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tits up

Published on August 20, 2008 in best of, bluishorange and travel. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

On our second night in Brussels, Jessica and I went to a nearby square to find someplace to have dinner. Anyone who travels in foreign countries is probably familiar with this method of dinner-finding:

“What about this place?”
“I dunno, let’s look at the menu.”
[Looking at menu]
“Whoa, that’s expensive! Let’s keep walking.”

[Walking]

“How about here?”
[Looking at menu]
“Eh, we had pizza last night. Let’s keep walking.”

[Walking]

“Here?”
[Looking at menu]
“I can’t tell what this is.”
“Me, either.”

[Walking]

“What about this place?”
[Looking at menu]
“I think I can find something to eat here. You?”
“Yeah, this looks good.”

We sat down at a table outside and looked at the menu. The waiter came over and spoke English to us, so we asked him to translate some of the less-obvious words on the menu, and he helped us pick out some drinks and salads and pasta.

As we waited for our food, I noticed an elderly man sitting by himself at a table just behind Jessica, with what looked like a metal crutch propped up next to him. On his table there was a beer and a bunch of colored pencils; it looked like he was drawing something.

Just after our food arrived, the man stood up and hobbled over to where Jessica and I were sitting. “Excuse me,” he said in heavily-accented English, handing me a beer coaster, “I draw this for you.”

I looked at the beer coaster. It was just a regular coaster on the printed side, but on the blank side he had drawn this:

a gift from an elderly man

In case it isn’t glaringly obvious, this is a drawing of me. Topless.

Of course I was not topless at the time; I guess the drawing was just his representation of what I might look like topless. While I was quietly freaking out, the elderly man was telling Jessica that to get the breasts so perfectly round, he had traced around an old Belgian penny. Not a Euro penny, a Belgian penny, I guess to add a little Belgian nationalism to his topless works.

I say I was quietly freaking out, but really I wasn’t sure what to think. How was I supposed to feel about this? Was the topless coaster drawing offensive? Was it creepy? Or was it just a prop for a funny travel tale? The waiter came out, saw the drawing on the table, and chuckled. “He does that every day,” he said.

The fact that the elderly man was there at the restaurant every day, drawing all sorts of topless tourists, made me feel a bit better. If he was creepy, at least he wasn’t so creepy that he had alienated restaurant employees. As a former waitress, I’ve known restaurant regulars like this–they walk a fine line between creepy and normal, but if you work at a place long enough, they start to seem a little endearing.

Jessica and I were halfway through our meal when the elderly man came over to our table again. “Excuse me. What is your name?” he said to Jessica.

“Jessica,” she said.

“Yessica!” he said. “You write it here.” He handed her a beer coaster and a marker and pointed to the printed side of the coaster. She wrote her name and gave it back to him. A few minutes later he came back over and handed her the coaster. On the blank side he had drawn a train, with Jessica’s name incorporated into the front grill of the locomotive.

“Thanks!” she said.

He asked us where we were from, and we told him Texas. “Texas!” he exclamed, as though pleasantly surprised. A few minutes later he asked me to write my name down, and I received a drawing of “a steam ship on the Mississippi!” with my name on it.

“Thanks,” I said.

The rest of the meal was uneventful except for the part where I arm-wrestled the waiter and he tried to give me a neck massage, but that’s another story. As we walked away from the restaurant, I thought about the topless drawing of me. What if the elderly man liked men instead of women? Would he draw pictures of shirtless or pantsless* men and hand them out to male tourists? I imagined how things might go if he handed out pictures of pantsless men:

“Excuse me, I draw this for you.”
[Punch]

If that’s really what would happen, then the beer-coaster drawing represents yet another thing that happens to women more often than men. Women are generally seen as more passive than men, and therefore less likely to react violently or negatively to things like this. Maybe the elderly man felt safe giving me the drawing because I’m a woman, so he probably wouldn’t get punched or even yelled at.

And he was right, apparently. I didn’t punch him or yell at him at all; in fact I thanked him. My general rule when I’m in a country where I don’t speak the language, don’t know the laws, and don’t know anyone besides my traveling companion is that it’s important to stay as safe as possible; negative incidents I might not walk away from at home are usually best avoided when abroad. So maybe that’s part of it. But the truth is that I am pretty passive. If a man in an Austin restaurant handed me a naked drawing of myself, I’d only make a fuss if he followed up with something inappropriate, and even then I’d probably just ask for the check and tell the waiter, “I’ve got to go, this customer is harassing me.”

The elderly man in the restaurant was obviously not coming on to me, and there was no inappropriate followup to be found. After he gave us our drawings, he didn’t talk to us again for the rest of our meal. If the same incident had happened in Austin, I’d have done the same exact thing that I did in Brussels.

There are a few other things at play here:

1. I felt less threatened because he was elderly, and walked with a cane. If he’d been large and/or muscular and imposing, I might have reacted differently, or at the very least felt differently.

2. My reaction to the drawing was a pretty American one. It’s an unfortunate American convention that, no matter what the context, the nude female form is automatically seen as a sexual thing to be censored.** Our movies are filled with more blood and violence and killing than with nudity, and when the nudity appears, it’s a big fat deal. Watching any amount of European television will tell you that they don’t look at nudity the same way we do. Perhaps the elderly Belgian man didn’t see his drawing as overtly sexual, at least not in the way I did.

I still struggle with my reaction to the drawing, and what it means as far as how I lead my daily life. I guess I don’t wish I’d been less passive at that restaurant in Brussels; the elderly man was harmless enough, as are your average men. But what about when things aren’t so harmless? I wish I didn’t feel the need to look behind me every time I walked down a deserted street. I wish I didn’t have to take my keys out and have them ready while walking to my car or apartment at night. I wish I didn’t feel like I can’t do certain things for safety reasons because I’m female. I wish about a lot of things that happen to women.

A friend once told me that whenever he’s walking down a nearly-deserted Manhattan street at night and there’s a lone woman walking in front of him, he’ll sometimes cross to the other side of the street to avoid freaking her out. And I think that’s what I really struggle with. Is it up to other people to try not to freak me out, or is it up to me to avoid allowing myself to freak out?***

As for the drawing, of course I took it with me, to use as a prop for a funny travel tale. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good story.

*Side question: if he drew pictures of pantsless males, what would he trace for the penis?

**However gradually, I do think America is improving on this front, but we’re still much different from the rest of the western world in how we view our nudity.

***I think it’s both, really.

Dear Frank Warren,

Published on May 8, 2008 in best of, bluishorange and letters. 34 Comments Tags: , , , , .

We’ve never met before, but I was in the audience at your keynote at SXSW in March. SXSW 2008 was the eighth SXSW I’ve attended, and I’ve been to many panels and many keynotes, but yours has been the only one during which I cried.

SXSW is often a rather stressful event for me, so this year at SXSW I gave myself a set of rules to keep myself from getting depressed, from getting too stressed out, from–well, from crying. But I didn’t cry during your keynote for any of my usual reasons, and I didn’t cry any other times during the conference, so I’m going to give myself a pass and call this year’s SXSW a success.

Your keynote made me cry for the same reason I had to stop visiting your website. You may not be too happy to hear about that, but it’s not your fault. PostSecret is a wonderful project, but I had to stop reading the website because it made me too sad. My small corner of the world–my job, my city, my hobbies, my friends, my family–is about all I can handle sometimes, and reading PostSecret reminded me that the world is much larger than I’ll ever be able to understand. Every single person has their own small corner of the world like mine, a corner they probably feel like they can’t handle any more than I can, and all those corners with their beautiful and terrible and painful secrets are sometimes too much for me to bear. I’ll never know any of these people, and the enormity of that frightens me a little.

The secrets also worry me because they make me wonder about the people I do know. Do my friends or family members have terrible secrets they’ll never tell me? How well can you ever really know another person?

Here’s the thing, though: that concept goes both ways. I’m as complicated as any other human being, aren’t I? How well do my friends and family know me? And that’s the other reason I cried during your keynote. You see, Frank Warren, I have a secret.

When I told my therapist about my secret, I expected him to look surprised. I thought he would put down his Diet Dr. Pepper, lean forward in his chair and say, “Really? Tell me more.” But he didn’t. Instead he just said, “Oh. Yeah.” I get the feeling that I share this secret with others.

I guess my secret can best be described as a debilitating, all-encompassing fear of an apocalypse. But it’s not the kind of apocalypse you see in movies where Bill Pullman is the president and Jeff Goldblum is the scientist and the aliens/dinosaurs/meteors are coming to kill us all. It’s the kind where we’re going to run out of oil, we’re going to run out of food, we’re going to run out of money, we’re going to run out of places to keep all the people and garbage and stuff we’ve created.

When gripped with apocalypse fear, I run through the same scenario over and over again in my head. It’s pretty ridiculous; are you ready to hear it? Okay. In the apocalyptic scenario, I’m sixty years old, and somehow I’m still living in the same apartment I do now. (I don’t really like this apartment, and I know I won’t be living in it when I’m sixty. Hell, it probably won’t even be here when I’m sixty. But that’s the scenario, so I go with it.) I’m sixty, and I live in this apartment, and BAM! The world runs out of gasoline, electricity, and food, all in the span of hours. There’s anarchy outside, and I’m alone in my apartment. Most of my friends don’t live nearby, so I have no way to get to them if I don’t want to walk really, really far. But then I think, hey! I have some gas left in my car, probably enough to get me to a friend’s house, and then we can all go find food together. So I walk out to the parking lot where my 1996 Acura is still there and functional, and BAM! Someone kills me for a tank of gas.

I know that what I’ve done here is taken all my worst fears and combined them into a single ten-minute play. I’m afraid I’ll never live in a place I actually like, I’m afraid I’ll be chained to my car forever, I’m afraid I’ll always be a fifteen-minute drive away from my friends, I’m afraid we’re going to run out of everything all at once and there’ll be anarchy, and I’m afraid my death will be painful, lonely, and meaningless.

Sometimes the play has a different ending. Sometimes my apartment neighbors and I band together in the crisis. We used to be strangers, but now we’re friends by necessity, and we protect each other and look for food together and take turns going down to the creek to get water. We fend off hostile groups from other apartments with pointy sticks and old kitchen knives, and at night one of us always keeps watch while the others sleep. It’s okay for awhile, but then I die of heat stroke and sunburn.

Or sometimes I manage to walk all the way to a friend’s house, and my friends and I band together to help each other stay safe and get food and water and sleep. But then someone from a rival group kills our leader, and we’re all so despondent and directionless that we disband, and then someone kills me for a tank of gas while I’m dying of heat stroke and sunburn.

But usually I’m killed for the gas right away. I’ve begun to use the phrase, “when someone kills me for a tank of gas” as shorthand for the whole thing. “My inability to be productive won’t really matter when someone kills me for a tank of gas.” “It’s okay if I watch TV all day because it won’t make a difference when someone kills me for a tank of gas.” “This problem will seem insignificant by the time someone kills me for a tank of gas.”

The shorthand is necessary, though, because not a day goes by when I don’t think about my apocalypse fear. I can’t go to the grocery store without imagining what it might look like with empty shelves. I can’t check my mailbox without imagining all my junk mail in a landfill. I can’t visit Houston without imagining it flooded with seawater from melted ice. I can’t look at paper plates and plastic forks without thinking about our “consumption-based culture in which disposability is an added value.” I can’t look at my coworkers and acquaintances without thinking, “Do they know? Can they see it coming?” My corner of the world may look normal on the outside, but inside my head it’s covered with a sticky film of impending disaster.

My apocalypse fear came to a head last summer and fall. I was having at least one anxiety attack per day, usually while driving home from work, usually related to the fact that I work in a far-flung suburb of a city without a lot of reliable public transportation. I would find myself paralyzed with guilt at all the gas I was wasting getting to and from work, and equally paralyzed at the thought of having to ride both the bus and my bicycle to the office every day. Then I would feel guilty about not wanting to ride the bus, and then guilty about wasting the gas, and on and on until sometimes I wasn’t really watching the road anymore. “That’s okay,” I would think to myself. “This won’t matter when someone kills me for a tank of gas.”

(When I find myself thinking this way, I’m reminded of a comment someone left on a post I wrote on my website awhile back. I’d had a bad day, and I wrote that it seemed to me like nothing I did was ever going to matter in the grand scope of human existence, so what the hell was the point. Someone named John wrote, “The sun’s going to go out in a million years, and here I am going to work like a sucker.” It was exactly how I felt that day, and it was exactly how I felt last fall.)

I didn’t tell anyone about my fear for a really long time. Running out of food and gasoline and electricity and potable water is a scary topic, and I didn’t want to depress my friends. I was afraid that they’d hear about what I was going through and say, “Alison, I don’t really want to talk about that right now.” Worse, I was afraid they would tell me that I was wrong, that all that stuff is never going to happen, that it’s pointless to worry about it. As I’m pretty sure it’s all going to happen at some point, hearing that would only have made me feel even more alone. And I already felt really alone. The collapse of Western civilization isn’t something I’d ever heard anyone talk about in casual conversation, so naturally I assumed that everyone else a) didn’t know, or b) knew but was handling it much better than I was.

Things all came to a head in December. I’d been obsessing over the apocalypse since June or July, I hadn’t told anyone, and it was driving me so insane that I was probably thisclose to buying a gun and putting all my savings under my mattress. A few weeks before Christmas, I had a friend over. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I guess I couldn’t hold my worry and fear in anymore, and all of a sudden I was telling him that we were running out of food and water and electricity and someone was going to kill me for a tank of gas. To my great surprise, he didn’t tell me he didn’t want to talk about it, and he didn’t tell me my fears were unfounded. Instead he listened, and asked questions, and was generally sympathetic to what I was going through. I guess I don’t give my friends enough credit.

After I finally told someone about it, I started to feel a bit better. At SXSW I told another friend, who said that he thinks about it, too. Then I told another friend, who said that it’s something she and her mom have talked about. And that, Frank Warren, is why I think PostSecret is important, even if I can’t read it myself. To take your secret out of your own head and put it somewhere else is often the thing that separates you from insanity. I still see the world through empty shelves and plastic bags and non-renewable resources and the wasting, wasting, wasting of everything, but talking about it has made living in that world a little bit easier.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Alison Headley

P.S. Other good has come out of this, too. I’m becoming much more aware of what I buy and what I throw away, I’ve mostly stopped eating meat, and I’m working on chipping away at my gas usage. It’s a slow process, but if I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that I won’t do anyone any good if I sit back and let it drive me insane.

P.P.S. I know that we’re not going to run out of food and water and oil all at the same time. I also know that thirty years from now is a debatable, perhaps even arbitrary, figure. My fears are just that, fears, and I don’t put them through an accuracy test before I let them take over.

P.P.P.S. I would never really buy a gun. You know that, right?

P.P.P.P.S. Thank you Ryan and Ariel.

Dear Shaun,

Published on February 13, 2008 in best of, bluishorange, letters and writing. 0 Comments Tags: .

Today at lunch I spent a little time on Ask Metafilter–not looking for anything in particular, mind you, just a general sort of looking. I spend less time online lately, but the Metafiltering is a thing I still do every now and then, usually when I’m trying to avoid doing something else. So there I was, clicking and avoiding, and then I read this comment you wrote, and I started to cry. I didn’t cry about the vegetarian food ideas (Smart Dogs are good, but they’re not that good) or about how expensive Whole Foods is (fucking expensive, but not tear-inducingly so) or about how much I might miss bacon if I stopped eating it (although I’d miss it a lot). No, I cried at this part:

You might get fed up and snap and have a hamburger. You might find that you’re perfectly happy being a vegetarian all the time except Sunday mornings, when you just want to goddamned pieces of bacon with your scrambled eggs. You might not think about the chicken stock in the soup until after you’ve eaten it. That’s ok. Don’t feel like you’ve failed as a vegetarian. Even though, yes, you ate some meat, you are eating less meat. Your new vegetarianism (whatever your reason for it) is not some fragile vase that is going to shatter the second you have a bite of meat. It is as strong as you decide it is, and the boundaries are where you set them. Remember that what’s important here is net benefit. A single hot dog does not erase all the benefits from not eating meat for the previous weeks, months, or years. If you were only 100% vegetarian for a single day that would be better than never.

You wrote it about vegetarianism, but I read it like this:

Your $x (whatever your reason for it) is not some fragile vase that is going to shatter the second you $y. It is as strong as you decide it is, and the boundaries are where you set them.

At which point it became about the long, long list of things I’ve stopped doing lately, things I’ve let languish simply because I’m afraid I can’t do them perfectly. I can’t write a book perfectly, I can’t sew a skirt perfectly, I can’t redesign this website perfectly (let alone post on it), I can’t process my photos perfectly, I can’t do anything perfectly. This particular thought pattern has crippled me to the point where I’ve become paralyzed with anxiety, and I’ve stopped doing anything at all.

I’m sure that this is obvious to other people, but it is not obvious to me: it’s okay if I’m not perfect. Really, it is. My writing is not some fragile vase that is going to shatter the second I split an infinitive; if I only sewed for a single day that would be better than never; and so on and so forth. And that’s why I cried when I read your comment. I’ve always known that “It’s okay if I’m not perfect” is a factual statement, but reading what you wrote made me think that I just might start believing it.

Thank you.
-Alison

stuff in my apartment

Published on December 16, 2007 in best of, bluishorange and childhood. Closed

(I think I’m stealing this idea from Sarah. I seem to remember her doing something like it a few years ago, though I can’t seem to find it on her site. Thanks, Sarah.)

Bass mirror, permanently dusty

My first waitressing job was at a doomed restaurant/bar in a suburb of Houston. It was run by a man who had never run a restaurant or bar before, and it was in a neighborhood where a children’s menu (which we didn’t have) was more important than an ample scotch selection (which we did). I only worked there three months before we had to shut down to make way for a Wings N Things. I blame this job for my dislike of chain restaurants.

I’d become quite attached to the restaurant in my brief time there—the classic-rock jukebox, the collection of old beer cans on a shelf along the ceiling, the caricatures of employees and regular customers hanging on the walls. Two weeks before we closed I was promoted to bartender, so I spent the last night we were open holding back tears while getting drunk on bizarre cocktails of my own invention. “I call this one The Thing That Devoured the Bronx Pub and Grill,” I said, downing a mixture of Chambord, Midori, and blue CuraÁao. “Does anyone else want a White Bread Ate Manhattan?”

Before closing the doors for the last time, the owner let us take whatever we wanted off the walls. I took two things: a framed martini-themed poster and this gigantic Bass mirror. I’m still upset I didn’t remember to take my own caricature.

tea set Andy's mom gave me

My ex-boyfriend Andy’s mom was a frequent shopper at weekend garage sales. Andy and I had only been dating for a few months when she started to buy things she thought I might like. I’m quite narrow and particular in my tastes, so I was surprised when she turned out to be pretty good at picking things out for me. I still have two shirts she bought, and this tea set marked the beginning of my small teapot collection.

Andy’s mom was very generous and thoughtful, so much so that it made me feel guilty sometimes. I’d do a few loads of laundry at their house one night, and the next morning I’d wake up to find it all perfectly folded in the basket. No matter how many times I told her not to do it, she always folded my laundry anyway.

Andy had one brother and no sisters, and I always suspected that his mom folded my laundry and bought me things at garage sales because she enjoyed having a girl around the house.

glass bowl that my grandmother gave me

In the last few years of my grandmother’s life, she began to give her things away. She had a lot of china and other glass knick-knacks, and every time my parents or I went for a visit, we’d come back with a few pieces from her collection. For most of the pieces, she’d write a little note in her spindly handwriting with the date and place she acquired it. This bowl is my favorite, but unfortunately I don’t have the note anymore.

glass fish, glass paperweight, Faulkner shotglass

In February of my senior year of high school, I dated a guy who worked in the courtesy booth at the grocery store where I was a cashier. He was a freshman in college and much cooler than me, and I was surprised he asked me out in the first place. We’d only been out a few times when Valentine’s Day came around, and I worried about it for days beforehand. I’d always thought that Valentine’s Day was kind of stupid, with its standard gifts of flowers and chocolate and jewelry, but I didn’t know how to tell him that. He was the first guy I’d ever dated on Valentine’s Day, and I didn’t want to mess things up by doing something wrong. By the time Valentine’s Day arrived and he was at the door to pick me up for dinner, I was terrified.

When I opened the door, he handed me a little box. Oh, shit! I thought. He got me jewelry! What am I supposed to do? “I didn’t figure you were too into the whole Valentine’s Day thing,” he said, “but I wanted to get you a little something, and I thought you might like this.” I opened the box, and there on a little bed of cotton was a small glass paperweight. It was beautiful and thoughtful and not too weird at all. I couldn’t believe he had managed to find something so perfect.

We broke up three weeks later, but not because of the paperweight.

wooden name carving

I’ve had this wooden carving of my name since I was a kid, but I have no idea where it came from. I asked my dad about it over Thanksgiving and he said that an old coworker of his might have made it, but he’s not too sure either.

wild turkey cologne from Avon

On the bottom of this turkey-shaped cologned bottle, there’s a little sticker that says “Avon Wild Turkey.” It sat on my dad’s side of the counter in my parents’ bathroom for years. When I was little I’d go into the bathroom, take off the turkey’s head, and unscrew the cap to smell the cologne inside. My dad never, ever wore cologne, so I always wondered why he had it. Did he live the cologne-splashing life before my sister and I came along?

Before my parents moved to St. Louis, my dad asked me if I would look through the stuff they were giving away to see if there was anything I wanted. I found this cologne bottle in the pile, and asked my dad why he ever had it in the first place. I don’t remember what he said.

the Horny Bull

Just before I moved out of my parents’ house, I found this poster folded inside an old bartending guide in the liquor cabinet. My dad told me he didn’t even know it was there, and of course I could keep it if I wanted. I’ve hung it up in every bathroom I’ve had since. The copyright date on it is 1972, and the instructions at the bottom are for how to make tequila and Tang with ice in a Mason jar. According to this poster, Montezuma is the brave, bold tequila.

Eddie Mathews bobblehead

When I went to Atlanta in 2004, Chris and Kelly and I took a tour of Turner Field. They gave us these Eddie Mathews bobbleheads for free as we were leaving. Chris said that he planned to hang his upside-down next to his television so that the Braves would lose and the Astros would win. He also spat in the Braves dugout during the tour for good measure. Eddie’s bat broke off a few years ago, and I’ve never been able to glue it back on. Sorry, Eddie.

bathroom Simpsons collection

During the month I spent in London in 2001, I ate Nutella and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day. I was going to eat Nutella anyway (hello?), and the jelly was easily stolen from the refectory, so I figured I may as well make a lunch out of it. At the time, Nutella was sold in Simpsons-themed collectible jars with free magnets in the lids. I loved Nutella and I loved the Simpsons and I loved London, so this made me very happy.

I got my nose pierced while I was in London. When I told the guy behind the counter at Metalmorphosis that I hadn’t had lunch yet, he made me go eat something before they would pierce my nose. I felt kind of stupid eating a Nutella sandwich on the sidewalk outside a piercing place, but it had to be done.

scary Bailey's mug

The first time I went to Europe, in the summer of 1996, my friends and I bought a big bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream from a liquor store in Madrid. When we walked in and asked for Bailey’s, the shopkeeper pretended to think we said “bailar,” the Spanish word for dance, and he pantomimed dancing behind the counter. I can’t remember why we thought Bailey’s was so great, but we were eighteen so we didn’t know much about alcohol. We drank the whole thing and were disappointed that we didn’t get drunk.

“Do you feel anything yet?”

“No.”

“Me either. Dammit.”

My friend Lauren’s mother had a whole box of these Bailey’s mugs in her kitchen. She never used them or even looked at them, so Lauren stole one and gave it to me as a gift. I’d have felt guilty about it, but Lauren’s mother was not very nice.

orangutan painting and various knick-knacks

My friends Trina and Kelly used to work in the primate area at the Houston zoo. This was awesome for me because whenever I went to visit, they would take me back to the feeding area and other places that regular visitors weren’t allowed to go. I got to meet a bunch of orangutans and a baboon and a gibbon.

The zoo did this fundraising campaign where they would get the orangutans to make paintings, which they would then auction off to benefit various primate causes. For Christmas one year, Kelly gave the orangs some blue and orange paint and a canvas and had them make this painting for me.

Andy's paintings

Andy did these two paintings. He gave them to me unsigned, but I made him sign them so I could tell when they were right-side up.

pickle ornament

In my life so far, I’ve had no interest whatsoever in getting my own Christmas tree. I live by myself in a small apartment with a tiny, curious dog, so I’d rather enjoy other people’s Christmas trees, thank you. But I have exactly one Christmas ornament—a glass pickle that lives on this lamp switch all year round. I couldn’t resist buying it from Hendley market in Galveston a few years ago. It’s a pickle, for God’s sake.

really old refrigerator magnets

I can’t remember my life without these refrigerator magnets. My parents gave them to me when I got my first apartment, since I loved them so much when I was little. Usually I’m not a fan of such gratuitous branding, but apparently I make exceptions for jelly jar magnets, alcohol paraphernalia, and the Simpsons.

There’s very little in my house that I’m not attached to sentimentally. I keep trying to convince myself that I should start decorating with things that are more almost-30-years-old and less OMG-my-first-apartment-rules! but I can’t seem to bring myself to do it. Maybe the fact that my apartment is an ode to my childhood and twenties is a little bit sad, but I don’t care. I’m comfortable here.

(The set has more photos.)

Condom-inium!

Published on December 10, 2007 in best of, bluishorange and childhood. Closed

I’ve never liked “I love you” as a telephone conversation-ender.  Several years ago, I read a post on someone’s weblog that said simply, “At some point I love you becomes talk to you later.” It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about before, but as soon as I read that post, I realized how true it was. “I love you” is like a curse word that way—if said often enough, it loses its impact.

“But what if that’s our last phone conversation ever?” an old boyfriend said to me once. “What if something happens to one of us? I would want ‘I love you’ to be the last thing we said.”

“Well,” I said, “if something bad happened, it’d certainly be ideal if ‘I love you’ was the last thing we ever said to one another. But it never sounds right on the phone.”

So we made a deal where we would only say it on the phone if we weren’t in the same town, and I thought it a fair compromise. But it still never sounded right.

A few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk, talking on the phone with a coworker. As we ended our conversation, I thought, “God, wouldn’t it be embarrassing if I accidentally said ‘I love you’ right before I hung up?” It certainly would be embarrassing, and I’d have to explain that sometimes I’m really weird in my head and I didn’t mean it, of course, I just was thinking about what if I said it and then it came out and I’m really sorry, sir.

After I hung up the phone I had a good laugh and didn’t think about it again, at least not until my next phone conversation. See, now I’ve psyched myself out. Ever since I first had that thought, every single time I’m nearing the end of a phone conversation something in my head says, “Okay, talk to you soon, I love you, bye!” and I panic just a little bit. Don’t say it! Then I hang up and sigh with relief at not having said it this time. But who knows how long it will be until my brain finally tricks me into saying it?

Jessica and I talked recently about when we had to read the textbook out loud during seventh-grade science class. The teacher would tell us that we each had to read three sentences from the book, going up and down the desk rows taking turns until we finished reading chapter seven. “I would always count the sentences in advance and figure out which ones I would have to read so I could practice beforehand,” Jessica said.

“So did I!” I said. “I was always terrified that I’d mess up. And I was really afraid that one of my sentences would have organism in it.”

“I was afraid of condominium.”

“Why would you talk about condominiums in science class?”

“I guess we wouldn’t, but I still liked to be prepared.”

Until Jessica and I talked about this, I’d forgotten how much I hated the reading out loud. I never even listened to what everyone else was reading; I was too busy counting how many kids were going to read before me and counting the sentences until it was my turn and oh now that one kid is finished so I’ve got to recount and I think these are my sentences and oh my god I have to say organism and I just know that this is going to be the day when I slip up and say orgasm in front of the whole class. Everyone will laugh and laugh and I’ll be known as The Girl Who Said Orgasm in Fifth Period Science until I get to college, and even then I bet someone in my dorm will have heard about it.

Don’t say orgasm don’t say orgasm don’t say orgasm

I never said orgasm in science class, but in seventh grade I farted in reading, which was even worse, because then I was The Girl Who Farted in Reading. I tried to convince everyone that it wasn’t me, it was these damn creaky chairs (hoping that the added “damn” would make me seem like the kind of badass who wouldn’t ever fart in reading), but they didn’t believe me. So everyone laughed and laughed while I sat there red-faced in the damn creaky chair pretending to read Tuck Everlasting, which of course I’d already read at home, but there was no point bragging about that because it would probably make things worse and anyway it wouldn’t erase my status as The Girl Who Farted in Reading.

Not that I’m any better about these things. I still remember Amy Vance as The Girl Who Barfed in Ninth-Grade English.

And apparently I’m still convinced that my brain is going to try and humiliate me. I just know that the next time I’m at my desk on the phone with someone from finance or purchasing, I’m going to end the conversation with “I love you! Orgasm!” and there’ll be no proper way to explain it. Only this time, instead of laughing at me, they’re going to file a grievance.

double entendre

Published on November 26, 2007 in best of, bluishorange and lists. Closed

Most of the time I take my own lunch to work—a reusable plastic container full of salad or crock-pot veggie chili to eat while surfing the web at my desk. It saves me a lot of money and a LOT of calories, and lately whenever I drive by a McDonald’s I think to myself, “The road to hell is paved with disposable fast-food containers,” so I feel pretty good in that department, too.

(Boy, it’s a good thing I’m a single-occupant vehicle most of the time; I’d hate for someone to see me frowning at fast-food restaurants and flipping off Hummers on my commute to work and think I’m some kind of hypocrite.)

Except once a week I get my lunch at Freebird’s, a burrito place near my office. The burritos are good and fresh and not too expensive, and they come packaged in foil and a little paper bag, so I don’t feel too bad about the packaging (or at least not as bad as I would if it were plastic).

Freebird’s is one of those choice-type places, where you walk in and ask one of the fifteen people behind the counter for a burrito, and they say what size? what kind of tortilla? do you want rice? meat? what kind of cheese? what kind of beans? pico? guacamole? onions? sauce? a cookie? a drink? and so on and so forth until you’re tired of all the interrogation, but you end up with a really good burrito, so you get over it.

Since I’ve ordered the same thing several times now, the interrogation process has become quick and easy for me, except when I’m faced with one counter guy in particular. A few weeks ago it was my turn in line and I was ready to give the same answers I usually do to the same burrito questions I usually hear, except I couldn’t hear this guy. When he asked what kind of cheese I wanted, I had to say, “Sorry, what?” and when he asked about beans I said, “Huh?” He asked me about onions and I said, “Eh?” and we both laughed. By the time we got to the pico (“What?”), it occurred to me that despite his tendency to mumble, this burrito guy was ridiculously adorable.

Which is to say he was ridiculously adorable in the way one is if one works behind the counter at a burrito place that pretends to be anti-establishment but is actually a chain with twenty locations statewide. But he had arm tattoos and a red goatee and I’m a sucker for such things. And there was something about his eyes.

When I got to the end of the line, he had forgotten to put my cookie in the bag, and the cashier said, “Dude, you forgot the cookie.”

“Oh, sorry,” he said, handing a cookie to the cashier. “But it’s not just me! She’s all spaced out too.” He smiled at me.

“It’s true,” I said, and smiled back. It’s possible I giggled. For the rest of the day I felt kind of giddy, like I was thirteen instead of twenty-nine.

So now when I go to Freebird’s I try not to look at him. It makes me wish I had a girlfriend there with me, someone with whom I could commiserate, someone to whom I could say, “Okay, he’s the one over there with the red goatee; see him? NO DON’T LOOK! He’s gonna see us if you look! Did you see him? DON’T LOOK!”

Thirteen.

But I’m always there by myself, so while I wait in the burrito line I play this stupid scene in my head where I’m walking out to the parking lot with my burrito in a bag, and he comes running after me and asks me out, and I say “Sorry, what?” so he has to repeat himself, and then I say, Look, I think you’re ridiculously adorable, but I’m too old for you, and that’s when he tells me that he’s 27-35 and an aspiring writer/artist/musician who works at Freebird’s during the day so he can write/make art/gig at night.

So I sculpt my phone number for him in burrito foil and we go on one of those legendary dates where you walk out of the coffeehouse/bar together and then you just keep walking and walking all over downtown until it’s 4am and neither of you remembers where you parked but it doesn’t seem to matter. And there are more dates, and then one of four things happens:

1) He becomes a wildly successful writer/artist/musician and dumps me because I’m still just a web chick. His fantastic new album is full of songs that I suspect may be about me, but I’m probably projecting.

2) He becomes a wildly successful writer/artist/musician and this bothers me so I dump him for a web dude. The web dude is better for me, but I still miss him sometimes.

2) I become a wildly successful writer and dump him because he’s still just a burrito dude. Even when I’m back in town I can’t buy burritos at his Freebird’s location because it’d be too awkward, so I go to the one on South Congress instead.

3) I become a wildly successful writer and this bothers him so he dumps me for a burrito chick. I’m happy as a writer, but I never eat burritos again.

I’m sure I could think of more potential scenarios, but by this time I’m at the front of the line and oh my God he’s asking me what I want and I’m all flustered so I say, “I’ll have a veggie Freebird on a mixed cheese,” which makes no sense at all.

“What?” he says. Oh, good, maybe he didn’t hear me. Veggie Freebird on a spinach tortilla, I say. But I can kind of tell he remembers me from last time, which means he’s branded me for life as a partially-deaf flake.

And that’s okay, because I’m already at the part where I make up horrible things about him so that I can be glad we’ll never date. His favorite band is Slipknot. He believes that all Chihuahuas should be put to sleep. He thinks Disneyland really is the happiest place on earth. He’s going to vote for Mitt Romney. When he gets home from work all he does is smoke weed and watch CSI. His back is hairy. He has no teeth. He drives a Ford Excursion with automatic windows, the better to throw his McDonald’s wrappers on the side of the road.

By the time I get to my car I’ve turned him into the worst person I’ve ever met, and when I get back to my office and sit down to my veggie Freebird on a mixed cheese, it’s like he never existed.

Except for the part where, when I go back to Freebird’s next week, I’m going to make sure it’s on a day when my hair looks nice.