I have a coffee mug that is a little unlike some of my other mugs, mostly because it is a sort of flimsy hollow-sounding earthenware number instead of something factory-poured or something study like stoneware. It is also erratic in appearance. Most of my other mugs are somewhat subdued albeit spontaneous (I do have a matching set, but most of them are up on a high shelf because where’s the fun in that? Variety is the spice of life don’t you know. That and cumin.) but this one is a bright green with little spastic black marks all over it, with a little orange box that says INSTANT HUMAN: JUST ADD COFFEE. This mug was a gift from Anthony about 3 weeks after we had met, demonstrating his superb listening skills since I had seen it at the newsstand previously and had said, I’d like that! so for me it sort of functions as a material representation of one of the many reasons he is awesome. I like to keep the word-box turned towards me, like a secret.
And speaking of my comrade: this weekend I was in Oklahoma visiting my Grandmother, who knows about Anthony vaguely and asked to have a picture. She likes to hang framed pictures of EVERYONE in the extended family, so the fact that she wants a picture of him isn’t that weird. What is weird of course is the whole question of my Grandmother assuming he is ‘part of the family,’ which he is I suppose, but us non-married people have slight issues with these implications, particularly when a.) we don’t like thinking about it (because if you think about something, you will jinx it! Or some sort of horrible ironic plot twist will surprise you before the last chapter! or it isn’t meant to be and you don’t know it yet!) and b.) there’s that whole geographical problem of graduate school and me hungering for Portland, which makes the next 5-7 years a big question, and the whole “what if” game only complicates this further, (see item #a,) and c.) We don’t even live together, really. So what’s your rush, Grandma?
The other problem with this is that I didn’t refuse outright. On the plane home I was mentally going through all of the pictures I have of him.
These are all great. But they aren’t what you send to your Grandmother to hang in a 6×8 frame next to all the studio pictures. This might mean that I have to take a sensible picture of Anthony, and I don’t really want to.
HERE ARE SOME DEEPLY WEIRD THINGS I SAW ON THE WAY TO OKLAHOMA
1. A dead cow. I have seen many dead animals on the side of the road, but never any as big or as startling as a big black cow. You know how in cartoons animals who are ‘dead’ have stiff legs up in the air? Yeah. That happens apparently. It’s creepy.
2. A bunch of coat hooks in a cafe that were old doorknobs nailed into the wall.
3. My mother listens to a 40’s station on XM radio, and one of the song titles (truncated, one assumes) was “SATAN TAKES A HO.”
4. About a zillion little black birds flying into a tree — so many it looked like the tree’s leaves were blowing away in reverse motion. I thought it would be a really interesting film technique, and wondered if anyone had ever done that before.
5. A package of sesame seeds called SESAME NUTMEATS that I really wanted to get for the packaging alone. Nutmeats!
6. The flattest tire I have ever seen, and unfortunately it was attached to our car so we had to fill up the thing with air and then limp over to the auto service place at Wal-mart and hang out in the parking lot for a while. It really wasn’t all that bad, the weather was semi-cloudy and a warm breeze and about 70*, I sat with the dog kind of behind the building next to a windmill, some grass, flowers and birds and read The English Patient for a while. Apparently there was a huge gash in it. (The tire, not any of the nouns in the previous sentence.) No one knows how it got there. It was a good thing I noticed it at the gas station, rather than having a blowout in Swink or some similar tiny town. Or in the middle of no where. That would have been less good.
7. There must have been some tornados around there recently, because I saw a silo that looked like a giant walked up and crushed the top of it with his giant hand (no damage to the bottom, just the top, like it had been squeezed) and a whole field of radio towers that were completely crumbled into giant huge piles. I would say there were about 40 of them, all scattered around in the ground, and if I were to draw them for you I would just scribble little blobs of scribbley lines because that is exactly what they looked like. Except they used to be radio towers. It was completely crazy and I wished that I’d had my camera but I didn’t.
8. A big billboard that said “You call it ABORTION but God calls it MURDER,” which wins the award of Loudest Pro-life Propaganda I’ve Seen To Date.* It was next to a feedlot, and I wanted to see an accompanying sign that said “You call it PRIME RIB but God calls it MURDER,” just to cover all the bases.
9. A big field of empty freight train things, all stacked up and sprawling and huge. All of them said EPIC on the side.
*After making this claim a friend of mine reminded me that this was NOT in fact the loudest PLPISTD, because on our campus for a week in spring we are subjected to some truly awful Pro-Life Propaganda. I am not saying “awful” because I am Pro-Choice. I am saying “awful” because it is, not the topic itself but the way they inflict their express their opinions on the entire student body, for a solid week. So I could amend that above claim and add “besides DRIVE-IN MOVIE SCREEN SIZED HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGES OF BLOODY FETUSES WITH SELF-GLORIFYING, VULGAR COMMENTARY, the loudest Pro-Life Propaganda I have ever seen,” but honestly I always sort of forget about this and the people who inflict it on us, (who are not affiliated with the school per se, they are some outside organization,) because the pictures are so graphic that it literally makes me sick to my stomach, and every time they are there, right in the middle of the large field in front of the library, pretty much in the center of West Campus, I either have to skip my classes over there or run by them with my eye closed because it’s far too gruesome to deal with. Give thanks to Jesus, Krishna and the Easter Bunny that you do not go to my school during a certain week in spring.
SOME ODD THINGS I OVERHEARD AT WORK TODAY
“The butter was bacon butter … or maybe bacon grease?”
“I went down two pants sizes! I should get the flu more often!”
I was reading an article in the latest issue of Bitch called “Perfect girls, starving daughters,” by Courtney E. Martin. It is mostly an article about the intricacies of eating disorders, specifically with people who suffer a bit form “perfect girl” syndrome. Of course this “perfect-human” phenomenon is not gender-specific, how many stories have I heard about stars of the track team or straight-A students being found too late? A lot. I could digress here about the luxury of fretting-about-one’s-non-shitty-life regarding these suburban teens’ committing suicide, but I must resist. We were talking about eating disorders. Which are not really specific to American women now, thanks to the omnipresence of good ol’ American media.
The thing I was all interested in was how within you (well, me. Or any young woman in her late teens – early thirties,) there is a Perfect Girl and a Starving Daughter. The Starving Daughter wants comfort food, and warmth, and is petty or nostalgic, “doubts your ability to handle full-time school and full-time work,” and so forth. The Perfect Girl slogs on until the Staving Daughter can’t take it anymore, and then you sob alone in a bathroom. Or pick a fight with a loved one. Or, in the case of the article, binge eat.
The thing is, I know all about this. I know because there is a thirsty fish child inside me. But this child isn’t a “starving daughter” — I don’t have a daughter, and I definitely do not starve the little girl inside me. That’s because the little girl is me.
I always find that the best way to explain this is to let Sandra Cisneros do it for me:
What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday, you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. …Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your Mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay.
- Rachel, Woman Hollering Creek, embellishment added.
Now understand: it has never really been that complicated for me. With maturity comes patience, and shaman-like abilities to deal with most of the things that drive you apeshit when you are small. I also never broke my neck to be the “perfect human” in any respect, my shtick was weird-secondary-character-rich-with-personality if we want to go all Young Adult Lit on the high school situation. So all the while I’ve been becoming a “grown-up” and proportionately getting more responsibility and saner thoughts and learning better words (churlish, recently,) I’ve also had me-as-a-seven-year-old inside me this whole time. It’s kind of like having an internal compass that points to happiness, a barometric pressure gauge that tells you when to step away from the desk and look at the plants in the break room for a moment before she takes over and has a full-blown panic attack, or busts a move.
The author of the article never really went back to this idea, instead of saying “listen to and/or feed the starving daughter for goodness sakes” she kind of just says “love your body” which is hardly a compelling solution for people driven to self-starvation or who even just have unrealistic expectations of their own body. I feel like I can attribute a great deal of my happiness to the fact that I DO indulge in swings, or a walk to the park, or a simple TV show about sharing when the seven-year-old me asks for it. Your own personal inner voice mileage may vary, and I’m not saying satisfy the one that says ‘kill the president’ (well, actually..) but if it’s asking you for happy things, and you’re denying it that, maybe you should indulge. That is my ill-advised advice of the day.
In high school I didn’t know what a clitoris was. I knew there was something there, and I even knew it was a nice happy little spot sometimes, but I had no idea what it was called. I find that kind of sad.
