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.
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.
Monday, June 30, 2008
A Bug's Life
As I write this, a tiny bug crawls across the glowing monitor of my computer. The fucking bastard.
I'm overrun!!
I was brushing my teeth before going to bed tonight and noticed a many-legged creature crawling on the bathroom wall. "Ugh!" I shouted through the Aqua-Fresh. It was one of those bugs that crawls like a millipede and has what looks like a little set of pinchers on its business end. Instinctively, I closed my eyes, and I swear to god, by the time I completed the "open" part of my blink, it was gone. My toothbrush didn't stop me from shouting, "Whewre tha fuck did ih go?"
These bugs, they move like ninjas, and, like ninjas, you can never be sure of where they are or what their intentions towards you might be. And yet...
And yet, I cannot kill them. For as disgusting as their very existence seems to be to me (I can't help it; they just gross me out), the thought of crushing their little exoskeletons and stopping their little bug neurons from firing just turns my stomach. So I have, over the years, developed quite a talent for corralling bugs onto readily available pieces of junk mail, computer paper, magazines--anything long and sturdy enough to keep the vile thing off my skin--and hauling my ass out of doors ASAP. If you enter a room expecting to find me and find only a few sheets of paper floating in the wake of air rushing out a slamming door, expect my return any moment. I'll be along shortly, obsessively brushing my sleeves, pants, and hair while, at the same time, smiling a self-satisfied smile of one who has spared the tiny life she held in her hands... well, not literally in her hands or really anywhere near her hands if she could help it. Ugh! Is there something crawling on my hand?
Okay, false alarm.
To find the source of this empathy with creatures that make my skin crawl, I must look where I always look for influences on my perception of reality: the movies. In this case, I'd have to say it was the ant in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. This blog does not condone spoilers, but that ant gave his all to help those shrunken brats, and the thanks he got...well, let's just say Andy's sputtering cries ring in my ears as I ferry his brethren to the free air. "If I was shrunk, you'd do the same for me," I whisper along the way...you know, in my mind.
But something about this bathroom bug told me my usual approach wouldn't work. It was just too fast. My job requires me to be aware of fractions of a second of video, so believe me when I say that the amount of time it took for this beast to move the bug equivalent of a football field was no more than half a second. And so in the same instant that I considered going for the Papa Murphy's coupon--no, wait; bigger--the New Classics issue of Entertainment Weekly, I had also realized that that it was no good. Jet Li here would be up my arm and into my hair before I could scream.
So I spit out my mouthful of toothpaste, turned off the light, and actually said, "Good night," closing the bathroom door on my way out.
"He'll be gone in the morning," I told myself hopefully, dismissing any ideas of where he would go, and most especially the idea that he would go into the bathtub. "Why would he even go in there?" I reasoned, grasping, "There's no future for him in the bathtub. None of his friends are there."
And so I was reasonably calm and had grown somewhat accustomed to the idea of my new roommate as I got into bed and decided to read a bit before going to sleep. But it wasn't long before something caught my eye beyond the horizon of my open book. There, on the stark white wall opposite my bed was a big, dark, bug-shaped blob. Closer inspection revealed that it was a box elder-y-looking thing idly following his lazy antennae up the wall.
An agreement like the one I'd reached with Jet Li in the bathroom was out of the question here. This was my bedroom, dude. My bedroom. I sleep here, totally trusting various insects not to walk all over me while I'm unconscious. This guy had already proven his brazenness in hauling his dark, bug-shaped carcass for a leisurely stroll across a well-lit and completely white wall. The balls on this one!
Ah, but he was slow, and that, my friend, earned him a one-way ticket on the paper-bowl train to Front Porchville. Employing the age-old method of trapping the bug under a dome-shaped object and sliding the object down the wall, I got him into the paper bowl and hurriedly unlocked two doors and pulled open a third to arrive on the darkened front porch of my apartment building. There is no light out there, and so I could not be sure of slow-poke's fate. I only wish my human ears could have perceived his bug-shout of gratitude when he found himself surrounded by dirt and flowers and a forest of grass.
Let's say you're a dark bug with antennae. You're out for a walk on a cold, hard, white wall one night and suddenly find yourself in a paper bowl and then, after--okay--a somewhat terrifying fall through space, you are in a lush forest of green grass, with soft soil beneath each of your many feet and bright flowers towering overhead. At least, you think they're bright. Technically, your antennae only tell you they're soft, but you just have a feeling...
You wouldn't even consider going back to that room with the white wall, would you? I mean, you know just the window that would take you there, and the sorry excuse for a screen would barely stand in your way. If you left now, you could be there before dawn. Of course, you'd have to crawl across that mountain range of a lumpy thing on the bed, but it's not like you couldn't stop and rest if you wanted to. Hell, you could take a bug-shit anywhere you like. And you know how much you love spelunking. You could explore that cave you've had your bug-eyes on for days, you know, the one just beyond Mount Nostril, with the white rocks and the steady whoosh of air in and out. You wouldn't hear your bug-self say, "Live in the now, man. You're a fucking bug. Your life is short." Would you? Would YOU?
I'm overrun!!
I was brushing my teeth before going to bed tonight and noticed a many-legged creature crawling on the bathroom wall. "Ugh!" I shouted through the Aqua-Fresh. It was one of those bugs that crawls like a millipede and has what looks like a little set of pinchers on its business end. Instinctively, I closed my eyes, and I swear to god, by the time I completed the "open" part of my blink, it was gone. My toothbrush didn't stop me from shouting, "Whewre tha fuck did ih go?"
These bugs, they move like ninjas, and, like ninjas, you can never be sure of where they are or what their intentions towards you might be. And yet...
And yet, I cannot kill them. For as disgusting as their very existence seems to be to me (I can't help it; they just gross me out), the thought of crushing their little exoskeletons and stopping their little bug neurons from firing just turns my stomach. So I have, over the years, developed quite a talent for corralling bugs onto readily available pieces of junk mail, computer paper, magazines--anything long and sturdy enough to keep the vile thing off my skin--and hauling my ass out of doors ASAP. If you enter a room expecting to find me and find only a few sheets of paper floating in the wake of air rushing out a slamming door, expect my return any moment. I'll be along shortly, obsessively brushing my sleeves, pants, and hair while, at the same time, smiling a self-satisfied smile of one who has spared the tiny life she held in her hands... well, not literally in her hands or really anywhere near her hands if she could help it. Ugh! Is there something crawling on my hand?
Okay, false alarm.
To find the source of this empathy with creatures that make my skin crawl, I must look where I always look for influences on my perception of reality: the movies. In this case, I'd have to say it was the ant in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. This blog does not condone spoilers, but that ant gave his all to help those shrunken brats, and the thanks he got...well, let's just say Andy's sputtering cries ring in my ears as I ferry his brethren to the free air. "If I was shrunk, you'd do the same for me," I whisper along the way...you know, in my mind.
But something about this bathroom bug told me my usual approach wouldn't work. It was just too fast. My job requires me to be aware of fractions of a second of video, so believe me when I say that the amount of time it took for this beast to move the bug equivalent of a football field was no more than half a second. And so in the same instant that I considered going for the Papa Murphy's coupon--no, wait; bigger--the New Classics issue of Entertainment Weekly, I had also realized that that it was no good. Jet Li here would be up my arm and into my hair before I could scream.
So I spit out my mouthful of toothpaste, turned off the light, and actually said, "Good night," closing the bathroom door on my way out.
"He'll be gone in the morning," I told myself hopefully, dismissing any ideas of where he would go, and most especially the idea that he would go into the bathtub. "Why would he even go in there?" I reasoned, grasping, "There's no future for him in the bathtub. None of his friends are there."
And so I was reasonably calm and had grown somewhat accustomed to the idea of my new roommate as I got into bed and decided to read a bit before going to sleep. But it wasn't long before something caught my eye beyond the horizon of my open book. There, on the stark white wall opposite my bed was a big, dark, bug-shaped blob. Closer inspection revealed that it was a box elder-y-looking thing idly following his lazy antennae up the wall.
An agreement like the one I'd reached with Jet Li in the bathroom was out of the question here. This was my bedroom, dude. My bedroom. I sleep here, totally trusting various insects not to walk all over me while I'm unconscious. This guy had already proven his brazenness in hauling his dark, bug-shaped carcass for a leisurely stroll across a well-lit and completely white wall. The balls on this one!
Ah, but he was slow, and that, my friend, earned him a one-way ticket on the paper-bowl train to Front Porchville. Employing the age-old method of trapping the bug under a dome-shaped object and sliding the object down the wall, I got him into the paper bowl and hurriedly unlocked two doors and pulled open a third to arrive on the darkened front porch of my apartment building. There is no light out there, and so I could not be sure of slow-poke's fate. I only wish my human ears could have perceived his bug-shout of gratitude when he found himself surrounded by dirt and flowers and a forest of grass.
Let's say you're a dark bug with antennae. You're out for a walk on a cold, hard, white wall one night and suddenly find yourself in a paper bowl and then, after--okay--a somewhat terrifying fall through space, you are in a lush forest of green grass, with soft soil beneath each of your many feet and bright flowers towering overhead. At least, you think they're bright. Technically, your antennae only tell you they're soft, but you just have a feeling...
You wouldn't even consider going back to that room with the white wall, would you? I mean, you know just the window that would take you there, and the sorry excuse for a screen would barely stand in your way. If you left now, you could be there before dawn. Of course, you'd have to crawl across that mountain range of a lumpy thing on the bed, but it's not like you couldn't stop and rest if you wanted to. Hell, you could take a bug-shit anywhere you like. And you know how much you love spelunking. You could explore that cave you've had your bug-eyes on for days, you know, the one just beyond Mount Nostril, with the white rocks and the steady whoosh of air in and out. You wouldn't hear your bug-self say, "Live in the now, man. You're a fucking bug. Your life is short." Would you? Would YOU?
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...
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Blob of Woe, Wonder
My mom recently rented out the bottom floor of her house to a friend of hers from work, a wonderful woman who regales my grandmother (also--well, mostly--known as Garper) with hilarious tales of her totally Wisconsin family. For instance, her grandfather was apparently the Digit Bandit of Milwaukee, so named for the clever ruse wherein he would point his finger through his pocket at various clerks and say, "This is a robbery." Seriously. When I met my family for dinner today, my grandma couldn't wait to tell me the latest of her new roommate's stories. It was a good one, something about a trip to a fancy restaurant and one family member's attempt at stealing flatware that ended with the clatter of silver falling through pant legs and an embarrassed apology to the waitstaff. But it was Garper's lead-in that had me rolling.
"Jessie," she said, "I have a new subject for your blob."
I knew exactly what she meant, but I feigned ignorance as I laughed. "My what?"
"Your blob. You know, on the computer. Isn't that what you--yeah, your blob."
"Jessie," she said, "I have a new subject for your blob."
I knew exactly what she meant, but I feigned ignorance as I laughed. "My what?"
"Your blob. You know, on the computer. Isn't that what you--yeah, your blob."
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
The Moon and the Wannabe Stars
I learned a very special lesson tonight. There has been talk, you may have noticed, about a lunar eclipse this evening. This talk had indicated that the event would probably reach its climactic state of "no moon" around 8:30. The windows in my living room afforded a good view of the rapidly waning Moon when I checked on it at around 8:00. I don't know; for something that was supposed to be all red-tinted and disappearing before my eyes, it just looked like a bunch of white Moon in the sky.
So I watched some American Idol. And okay, I'll admit it: I totally agree with Simon most of the time. I mean, the contestants this year have been very cruise-shippy, and--wait, wasn't I doing something else? What was it? Anyway, this competition is about star quality, and when you're talking about--wait. Star quality. Stars...stars...moon....Moon! Holy crap! I forgot to check on the Moon.
It was 8:45, and as I shuffled quickly to the front of my apartment, I had the odd experience of hoping the Moon, that old dependable rock in the sky, wouldn't be there when I got to the living room window. I looked up, and...nothing, just black sky.
"Hey," I said to myself, "lunar eclipse."
But then I realized that I just had a bad angle. I had to take one more step forward to make my eye line clear the building next door.
I took my step, and... "Nope, there it is." Stupid Moon.
Sure, it was a little smokier than it usually appears, but, well, I could see it, and that's sort of the way it usually is with me and the Moon; nothing particularly special about this Wednesday night.
I think Simon would say the Moon's performance tonight was forgettable. It was pretty much what you'd expect of the Moon, and American audiences are looking for something with more of a modern edge, something exciting and new. And maybe he'd be right. But you know what? I learned something from my experience. There's probably an element of the downfall of modern society, you know, where reality TV and over-orchestrated multimedia platforms for quasi-stardom trump the act of gazing at real stars. Whatever. Here's the more specific lesson and what I'll really take away from my Wednesday night: if you approach a living room window expecting to see a lunar eclipse, you might just mistake an empty part of the sky for a celestial event.
So I watched some American Idol. And okay, I'll admit it: I totally agree with Simon most of the time. I mean, the contestants this year have been very cruise-shippy, and--wait, wasn't I doing something else? What was it? Anyway, this competition is about star quality, and when you're talking about--wait. Star quality. Stars...stars...moon....Moon! Holy crap! I forgot to check on the Moon.
It was 8:45, and as I shuffled quickly to the front of my apartment, I had the odd experience of hoping the Moon, that old dependable rock in the sky, wouldn't be there when I got to the living room window. I looked up, and...nothing, just black sky.
"Hey," I said to myself, "lunar eclipse."
But then I realized that I just had a bad angle. I had to take one more step forward to make my eye line clear the building next door.
I took my step, and... "Nope, there it is." Stupid Moon.
Sure, it was a little smokier than it usually appears, but, well, I could see it, and that's sort of the way it usually is with me and the Moon; nothing particularly special about this Wednesday night.
I think Simon would say the Moon's performance tonight was forgettable. It was pretty much what you'd expect of the Moon, and American audiences are looking for something with more of a modern edge, something exciting and new. And maybe he'd be right. But you know what? I learned something from my experience. There's probably an element of the downfall of modern society, you know, where reality TV and over-orchestrated multimedia platforms for quasi-stardom trump the act of gazing at real stars. Whatever. Here's the more specific lesson and what I'll really take away from my Wednesday night: if you approach a living room window expecting to see a lunar eclipse, you might just mistake an empty part of the sky for a celestial event.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
This Just In: Writer's Strike Ends!
Well, it's been rough, gentle reader, but I was finally able to reach an agreement with myself that will allow me to go back to work writing for Blog of Woe, Wonder. This writer's strike has ended!
Believe me, all these weeks I've spent not writing or thinking about writing have been very difficult. You probably thought that I was just sitting at home, drinking cosmos in the middle of the day and giving myself pedicures, but I assure you, it has not been a vacation. I had a creative vision for this year of entries on Blog of Woe, Wonder. There was an intricate story arc in place; it was all mapped out, and it was AWESOME. There was going to be intrigue and romance and adventure and a monkey! But sometimes you just have to take a stand and say, "No, I will not compromise my principles. I will not write!" So I didn't. And, you know, I really feel like I made my point.
But now I'm just ready to get back to work! You know, the work is what's most important.
So...
What's new? Yeah, I got nothing. I had a thought: I look at what people my age had accomplished, oh, say, a hundred years ago, and I think that maybe all these advances in medicine that have prolonged our lives have done ambition a disservice. Just like that paper assigned on the first day of class that's not due until the end of the semester, there's no sense of urgency anymore. "You know, I probably won't die in childbirth. I'll write that novel later." "TB? Oh, they've totally got a shot for that. I'll travel to a distant continent when I'm 40." Of course, the joke continues to be on we mortals, because there are still buses to run us over and things to fall onto our heads from great heights and totally batshit insane people holding a grudge and a gun. I guess we should all, like, seize the day or something.
I'm going to go on writing these entries as if someone is reading them, even though I know I've probably alienated most of my audience with the prolonged strike. Just remember: my long silence was political, not personal. Solidarity!
Believe me, all these weeks I've spent not writing or thinking about writing have been very difficult. You probably thought that I was just sitting at home, drinking cosmos in the middle of the day and giving myself pedicures, but I assure you, it has not been a vacation. I had a creative vision for this year of entries on Blog of Woe, Wonder. There was an intricate story arc in place; it was all mapped out, and it was AWESOME. There was going to be intrigue and romance and adventure and a monkey! But sometimes you just have to take a stand and say, "No, I will not compromise my principles. I will not write!" So I didn't. And, you know, I really feel like I made my point.
But now I'm just ready to get back to work! You know, the work is what's most important.
So...
What's new? Yeah, I got nothing. I had a thought: I look at what people my age had accomplished, oh, say, a hundred years ago, and I think that maybe all these advances in medicine that have prolonged our lives have done ambition a disservice. Just like that paper assigned on the first day of class that's not due until the end of the semester, there's no sense of urgency anymore. "You know, I probably won't die in childbirth. I'll write that novel later." "TB? Oh, they've totally got a shot for that. I'll travel to a distant continent when I'm 40." Of course, the joke continues to be on we mortals, because there are still buses to run us over and things to fall onto our heads from great heights and totally batshit insane people holding a grudge and a gun. I guess we should all, like, seize the day or something.
I'm going to go on writing these entries as if someone is reading them, even though I know I've probably alienated most of my audience with the prolonged strike. Just remember: my long silence was political, not personal. Solidarity!
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Ghost of Christmas Stop Telling Me I Look Like Your Dead Relative, Because it Really Freaks Me Out
I am the ghost that haunts the Midwest. I apparently look like a lot of people, as their relatives tend to tell me. Maybe my blank stare is a blank slate onto which they can easily project the images of their loved ones, many of them dead. Maybe I'm just sort of generically Eastern European in my build and gait. Sometimes I think I was engineered for the bearing of children and the digging up of potatoes.
Anyway, I walked through the doors of this building today, shuddering from the cold and stomping the snow off my feet and generally making enough of a commotion to drown out the majority of what a woman said to me as she sat in a wheelchair in the entryway. All I caught was, "Sister."
At first I thought she was expressing some sort of kindred womanly greeting. I'd already pulled open one of the second set of glass doors and was halfway through. "I'm sorry, what?" I said.
"You look just like my sister," the woman replied. She was waiting for her ride, with her chair angled to look out the glass doors. As she spoke, I noticed the gaping spaces where most of her teeth had been in her youth. Now she sat hunched in her chair, her elbows propped up on the armrests and her hands clenched together and held tight to her chest.
I wasn't sure how to take this as I imagined how much younger and more attractive her sister could possibly be, and I was just about to say, "Oh, that's nice." But I only got as far as, "Oh," before she continued.
"She died from leukemia when she was 39."
"That's--"
"You look just like her when she was young."
I was somewhat at a loss and finally said, "Oh...well, I'm sorry."
Then this hunched and toothless woman turned her face from the ghost of her long-dead sister and stared out the door into the winter damp. As I continued through the door, she quietly ended our awkward little talk. "Sorry to have to tell you."
Anyway, I walked through the doors of this building today, shuddering from the cold and stomping the snow off my feet and generally making enough of a commotion to drown out the majority of what a woman said to me as she sat in a wheelchair in the entryway. All I caught was, "Sister."
At first I thought she was expressing some sort of kindred womanly greeting. I'd already pulled open one of the second set of glass doors and was halfway through. "I'm sorry, what?" I said.
"You look just like my sister," the woman replied. She was waiting for her ride, with her chair angled to look out the glass doors. As she spoke, I noticed the gaping spaces where most of her teeth had been in her youth. Now she sat hunched in her chair, her elbows propped up on the armrests and her hands clenched together and held tight to her chest.
I wasn't sure how to take this as I imagined how much younger and more attractive her sister could possibly be, and I was just about to say, "Oh, that's nice." But I only got as far as, "Oh," before she continued.
"She died from leukemia when she was 39."
"That's--"
"You look just like her when she was young."
I was somewhat at a loss and finally said, "Oh...well, I'm sorry."
Then this hunched and toothless woman turned her face from the ghost of her long-dead sister and stared out the door into the winter damp. As I continued through the door, she quietly ended our awkward little talk. "Sorry to have to tell you."
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Snowsabers
(I'd turn down the sound before playing the video. It's significantly less magical with the roaring motors and me shouting.)
When I was a little girl, these things seriously scared me. Seriously. Mattress sales and grand openings of grocery stores were a constant threat as my hometown expanded. I still remember the pit in my stomach when Food 4 Less opened in Kenosha, WI. Thriller was on the radio, the lights were in the sky, and I was huddled in the backseat with my eyes shut tight. "Shut tight against what?" you ask? The aliens, of course. I don't know why, but of all the things to be afraid of, aliens were my thing. My fear was twofold: first, that the beams of the searchlight would actually find something in the sky, namely something saucer-shaped and flown by beings intent on brain-sucking world domination...or, at the very least, hiding in the attic that opened into my bedroom. And if intelligent beings had come millions of light years to squat in my attic, I certainly didn't want some giant, swinging beam of light to advertise my location.
We'll call it a mark of maturity, then, that rather than shutting my eyes and screaming when I caught sight of this searchlight on Saturday, I Jessica Fletchered the source of the light and drove right up to it. My courage was rewarded with a quietly stunning display of glittering snow in fast-moving beams of hypnotically swinging light.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Reflections on Metal
Two full years ago, I made a sort of rash decision to get braces. While my friends get married and have kids, move to far-flung cities, get masters degrees, start careers, my two years of having a mouth full of metal is the longest running consequence of a decision in my adult life. And tomorrow, they’re coming off.
I had braces once before when I was a kid. When they came off, I was left with a permanent retainer that ended up doing more harm than good. By the time 2005 rolled around, I had a pretty gnarly snaggletooth right in the front of my mouth. Now, I never measured with a protractor, but I’d say it jutted out of my mouth at a degree roughly parallel to the ground. This had the effect of giving the usually wrong impression that I was snarling, as my upper lip would sometimes hang out on my tooth ledge. Couple that with the faraway gaze that is my standard facial expression, and I’m surprised anyone ever talked to this apparently bored and snarling girl.
As my teeth have been slowly moving in my skull, I’ve been casually observing a dental trend that I find quite shocking: whitening. I spent years smiling with my lips closed, demurely covering my mouth with my hand so as not to alarm anyone who, by virtue of engaging me in conversation, might find themselves staring down the barrel of my snaggletooth. Meanwhile, public figures (and more and more private ones, it seems) have no qualms about exposing others to what has to be a harmful degree of UV light shining off their whitened teeth. Around the time I had my first set of braces, a local Milwaukee weatherman, John Malan, came to my elementary school to terrify me with pictures of tornado-producing clouds that were, to my untrained eye, exactly like the ones in the sky outside the classroom window. But I also remember him talking about something called albedo, which is apparently the degree to which light reflects off stuff. In John Malan’s example, it was snow. He talked about snow’s albedo being great enough to cause momentary blindness when you look right at it. You can now experience the same phenomenon by accidentally looking directly at the teeth of your favorite celebrity or politician or hairdresser. I’m always grossed out by this unnatural whiteness, and, further cementing my place in the ranks of ueber-nerds, will sometimes throw my hand up as the local news anchors smile at me from the TV or from billboards along the freeway, shouting, “Albedo! Ahhh…ahhh….ah-ah.”
I know other people are put off by this trend, because they flat-out say it when they ask about my braces. “Your teeth look fine,” they’ll say. “Why did you think you needed to get braces? Everybody thinks they have to have perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth these days.” And I have to stop myself from saying, “Oh, yeah? You don’t know how lucky you are right now. You could be locking eyes with Ol’ Snaggle right now. And believe me, he’s trying to get at you. You’d better be glad these metal bars are keepin’ him back, ‘cause he’s got your scent now.” I may have just cross a line by giving my tooth eyes and a nose, but watch me soldier on, because I have a point.
See, as much as I have been dreaming of this day—well, the day that comes after this one, Friday, the day I get my braces off—the looming event has created a bit of very deep anxiety about my identity. When I got these dental shackles, I was two years less removed from college and that phase of your life when you’re supposed to be finding yourself. Now I’m in that part of my 20s that can’t even be rounded down to “mid.” And for these two years, I’ve had a very physically apparent cue that I’m a “work in progress.” There’s been a freakin’ scaffold on my face. At some level, I could always laugh off an awkward social encounter, my inability to cook, my hundreds of dollars in parking tickets; I could just dust off my ass after literally falling down, smile a broad, metallic smile, shrug and say, “Still under construction.” But when the scaffolding comes off tomorrow, for all anyone knows, I’m done. This is the way I intend to be.
And I’m reminded of a very modern-looking church just built near where I went to high school. They were working on it for months, and it was another few months before anyone realized it was actually done, that all those different colored walls were meant to be that way. It was January when I realized the scaffolding was down and it was a finished building. There was a thick blanket of snow on the field around the church, and I had just flung my hand up and was about to shout, “Albedo!” when I noticed parishioners walking into the fully functioning church. I slowly lowered my hand and squinted through the light reflecting off the snow. “Huh. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, I guess.” I squinted a little bit harder at the church’s red and brown and gray and white walls and its odd angles and small windows, and I thought, “Seriously?”
I had braces once before when I was a kid. When they came off, I was left with a permanent retainer that ended up doing more harm than good. By the time 2005 rolled around, I had a pretty gnarly snaggletooth right in the front of my mouth. Now, I never measured with a protractor, but I’d say it jutted out of my mouth at a degree roughly parallel to the ground. This had the effect of giving the usually wrong impression that I was snarling, as my upper lip would sometimes hang out on my tooth ledge. Couple that with the faraway gaze that is my standard facial expression, and I’m surprised anyone ever talked to this apparently bored and snarling girl.
As my teeth have been slowly moving in my skull, I’ve been casually observing a dental trend that I find quite shocking: whitening. I spent years smiling with my lips closed, demurely covering my mouth with my hand so as not to alarm anyone who, by virtue of engaging me in conversation, might find themselves staring down the barrel of my snaggletooth. Meanwhile, public figures (and more and more private ones, it seems) have no qualms about exposing others to what has to be a harmful degree of UV light shining off their whitened teeth. Around the time I had my first set of braces, a local Milwaukee weatherman, John Malan, came to my elementary school to terrify me with pictures of tornado-producing clouds that were, to my untrained eye, exactly like the ones in the sky outside the classroom window. But I also remember him talking about something called albedo, which is apparently the degree to which light reflects off stuff. In John Malan’s example, it was snow. He talked about snow’s albedo being great enough to cause momentary blindness when you look right at it. You can now experience the same phenomenon by accidentally looking directly at the teeth of your favorite celebrity or politician or hairdresser. I’m always grossed out by this unnatural whiteness, and, further cementing my place in the ranks of ueber-nerds, will sometimes throw my hand up as the local news anchors smile at me from the TV or from billboards along the freeway, shouting, “Albedo! Ahhh…ahhh….ah-ah.”
I know other people are put off by this trend, because they flat-out say it when they ask about my braces. “Your teeth look fine,” they’ll say. “Why did you think you needed to get braces? Everybody thinks they have to have perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth these days.” And I have to stop myself from saying, “Oh, yeah? You don’t know how lucky you are right now. You could be locking eyes with Ol’ Snaggle right now. And believe me, he’s trying to get at you. You’d better be glad these metal bars are keepin’ him back, ‘cause he’s got your scent now.” I may have just cross a line by giving my tooth eyes and a nose, but watch me soldier on, because I have a point.
See, as much as I have been dreaming of this day—well, the day that comes after this one, Friday, the day I get my braces off—the looming event has created a bit of very deep anxiety about my identity. When I got these dental shackles, I was two years less removed from college and that phase of your life when you’re supposed to be finding yourself. Now I’m in that part of my 20s that can’t even be rounded down to “mid.” And for these two years, I’ve had a very physically apparent cue that I’m a “work in progress.” There’s been a freakin’ scaffold on my face. At some level, I could always laugh off an awkward social encounter, my inability to cook, my hundreds of dollars in parking tickets; I could just dust off my ass after literally falling down, smile a broad, metallic smile, shrug and say, “Still under construction.” But when the scaffolding comes off tomorrow, for all anyone knows, I’m done. This is the way I intend to be.
And I’m reminded of a very modern-looking church just built near where I went to high school. They were working on it for months, and it was another few months before anyone realized it was actually done, that all those different colored walls were meant to be that way. It was January when I realized the scaffolding was down and it was a finished building. There was a thick blanket of snow on the field around the church, and I had just flung my hand up and was about to shout, “Albedo!” when I noticed parishioners walking into the fully functioning church. I slowly lowered my hand and squinted through the light reflecting off the snow. “Huh. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, I guess.” I squinted a little bit harder at the church’s red and brown and gray and white walls and its odd angles and small windows, and I thought, “Seriously?”
Friday, November 2, 2007
Okay, I get it!
I am attracting some bad, bad enviro-mojo with my shitty car. I took it in for an oil change the other day, something I had been putting off for a while because my car's "check submarine" light has come on again, and I really didn't want to know the reason this time. Turns out, it's the same old reason: the catalytic converter isn't converting anything, certainly not horrible pollutants to less-harmful ones. The last project I did at work today was about alternative energy, so Mother Earth was already on my mind. Plus, the leaves are all multicolored and falling and swirling, and I was all, "Whoa, beautiful Nature, with a capital N."
And then Mother Nature screamed at me, "Oh, you like nature, do you? That's rich!" And she fucking threw someone's recycle bins at my car! A gentle breeze hypnotically swirled these many-colored leaves before my eyes, and then, just when I was lulled into a dreamy complacency (hey, my eyes were still on the road), that breeze suddenly turned into a gust of admonishing wind and smashed these two blue recycle bins into the driver's side door.
Jeesh. Get a grip, Nature.
And then Mother Nature screamed at me, "Oh, you like nature, do you? That's rich!" And she fucking threw someone's recycle bins at my car! A gentle breeze hypnotically swirled these many-colored leaves before my eyes, and then, just when I was lulled into a dreamy complacency (hey, my eyes were still on the road), that breeze suddenly turned into a gust of admonishing wind and smashed these two blue recycle bins into the driver's side door.
Jeesh. Get a grip, Nature.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Aha!
If you were to venture to Oprah.com, you could find a collection of celebrity accounts of their “aha moments.” Invariably, they are tales of experiences wherein your favorite female star realized she's not as eco-conscious as she could be (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), that she hasn’t properly introduced her deceased mother to her children (Oprah’s BFF, Gayle King), or that she is both black and beautiful (Alfre Woodard).
This one’s for you, Oprah.
This past weekend, I had a real-life “aha” moment. I felt the universe tugging on my skirt (yeah, I was wearing a skirt), all, “Psst. Jess. Hey. Psst.” I was occupying my place as the third leg in the generational relay race through time that had gathered around my mother’s kitchen counter. My grandmother and I had just returned from the dedication ceremony for my friends’ new baby. I had told my mom about all the delicious food my friend had made for the lunch reception afterwards and was just about to marvel at the vast differences between my life and my friend’s when I remembered to ask what she had done all day. Turns out, she was pretty exhausted, what with all the burning of the Bibles.
“Psst. Jess.”
“Shut up, Universe! Mom, you did what?”
When I left that morning, I knew my mother would probably spend the day cleaning, as she’s preparing to sell her home. In a house where six people once lived and various people have stayed over the last ten years, it’s now down to her, my grandma, my little brother, and all the shit we deserters left behind. And so the task of gutting the house has largely fallen to my mom. Sure, she makes piles for Goodwill and “do you want this?” stacks for me to look at when I visit, but lately, it would seem, she’s taken to burning stuff she doesn’t want to take with her when she moves.
“How many Bibles did you burn?” I asked, a little astonished.
“I don’t know. Maybe five.”
“You found five Bibles here? Whose were they?”
She couldn’t say for sure.
“What else do you burn?”
“Oh, just shit I find. You know, some papers, a big map, some clothes.”
Some Bibles.
No wonder I’d been nervous about going to church to see my friends’ baby dedicated. I’ve always felt a little silly sitting in congregations where I clearly do not belong…which is to say, all of them. When I do find myself in church for the inevitable procession of marriages of friends and baptisms of their babies that comes with being 20-something, I’m usually able to sit quietly, sing inaudibly, and maybe even give the impression of deep understanding with my patented faraway, could-be-thoughtful gaze.
My grandma had met these friends of mine at the wedding that was my left knee’s undoing. She’d developed quite a crush on their little family, and so when I got the invitation to the dedication of their third child, I thought it was the perfect chance for her to ogle my friend’s husband (only peripherally, thanks to macular degeneration) and coo over their truly lovely and ever-growing family.
And so I sat with my grandma in church on a Sunday morning for the first time I can remember. The congregation was very young and friendly, with people constantly catching my eye and smiling right at me. They were different from my usual crowd, but I managed to smile back after a few initial suspicious glances proved to be pretty clearly not the appropriate response. People shook my hand and welcomed me; their hearts seemed warmed by the sight of me in my skirt, leading my mostly blind grandma to the restroom.
I was almost out. With a few nods to people I recognized from the service and a loud declaration to my grandma that, “it really was a thought-provoking sermon,” we were in the parking lot and the home stretch. There was only one church member between my slow-moving grandma and our parked car. It was an older gentleman with a gray beard and a large motorcycle. He was putting on a leather vest that was truly riddled with various buttons along the alternating themes of patriotism, motorcycles, and Jesus.
And then something fluttered in the corner of my grandma’s eye. Universe! Why did it have to be the corner? That’s the only part where she can see!
There were two flags waving on the back of his motorcycle: one was the stars and stripes; the other was black with the POW/MIA insignia. The man told us a touching story of how the Lord had returned his POW/MIA flag when it had been dislodged by enemy wind on his way home one night. He hadn’t realized it was gone until he got home, but just as he was vowing to never give up on his missing flag, his wife pulled into the driveway and held it out to him, saying, “You missing something?”
Come on! But I kept my mouth shut. I smiled and said, “That’s amazing. Well, have a great ride home.” And I turned to continue toward the car. As soon as my grandma spoke, I knew.
“Well, you better watch out with your American flag,” my grandmother said to this very patriotic man. She pointed vaguely to where she knew I stood. “She’ll run right over it if you give her the chance.”
He was a large man, and he turned like a bear to face me. Somewhere in the cackling, nervous laughter, I managed to form the words “Canada,” “motorcycle,” “flag,” and “it was an accident.” The bear seemed placated, if not wholly amused. I held out my hand to my grandma and politely begged her to come along. She was shouting over her shoulder, “And it was on the Fourth of July,” when we finally reached the car.
“Well, that was a nice service,” she said from the passenger’s seat.
At my friends’ house, my grandma found a woman roughly her own age to talk to, the grandmother of my friend’s husband. They shared family stories over plates of cheesy potatoes and meatballs. Collected in the house were four generations of this particular family, with this woman’s great-grandchildren shouting playfully in the other room and her daughter sitting with us, sharing doting observations of the little ones.
I told my grandma her best chance at great-grandchildren was probably my younger brother, but even that chance seemed slim at the moment. “You should have taken this woman’s lead,” I joked, with a big gesture so she could see I was indicating her new friend. “You should have just had more kids to begin with and increased your chances.”
We all chuckled.
“Oh, I think I had enough.” My grandmother laughed.
We all laughed.
“And I think I’m safe now,” she said with a nudge of camaraderie to her new friend.
I laughed a little nervously.
“You’re safe, aren’t you?” she asked the woman.
“Oh, yes, I should think so,” the woman replied with a laugh.
“G—“ I started.
“Well, you never know,” she continued. “Just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn't fire in the furnace.”
Later, in my mother’s kitchen, the Universe tugs at my costume of a skirt. “Pst. Hey.”
How could my friend and I—roughly the same age, having grown up in the same area, gone to the same college—lead such vastly different lives now? I’d seen members of all the generations of her family earlier that day, and here were all three generations of mine, all sharing what we’d done that day.
“Psst.”
Aha! And I realized that probably at the same moment my grandmother had been joking about postmenopausal sexuality, my mother had been poking at a pile of burning Bibles, smiling through the smoke with a real sense of accomplishment.
This one’s for you, Oprah.
This past weekend, I had a real-life “aha” moment. I felt the universe tugging on my skirt (yeah, I was wearing a skirt), all, “Psst. Jess. Hey. Psst.” I was occupying my place as the third leg in the generational relay race through time that had gathered around my mother’s kitchen counter. My grandmother and I had just returned from the dedication ceremony for my friends’ new baby. I had told my mom about all the delicious food my friend had made for the lunch reception afterwards and was just about to marvel at the vast differences between my life and my friend’s when I remembered to ask what she had done all day. Turns out, she was pretty exhausted, what with all the burning of the Bibles.
“Psst. Jess.”
“Shut up, Universe! Mom, you did what?”
When I left that morning, I knew my mother would probably spend the day cleaning, as she’s preparing to sell her home. In a house where six people once lived and various people have stayed over the last ten years, it’s now down to her, my grandma, my little brother, and all the shit we deserters left behind. And so the task of gutting the house has largely fallen to my mom. Sure, she makes piles for Goodwill and “do you want this?” stacks for me to look at when I visit, but lately, it would seem, she’s taken to burning stuff she doesn’t want to take with her when she moves.
“How many Bibles did you burn?” I asked, a little astonished.
“I don’t know. Maybe five.”
“You found five Bibles here? Whose were they?”
She couldn’t say for sure.
“What else do you burn?”
“Oh, just shit I find. You know, some papers, a big map, some clothes.”
Some Bibles.
No wonder I’d been nervous about going to church to see my friends’ baby dedicated. I’ve always felt a little silly sitting in congregations where I clearly do not belong…which is to say, all of them. When I do find myself in church for the inevitable procession of marriages of friends and baptisms of their babies that comes with being 20-something, I’m usually able to sit quietly, sing inaudibly, and maybe even give the impression of deep understanding with my patented faraway, could-be-thoughtful gaze.
My grandma had met these friends of mine at the wedding that was my left knee’s undoing. She’d developed quite a crush on their little family, and so when I got the invitation to the dedication of their third child, I thought it was the perfect chance for her to ogle my friend’s husband (only peripherally, thanks to macular degeneration) and coo over their truly lovely and ever-growing family.
And so I sat with my grandma in church on a Sunday morning for the first time I can remember. The congregation was very young and friendly, with people constantly catching my eye and smiling right at me. They were different from my usual crowd, but I managed to smile back after a few initial suspicious glances proved to be pretty clearly not the appropriate response. People shook my hand and welcomed me; their hearts seemed warmed by the sight of me in my skirt, leading my mostly blind grandma to the restroom.
I was almost out. With a few nods to people I recognized from the service and a loud declaration to my grandma that, “it really was a thought-provoking sermon,” we were in the parking lot and the home stretch. There was only one church member between my slow-moving grandma and our parked car. It was an older gentleman with a gray beard and a large motorcycle. He was putting on a leather vest that was truly riddled with various buttons along the alternating themes of patriotism, motorcycles, and Jesus.
And then something fluttered in the corner of my grandma’s eye. Universe! Why did it have to be the corner? That’s the only part where she can see!
There were two flags waving on the back of his motorcycle: one was the stars and stripes; the other was black with the POW/MIA insignia. The man told us a touching story of how the Lord had returned his POW/MIA flag when it had been dislodged by enemy wind on his way home one night. He hadn’t realized it was gone until he got home, but just as he was vowing to never give up on his missing flag, his wife pulled into the driveway and held it out to him, saying, “You missing something?”
Come on! But I kept my mouth shut. I smiled and said, “That’s amazing. Well, have a great ride home.” And I turned to continue toward the car. As soon as my grandma spoke, I knew.
“Well, you better watch out with your American flag,” my grandmother said to this very patriotic man. She pointed vaguely to where she knew I stood. “She’ll run right over it if you give her the chance.”
He was a large man, and he turned like a bear to face me. Somewhere in the cackling, nervous laughter, I managed to form the words “Canada,” “motorcycle,” “flag,” and “it was an accident.” The bear seemed placated, if not wholly amused. I held out my hand to my grandma and politely begged her to come along. She was shouting over her shoulder, “And it was on the Fourth of July,” when we finally reached the car.
“Well, that was a nice service,” she said from the passenger’s seat.
At my friends’ house, my grandma found a woman roughly her own age to talk to, the grandmother of my friend’s husband. They shared family stories over plates of cheesy potatoes and meatballs. Collected in the house were four generations of this particular family, with this woman’s great-grandchildren shouting playfully in the other room and her daughter sitting with us, sharing doting observations of the little ones.
I told my grandma her best chance at great-grandchildren was probably my younger brother, but even that chance seemed slim at the moment. “You should have taken this woman’s lead,” I joked, with a big gesture so she could see I was indicating her new friend. “You should have just had more kids to begin with and increased your chances.”
We all chuckled.
“Oh, I think I had enough.” My grandmother laughed.
We all laughed.
“And I think I’m safe now,” she said with a nudge of camaraderie to her new friend.
I laughed a little nervously.
“You’re safe, aren’t you?” she asked the woman.
“Oh, yes, I should think so,” the woman replied with a laugh.
“G—“ I started.
“Well, you never know,” she continued. “Just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn't fire in the furnace.”
Later, in my mother’s kitchen, the Universe tugs at my costume of a skirt. “Pst. Hey.”
How could my friend and I—roughly the same age, having grown up in the same area, gone to the same college—lead such vastly different lives now? I’d seen members of all the generations of her family earlier that day, and here were all three generations of mine, all sharing what we’d done that day.
“Psst.”
Aha! And I realized that probably at the same moment my grandmother had been joking about postmenopausal sexuality, my mother had been poking at a pile of burning Bibles, smiling through the smoke with a real sense of accomplishment.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Pony Up
Like that creative writing teacher in high school, Blog Action Day has provided me with a prompt today: “The environment. You have till midnight, the end of Blog Action Day. Go!"
It is with pangs of guilt that I write about the environment. Not only am I currently driving by myself to and from work every day, but I am doing it in a car that is more liberally spewing pollutants into the air than other cars on the road. I am, in fact, a hypocritical ass.
I recently made a huge life decision: that I would get rid of my car and try to, like, save the Earth and stuff by personally accounting for less pollution than I usually do. As soon as the idea entered my mind, it just felt right. Not only would it help out the aforementioned Earth, but it would make me feel better about myself, and that’s really what ultimately matters.
My plan hit a snag, however, when a little light depicting a submarine and the word “check” flashed on my car’s dashboard. I took the car to a mechanic, who informed me that there was in fact no submarine to check and also that the drawing was of an automobile engine. After checking the engine, he told me that the catalytic converter in my car was no good.
The mechanic now put my two options before me. One: I could fix the catalytic converter for an absolutely obscene amount of money and dismiss all hope of even breaking even on the sale of this car. Two: I could just have him turn off the submarine light, because Minnesota doesn’t have emissions standards. With what I’m assuming would be a flick of his wrist, he could make my little submarine problem disappear.
I looked up the catalytic converter and its function when I got home. If I’m understanding the internet diagrams correctly, the catalytic converter is like a magical pony attached to your car’s undercarriage whose favorite food is pollutants. She could eat that stuff all day. Sure, some gets by her, but she eats what she can, and the air is better for it.
Oh, Universe! Why do you got to make shit so difficult? The price of a new pony was truly atrocious, and, so very soon after making my resolve to get rid of my car and be less of an asshole to the planet, the Universe was like, “Hey, asshole, why don’t you just go home and watch some TV instead?”
So, sadly, that’s what I did. What difference would it make anyway? I’m just one person with one car, and it looks like I’ll be keeping it for now.
If I believed in fate, I’d think it was a sign that "The Day After Tomorrow" was on television the day I decided to sell my car and take up the carless lifestyle. In this film, mankind has puffed so much pollution into the air that the weather gets apocalyptic and ushers in a new ice age. Cities are laid to waste by massive tornadoes, and golf-cart sized hail squishes unsuspecting Asian people. The entire Northern hemisphere is plunged into frozen chaos, all resulting in poor, lovely Jake Gyllenhaal being trapped in the New York Public Library with a killer superstorm fast approaching. That is how bad shit can get, people.
And if I had any hope that there was a deus to ex-machina our asses out of the trouble mankind is in, none of this stuff would seem scary. But the cards are stacked against hope for children of the ‘80s. Ours was one of the first generations to be sat down and told in firm tones by reliable authority figures that the environment was in trouble. Furry creatures were endangered. Exxon was a dirty word. There was a hole—a giant freakin’ hole—in the protective ozone barrier between us and the careening asteroids. Had we been allowed to swear, our collective cry would have been, “Holy fucking shit!”
And the world seems to have stalled in that moment, if pop culture—which is really the only culture, if you ask me—is any indicator. All the end-of-the world references have me scared out of my mind. According to my exhaustive research, mankind’s destruction by global war, pandemic zombie infection, asteroid collision or robot uprising seems a foregone conclusion. Sometime after that “holy shit” moment in middle school and all these glimpses into the dismal, dismal future, me and many of my generation seem to have lost all hope that we as a species might actually pull this one out of the fire.
But wait; it gets worse. Having gathered a great deal of evidence in watching a great many of these scenarios unfold on TV and in movies, I must conclude that I’m not pretty enough to survive the apocalypse. While I enjoy the stories of the ragtag group of survivors eking out an existence after the decimation of their cultures by war or by superstorms or asteroids or cylons, I know that were it to come to that now, I’d be among those cautionary tales the good-looking ragtag survivors would tell.
“You’ve got to pull yourself together, Chloe! Sure, food is scarce, human skeletons are lying everywhere, and all the wild animals that were in zoos are now roaming the deserted streets of ruined cities with enormous chips on each of their four furry shoulders, but you’re a survivor. You don’t want to end up like those people who gathered their most precious seasons of TV on DVD and wandered around for weeks, finally succumbing to the ravages of hunger and disease on the plains of South Dakota? Do you? Huh?” Man, if the apocalypse hits, I just know I’m going to end up in South Dakota.
The problem seems too big. What we need, children of the ‘80s, is a sledgehammer of hope to break it down! South Dakota looms large, but it seems the first step, the only step we can take is to believe that what we do makes a difference. In my case, that will allow for possible future steps: a new pony for my car, carpooling, getting rid of my car altogether. Who knows? It’s easier on my conscience and my wallet to ignore the submarine light, but Jake Gyllenhaal is counting on me not to be a jerk to the environment. Just say no to superstorms!
So while my point is vague at best, as if seen through a veil of smog (See? It's an intentionally hazy blog entry.), and I don’t seem to be taking any immediate action myself, damned if my blog can’t be active on Blog Action Day. Just you wait. On Crotchety Girl Action Day, I’ll be all kinds of motivated and specific. It’ll be sweet.
It is with pangs of guilt that I write about the environment. Not only am I currently driving by myself to and from work every day, but I am doing it in a car that is more liberally spewing pollutants into the air than other cars on the road. I am, in fact, a hypocritical ass.
I recently made a huge life decision: that I would get rid of my car and try to, like, save the Earth and stuff by personally accounting for less pollution than I usually do. As soon as the idea entered my mind, it just felt right. Not only would it help out the aforementioned Earth, but it would make me feel better about myself, and that’s really what ultimately matters.
My plan hit a snag, however, when a little light depicting a submarine and the word “check” flashed on my car’s dashboard. I took the car to a mechanic, who informed me that there was in fact no submarine to check and also that the drawing was of an automobile engine. After checking the engine, he told me that the catalytic converter in my car was no good.
The mechanic now put my two options before me. One: I could fix the catalytic converter for an absolutely obscene amount of money and dismiss all hope of even breaking even on the sale of this car. Two: I could just have him turn off the submarine light, because Minnesota doesn’t have emissions standards. With what I’m assuming would be a flick of his wrist, he could make my little submarine problem disappear.
I looked up the catalytic converter and its function when I got home. If I’m understanding the internet diagrams correctly, the catalytic converter is like a magical pony attached to your car’s undercarriage whose favorite food is pollutants. She could eat that stuff all day. Sure, some gets by her, but she eats what she can, and the air is better for it.
Oh, Universe! Why do you got to make shit so difficult? The price of a new pony was truly atrocious, and, so very soon after making my resolve to get rid of my car and be less of an asshole to the planet, the Universe was like, “Hey, asshole, why don’t you just go home and watch some TV instead?”
So, sadly, that’s what I did. What difference would it make anyway? I’m just one person with one car, and it looks like I’ll be keeping it for now.
If I believed in fate, I’d think it was a sign that "The Day After Tomorrow" was on television the day I decided to sell my car and take up the carless lifestyle. In this film, mankind has puffed so much pollution into the air that the weather gets apocalyptic and ushers in a new ice age. Cities are laid to waste by massive tornadoes, and golf-cart sized hail squishes unsuspecting Asian people. The entire Northern hemisphere is plunged into frozen chaos, all resulting in poor, lovely Jake Gyllenhaal being trapped in the New York Public Library with a killer superstorm fast approaching. That is how bad shit can get, people.
And if I had any hope that there was a deus to ex-machina our asses out of the trouble mankind is in, none of this stuff would seem scary. But the cards are stacked against hope for children of the ‘80s. Ours was one of the first generations to be sat down and told in firm tones by reliable authority figures that the environment was in trouble. Furry creatures were endangered. Exxon was a dirty word. There was a hole—a giant freakin’ hole—in the protective ozone barrier between us and the careening asteroids. Had we been allowed to swear, our collective cry would have been, “Holy fucking shit!”
And the world seems to have stalled in that moment, if pop culture—which is really the only culture, if you ask me—is any indicator. All the end-of-the world references have me scared out of my mind. According to my exhaustive research, mankind’s destruction by global war, pandemic zombie infection, asteroid collision or robot uprising seems a foregone conclusion. Sometime after that “holy shit” moment in middle school and all these glimpses into the dismal, dismal future, me and many of my generation seem to have lost all hope that we as a species might actually pull this one out of the fire.
But wait; it gets worse. Having gathered a great deal of evidence in watching a great many of these scenarios unfold on TV and in movies, I must conclude that I’m not pretty enough to survive the apocalypse. While I enjoy the stories of the ragtag group of survivors eking out an existence after the decimation of their cultures by war or by superstorms or asteroids or cylons, I know that were it to come to that now, I’d be among those cautionary tales the good-looking ragtag survivors would tell.
“You’ve got to pull yourself together, Chloe! Sure, food is scarce, human skeletons are lying everywhere, and all the wild animals that were in zoos are now roaming the deserted streets of ruined cities with enormous chips on each of their four furry shoulders, but you’re a survivor. You don’t want to end up like those people who gathered their most precious seasons of TV on DVD and wandered around for weeks, finally succumbing to the ravages of hunger and disease on the plains of South Dakota? Do you? Huh?” Man, if the apocalypse hits, I just know I’m going to end up in South Dakota.
The problem seems too big. What we need, children of the ‘80s, is a sledgehammer of hope to break it down! South Dakota looms large, but it seems the first step, the only step we can take is to believe that what we do makes a difference. In my case, that will allow for possible future steps: a new pony for my car, carpooling, getting rid of my car altogether. Who knows? It’s easier on my conscience and my wallet to ignore the submarine light, but Jake Gyllenhaal is counting on me not to be a jerk to the environment. Just say no to superstorms!
So while my point is vague at best, as if seen through a veil of smog (See? It's an intentionally hazy blog entry.), and I don’t seem to be taking any immediate action myself, damned if my blog can’t be active on Blog Action Day. Just you wait. On Crotchety Girl Action Day, I’ll be all kinds of motivated and specific. It’ll be sweet.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Take Back the Knight: How Baby Got Back in the Saddle
I have lived in the shadow of defeat for the past year. Sure, I’ve gone to work, socialized with friends, even made a few new ones. I’ve laughed and joked and gone about my life, but it has all been under the pall of tainted honor. For one year ago, I met a knight who proved my better. I fell to the swift sword of his infectious beat. One year ago, I fell to the notorious Sir Mix-A-Lot.
I won’t soon forget the challenge Mix-A-Lot issued to the assembled revelers at my good friends’ wedding reception. Sure, I had a couple chocolate martinis in me…and some rum from a thermos a friend had spirited into the building, but I felt ready to meet Sir Mix-A-Lot on the level ground of the makeshift dance floor covering the marble of the Minnesota Historical Society. His words said all the wrong things, objectifying women, reducing their worth to the circumference of their backsides; but the beat of the song said something else. The rhythm pounding through the rented sound system said, “I dare you not to dance to this.”
Well, this knight had picked the wrong day to make assumptions about my reluctance to dance due to moral and political reservations about a song’s lyrics. As a woman who sometimes forgets to brush her hair, I was feeling special in my plum-colored bridesmaid dress, neatly curled hair, and professionally applied makeup. And I had an advantage over Mix-A-Lot: he didn’t know of my family’s wedding dancing legacy. He couldn’t know that my father is none other than “The Dancing Machine” of southeastern Wisconsin.
Ah, but as fate would have it, my father’s legacy is a cruelly ironic one. For as I bore the mantle of The Dancing Machine, little did I know that my knees were quaking under the weight of it. I had inherited my father’s weak knees, and they were about to prove my very public undoing.
Just as I was answering Mix-A-Lot’s call to shake it, shake it, shake that healthy butt, there was an ear-splitting POP, and I found myself flat on the very moneymaker I’d been shaking mere moments before. At first, I was at a loss as to what had happened. My mind raced for the answer, quickly weighing the little evidence I had. There was the loud POP and the fact that I was on the floor. “Am I shot?” I wondered. But before I could remember if Sir Mix-A-Lot was from the East or West Coast, I caught sight of a foot to my left. It was wearing my shoe and appeared to be attached to a leg in my skirt, but the angle was all wrong; it couldn’t be attached to me.
As my friends formed a supportive circle of laughter around me, I was horrified to discover that the foot and the awkwardly bent leg were indeed mine. Unable to stand on my own and finding all my friends’ hands occupied in the act of pointing at me, I exited the dance floor by the only means left to me: this baby scooted backwards out of the flashing lights and into the darkness of a shame that has haunted me for a year.
The scooting may have managed to jostle my wayward joint back into place, but I limped through the world for a good two months. And when the swelling in my knee and foot finally went down, I carried the scars of my encounter with Sir Mix-A-Lot on the inside. My confidence was shaken; my ability to continue my family’s proud wedding dancing legacy was in doubt. I thought about Mix-A-Lot often, thought of a rematch. I knew how to find him; he had brazenly shouted his number, 1-900-MIX-ALOT, as I struggled to remove my fancy shoe from my rapidly swelling foot. But I couldn’t bring myself to meet him again…
…That is, not until a wedding I attended last weekend. It was in a small town in Wisconsin, and there were far more people at the bar than on the dance floor. This was my comeback dance, and I had eased back into it with the twist and some flailing to Love Shack. Along with the bride, I was one of about six women on the dance floor when the DJ announced a special request from one local man to another. The bride and her local friends froze as the DJ continued, “I don’t really want to know what this is all about, but here we go.”
“We got to get out of here,” the bride said as she joined the exodus from the dance floor. I was almost back to my table when I heard that unmistakable beat and that whiny woman’s voice urging Becky to look at another woman’s impossibly big butt, and I knew in an instant why everyone had run. This whiny woman is but the herald to the dark knight who commands feet and legs to dance and, yes, knees to bend unnaturally before him. As the local women scattered, I couldn’t blame them for their fear. The last time I’d faced Sir Mix-A-Lot, I’d ended up missing two days of work and riding the electric shopping cart at Target.
“I like big butts, and I cannot lie,” came his voice through the darkened dance hall. I spun on my heels and looked back at the deserted dance floor. Lights flickered on empty parquet flooring. Not a soul, it seemed, was brave enough to face Mix-A-Lot in that arena. I looked to my friend Sarah, who had been witness (pointing, laughing witness) to my fall one year ago. She looked to the dance floor and back at me then nodded slowly; I knew would not face him alone. I persuaded the bride to come back to the dance floor with us, and several women reluctantly followed her.
Our little mass of flailing femininity moved toward the dance floor, and I steeled myself with quiet resolve: I would not kneel before Sir Mix-A-Lot…mostly because I can’t really kneel anymore without shooting pains in my leg. But as I took those first tentative steps back into the flickering lights, that familiar beat pounding through the autumn air, I was surrounded by women shaking their butts in solidarity, and I knew I had already won.
I won’t soon forget the challenge Mix-A-Lot issued to the assembled revelers at my good friends’ wedding reception. Sure, I had a couple chocolate martinis in me…and some rum from a thermos a friend had spirited into the building, but I felt ready to meet Sir Mix-A-Lot on the level ground of the makeshift dance floor covering the marble of the Minnesota Historical Society. His words said all the wrong things, objectifying women, reducing their worth to the circumference of their backsides; but the beat of the song said something else. The rhythm pounding through the rented sound system said, “I dare you not to dance to this.”
Well, this knight had picked the wrong day to make assumptions about my reluctance to dance due to moral and political reservations about a song’s lyrics. As a woman who sometimes forgets to brush her hair, I was feeling special in my plum-colored bridesmaid dress, neatly curled hair, and professionally applied makeup. And I had an advantage over Mix-A-Lot: he didn’t know of my family’s wedding dancing legacy. He couldn’t know that my father is none other than “The Dancing Machine” of southeastern Wisconsin.
Ah, but as fate would have it, my father’s legacy is a cruelly ironic one. For as I bore the mantle of The Dancing Machine, little did I know that my knees were quaking under the weight of it. I had inherited my father’s weak knees, and they were about to prove my very public undoing.
Just as I was answering Mix-A-Lot’s call to shake it, shake it, shake that healthy butt, there was an ear-splitting POP, and I found myself flat on the very moneymaker I’d been shaking mere moments before. At first, I was at a loss as to what had happened. My mind raced for the answer, quickly weighing the little evidence I had. There was the loud POP and the fact that I was on the floor. “Am I shot?” I wondered. But before I could remember if Sir Mix-A-Lot was from the East or West Coast, I caught sight of a foot to my left. It was wearing my shoe and appeared to be attached to a leg in my skirt, but the angle was all wrong; it couldn’t be attached to me.
As my friends formed a supportive circle of laughter around me, I was horrified to discover that the foot and the awkwardly bent leg were indeed mine. Unable to stand on my own and finding all my friends’ hands occupied in the act of pointing at me, I exited the dance floor by the only means left to me: this baby scooted backwards out of the flashing lights and into the darkness of a shame that has haunted me for a year.
The scooting may have managed to jostle my wayward joint back into place, but I limped through the world for a good two months. And when the swelling in my knee and foot finally went down, I carried the scars of my encounter with Sir Mix-A-Lot on the inside. My confidence was shaken; my ability to continue my family’s proud wedding dancing legacy was in doubt. I thought about Mix-A-Lot often, thought of a rematch. I knew how to find him; he had brazenly shouted his number, 1-900-MIX-ALOT, as I struggled to remove my fancy shoe from my rapidly swelling foot. But I couldn’t bring myself to meet him again…
…That is, not until a wedding I attended last weekend. It was in a small town in Wisconsin, and there were far more people at the bar than on the dance floor. This was my comeback dance, and I had eased back into it with the twist and some flailing to Love Shack. Along with the bride, I was one of about six women on the dance floor when the DJ announced a special request from one local man to another. The bride and her local friends froze as the DJ continued, “I don’t really want to know what this is all about, but here we go.”
“We got to get out of here,” the bride said as she joined the exodus from the dance floor. I was almost back to my table when I heard that unmistakable beat and that whiny woman’s voice urging Becky to look at another woman’s impossibly big butt, and I knew in an instant why everyone had run. This whiny woman is but the herald to the dark knight who commands feet and legs to dance and, yes, knees to bend unnaturally before him. As the local women scattered, I couldn’t blame them for their fear. The last time I’d faced Sir Mix-A-Lot, I’d ended up missing two days of work and riding the electric shopping cart at Target.
“I like big butts, and I cannot lie,” came his voice through the darkened dance hall. I spun on my heels and looked back at the deserted dance floor. Lights flickered on empty parquet flooring. Not a soul, it seemed, was brave enough to face Mix-A-Lot in that arena. I looked to my friend Sarah, who had been witness (pointing, laughing witness) to my fall one year ago. She looked to the dance floor and back at me then nodded slowly; I knew would not face him alone. I persuaded the bride to come back to the dance floor with us, and several women reluctantly followed her.
Our little mass of flailing femininity moved toward the dance floor, and I steeled myself with quiet resolve: I would not kneel before Sir Mix-A-Lot…mostly because I can’t really kneel anymore without shooting pains in my leg. But as I took those first tentative steps back into the flickering lights, that familiar beat pounding through the autumn air, I was surrounded by women shaking their butts in solidarity, and I knew I had already won.
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.”
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Let My People* Go
*and by "people," I mean "teeth"
Woe = me.
No, make that "woe is less than or equal to me." I had thought I might be getting my braces off on Friday, but alas, no. Here they are, cemented still to my teeth. Oh, my teeth! Would I recognize them if I saw them today? It has been so long since they have felt the sun on their enamel. For nigh on two years have their metal shackles kept them from the sweet freedom of certain sweets.
I think they're starting to drive me a little crazy. I feel an odd claustrophobia of the mouth that is really unsettling at times. And on Thursday night, it actually crossed my mind that my orthodontia was receiving communications from other-worldly beings. The phone rang, and when I answered, a disjointed, somewhat androgynous electronic voice spoke, "This IS the UNIVersity OF MinnESOTA ORTHodontic CLINIC CALLING to reMIND you of YOUR APPOINTment tomorROW, FRIDAY, August 24th at 4 o'clock PM."
The voice informed me of a custom of its home world similar to our Earth RSVP, and I politely relayed my intention of attending this meeting by pressing 1 on my phone's number pad.
The faculty adviser to my manly orthodontic student dentist seems to think my teeth could be just a little straighter, and so I must bear this bondage a little longer, the impressions of these metal brackets and wires sinking deeper and deeper into the soft tissue of my mouth. They have to come off one day, right? Right? Until then, I'll keep my teeth to the sky and my ears open for messages from the universe at large. At this point, I wouldn't care so much if they came in peace, just as long as they brought futuristic tooth-straightening devices. Or they could even just knock out all the teeth on Earth so that no one--namely me--is covetous of another's straight teeth EVER AGAIN.
Woe = me.
No, make that "woe is less than or equal to me." I had thought I might be getting my braces off on Friday, but alas, no. Here they are, cemented still to my teeth. Oh, my teeth! Would I recognize them if I saw them today? It has been so long since they have felt the sun on their enamel. For nigh on two years have their metal shackles kept them from the sweet freedom of certain sweets.
I think they're starting to drive me a little crazy. I feel an odd claustrophobia of the mouth that is really unsettling at times. And on Thursday night, it actually crossed my mind that my orthodontia was receiving communications from other-worldly beings. The phone rang, and when I answered, a disjointed, somewhat androgynous electronic voice spoke, "This IS the UNIVersity OF MinnESOTA ORTHodontic CLINIC CALLING to reMIND you of YOUR APPOINTment tomorROW, FRIDAY, August 24th at 4 o'clock PM."
The voice informed me of a custom of its home world similar to our Earth RSVP, and I politely relayed my intention of attending this meeting by pressing 1 on my phone's number pad.
The faculty adviser to my manly orthodontic student dentist seems to think my teeth could be just a little straighter, and so I must bear this bondage a little longer, the impressions of these metal brackets and wires sinking deeper and deeper into the soft tissue of my mouth. They have to come off one day, right? Right? Until then, I'll keep my teeth to the sky and my ears open for messages from the universe at large. At this point, I wouldn't care so much if they came in peace, just as long as they brought futuristic tooth-straightening devices. Or they could even just knock out all the teeth on Earth so that no one--namely me--is covetous of another's straight teeth EVER AGAIN.
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