two open registers. At one, of course, a man is having trouble entering the weight of the produce he’s buying. At the other, a woman is fidgeting with a large stack of coupons. Clearly, it would have been much faster for these people to just go through the express lane and let the professionals handle the registers.
But there’s something appealing to a certain group of people, of whom I am one, about the self-check-out lane at Cub. Here you can buy whatever you want without all the hassle of human interaction. In some small way, you are making a statement about your fierce independence. So self-reliant are you that you’ve taken on the responsibilities usually reserved for someone with a nametag and extensive knowledge of the price per pound of produce. “See?” you tell yourself once you’ve quieted the electronic voice telling you to remove that “unexpected item” from the bagging area. “I can do this myself. I don’t need anyone else.”
But even as I stood waiting for my turn to prove my independence, Lionel Richie and Diana Ross crooned over the store’s loudspeaker, professing their eternal devotion, their deep and abiding need for one another, their endless love. And all at once, the epic story of man and woman—of humankind—crushed in on me. It had been screaming at me since I left the house, but until now, I hadn’t really heard.
I had decided to bring my roommate’s dog with me for a late-night run the store. Before getting in the car, I walked her down to the end of the block. As we approached the corner, a car parked on St. Clair pulled a U-ey in what I would call a pretty urgent manner. There were no other cars on the street, so I wasn’t sure what the woman driver’s hurry was until a man’s voice shouted from a window in one of the upper stories of the apartment building across the street, “Fuck you, bitch!”
His voice was so angry, so loud; it absolutely shattered the calm night air. As a pickup truck loaded with what was probably the woman’s share of the household furniture followed after her speeding car, I scanned the lighted windows of the apartment building for the heartbroken man’s silhouette. Also, I scanned for the silhouette of the heartbroken man’s gun. Finding neither, I quickly moved from my hiding place behind an annoyingly small tree and double-timed it to my car down the block.
The man’s wrathful cry was still ringing in my ears as I waited for oncoming traffic to slow so I could turn left onto University Avenue. The light changed, and a white pickup truck that now had the green light moved impatiently into the intersection and made as if to hit my car. For the second time in five minutes, a man’s voice rang angrily through the night, but this time, the intended targets were my own delicate female ears. “Asshole!” he yelled.
I don’t know if I was more surprised to be thus treated or to have the wrongly gendered “asshole” applied to me. I wanted to set the record straight, to let him hear my woman’s voice and alert him of his faux pas. To my frustration, all that came to me was, “Shut up!” Too late, I thought to add a more gender-appropriate curse than his and shouted, “Bastard!” but he was gone, already speeding off in the opposite direction.
“What is wrong with the men in this city tonight?” I wondered aloud to the dog in the backseat. She looked back at me blankly, perplexed and utterly without an answer.
I had an odd list of things to pick up at Cub: cookie dough, a barrette for my increasingly unruly hair, and bread. I made for the health-and-beauty section of the store and found it nearly deserted. There was only one other person within a five-aisle radius, and it was a man. At first, I’d been surprised to see a guy in this section, but any uneasiness I might have felt at entering this secluded corner of the store at night was quelled when I saw that he was examining the nail-care products. “Phew,” I said to myself. “It’s just a harmless metrosexual.”
I found the aisle with hair accessories and noticed out of the corner of my eye that the man was walking slowly towards me. I got in my defensive stance and prepared to scurry around the end cap if he got any closer. I was especially concerned to realize that he seemed to be whispering to himself. I grabbed my barrettes and glanced up to plan my escape route. It was then I noticed a cord trailing from his ear to his pocket. He was not talking to himself about the various brands of lady shavers but to someone on the other end of the phone. His voice was soft and appeasing: “They’ve got a three-pack on sale, baby.” The marionette string that was his phone cord twitched, and his arms moved for nail polish remover, for conditioner and razors not of is own volition but in direct response to the whispered commands of a woman he loved.
My heart was softened a bit by the scene of a man running unmanly errands for his special lady. I had nearly forgotten all the shouting and swearing I’d heard tonight as I picked up the cookie dough and made for the bread aisle. I snagged a loaf of the cheapest wheat and noticed a small piece of cardboard on the nearly empty shelf. On one side was an ink drawing depicting the familiar pattern of a skull and crossbones, but where the skull should have been, the artist had drawn a heart with eyes that were crying. A similar figure appeared on the back of the cardboard, perhaps an earlier draft of the emblem, along with a crude drawing of a cloud and several lightning bolts.
“Hmm,” I thought as I headed toward the self-checkout lanes.
Several minutes later, still waiting for the man with his produce and the woman with her coupons to figure out the machines, I took a deep breath to avoid strangling them. In my newly calm state, I became aware of the music playing over the store’s sound system.
Lionel Richie sings, “My love, there’s only you in my life, the only thing that’s bright,” and I think of the moon. Tonight it’s low and waning. As I was parking my car in the grocery store’s lot, I’d noticed its pale form hanging dejectedly over Herberger’s. It’s two nights since the moon was full, and now it looks like someone took a lady shaver to its right side. The Man in the Moon will lose more and more of his light to the black of the night sky, and he seems to know it.
Diana Ross’ voice seems placating to me now, offering assurances of her love in irresistibly sweet tones, singing over Lionel’s lines with a soft urgency. Diana, goddess of the hunt and of the moon, reassures her man: “You’re every breath that I take. You’re every step I make.”
I thought of the woman speeding away from the apartment building on my street, the end of romance breaking the night with a disembodied curse from above. Was it the waning moon shouting after her from its low perch in the sky? “Go on, leave! And take that sliver of light off my right side with you! Fuck you, bitch!”
The squeal of tires, and my mind morphs her dark hatchback into a white pickup speeding off into the night. Had the man heard me shout my lame “Shut up…bastard”? Did he feel bad about calling me an asshole? Probably not. Had he wished he called me a bitch? Maybe.
And I wonder to myself if the man in the health-and-beauty section has moved on to the feminine hygiene products yet. Is there a pillow-soft voice whispering directly into his ear about a preferred brand of tampons?
Love is a treacherous thing, it seems to me. The mystery bread-aisle artist had captured the sentiment so simply, so eloquently in the skull-and-crying-heart drawing.
“And your eyes, your eyes, your eyes, tell me how much you care.” Lionel and Diana are working their way to the song’s climactic declaration of endless love, and all the events of the night press upon me in a fleeting glimpse and only marginal understanding of the epic struggle, the eternally rocky relationship between men and women. And suddenly I think of the lightning in the heart-and-crossbones drawing, the violence with which the sky seeks electrical balance with the earth.
There is something in the air tonight between the men and women of St. Paul, all toiling under the waning moon. I know I must do something on behalf of my sex, a small gesture at reconciliation. Some human interaction might be required. For this moment in time, I will have to abandon my independence and the self-checkout lane. I see that there are two express lanes open, one with a female cashier, one with a male. I make for the lane with the man at the register.
He rings up my three items, and I slide my credit card through the machine. A sign above the man reads that credit card transactions for purchases below $25 don’t require a signature. But this might be my only chance to communicate the apologies of my sex for our role in the lunacy of the evening, to reassure this man that, like Diana, we all “can’t resist your charms.” So I pick up the fake pen attached to the credit card machine and pretend to get ready to sign.
“Oh, you don’t have to sign,” the cashier says as if he’s doing me a huge favor. I look him straight in the eye and channel Diana Ross for my one word reply that contains the whole of human interaction: “Awesome.”
I’ll be that fool for you,
I’m sure.
You know I don’t mind.
Oh, you know I don’t mind.
And, yes, you’ll be the only one,
‘cause no one can deny
this love I have inside.
And I’ll give it all to you,
my love, my love, my love,
my endless love.”
--Lionel Richie and Diana Ross
I’m standing in the self-checkout lane at Cub. Because this is the Cub on University Avenue in St. Paul, two of the registers are covered with quickly written magic marker signs that read “Out of Order.” This leaves two open registers. At one, of course, a man is having trouble entering the weight of the produce he’s buying. At the other, a woman is fidgeting with a large stack of coupons. Clearly, it would have been much faster for these people to just go through the express lane and let the professionals handle the registers.
But there’s something appealing to a certain group of people, of whom I am one, about the self-check-out lane at Cub. Here you can buy whatever you want without all the hassle of human interaction. In some small way, you are making a statement about your fierce independence. So self-reliant are you that you’ve taken on the responsibilities usually reserved for someone with a nametag and extensive knowledge of the price per pound of produce. “See?” you tell yourself once you’ve quieted the electronic voice telling you to remove that “unexpected item” from the bagging area. “I can do this myself. I don’t need anyone else.”
But even as I stood waiting for my turn to prove my independence, Lionel Richie and Diana Ross crooned over the store’s loudspeaker, professing their eternal devotion, their deep and abiding need for one another, their endless love. And all at once, the epic story of man and woman—of humankind—crushed in on me. It had been screaming at me since I left the house, but until now, I hadn’t really heard.
I had decided to bring my roommate’s dog with me for a late-night run the store. Before getting in the car, I walked her down to the end of the block. As we approached the corner, a car parked on St. Clair pulled a U-ey in what I would call a pretty urgent manner. There were no other cars on the street, so I wasn’t sure what the woman driver’s hurry was until a man’s voice shouted from a window in one of the upper stories of the apartment building across the street, “Fuck you, bitch!”
His voice was so angry, so loud; it absolutely shattered the calm night air. As a pickup truck loaded with what was probably the woman’s share of the household furniture followed after her speeding car, I scanned the lighted windows of the apartment building for the heartbroken man’s silhouette. Also, I scanned for the silhouette of the heartbroken man’s gun. Finding neither, I quickly moved from my hiding place behind an annoyingly small tree and double-timed it to my car down the block.
The man’s wrathful cry was still ringing in my ears as I waited for oncoming traffic to slow so I could turn left onto University Avenue. The light changed, and a white pickup truck that now had the green light moved impatiently into the intersection and made as if to hit my car. For the second time in five minutes, a man’s voice rang angrily through the night, but this time, the intended targets were my own delicate female ears. “Asshole!” he yelled.
I don’t know if I was more surprised to be thus treated or to have the wrongly gendered “asshole” applied to me. I wanted to set the record straight, to let him hear my woman’s voice and alert him of his faux pas. To my frustration, all that came to me was, “Shut up!” Too late, I thought to add a more gender-appropriate curse than his and shouted, “Bastard!” but he was gone, already speeding off in the opposite direction.
“What is wrong with the men in this city tonight?” I wondered aloud to the dog in the backseat. She looked back at me blankly, perplexed and utterly without an answer.
I had an odd list of things to pick up at Cub: cookie dough, a barrette for my increasingly unruly hair, and bread. I made for the health-and-beauty section of the store and found it nearly deserted. There was only one other person within a five-aisle radius, and it was a man. At first, I’d been surprised to see a guy in this section, but any uneasiness I might have felt at entering this secluded corner of the store at night was quelled when I saw that he was examining the nail-care products. “Phew,” I said to myself. “It’s just a harmless metrosexual.”
I found the aisle with hair accessories and noticed out of the corner of my eye that the man was walking slowly towards me. I got in my defensive stance and prepared to scurry around the end cap if he got any closer. I was especially concerned to realize that he seemed to be whispering to himself. I grabbed my barrettes and glanced up to plan my escape route. It was then I noticed a cord trailing from his ear to his pocket. He was not talking to himself about the various brands of lady shavers but to someone on the other end of the phone. His voice was soft and appeasing: “They’ve got a three-pack on sale, baby.” The marionette string that was his phone cord twitched, and his arms moved for nail polish remover, for conditioner and razors not of is own volition but in direct response to the whispered commands of a woman he loved.
My heart was softened a bit by the scene of a man running unmanly errands for his special lady. I had nearly forgotten all the shouting and swearing I’d heard tonight as I picked up the cookie dough and made for the bread aisle. I snagged a loaf of the cheapest wheat and noticed a small piece of cardboard on the nearly empty shelf. On one side was an ink drawing depicting the familiar pattern of a skull and crossbones, but where the skull should have been, the artist had drawn a heart with eyes that were crying. A similar figure appeared on the back of the cardboard, perhaps an earlier draft of the emblem, along with a crude drawing of a cloud and several lightning bolts.
“Hmm,” I thought as I headed toward the self-checkout lanes.
Several minutes later, still waiting for the man with his produce and the woman with her coupons to figure out the machines, I took a deep breath to avoid strangling them. In my newly calm state, I became aware of the music playing over the store’s sound system.
Lionel Richie sings, “My love, there’s only you in my life, the only thing that’s bright,” and I think of the moon. Tonight it’s low and waning. As I was parking my car in the grocery store’s lot, I’d noticed its pale form hanging dejectedly over Herberger’s. It’s two nights since the moon was full, and now it looks like someone took a lady shaver to its right side. The Man in the Moon will lose more and more of his light to the black of the night sky, and he seems to know it.
Diana Ross’ voice seems placating to me now, offering assurances of her love in irresistibly sweet tones, singing over Lionel’s lines with a soft urgency. Diana, goddess of the hunt and of the moon, reassures her man: “You’re every breath that I take. You’re every step I make.”
I thought of the woman speeding away from the apartment building on my street, the end of romance breaking the night with a disembodied curse from above. Was it the waning moon shouting after her from its low perch in the sky? “Go on, leave! And take that sliver of light off my right side with you! Fuck you, bitch!”
The squeal of tires, and my mind morphs her dark hatchback into a white pickup speeding off into the night. Had the man heard me shout my lame “Shut up…bastard”? Did he feel bad about calling me an asshole? Probably not. Had he wished he called me a bitch? Maybe.
And I wonder to myself if the man in the health-and-beauty section has moved on to the feminine hygiene products yet. Is there a pillow-soft voice whispering directly into his ear about a preferred brand of tampons?
Love is a treacherous thing, it seems to me. The mystery bread-aisle artist had captured the sentiment so simply, so eloquently in the skull-and-crying-heart drawing.
“And your eyes, your eyes, your eyes, tell me how much you care.” Lionel and Diana are working their way to the song’s climactic declaration of endless love, and all the events of the night press upon me in a fleeting glimpse and only marginal understanding of the epic struggle, the eternally rocky relationship between men and women. And suddenly I think of the lightning in the heart-and-crossbones drawing, the violence with which the sky seeks electrical balance with the earth.
There is something in the air tonight between the men and women of St. Paul, all toiling under the waning moon. I know I must do something on behalf of my sex, a small gesture at reconciliation. Some human interaction might be required. For this moment in time, I will have to abandon my independence and the self-checkout lane. I see that there are two express lanes open, one with a female cashier, one with a male. I make for the lane with the man at the register.
He rings up my three items, and I slide my credit card through the machine. A sign above the man reads that credit card transactions for purchases below $25 don’t require a signature. But this might be my only chance to communicate the apologies of my sex for our role in the lunacy of the evening, to reassure this man that, like Diana, we all “can’t resist your charms.” So I pick up the fake pen attached to the credit card machine and pretend to get ready to sign.
“Oh, you don’t have to sign,” the cashier says as if he’s doing me a huge favor. I look him straight in the eye and channel Diana Ross for my one word reply that contains the whole of human interaction: “Awesome.”
Monday, August 13, 2007
Heights of Joy
(a companion blog entry to Depths of Despair)
Holy crap! Breaking news!
I was just walking my roommate's dog down St. Clair Avenue. The wind is sort of high in St. Paul today, and it's rush hour, so there were a lot of cars on the street. With all the wind and the cars rushing, I didn't notice any shouting when I left the building. But on the way back, over the traffic and the fine summer breeze, I heard a resounding "THREE!"
The Tourettes Baller just made it to three!
This is seriously the first time I've ever heard him get that high, and I've been listening to his counting and his curses for over a year. I haven't heard any shouting since, so I have to wonder if he's just reached his life-long goal and decided to go out while he was on top--you know, like Seinfeld.
Oh, I wish I could have seen it, but the basketball court is sunken. And I have to admit, the mystery associated with the Baller is a large part of his appeal to my imagination. If I had just charged over there, I would have been like a little girl hearing a commotion on Christmas Eve and running downstairs to congratulate Santa on finding her house: I don't want to risk the shattering of any illusions; nor do I want to have to pretend not to know the truth for the benefit of the other kids in the neighborhood.
Plus, I'm not sure the Tourettes Baller is entirely aware of how far his voice carries or how many people are invested in his progress on the basketball court. I wouldn't want him to have the added pressure of knowing he had a far-reaching audience. It might also be--I don't know--disconcerting to him if a strange woman with crazy wind-blown hair and a bag of dog shit hurried over to him shouting, "Way to go, Baller! I knew you could do it."
Holy crap! Breaking news!
I was just walking my roommate's dog down St. Clair Avenue. The wind is sort of high in St. Paul today, and it's rush hour, so there were a lot of cars on the street. With all the wind and the cars rushing, I didn't notice any shouting when I left the building. But on the way back, over the traffic and the fine summer breeze, I heard a resounding "THREE!"
The Tourettes Baller just made it to three!
This is seriously the first time I've ever heard him get that high, and I've been listening to his counting and his curses for over a year. I haven't heard any shouting since, so I have to wonder if he's just reached his life-long goal and decided to go out while he was on top--you know, like Seinfeld.
Oh, I wish I could have seen it, but the basketball court is sunken. And I have to admit, the mystery associated with the Baller is a large part of his appeal to my imagination. If I had just charged over there, I would have been like a little girl hearing a commotion on Christmas Eve and running downstairs to congratulate Santa on finding her house: I don't want to risk the shattering of any illusions; nor do I want to have to pretend not to know the truth for the benefit of the other kids in the neighborhood.
Plus, I'm not sure the Tourettes Baller is entirely aware of how far his voice carries or how many people are invested in his progress on the basketball court. I wouldn't want him to have the added pressure of knowing he had a far-reaching audience. It might also be--I don't know--disconcerting to him if a strange woman with crazy wind-blown hair and a bag of dog shit hurried over to him shouting, "Way to go, Baller! I knew you could do it."
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Writing on the Walls of History
Oh, my god! I just totally saw the president's decoy helicopter leaving Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport. I rolled out of bed around 11:00 this morning and turned on the TV to the sounds of a reporter on the second-to-worst local news apologizing for causing confusion as to whether or not Marine One had just landed at the airport after the president's visit to Minneapolis. "No, this one. It's this one. Here it comes. Yeah, this one is definitely Marine One." I got the feeling her in-studio counterparts had reason to doubt her assertions. "No, the other ones didn't have the white top, but this one does. Yeah, this is the president's helicopter."
The airport is just south of my apartment, and I could hear helicopter blades whirring ;) outside. So, keen for a chance to shake my fist at something presidential, I hurried to my front windows and caught sight of a single black helicopter in the distance. I aimed my fist pump in the direction of the airport and shouted, "Yeah, you better leave!" And then I watched George Bush oblige on TV.
I view my fist-shaking from St. Paul as a continuation of the traditions upon which this city was founded. Like a baby who narrowly escapes being named after crazy Uncle No Nose, St. Paul is lucky to have such a respectable, even holy, moniker, considering it was basically founded by a one-eyed fur trader turned moonshiner known for his "intemperate and licentious" behavior. Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant set up his still in what is now downtown St. Paul only after being kicked out of the area around Fort Snelling. Seems the respectable military types in charge of bringing civilization to the upper Midwest didn't approve of the squatters' camp around the fort, and especially of Pierre and his whiskey.
So Pierre packed up his still, popped in his false eye, and moved up the river to a place called Fountain Cave. But it apparently wasn't far enough away from the outpost. The officers perched up in their fort on the cliffs of the Mississippi didn't want the blemish of Pig's Eye within their sight. Pierre was forced even farther upriver, and St. Paul's skyline now rises from the place where some ragtag squatters blindly followed a one-eyed coot and his whiskey still. And for a long time, the area was named for crazy Uncle Pig's Eye.
Curious about the origins of this city, I visited historic Fort Snelling on Memorial Day this year. There was to be a flag raising ceremony and historical reenactments throughout the day. As I mentioned earlier, I am a vegetarian who loves The Deadliest Catch. Well, I'm also a pacifist who likes war stories. And although Fort Snelling never saw any kind of action, it's chock full of military history, and the promise of reenactors tromping around, using words like "musket" and "nigh on" in conversation was irresistible to me. I made my little brother go with me, you know, for his historical edification. Really, I needed a young boy to point to if I was called upon to say, "No, I'm not here alone. You know boys and guns. He just loves this stuff."
We arrived just as they were raising the new flag on its recently relocated pole, now in its original 19th-century position. A man dressed in a uniform and holding a spear welcomed us through the sally port gate. I turned to my little brother. "Here's your gate, Sally."
Already resentful at being dragged here, he didn't look at me. "Shut up," he said, his eyes on the sidewalk leading to the fort.
The uniformed man began, "They're about to fire a"-- BOOM! Cannon fire split the still May morning, my heart jumped, and my arms flailed. I looked down at my little brother, who regarded my expression with the look of a prisoner suddenly resigned to his sentence of death by boredom.
So this was the outpost of civilization on the upper Mississippi? It's an impressive collection of neatly ordered brick buildings high above the river. The area surrounding it, where the squatters once sang their drunken songs up to the disapproving fort, is now a state park with bike paths and hiking trails. Airplanes fly low and loud on their approach to the airport, which is about three miles away.
My brother and I made our way from building to building, watching demonstrations by washerwomen and blacksmiths. A man who said he was Josiah Snelling and produced as proof a bicorn hat gave a demonstration of 19th-century manners for a roomful of children and their nerdy parents. His house was the most well-appointed building in the fort, and I imagined the other soldiers in their barracks casting the occasional jealous eye at their colonel's fancy window panes and personal waste buckets.
Colonel Snelling had all sorts of rules regarding interaction between men and women: how to address one's wife, how to lead one's wife by the arm, how to walk up and down stairs in a manner most likely to avoid impaling one's wife on one's sword.
The signs on the walls of historic Fort Snelling are also telling of a period in history governed by a strict adherence to social rules, even in the remotest areas of untamed Minnesota. One framed sheet of paper in the hospital building bears a warning in Old English: "No person fhall fpit on the floor or walls of the hofpital, but fhall endeavor to keep the ward as clean as poffible." I was imagining the self-hating lisper who wrote this message when my little brother's voice came through the centuries.
"Can we go now?"
We made our way back to the sally port gate and arrived in time to hear the guard chastising a bicyclist. "No bikes on the sidewalk!" he shouted. The bicyclist eyed the man's spear and decided it wasn't worth the fight. He slung his bike over his shoulder and walked down the gravel path toward the state park's bike trails.
I like to think he continued down the trail that runs along the river, all the way past Fountain Cave and to Lowertown St. Paul. He stops in the shadow of Galtier Plaza, in the city once known as Pig's Eye, spots the planes circling the airport, and shakes his fist in the direction of Fort Snelling.
The airport is just south of my apartment, and I could hear helicopter blades whirring ;) outside. So, keen for a chance to shake my fist at something presidential, I hurried to my front windows and caught sight of a single black helicopter in the distance. I aimed my fist pump in the direction of the airport and shouted, "Yeah, you better leave!" And then I watched George Bush oblige on TV.
I view my fist-shaking from St. Paul as a continuation of the traditions upon which this city was founded. Like a baby who narrowly escapes being named after crazy Uncle No Nose, St. Paul is lucky to have such a respectable, even holy, moniker, considering it was basically founded by a one-eyed fur trader turned moonshiner known for his "intemperate and licentious" behavior. Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant set up his still in what is now downtown St. Paul only after being kicked out of the area around Fort Snelling. Seems the respectable military types in charge of bringing civilization to the upper Midwest didn't approve of the squatters' camp around the fort, and especially of Pierre and his whiskey.
So Pierre packed up his still, popped in his false eye, and moved up the river to a place called Fountain Cave. But it apparently wasn't far enough away from the outpost. The officers perched up in their fort on the cliffs of the Mississippi didn't want the blemish of Pig's Eye within their sight. Pierre was forced even farther upriver, and St. Paul's skyline now rises from the place where some ragtag squatters blindly followed a one-eyed coot and his whiskey still. And for a long time, the area was named for crazy Uncle Pig's Eye.
Curious about the origins of this city, I visited historic Fort Snelling on Memorial Day this year. There was to be a flag raising ceremony and historical reenactments throughout the day. As I mentioned earlier, I am a vegetarian who loves The Deadliest Catch. Well, I'm also a pacifist who likes war stories. And although Fort Snelling never saw any kind of action, it's chock full of military history, and the promise of reenactors tromping around, using words like "musket" and "nigh on" in conversation was irresistible to me. I made my little brother go with me, you know, for his historical edification. Really, I needed a young boy to point to if I was called upon to say, "No, I'm not here alone. You know boys and guns. He just loves this stuff."
We arrived just as they were raising the new flag on its recently relocated pole, now in its original 19th-century position. A man dressed in a uniform and holding a spear welcomed us through the sally port gate. I turned to my little brother. "Here's your gate, Sally."
Already resentful at being dragged here, he didn't look at me. "Shut up," he said, his eyes on the sidewalk leading to the fort.
The uniformed man began, "They're about to fire a"-- BOOM! Cannon fire split the still May morning, my heart jumped, and my arms flailed. I looked down at my little brother, who regarded my expression with the look of a prisoner suddenly resigned to his sentence of death by boredom.
So this was the outpost of civilization on the upper Mississippi? It's an impressive collection of neatly ordered brick buildings high above the river. The area surrounding it, where the squatters once sang their drunken songs up to the disapproving fort, is now a state park with bike paths and hiking trails. Airplanes fly low and loud on their approach to the airport, which is about three miles away.
My brother and I made our way from building to building, watching demonstrations by washerwomen and blacksmiths. A man who said he was Josiah Snelling and produced as proof a bicorn hat gave a demonstration of 19th-century manners for a roomful of children and their nerdy parents. His house was the most well-appointed building in the fort, and I imagined the other soldiers in their barracks casting the occasional jealous eye at their colonel's fancy window panes and personal waste buckets.
Colonel Snelling had all sorts of rules regarding interaction between men and women: how to address one's wife, how to lead one's wife by the arm, how to walk up and down stairs in a manner most likely to avoid impaling one's wife on one's sword.
The signs on the walls of historic Fort Snelling are also telling of a period in history governed by a strict adherence to social rules, even in the remotest areas of untamed Minnesota. One framed sheet of paper in the hospital building bears a warning in Old English: "No person fhall fpit on the floor or walls of the hofpital, but fhall endeavor to keep the ward as clean as poffible." I was imagining the self-hating lisper who wrote this message when my little brother's voice came through the centuries.
"Can we go now?"
We made our way back to the sally port gate and arrived in time to hear the guard chastising a bicyclist. "No bikes on the sidewalk!" he shouted. The bicyclist eyed the man's spear and decided it wasn't worth the fight. He slung his bike over his shoulder and walked down the gravel path toward the state park's bike trails.
I like to think he continued down the trail that runs along the river, all the way past Fountain Cave and to Lowertown St. Paul. He stops in the shadow of Galtier Plaza, in the city once known as Pig's Eye, spots the planes circling the airport, and shakes his fist in the direction of Fort Snelling.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Booblog
Warning: the following is rated PG-13 and may not be suitable for some audiences. Parental discretion is advised.
Recently I realized that, were my life a movie, it would be rated PG-13 for language and possibly "intense situations." I wouldn't get an R rating; that's for sure. I don't swear much, and the naughtiest thing that's happened to me lately was being felt up by a two-year-old at a tea party on my front lawn.
The invitation to tea had been extended to my roommate and I by our ten-year-old downstairs neighbor. She and her mom and little sister have become something like a surrogate family to each of us, inviting us to birthday parties and piano recitals, borrowing kitchen items, and sending up portions of whatever they bake. The oldest girl is taking a summer finishing class--you know, where little ladies learn real manners--and had some sort of a test the next day.
So it was that we all came to be sitting on a blanket on the front lawn of our apartment building, a plastic tea set and plateful of cookies spread before us.
"Do tell us about finishing school, won't you? It's ever so interesting." I prompted, pinkie up as I sipped carbonated juice from a plastic teacup. We learned about how to properly hold your saucer and cup and how to signal when you shan't have any more tea (lay your upside-down spoon across the top of your cup, of course).
At one point, the middle-aged woman who lives in the other downstairs apartment came home and walked past our little spread. "Oh, a tea party, huh?" She was holding a styrofoam container of leftovers and told us there were buffalo wings inside. "I just love the hot stuff," she explained.
It's hard for me to look at this woman without thinking of a recent incident in which she answered the door, plastered and pants-less, after an evening of drunken shouting at no one. I'd finally knocked on her door sometime around midnight when the banging on the wall started to worry me.
"Are you okay in there?" I'd asked. "Do you think you could stop the banging? Because I have to get up for work in--"
"Honey," she'd slurred, flinging one hand out while the other struggled to pinch together the strained edges of a very small towel she'd wrapped around her waist, "I don't care what time you have to get up in the morning."
Now she cast a wary eye on her leftovers. "Sure doesn't help with my hot flashes, though. And we'll just see how much I love the hot stuff in the morning."
My young neighbor stirred her plastic spoon in her make-believe tea and searched for a ladylike response to talk of menopause and bowel movements. "Well, have a pleasant evening, won't you?"
"Sure."
As she walked into the building, I felt glad to be on the blanket with the family, an observer of crass behavior rather than a practitioner. A few months after we moved in, I scandalized the ten-year-old by saying "crap." Scandal has since proven to have a sliding scale, and it's slid quite a bit.
One Saturday, after working a few hours of overtime, I came home to a note from my roommate: "Margaritas in the freezer. Help yourself!" Perfect. I ate dinner and sipped--
Whoa, tequila! The ice and citrus flavor were footnotes to the liquor in this stuff, and who reads footnotes anyway? The dog watched as I sat alone at the table, each sip bringing a shudder and a puckered, cartoonish expression to my face.
"Bleh!" I said to the dog. "That's a strong drink!" I hadn't even drank 1/3 of the large glass I'd poured before I started feeling a little buzz. I sipped about half of the concoction and then, in what I considered a very wise and responsible move, poured the rest down the sink. It was one thing to have a little drink after work on a Saturday, but it was quite another to get boozed by myself at 4:00 in the afternoon.
What I needed was some fresh air, and what the dog needed was a walk. I put two and two together and congratulated myself at how unimpaired were my powers of reasoning as I fumbled for the dog's leash and a poop bag.
"Poop bag," I snickered.
The dog looked at me like I'd just stumbled out of a bar, pulled my keys out of my pocket, and said, "I'll take you home. My car's just over here." In the end, though, she was more interested in going outside than she was in judging me. She let me clasp the leash to her collar, and we headed down the stairs and outside.
My little neighbors were in the front yard and greeted me with their usual enthusiasm. "Let's play a game!" the oldest one said. By this time, I was a little drunk, and I readily agreed to a fairly straightforward game called "tell a funny story." I regarded my audience and decided bathroom humor was the way to go--and, man, was I right. They loved this stuff! I regaled them with my entire potty-story repertoire, the finale being a cautionary tale about the wrong way for a girl to pee in the woods.
"See?" I thought, congratulating myself on being fun and informative. "They can use this."
The buzz had started to wear off by the time their mother came to check on the girls. We were all rolling with laughter, and the toddler looked up and said, "Jess pants were down, and then she fell."
Somehow my camping story seemed less funny as I quickly repeated it for an adult audience--less funny, less educational, less appropriate for children. I resolved to watch my tongue around the little ones.
And I did. I was being really good for a long time, but there, where I least expected it, at a tea party emphasizing manners, my resolve to be proper was sorely tested. The youngest girl suddenly decided she wanted to sit on my lap, and I obliged, extending a polite invitation for her to take a seat on my knee.
Without so much as a "how do you do," the toddler dramatically hit my left boob and exclaimed "What is this?" I laughed a little and looked around at the other tea party attendants. Only her mother had an inkling of all the good manners about to be smashed to pieces. The little girl turned her attention to the right boob and tapped that one. "What are these?"
So great was her horror at her discovery that no one could ignore her screams this time. It was as if she had just stumbled upon a spaceship on her front lawn. "WHAT IS THIS?" she yelled tapping and hitting and genuinely astounded.
And we all laughed. Teacups were forgotten, half-chewed cookies spit out. Her mother shouted her apologies through her laughter.
"What are these?" A string of euphemisms went through my mind: boobs, tatas, knockers, hooters. None of them seemed to have the right shade of meaning for a 2 1/2 year old girl. "Ask your mom," I finally said. Somewhat at a loss over the scene she'd created, the little girl soon gave up her crass line of questioning and moved on to exploring the ant hills on the sidewalk.
My niche in this place seems clear to me now. I just have to find the right towel to keep by the door.
Recently I realized that, were my life a movie, it would be rated PG-13 for language and possibly "intense situations." I wouldn't get an R rating; that's for sure. I don't swear much, and the naughtiest thing that's happened to me lately was being felt up by a two-year-old at a tea party on my front lawn.
The invitation to tea had been extended to my roommate and I by our ten-year-old downstairs neighbor. She and her mom and little sister have become something like a surrogate family to each of us, inviting us to birthday parties and piano recitals, borrowing kitchen items, and sending up portions of whatever they bake. The oldest girl is taking a summer finishing class--you know, where little ladies learn real manners--and had some sort of a test the next day.
So it was that we all came to be sitting on a blanket on the front lawn of our apartment building, a plastic tea set and plateful of cookies spread before us.
"Do tell us about finishing school, won't you? It's ever so interesting." I prompted, pinkie up as I sipped carbonated juice from a plastic teacup. We learned about how to properly hold your saucer and cup and how to signal when you shan't have any more tea (lay your upside-down spoon across the top of your cup, of course).
At one point, the middle-aged woman who lives in the other downstairs apartment came home and walked past our little spread. "Oh, a tea party, huh?" She was holding a styrofoam container of leftovers and told us there were buffalo wings inside. "I just love the hot stuff," she explained.
It's hard for me to look at this woman without thinking of a recent incident in which she answered the door, plastered and pants-less, after an evening of drunken shouting at no one. I'd finally knocked on her door sometime around midnight when the banging on the wall started to worry me.
"Are you okay in there?" I'd asked. "Do you think you could stop the banging? Because I have to get up for work in--"
"Honey," she'd slurred, flinging one hand out while the other struggled to pinch together the strained edges of a very small towel she'd wrapped around her waist, "I don't care what time you have to get up in the morning."
Now she cast a wary eye on her leftovers. "Sure doesn't help with my hot flashes, though. And we'll just see how much I love the hot stuff in the morning."
My young neighbor stirred her plastic spoon in her make-believe tea and searched for a ladylike response to talk of menopause and bowel movements. "Well, have a pleasant evening, won't you?"
"Sure."
As she walked into the building, I felt glad to be on the blanket with the family, an observer of crass behavior rather than a practitioner. A few months after we moved in, I scandalized the ten-year-old by saying "crap." Scandal has since proven to have a sliding scale, and it's slid quite a bit.
One Saturday, after working a few hours of overtime, I came home to a note from my roommate: "Margaritas in the freezer. Help yourself!" Perfect. I ate dinner and sipped--
Whoa, tequila! The ice and citrus flavor were footnotes to the liquor in this stuff, and who reads footnotes anyway? The dog watched as I sat alone at the table, each sip bringing a shudder and a puckered, cartoonish expression to my face.
"Bleh!" I said to the dog. "That's a strong drink!" I hadn't even drank 1/3 of the large glass I'd poured before I started feeling a little buzz. I sipped about half of the concoction and then, in what I considered a very wise and responsible move, poured the rest down the sink. It was one thing to have a little drink after work on a Saturday, but it was quite another to get boozed by myself at 4:00 in the afternoon.
What I needed was some fresh air, and what the dog needed was a walk. I put two and two together and congratulated myself at how unimpaired were my powers of reasoning as I fumbled for the dog's leash and a poop bag.
"Poop bag," I snickered.
The dog looked at me like I'd just stumbled out of a bar, pulled my keys out of my pocket, and said, "I'll take you home. My car's just over here." In the end, though, she was more interested in going outside than she was in judging me. She let me clasp the leash to her collar, and we headed down the stairs and outside.
My little neighbors were in the front yard and greeted me with their usual enthusiasm. "Let's play a game!" the oldest one said. By this time, I was a little drunk, and I readily agreed to a fairly straightforward game called "tell a funny story." I regarded my audience and decided bathroom humor was the way to go--and, man, was I right. They loved this stuff! I regaled them with my entire potty-story repertoire, the finale being a cautionary tale about the wrong way for a girl to pee in the woods.
"See?" I thought, congratulating myself on being fun and informative. "They can use this."
The buzz had started to wear off by the time their mother came to check on the girls. We were all rolling with laughter, and the toddler looked up and said, "Jess pants were down, and then she fell."
Somehow my camping story seemed less funny as I quickly repeated it for an adult audience--less funny, less educational, less appropriate for children. I resolved to watch my tongue around the little ones.
And I did. I was being really good for a long time, but there, where I least expected it, at a tea party emphasizing manners, my resolve to be proper was sorely tested. The youngest girl suddenly decided she wanted to sit on my lap, and I obliged, extending a polite invitation for her to take a seat on my knee.
Without so much as a "how do you do," the toddler dramatically hit my left boob and exclaimed "What is this?" I laughed a little and looked around at the other tea party attendants. Only her mother had an inkling of all the good manners about to be smashed to pieces. The little girl turned her attention to the right boob and tapped that one. "What are these?"
So great was her horror at her discovery that no one could ignore her screams this time. It was as if she had just stumbled upon a spaceship on her front lawn. "WHAT IS THIS?" she yelled tapping and hitting and genuinely astounded.
And we all laughed. Teacups were forgotten, half-chewed cookies spit out. Her mother shouted her apologies through her laughter.
"What are these?" A string of euphemisms went through my mind: boobs, tatas, knockers, hooters. None of them seemed to have the right shade of meaning for a 2 1/2 year old girl. "Ask your mom," I finally said. Somewhat at a loss over the scene she'd created, the little girl soon gave up her crass line of questioning and moved on to exploring the ant hills on the sidewalk.
My niche in this place seems clear to me now. I just have to find the right towel to keep by the door.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Depths of Despair
St. Paul begins its slope down to the Mississippi River just across the street from my apartment building. From my second-story window, I can't see the river, but I can make out the trees on its opposite shore. This is the Mighty Mississippi, on which riverboat sailors once called out the depths as their ships glided south--of course, south.
Two fathoms of navigable water? "Mark twain!"
Today a man's voice booms into my living room through the windows I've opened to let the summer air in. "ONE!" His voice is an angry bark, as if he's spotted that good-for-nothing One who took all his money and knocked up his sister, kicked his dog, and left town months ago. Ah, but now he's got him in his sights. Don't you walk away from him, One! He sees you. "ONE!"
"TWO!" he bellows. His voice bounces sharply off the concrete retaining wall that sinks the community center's basketball court down into the hillside. I can't see the court from my window, but this time I notice the metallic thump of a basketball hitting the rim of the hoop, followed by several soft, quick bounces on concrete. I stop what I am doing and admire the man's courage. He's decided to better his game and to bravely announce his progress to the world.
Thump. Bounce.
"GOD DAMN FUCKING SHIT-FUCK!"
Oh, dear.
There is a moment of silence.
"ONE!"
I ask about him the next time I go to the community center gym and discover that he is actually "a very nice man" whose Tourette syndrome unfortunately prevents him from exaggerating his abilities on the court. Day after day, the Tourettes Baller, as I've come to call him, strives to improve his game, but his curses ring through the neighborhood, stopping mothers in their tracks, their trailing toddlers running into the backs of their suddenly immobile legs. Middle-aged middle-class fathers hover around the court, rehearsing their speeches to him about how much they'd appreciate it, man, if he'd watch his language around all these kids.
But no one ever really confronts him. The twangs of his ball bouncing off the metal hoop reverberate down the street, and he never gets past twain.
Two fathoms of navigable water? "Mark twain!"
Today a man's voice booms into my living room through the windows I've opened to let the summer air in. "ONE!" His voice is an angry bark, as if he's spotted that good-for-nothing One who took all his money and knocked up his sister, kicked his dog, and left town months ago. Ah, but now he's got him in his sights. Don't you walk away from him, One! He sees you. "ONE!"
"TWO!" he bellows. His voice bounces sharply off the concrete retaining wall that sinks the community center's basketball court down into the hillside. I can't see the court from my window, but this time I notice the metallic thump of a basketball hitting the rim of the hoop, followed by several soft, quick bounces on concrete. I stop what I am doing and admire the man's courage. He's decided to better his game and to bravely announce his progress to the world.
Thump. Bounce.
"GOD DAMN FUCKING SHIT-FUCK!"
Oh, dear.
There is a moment of silence.
"ONE!"
I ask about him the next time I go to the community center gym and discover that he is actually "a very nice man" whose Tourette syndrome unfortunately prevents him from exaggerating his abilities on the court. Day after day, the Tourettes Baller, as I've come to call him, strives to improve his game, but his curses ring through the neighborhood, stopping mothers in their tracks, their trailing toddlers running into the backs of their suddenly immobile legs. Middle-aged middle-class fathers hover around the court, rehearsing their speeches to him about how much they'd appreciate it, man, if he'd watch his language around all these kids.
But no one ever really confronts him. The twangs of his ball bouncing off the metal hoop reverberate down the street, and he never gets past twain.
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