Archive for October, 2007

scary star wheel

Published
by
alison
on October 28, 2007
in bluishorange
. Closed

Last Sunday at Maker Faire, my sister Megan and I were walking out of the freakshow tent and talking about finding some coffee when we saw this:

star wheel

“Ooh, look at that,” Megan said.

“Wow,” I said, “that looks scary.  Are those guys flipping over?”

“I think so,” Megan said.  “How does it work, though?  They don’t seem to be pedaling much, and the guys on the outside are doing most of the pushing.”

“I think the guys on the outside are just steering it.”

A girl in a Mexican dress came running up to us, her frog-shaped backpack jumping behind her.  She stopped just short of crashing into us.  “You have to do that with me!” she yelled.

“What?” I said.

“You guys have to do that with me!” she said again, pointing at the scary wheel.

“Oh HELL no,” I said.

“”But they only take people in groups of three!” she said.  “If you don’t do it with me, then I won’t get to do it at all.”

I’m not afraid of heights, exactly.  That is, I’m not afraid of safe heights.  I can look out over a tall balcony, I can admire the view from the top floor of a skyscraper, and I can climb the steep stairs to my seat in the nosebleed section of any arena without too much white-knuckling.  Hell, I can go up to the top of the St. Louis Arch even though the thing rocks back and forth in a stiff wind.  But when it comes to tall trees and tall ladders and roller coasters, I’m a total sissy.  These are things that I just don’t DO.

“I’ll do it,” Megan said.  She and the frog backpack girl looked at me expectantly.  If I didn’t ride the star wheel, frog girl wouldn’t get to do it.  Well, she’d probably find some other people eventually, but I’d still feel bad.  By this time the wheel had rolled its way over to us, and the wheel guys were unstrapping the riders to let someone else have a turn.  “Come on,” one of them said to me.  “It’ll be fun!”

“Oh, FINE,” I said.

“YAY!” cried frog girl.

I had barely come to terms with my decision when a wheel guy shoved a clipboard into Megan’s hands.  “You guys all have to sign this waiver,” he said. If this thing crashes and we all die, I thought (irrationally), my parents will lose both their children and be unable to sue for damages.  I signed the waiver.

“What do I do with my purse?” I asked.

“I’ll hold onto your bags,” one of the wheel guys said.  How said it must be to take part in putting this contraption together with scrap metal and old bicycles and plastic chairs, and then have to be the guy who holds the purses.  “Hey, what do we have here?” he said, glancing inside my open bag as I handed it to him.  “A phone, a camera.  Nice.”

“So that’s how you guys are paying for this thing, huh?” I said.  He laughed.  I asked him to take pictures.

When it was my turn to get strapped into the wheel, I put the seat belt on, cinched it tight, and stretched my feet out to the pedals.  They were too far away.  “Wait, I can’t reach the pedals!” I said to one of the wheel guys.

“Then I guess you’ll have to slouch,” he said, and we were off.

“HOLY FUCK!” I yelled as we started rolling.  My chair began to swing wildly.  I really couldn’t reach the pedals.  “OH, SHIT.”

“Pedal, ladies!” the wheel guy shouted.  “The more you pedal, the less you’ll flip over!”

I slouched down, but my chair was swinging like crazy, and I was already at the top of the wheel.

“Whatever you do, don’t look up!” one of the wheel guys said.

Reach the pedals, don’t look up, try not to flip over.  The ground was close, and then far away, and then close again.  I was starting to feel sick.  I stretched out a little bit more and found the pedals, and my chair stopped swinging almost immediately.

it was fun once i got used to it Once the swinging stopped, the ride got a bit better.  The pedaling did indeed make the wheel turn; the wheel guys were there to make sure we didn’t roll into a tree.  When we had to turn a corner, we’d stop pedaling and wait for the guys to turn the wheel in the proper direction.  It got easier to pedal and look around me at the same time; when my chair was at the top of the wheel I had a really nice view of the fair.  But I still didn’t let myself look up, and I think I got some good cursing in when we went over a bump in the road.  Eventually three new riders were waiting, so they stopped the wheel and let us off.  When my feet hit the ground I noticed that I was shaking.

“THAT WAS AWESOME!” frog girl said.

“You know,” I said, “I think you’re right.”

“And too short!  Way too short.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, looking up at the top chair, at how high it really was.  “But I’m glad I went.  Thanks for making me do that.”  I turned back towards frog girl, but she was already gone.

“Do you still want to get coffee?” I said to Megan as we hobbled away from the wheel.

“Nah, I think I’m awake now,” she said.

things that happen and don’t happen

Published
by
alison
on October 21, 2007
in bluishorange and childhood
. Closed

Right now I’m sitting outside at a coffeehouse with my glasses off. I kind of like a blurry coffeehouse. Without my glasses on, the guy sitting across the way looks pretty attractive, the brick wall inside looks like it has hair combs stapled to it, and I can glare at the family across the way under the guise of squinting at something just over their heads. Who the hell brings their cranky toddler to a crowded coffeehouse at 10:30 on a Wednesday? That baby should be asleep.

I’m here at this coffeehouse working on my weekly posts for the Paranormal Insider. Did I tell you I write for the Paranormal Insider? This is my first gig writing for a weblog I didn’t create, and sadly enough, writing about something besides myself is kind of a challenge. But it’s interesting so far, and the subject matter has yet to make me sleep with the lights on. As long as the call’s not coming from inside the house, I think I’ll be okay.

A few months ago I found two websites belonging to a pair of sisters I knew as a child. Their family moved away when we were all quite young, but our parents have kept in touch and I’ve seen them a few times since.

When I think of Meg, I always think of this particular old photo in one of my parents’ albums. It’s a photo of Meg and my sister Megan when they were five or six. Both of them are dressed in grownup clothes and grinning for the camera. Meg’s wearing a fancy dress and Megan’s wearing a suit; the photo may have been taken during the phase in which Megan and I were fond of having fake weddings with our mom as the officiant.

Now that I think about it, it might have been me and not Megan in the photo.

But my point is that I find it endlessly interesting to read their websites and hear about what they’re doing now. To see that photo and others from that time, you’d never know that Megan would grow up to be fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, that Leah would help rebuild houses in Mississippi, that Meg would be such a good artist.

When I found Meg’s website, I was surprised to find out that she paints. But I don’t know why I was surprised; after all, it doesn’t make sense to assume that nothing’s changed about a person since the last thing you heard about them, or the last photo you saw. I didn’t think Meg was going to spend her life as a fake bride, and you wouldn’t look at photos of me when I was a kid and think that I’d become a 29-year-old who loves Fraggle Rock and dressing up in fancy clothes.

Oh, wait.

all kinds of faulty metaphors

Published
by
alison
on October 13, 2007
in bluishorange and television
. Closed

I wish I had more to write about here, but all the new, writing-worthy things I’ve been doing lately involve my job.  I have a lot to say about how I’m adjusting to the decision-making part of it.  It’s been a long time since I had a job in which people came to me to inquire about What Should We Do With This Thing or How Should We Approach That Issue.  In the past five years I’ve been a waitress and an HTML e-mail coder, neither of which involved other people consulting me on the major decisions.  This new role is an interesting adjustment.

But I can’t really talk about my job.

Last Sunday afternoon I watched ten episodes of Dexter in a row.  I didn’t intend to watch ten episodes in a row, but I watched the first one while riding my exercise bike, and it was really good so I watched the second one while I ate.  That one was good, too, and I wanted to find out what happened next.  So I watched another one and another one and another one, and then I looked up and it was midnight.

Dexter is really scary.  It’s very gross, but I’m mostly okay with that.  It’s creepy and dark and suspenseful, and that was scary enough that I debated sleeping with the lights on.  But what scared me the most was the main character.

Dexter is a forensics analyst for the Miami police by day and a serial killer by night, but he only kills people who are guilty of terrible crimes (child molestation, multiple murder, etc.).  The fact that he only kills bad people, coupled with the slightly dubious story of how he became the way he is, compounded by the fact that the story takes place from his point of view, is supposed to make him a sympathetic character.  And for the most part, it does.

So the character of Dexter himself isn’t what scared me.  No, the thing that scared me arose from a particular type of dizzying myopia that comes from spending long hours immersed in a fictional world.  This happens to me all the time.  When I watch one season of a TV show from start to finish, or when I read a book from cover to cover in one sitting, the characters and situations and themes stick with me long after I’m done.

As I was watching all these episodes of Dexter in a row, I was thinking, I bet it’s really hard keeping such a big secret from everyone.  How lonely it must be to have nobody to talk to about it.  I wonder if anyone I know has a really big secret like that.  Oh come on, that’s dumb.  But everyone has little secrets, don’t they?  Things they’ve only told one or two people over the course of their lifetimes?  Sometimes I look at people I know and wonder how much I really know about them.  How well do we know anyone at all?

That’s what really scared me about Dexter: the idea that (Google notwithstanding) we can only know as much about another person as they’re willing to tell us.  Though this scary thought was magnified by the ten hours I spent watching a show about a serial killer, it’s a thought I’ve been playing with for some time.

A few weeks ago I had dinner with a big group of people, most of whom I’ve known for at least six years.  I’d lost touch with most of them, though, and there were a few people there whom I hadn’t seen in a very long time.  At one point during the meal, I looked up from my plate and thought, I don’t know these people anymore.  Time and new jobs and moving away and breakups turned them all into virtual strangers, people I don’t know any better than I did six years ago.

During dinner, I found myself basing my interactions with these old friends on what I knew of them from the last time I saw them.  It didn’t work, of course.  They’re different and I’m different, and although I didn’t expect things to be the same as they used to be, I was surprised at how really weird it was.

Which made me wonder how well I knew them in the first place.  Maybe dinner was weird because they’ve all become secret serial killers in the intervening years.  Or maybe they were always secret serial killers and I just never knew.

As I’ve gotten older, everyone I know has become less and less forthcoming with the details of their lives.  Situations get complicated, relationships and other personal details get sticky, and we’re not as likely to share these layers of our experience as we were when things were simple.  I imagine it like a bedsheet falling slowly from a clothesline: as the sheet falls into the grass, the fabric sinks into a wrinkled pile, and you can’t see the whole thing anymore.

See, I used to have jobs I could write about.  When I was a waitress, I could tell you all about my coworkers and the bad customers and the good customers.  I didn’t care too much about my e-mail coding job, so I could write about that one, too.  But I care about this job quite a bit, so I’m holding it in.

The job example is a faulty one, because of course I talk about it with my family and friends.  But I used to be more open than I am now, and it’s a pattern I’m seeing in other people both online and off as I get older.  Good or bad, we’re all playing our lives close to the chest.

P.S. If I know you and you’re a secret serial killer, please don’t ever tell me.  And don’t come to my house, either; I’m sleeping with the lights on.

* A friend asked me, “Are you watching less TV now that you’ve decided to reevaluate what you watch?”
“Not really,” I said.
“But are you watching better TV?”
“That’s the thing,” I said.  “I’m definitely watching better TV, but somehow it still takes the same amount of time.”