So I’m not sick anymore…or who knows, maybe I am insofar as my boss just came into my office and asked if I needed to go home. I have a nasty cough and the sniffles, but I don’t want to leave because, dork-o-rama, I love my job and am so happy to be back after missing three days.
Why do I love it? I dunno. It could be because I work with great people or the work is interesting or whatever, but I think a lot of it is just pure silliness. I mean, I love working everyday with people who live in countries that I can barely pronounce. Everyone travels for their job, and I swear, the out-of-office replies make me smile.
The latest one I received today?
“I am on travel in Siberia…”
Siberia! That’s so cool. I want to go! I know. I’m probably the only person in the world who wants to visit Siberia, but seriously…Siberia!
Hmm, I wonder if I can get the attorney in Moscow to send me one of those cool little fur hats...and maybe the long wool coat...and army boots!
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
And I might wear purple too!
Perhaps it’s because I’ve been sick these past few days, or maybe I’m just completely worn out from everything, but this morning, as I was walking the dog and feeling sicker with each step, I passed a little old lady and was surprised when the thought passed my mind, “I want to be old!”
At first glance it makes no sense. Aren’t all of us in our own way trying to run from death in one form or fashion? Even those of us who have accepted our mortality don’t exactly want to accelerate the process and wouldn’t that be what I was doing if I suddenly jumped ahead 20-30 years?
No, I’m not ready to die, but this morning I found things to look forward to later on. I imagined myself alone in a little cottage by the sea or maybe by a lake or maybe a cabin in the Ozarks. Scratch that. I imagined a cabin on the lake in the Ozarks or other acceptable mountain range. In the mornings (when my body was up for it) I would walk the trails with my dogs, not tiny terriers (no offense, Martha), but really-really big dogs like a Bernese Mountain dog and a St. Bernard.
The afternoons would be spent sitting on the dock with either a sketchpad or a notebook and a glass of hot tea or cold lemonade depending on the season. I could write my memoirs or my observations on becoming older or perhaps even revive the long lost art of correspondence. There of course would be a town a few miles away and once a week or so, I load the dogs into the back of the pick-up truck and head down there for groceries.
It’s a charming little town that’s not much more than a square with a courthouse in the middle. The courthouse isn’t a courthouse anymore since the town’s become so small, and everyone drives to a larger city thirty miles away when they need to litigate. It does however still house a clerk’s office for deeds and licenses and whatnot. The rest of the building is used for other town services. There’s a welcome center (that is mostly frequented by locals due to the free coffee served between the hours of 6 and 10 am), a few meeting rooms (where the city council meets once a month), and the courthouse itself has been converted into a library.
I get into town around 9:45 am and head straight for the visitor center hoping to take advantage of the free coffee.
“Fred, the pot needs refilling,” I yell holding up the empty glass canister for him to see.
Fred has lived in this town all his life, and even though I’ve been here for the last fifteen years, he still considers me an outsider. His world is one of rules and obeisance.
“Ana, you know if I make a pot now, there’s no way the whole thing will be drunk by ten. Plus, that coffee’s for the visitors.”
In the corner, Rick and Cathy are ensconced in a game of chess, and I glance over at them rolling my eyes. They smile back because all of us know it’s been years since a stranger walked through these doors.
“Just for me, Fred?” I plead. “I’ll pay ya.”
Fred gives me a look of consternation, as if I’d just asked him to help me hide a body, and shakes his head no. I shrug to Rick and Cathy, then walk out the door calling, “Nice seeing ya, Fred,” and head for the library.
Oh god, Lucinda. Lucinda works at the library Mondays and Wednesdays. Though she’s lived in the town for less than five years, she knows every detail about every person in it, and isn’t afraid to talk about it or add a little extra to the story for the sake of color. She’s barely ten years younger than me, but still spends about an hour a day on hair, make-up, and dress, as if she expects her prince charming to come sauntering into our little library one day. If it happens she wants to be ready. Personally, I can’t stand her. By Lucinda’s telling, she was the wife of a prominent surgeon for many years until he ran off with a young and nimble nurse. It’s one of those sad, but true clichés, and I might feel sorry for her if she wasn’t such a dim-witted busybody.
“Mornin’,” I try to say in my least insincere voice as I walk up to the counter to retrieve the book I’d put on hold.
“Well hello there!” she exclaims with excitement, already reaching for the book as if she was waiting for my arrival.
Damn, she must have some dirt on me or else she wouldn’t look so happy. I briefly scroll through the rolodex of my memory trying to figure out what I’ve done in the past week that could possibly be construed as scandalous, but then give up, knowing that Lucinda is bound to reveal it in the next thirty seconds or less.
“So,” she says holding the book firmly in her heavily-lotioned hands with thickly polished nails that are just a little bit long for my taste, “I hear Frank was up at your place last week.”
Frank, not Fred. I would just like to clarify this. Fred was most certainly not at the cabin last week. Ah yes, I should have seen this coming. Frank raises about as much gossip in town as I do, though for a different reason. He minds his own business, keeps to himself, speaks in short, simple phrases. No one knows much about him, including myself. However, he is a lover of nature, and knows his way around a forest. He can repair and fix nearly any household item. The others don’t know this, but I do, and at moments Frank is as close to handyman as I’ve found in this town. Do I have romantic notions? I suppose. Dark, mysterious, complex, closed-off. What’s not to like?
“Um yeah, he came over to check and see how my cucumbers were coming along,” I tell Lucinda flatly.
Did I mention that I have a little victory garden in the back of the cabin?
“Oh, I bet he did,” giggles Lucinda as if she holds some nugget of erotic information.
God, this woman is two-dimensional, as two-dimensional as a cardboard cut-out character in a piece of poorly written fiction. And yet, she can sense that I’m hiding something, which I am, but not what she thinks. It is true, Frank did come over to survey the vegetable garden, but he stayed for a glass or two of wine, and by the early hours of the morning we found ourselves reading passages of William Blake to each other, BUT NOT in the way you’re thinking. It was a silly, dramatic, mocking version of reading, and the only thing remotely rapacious was our laughter. We eventually fell asleep by the fire in the den, I on the couch, and him in the big leather chair. By the time the dogs woke me the next morning he was gone, but I’ll be damned if I try to explain any of this to Lucinda.
“My book?” I ask her, knowing that my silence on Frank will later be retold on the street as an acknowledgment of my moral turpitude.
Lucinda frowns, passes over the Sontag, and I am off to the grocery.
No need to describe my shopping. I get the regular items – flour, granola, you know. Jenna, the owner, rings me up, and her son Eric helps me haul it out to the pick-up. He’s seventeen and will be starting college in the fall, but for some reason, he’s always shy and nervous around me. I tell myself that it’s because I’m still hot at sixty-something. In reality, it’s more likely because he doesn’t know how to take the harmless flirting of an old woman.
“Have you picked a major yet,” I ask as we load the bags into the cab.
“Um, yeah,” he says “World planning.”
“World Planning?” I repeat with curiosity, “whatever happened to good ol’ math and science and history and literature?”
“It’s all interdisciplinary now,” Eric explains earnestly. “The major incorporates all of the traditional fields you mentioned and adds practical application.”
I look at Eric like he’s speaking Greek. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Short of aspiring to become the next dictator or president, I am not sure why one would major in something as esoteric as ‘World Planning.’ He’s lingering by the car out of politeness, but he’s desperate to get back inside the grocery. In fact, he’s desperate to leave this town altogether. Who can blame him? These days it’s filled mostly with old codgers like me. I try to remember what is was like, back in high school when I thought the world was my oyster. And then my twenties where I was afraid to make any movement for fear that pursuing one opportunity would deny me another. And my thirties where I discovered that closing one door merely opened another no matter how many doors I shut in an attempt to draw a clear bright-lined path of life, all the way up until now where I am not so much waiting to die as I am happy to live a simple, unfettered life on a slowly depleting savings. I hand Eric twenty bucks and head back to the cabin.
I’m half-way through unloading the goods when the phone rings, and I run for it because I know that it’s Wine-Time-Girl. After spending most of her life married to a tortured genius who caused many ups and downs in her world, she met the nicest guy on the planet around the age of fifty. As it turns out, he was also devastatingly handsome and richer than sin. WTG now lives in a swanky part of Florida which, by the way, has been completely redeveloped and is not nearly as tacky as you might think Florida would be in the year 2040. I visit several times a year and always return looking like a lobster. These days her life is filled with shopping, writing the intermittent book review, speaking before Congress on immigration issues, and charity projects, of which I think I might be her main one. Throughout the years, WTG and I have kept in touch and now she regularly calls after her morning aerobics/calisthenics/yoga/whatever the heck it is. This morning I am especially excited to hear her voice because for the last few weeks she’s been traveling.
“SO!” I ask, “HOW WAS MONACO!”
“Oh, I got the cutest purse? Did you get the email with the picture?”
“Yes-yes,” I answer, “Very cute.”
“It’s a SuzyChooSashimi. I actually got one for you too and mailed it, but apparently it’s stuck in customs.”
“I take it that’s a name brand?”
“Yep, they’re really rare. I think you’ll like it though.”
“Cool. Is it waterproof?”
“No?” she answers.
“Oh, well, I’m sure I’ll like it,” I say.
Truth be told, I’ve been needing a sack to store the dog toys.
“Anymore thoughts about moving down to Florida? There’s plenty of space in the house, you know!”
WTG has been working this angle for years without success, but because she’s WTG, she mentions it at least once a week…just in case.
“I like it here,” I tell here.
It’s true. I do.
“I know,” she says, “I just worry about you being all by yourself. There aren’t any medical facilities nearby and the decent ones require traveling over ice and hills and snow and…”
“Yeah, that’s true,” I reply, “but who needs to waste a bunch of money on intense medical care at this age? And honestly, I can’t afford it anyway.” I chuckle and continue, “Hey remember when the government tried to pull off health care reform? Anyway, if I die, the dogs have been trained. They are to drag my body out back so that it can be eaten by the bears.”
“Oh, that’s horrible,” she says, “I don’t even want you to joke about that.”
I’m not joking. It’s cost-effective and environmentally sound. I like it.
“Well, do what you want,” WTG accedes.
And then suddenly a thought crosses my head, and I can’t stop laughing because of course while WTG may let me have my way in this matter, I am sure that there is no way that she won’t insist on some type of memorial service after my passing. I stare off into the future and can see it. There she is, in her living room with a group of other women, all dressed in some Lilly Pulitzer-type fashion. They’re eating tea and cakes while WTG tells them all about me. Though they’ve met me once or twice, none of them can quite place me, but they’re here for her more than me. Sitting on the coffee table is a canister which everyone assumes are my ashes. Little do they know that it’s an urn full of bear turd.
Somewhere in the ether I’m loving every minute of it.
At first glance it makes no sense. Aren’t all of us in our own way trying to run from death in one form or fashion? Even those of us who have accepted our mortality don’t exactly want to accelerate the process and wouldn’t that be what I was doing if I suddenly jumped ahead 20-30 years?
No, I’m not ready to die, but this morning I found things to look forward to later on. I imagined myself alone in a little cottage by the sea or maybe by a lake or maybe a cabin in the Ozarks. Scratch that. I imagined a cabin on the lake in the Ozarks or other acceptable mountain range. In the mornings (when my body was up for it) I would walk the trails with my dogs, not tiny terriers (no offense, Martha), but really-really big dogs like a Bernese Mountain dog and a St. Bernard.
The afternoons would be spent sitting on the dock with either a sketchpad or a notebook and a glass of hot tea or cold lemonade depending on the season. I could write my memoirs or my observations on becoming older or perhaps even revive the long lost art of correspondence. There of course would be a town a few miles away and once a week or so, I load the dogs into the back of the pick-up truck and head down there for groceries.
It’s a charming little town that’s not much more than a square with a courthouse in the middle. The courthouse isn’t a courthouse anymore since the town’s become so small, and everyone drives to a larger city thirty miles away when they need to litigate. It does however still house a clerk’s office for deeds and licenses and whatnot. The rest of the building is used for other town services. There’s a welcome center (that is mostly frequented by locals due to the free coffee served between the hours of 6 and 10 am), a few meeting rooms (where the city council meets once a month), and the courthouse itself has been converted into a library.
I get into town around 9:45 am and head straight for the visitor center hoping to take advantage of the free coffee.
“Fred, the pot needs refilling,” I yell holding up the empty glass canister for him to see.
Fred has lived in this town all his life, and even though I’ve been here for the last fifteen years, he still considers me an outsider. His world is one of rules and obeisance.
“Ana, you know if I make a pot now, there’s no way the whole thing will be drunk by ten. Plus, that coffee’s for the visitors.”
In the corner, Rick and Cathy are ensconced in a game of chess, and I glance over at them rolling my eyes. They smile back because all of us know it’s been years since a stranger walked through these doors.
“Just for me, Fred?” I plead. “I’ll pay ya.”
Fred gives me a look of consternation, as if I’d just asked him to help me hide a body, and shakes his head no. I shrug to Rick and Cathy, then walk out the door calling, “Nice seeing ya, Fred,” and head for the library.
Oh god, Lucinda. Lucinda works at the library Mondays and Wednesdays. Though she’s lived in the town for less than five years, she knows every detail about every person in it, and isn’t afraid to talk about it or add a little extra to the story for the sake of color. She’s barely ten years younger than me, but still spends about an hour a day on hair, make-up, and dress, as if she expects her prince charming to come sauntering into our little library one day. If it happens she wants to be ready. Personally, I can’t stand her. By Lucinda’s telling, she was the wife of a prominent surgeon for many years until he ran off with a young and nimble nurse. It’s one of those sad, but true clichés, and I might feel sorry for her if she wasn’t such a dim-witted busybody.
“Mornin’,” I try to say in my least insincere voice as I walk up to the counter to retrieve the book I’d put on hold.
“Well hello there!” she exclaims with excitement, already reaching for the book as if she was waiting for my arrival.
Damn, she must have some dirt on me or else she wouldn’t look so happy. I briefly scroll through the rolodex of my memory trying to figure out what I’ve done in the past week that could possibly be construed as scandalous, but then give up, knowing that Lucinda is bound to reveal it in the next thirty seconds or less.
“So,” she says holding the book firmly in her heavily-lotioned hands with thickly polished nails that are just a little bit long for my taste, “I hear Frank was up at your place last week.”
Frank, not Fred. I would just like to clarify this. Fred was most certainly not at the cabin last week. Ah yes, I should have seen this coming. Frank raises about as much gossip in town as I do, though for a different reason. He minds his own business, keeps to himself, speaks in short, simple phrases. No one knows much about him, including myself. However, he is a lover of nature, and knows his way around a forest. He can repair and fix nearly any household item. The others don’t know this, but I do, and at moments Frank is as close to handyman as I’ve found in this town. Do I have romantic notions? I suppose. Dark, mysterious, complex, closed-off. What’s not to like?
“Um yeah, he came over to check and see how my cucumbers were coming along,” I tell Lucinda flatly.
Did I mention that I have a little victory garden in the back of the cabin?
“Oh, I bet he did,” giggles Lucinda as if she holds some nugget of erotic information.
God, this woman is two-dimensional, as two-dimensional as a cardboard cut-out character in a piece of poorly written fiction. And yet, she can sense that I’m hiding something, which I am, but not what she thinks. It is true, Frank did come over to survey the vegetable garden, but he stayed for a glass or two of wine, and by the early hours of the morning we found ourselves reading passages of William Blake to each other, BUT NOT in the way you’re thinking. It was a silly, dramatic, mocking version of reading, and the only thing remotely rapacious was our laughter. We eventually fell asleep by the fire in the den, I on the couch, and him in the big leather chair. By the time the dogs woke me the next morning he was gone, but I’ll be damned if I try to explain any of this to Lucinda.
“My book?” I ask her, knowing that my silence on Frank will later be retold on the street as an acknowledgment of my moral turpitude.
Lucinda frowns, passes over the Sontag, and I am off to the grocery.
No need to describe my shopping. I get the regular items – flour, granola, you know. Jenna, the owner, rings me up, and her son Eric helps me haul it out to the pick-up. He’s seventeen and will be starting college in the fall, but for some reason, he’s always shy and nervous around me. I tell myself that it’s because I’m still hot at sixty-something. In reality, it’s more likely because he doesn’t know how to take the harmless flirting of an old woman.
“Have you picked a major yet,” I ask as we load the bags into the cab.
“Um, yeah,” he says “World planning.”
“World Planning?” I repeat with curiosity, “whatever happened to good ol’ math and science and history and literature?”
“It’s all interdisciplinary now,” Eric explains earnestly. “The major incorporates all of the traditional fields you mentioned and adds practical application.”
I look at Eric like he’s speaking Greek. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Short of aspiring to become the next dictator or president, I am not sure why one would major in something as esoteric as ‘World Planning.’ He’s lingering by the car out of politeness, but he’s desperate to get back inside the grocery. In fact, he’s desperate to leave this town altogether. Who can blame him? These days it’s filled mostly with old codgers like me. I try to remember what is was like, back in high school when I thought the world was my oyster. And then my twenties where I was afraid to make any movement for fear that pursuing one opportunity would deny me another. And my thirties where I discovered that closing one door merely opened another no matter how many doors I shut in an attempt to draw a clear bright-lined path of life, all the way up until now where I am not so much waiting to die as I am happy to live a simple, unfettered life on a slowly depleting savings. I hand Eric twenty bucks and head back to the cabin.
I’m half-way through unloading the goods when the phone rings, and I run for it because I know that it’s Wine-Time-Girl. After spending most of her life married to a tortured genius who caused many ups and downs in her world, she met the nicest guy on the planet around the age of fifty. As it turns out, he was also devastatingly handsome and richer than sin. WTG now lives in a swanky part of Florida which, by the way, has been completely redeveloped and is not nearly as tacky as you might think Florida would be in the year 2040. I visit several times a year and always return looking like a lobster. These days her life is filled with shopping, writing the intermittent book review, speaking before Congress on immigration issues, and charity projects, of which I think I might be her main one. Throughout the years, WTG and I have kept in touch and now she regularly calls after her morning aerobics/calisthenics/yoga/whatever the heck it is. This morning I am especially excited to hear her voice because for the last few weeks she’s been traveling.
“SO!” I ask, “HOW WAS MONACO!”
“Oh, I got the cutest purse? Did you get the email with the picture?”
“Yes-yes,” I answer, “Very cute.”
“It’s a SuzyChooSashimi. I actually got one for you too and mailed it, but apparently it’s stuck in customs.”
“I take it that’s a name brand?”
“Yep, they’re really rare. I think you’ll like it though.”
“Cool. Is it waterproof?”
“No?” she answers.
“Oh, well, I’m sure I’ll like it,” I say.
Truth be told, I’ve been needing a sack to store the dog toys.
“Anymore thoughts about moving down to Florida? There’s plenty of space in the house, you know!”
WTG has been working this angle for years without success, but because she’s WTG, she mentions it at least once a week…just in case.
“I like it here,” I tell here.
It’s true. I do.
“I know,” she says, “I just worry about you being all by yourself. There aren’t any medical facilities nearby and the decent ones require traveling over ice and hills and snow and…”
“Yeah, that’s true,” I reply, “but who needs to waste a bunch of money on intense medical care at this age? And honestly, I can’t afford it anyway.” I chuckle and continue, “Hey remember when the government tried to pull off health care reform? Anyway, if I die, the dogs have been trained. They are to drag my body out back so that it can be eaten by the bears.”
“Oh, that’s horrible,” she says, “I don’t even want you to joke about that.”
I’m not joking. It’s cost-effective and environmentally sound. I like it.
“Well, do what you want,” WTG accedes.
And then suddenly a thought crosses my head, and I can’t stop laughing because of course while WTG may let me have my way in this matter, I am sure that there is no way that she won’t insist on some type of memorial service after my passing. I stare off into the future and can see it. There she is, in her living room with a group of other women, all dressed in some Lilly Pulitzer-type fashion. They’re eating tea and cakes while WTG tells them all about me. Though they’ve met me once or twice, none of them can quite place me, but they’re here for her more than me. Sitting on the coffee table is a canister which everyone assumes are my ashes. Little do they know that it’s an urn full of bear turd.
Somewhere in the ether I’m loving every minute of it.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Lazy Saturday...
Oh, Saturday.
I have a list of things to do which includes paying my rent and picking up groceries, but it’s overcast outside, I’m a teensy bit tired, and all I want to do is lie in bed and read. This is how I spend my morning, finishing up the latest Thomas Py*nchon novel about a PI in the late 1960’s who lives on the beach and just happens to be a stoner prone to periods of blackout. I remember reading the reviews saying that this book was just a more high-brow version of Cheech & Chong jokes. I guess that appeals to me, as I found myself giggling throughout the book, never worrying about the main character as he wandered mindlessly into scenes of danger. Hmm, mindlessly isn’t the right word, more like his mind was somewhere else.
I think the great thing about stoners is, they say the most absurd things, and yet stupid offhand remarks do sometimes have the ability to cause your thoughts to drift off into unfamiliar areas. When the book is finished, I look up and realize that it’s nearly noon. No wonder the dog has been staring me down for the last hour. Alarm clocks may wake me up, but the thought of Martha whizzing all over my floor actually gets me out of bed.
When we’ve walked around our neighborhood block, I decide to fake productivity by throwing a load of clothes in the washer and taking out the trash while the coffee is brewing. I feel very wistful when I dump the last of the can into the filter.
Though I am now officially out of bed, I still don’t feel quite ready to bound into the day. I pause and consider taking a shower only to remember that I took one just before going to sleep, strange because I feel like I haven’t showered in days. The thought of brushing my teeth comes to mind, but just in passing, and so I head out with my coffee to sit on my back stoop and smoke a cigarette.
My neighbor with whom I share the deck is outside grading composition papers for a class he’s teaching at the local city college. My neighbor has red hair, is covered in tattoos, and is currently finishing a PhD in creative writing. Because of that and the fact that he always greets me when we cross paths on the fourplex, I’ve always liked him. Plus, he’s married which removes any uncomfortable edge that sometimes occurs in male-female conversation.
After a brief inquiry about the house repairs related to the break-in we discuss our other neighbors and he tells me that the last tenants of my apartment were a couple.
“So they decided to get married and get a house, huh?” I ask, ever the romantic optimist.
“No, actually,” he replies, “they broke up. Seemed very amicable though.”
This causes me to lament my inadvertent stumbling upon a house that must be filled with a broken home vibe. Though, I ponder aloud, it couldn’t have been that much of a love to begin with if the break-up was friendly. I oscillate back and forth about how break-ups should evolve when real love is involved. Part of me thinks, if you really love someone, you’ll work to make it as easy as possible because you don’t want to hurt the other person at all. The other part of me thinks that if love IS involved, all hell breaks loose because that’s kind of how love is, even when it’s good – emotional, passionate, unpredictable.
The discussion of housing leads us to our former abodes, and I smile when my neighbor mentions that he used to live on West Main.
Long before I moved to Houston I read a series of books by Larry Mc*Murtry, the ones on which the movie Terms of Endearment is based. All of them took place in Houston during the 60’s and though the main characters are women, there is a major group of male characters pursuing a Master’s in writing at Rice (much like Mc*Murtry himself was doing during that time). One of the married couples, Emma and Flip, lived in an old run-down apartment on West Main, dirt poor and waiting for a faculty assignment in what turns out to be Iowa.
It was so strange to move here and realize that West Main exists, shitty apartments and all, now further run down by an additional forty years of wear. Not only that, but the park on Dunlavy where the women used to take their children, the little garage apartments in Southampton. Everything is still here except for the soda shop on Bissonnet, which surely must have stood at some point. They’re all within walking distance of my house, and it feels surreal at moments to pass by them, as if it is not that I am walking by areas of inspiration, but rather have imagined myself into the setting of the novels forty years later, all of the characters still here, but now living in McMansions in West University.
I ask my neighbor how he met his wife, and sure enough, it is one of those whirlwind story-book romances that ends up with an elopement in the hill country six months later, further convincing me that my life is in fact the product of a writer’s imagination.
“Yeah, I wasn’t looking for it and it just happened,” he says, “so see, it could happen to you too.”
And I turn to him making an odd face because I hadn’t asked the question in an attempt to bolster my own hopes, but then again, maybe I had. The subconscious really can be a bitch sometimes. You spend your whole life seeking self-awareness, and yet there is this part of you that you cannot access, but strangers pick up on with ease.
I put out my cigarette, shrug in a ‘who knows?’ type fashion and walk back into the house to realize it is one o’clock.
My friend gets off of work at four, and around that time we are supposed to walk over to the Greek Festival and shove our faces with dolmas before catching a show later by the Greencards. I still have plenty of time to do my errands if I desire. I enter the bathroom and pick up the toothbrush, only to put it back down and wash my face instead.
Outside it is beginning to rain. Perhaps today I’ll finally finish the Zelda Fitzgerald biography that’s been sitting on my nightstand for weeks.
I have a list of things to do which includes paying my rent and picking up groceries, but it’s overcast outside, I’m a teensy bit tired, and all I want to do is lie in bed and read. This is how I spend my morning, finishing up the latest Thomas Py*nchon novel about a PI in the late 1960’s who lives on the beach and just happens to be a stoner prone to periods of blackout. I remember reading the reviews saying that this book was just a more high-brow version of Cheech & Chong jokes. I guess that appeals to me, as I found myself giggling throughout the book, never worrying about the main character as he wandered mindlessly into scenes of danger. Hmm, mindlessly isn’t the right word, more like his mind was somewhere else.
I think the great thing about stoners is, they say the most absurd things, and yet stupid offhand remarks do sometimes have the ability to cause your thoughts to drift off into unfamiliar areas. When the book is finished, I look up and realize that it’s nearly noon. No wonder the dog has been staring me down for the last hour. Alarm clocks may wake me up, but the thought of Martha whizzing all over my floor actually gets me out of bed.
When we’ve walked around our neighborhood block, I decide to fake productivity by throwing a load of clothes in the washer and taking out the trash while the coffee is brewing. I feel very wistful when I dump the last of the can into the filter.
Though I am now officially out of bed, I still don’t feel quite ready to bound into the day. I pause and consider taking a shower only to remember that I took one just before going to sleep, strange because I feel like I haven’t showered in days. The thought of brushing my teeth comes to mind, but just in passing, and so I head out with my coffee to sit on my back stoop and smoke a cigarette.
My neighbor with whom I share the deck is outside grading composition papers for a class he’s teaching at the local city college. My neighbor has red hair, is covered in tattoos, and is currently finishing a PhD in creative writing. Because of that and the fact that he always greets me when we cross paths on the fourplex, I’ve always liked him. Plus, he’s married which removes any uncomfortable edge that sometimes occurs in male-female conversation.
After a brief inquiry about the house repairs related to the break-in we discuss our other neighbors and he tells me that the last tenants of my apartment were a couple.
“So they decided to get married and get a house, huh?” I ask, ever the romantic optimist.
“No, actually,” he replies, “they broke up. Seemed very amicable though.”
This causes me to lament my inadvertent stumbling upon a house that must be filled with a broken home vibe. Though, I ponder aloud, it couldn’t have been that much of a love to begin with if the break-up was friendly. I oscillate back and forth about how break-ups should evolve when real love is involved. Part of me thinks, if you really love someone, you’ll work to make it as easy as possible because you don’t want to hurt the other person at all. The other part of me thinks that if love IS involved, all hell breaks loose because that’s kind of how love is, even when it’s good – emotional, passionate, unpredictable.
The discussion of housing leads us to our former abodes, and I smile when my neighbor mentions that he used to live on West Main.
Long before I moved to Houston I read a series of books by Larry Mc*Murtry, the ones on which the movie Terms of Endearment is based. All of them took place in Houston during the 60’s and though the main characters are women, there is a major group of male characters pursuing a Master’s in writing at Rice (much like Mc*Murtry himself was doing during that time). One of the married couples, Emma and Flip, lived in an old run-down apartment on West Main, dirt poor and waiting for a faculty assignment in what turns out to be Iowa.
It was so strange to move here and realize that West Main exists, shitty apartments and all, now further run down by an additional forty years of wear. Not only that, but the park on Dunlavy where the women used to take their children, the little garage apartments in Southampton. Everything is still here except for the soda shop on Bissonnet, which surely must have stood at some point. They’re all within walking distance of my house, and it feels surreal at moments to pass by them, as if it is not that I am walking by areas of inspiration, but rather have imagined myself into the setting of the novels forty years later, all of the characters still here, but now living in McMansions in West University.
I ask my neighbor how he met his wife, and sure enough, it is one of those whirlwind story-book romances that ends up with an elopement in the hill country six months later, further convincing me that my life is in fact the product of a writer’s imagination.
“Yeah, I wasn’t looking for it and it just happened,” he says, “so see, it could happen to you too.”
And I turn to him making an odd face because I hadn’t asked the question in an attempt to bolster my own hopes, but then again, maybe I had. The subconscious really can be a bitch sometimes. You spend your whole life seeking self-awareness, and yet there is this part of you that you cannot access, but strangers pick up on with ease.
I put out my cigarette, shrug in a ‘who knows?’ type fashion and walk back into the house to realize it is one o’clock.
My friend gets off of work at four, and around that time we are supposed to walk over to the Greek Festival and shove our faces with dolmas before catching a show later by the Greencards. I still have plenty of time to do my errands if I desire. I enter the bathroom and pick up the toothbrush, only to put it back down and wash my face instead.
Outside it is beginning to rain. Perhaps today I’ll finally finish the Zelda Fitzgerald biography that’s been sitting on my nightstand for weeks.
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Hi there...
Oh dear-dear-dear readers, I must apologize. A few weeks ago, I posted a piece discussing my ambivalence about this blog, and you responded. And I wanted to say something back to you, but LIFE got in the way, and I became very busy, and I will tell you all about it in the next few paragraphs, but dear-dear-dear readers…
Thank you so very much.
Thank you for all of your kind words. You definitely think more of me than I do of myself, and it was so-so-so nice to hear from you. I did in fact read every single comment, and each one warmed my heart. (Does that sound too cheesy?) I mean, I knew people were reading, but I didn’t know you liked it! I feel like Sally Fie*ld that night at the Oscars. I feel like I have my own personal cheering section. Your words meant so much to me!
So, I can’t say enough.
Again, thanks.
BUT – why did I wait so long?
Oh readers, destiny is a silly thing, I suppose. We never know what is lurking right around the corner just as we are beginning to lose faith in everything we always felt so assured of.
A few short days after my post I found out that I was promoted.
I have a new title.
I have a new boss.
After going from sharing an office to being down-sized to a cubicle, I now have my *own* office.
I got a staggering raise.
(Ohmigod, I can pay off my loans now! Hallelujah!)
And my new focus is now internal investigations for issues outside of the U.S.
And while yes, I’ve worked hard for it, and I’ve taken risks to get to this point, I feel extremely blessed (in a non-religious way) because:
The economy sucks;
My office has undergone several management changes since I arrived;
The department has been upended and I was the only person to receive a promotion while several others have new titles that definitely smell of de-motion; and
I so freaking LOVE the new material that I am working on.
But my absence?
Well, I still have all of my old responsibilities in addition to the new ones…and I’m bringing work home every night now.
But I don’t care because I am SO happy for the time being. Not just okay, but happy, and for some reason all of the tension that I’ve felt since the Spring of 2008 has melted away. This whole law school gamble has finally worked out. And the job gamble has worked out. And the turning down the position in another department and staying in my own has worked out.
RELIEF!
Last night, Wine-Time-Girl and I visited a new psychic and she said to me, “You’re in a stage of transition right now, but you’re about to emerge from your cocoon as a butterfly."
I looked at her and said, “Lady, if you only knew how many cocoons I’ve fought my way out of in the last sixteen years!”
To everyone who’s sent me an email in the past three weeks, I will write you back, I promise! I have five or six to do. I haven’t forgotten you! And I have read them! I apologize!
Want a cute story?
WTG gave me a gift last week for my promotion. (Aww, so sweet.) She took it out her bag, unwrapped, and handed it to me saying, “I got you a perfume. You probably haven’t heard of the company. It’s a little French place…”
And I sat there staring agape at the box because the words at the bottom said LANVIN.
A long time ago, like in the early 40’s, Lanvin made four perfumes.
Just four.
The most famous one was called Arpege.
It was also, coincidentally, my grandmother’s FAVORITE perfume, but it was very hard to find in the States, and whenever anyone traveled abroad, they would have to pick her up a bottle.
She only wore it on special occasions because she never knew when she would get another bottle.
And there was WTG, sitting across from me at brunch saying, “I just thought you would like this perfume when I smelled it.”
It was Rumeur, not Arpege, and it has been reformulated in recent years and reissued in the U.S., but still was only available at Saks when it first came out. And sadly, it might disappear because no one else seems to like it, but I dabbed it on and reformulated or not, a company is bound to have similarities between its perfumes, and for a moment I felt transported to my grandmother’s master bathroom in San Antonio, staring up at the cosmetic rack and sounding out the word Arpege.
I’ve sprayed it all over the house. I love it, and if you’re thinking of trying it, WTG offers the advice of, “You need to let it adjust to your skin for a little bit because it stinks when you first put it on.”
But to me, it smells like the updated Anastasia version (perhaps because the base is patchouli) of my grandmother’s old perfume with a wink towards the past and a sharp eye on the future.
The whole thing, it was just so uncanny, so special.
So the blog. Will I continue it?
Well, I found out after I wrote the post that my mother has been reading it – under the auspices of “checking to make sure that I’m alive.” Now, this news came not from my mother, but a third party, and apparently my mother isn’t just checking the dates of the posts, but reading them as well. Mother, if you’re reading now, please know that if you are worried about my existence, you can always call me. I am not too busy. I will not be annoyed. I would, in fact, love to receive a phone call. Kiss-kiss!
So yes, that takes the privacy aspect away now, doesn’t it?
But, if she’s reading, she’s reading.
I think, after much consideration, I will not post as often, but rather just when the mood strikes. Hopefully, that will make the posts more legit.
So this blog isn’t dead…quite yet. (Ha, watch this turn out to be my last one ever.)
And in closing, I give you a picture of the best dog in the world. Oh Martha, how I love thee.
Vicious, I tell you. Vicious! Don't mess with this chick!
Thank you so very much.
Thank you for all of your kind words. You definitely think more of me than I do of myself, and it was so-so-so nice to hear from you. I did in fact read every single comment, and each one warmed my heart. (Does that sound too cheesy?) I mean, I knew people were reading, but I didn’t know you liked it! I feel like Sally Fie*ld that night at the Oscars. I feel like I have my own personal cheering section. Your words meant so much to me!
So, I can’t say enough.
Again, thanks.
BUT – why did I wait so long?
Oh readers, destiny is a silly thing, I suppose. We never know what is lurking right around the corner just as we are beginning to lose faith in everything we always felt so assured of.
A few short days after my post I found out that I was promoted.
I have a new title.
I have a new boss.
After going from sharing an office to being down-sized to a cubicle, I now have my *own* office.
I got a staggering raise.
(Ohmigod, I can pay off my loans now! Hallelujah!)
And my new focus is now internal investigations for issues outside of the U.S.
And while yes, I’ve worked hard for it, and I’ve taken risks to get to this point, I feel extremely blessed (in a non-religious way) because:
The economy sucks;
My office has undergone several management changes since I arrived;
The department has been upended and I was the only person to receive a promotion while several others have new titles that definitely smell of de-motion; and
I so freaking LOVE the new material that I am working on.
But my absence?
Well, I still have all of my old responsibilities in addition to the new ones…and I’m bringing work home every night now.
But I don’t care because I am SO happy for the time being. Not just okay, but happy, and for some reason all of the tension that I’ve felt since the Spring of 2008 has melted away. This whole law school gamble has finally worked out. And the job gamble has worked out. And the turning down the position in another department and staying in my own has worked out.
RELIEF!
Last night, Wine-Time-Girl and I visited a new psychic and she said to me, “You’re in a stage of transition right now, but you’re about to emerge from your cocoon as a butterfly."
I looked at her and said, “Lady, if you only knew how many cocoons I’ve fought my way out of in the last sixteen years!”
To everyone who’s sent me an email in the past three weeks, I will write you back, I promise! I have five or six to do. I haven’t forgotten you! And I have read them! I apologize!
Want a cute story?
WTG gave me a gift last week for my promotion. (Aww, so sweet.) She took it out her bag, unwrapped, and handed it to me saying, “I got you a perfume. You probably haven’t heard of the company. It’s a little French place…”
And I sat there staring agape at the box because the words at the bottom said LANVIN.
A long time ago, like in the early 40’s, Lanvin made four perfumes.
Just four.
The most famous one was called Arpege.
It was also, coincidentally, my grandmother’s FAVORITE perfume, but it was very hard to find in the States, and whenever anyone traveled abroad, they would have to pick her up a bottle.
She only wore it on special occasions because she never knew when she would get another bottle.
And there was WTG, sitting across from me at brunch saying, “I just thought you would like this perfume when I smelled it.”
It was Rumeur, not Arpege, and it has been reformulated in recent years and reissued in the U.S., but still was only available at Saks when it first came out. And sadly, it might disappear because no one else seems to like it, but I dabbed it on and reformulated or not, a company is bound to have similarities between its perfumes, and for a moment I felt transported to my grandmother’s master bathroom in San Antonio, staring up at the cosmetic rack and sounding out the word Arpege.
I’ve sprayed it all over the house. I love it, and if you’re thinking of trying it, WTG offers the advice of, “You need to let it adjust to your skin for a little bit because it stinks when you first put it on.”
But to me, it smells like the updated Anastasia version (perhaps because the base is patchouli) of my grandmother’s old perfume with a wink towards the past and a sharp eye on the future.
The whole thing, it was just so uncanny, so special.
So the blog. Will I continue it?
Well, I found out after I wrote the post that my mother has been reading it – under the auspices of “checking to make sure that I’m alive.” Now, this news came not from my mother, but a third party, and apparently my mother isn’t just checking the dates of the posts, but reading them as well. Mother, if you’re reading now, please know that if you are worried about my existence, you can always call me. I am not too busy. I will not be annoyed. I would, in fact, love to receive a phone call. Kiss-kiss!
So yes, that takes the privacy aspect away now, doesn’t it?
But, if she’s reading, she’s reading.
I think, after much consideration, I will not post as often, but rather just when the mood strikes. Hopefully, that will make the posts more legit.
So this blog isn’t dead…quite yet. (Ha, watch this turn out to be my last one ever.)
And in closing, I give you a picture of the best dog in the world. Oh Martha, how I love thee.
Vicious, I tell you. Vicious! Don't mess with this chick!
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