Well, Lit

Things have been hectic. Also suspiciously well lit for mid-September. I'm ready for a seriously gloomy, tea-worthy fall season.

Parody of a Good Time

Over the weekend I read this book, which isn’t remarkable. It’s exactly the kind of book that I always pluck covertly from a display in the public library while I’m waiting to use the self check-out station. It is, for that matter, exactly the kind of book that’s always on display in the public library next to some much-repaired copy of Angels and Demons. So the fact that a person with my oversized appreciation for the prairie and my library loitering habits read this book over the weekend is really, really not of note. What is of note is how this book — and the circumstances in which I ended up reading it — proved how epically un-cool I am.

The fact that I’m un-cool (and I mean un-cool here as the strict antithesis of “way cool”) isn’t really of note either; I fancy myself vaguely self-aware. But over the weekend I climbed (descended?) to new and dampish heights of squareness. I actually knocked on a neighbor’s door and asked them to please quiet down, because, you know, it’s really rather late and of course I don’t mind but the floor in my apartment is shaking somewhat vigorously. And after this fall from post-collegiate grace, I ambled back upstairs and kept on reading my plodding nonfiction book about the prairie. And since I try, as previously noted, to be vaguely self-aware, this juxtaposition wasn’t lost on me.

The incident occurred on Saturday night around midnight. I was lounging around the apartment after an evening of Mongolian BBQ and Mad Men catch-up on my laptop, wearing an ensemble zoned strictly for in-home and post-Mongolian evenings. The folks below us in our new place were being a little noisy, but as it was the weekend and I was firmly distracted by period-appropriate frocks I hadn’t been paying much attention. Anyway, I tend to fall on the lenient side with regard to neighbor relations. For one thing, a mean note on my car puts me off my feed for days; the possibility of glares in the shared foyer gives me hives. For another, I used to be an absolutely terrible neighbor, so I prefer to give noisy folks the benefit of the doubt. It’s my way of doing penance for all of those Simon and Garfunkel dance parties back in college.

As I settled down to read before bed on this fateful Saturday, I distracted myself from the noise by pondering how uncivilized my old apartment-mates and I had been during the first years of college. We threw parties, the kind where the cops would come and everyone would freeze but no one would get the door because someone would be whispering, persistently, that the cops couldn’t do anything if you didn’t. Of course, this only made the cops angry when you finally answered. And I imagine that the neighbors were angry, too, though none of them ever approached us about it. In hindsight and with several additional years of apartment living under my belt, it’s a little embarrassing to remember that I was so obtuse. But we were mostly drunk, often on cheap beer, but also on our own noise. There’s a certain egotism attached to being able to fill a house with people and that kind of high self-regard can lead to detachment from reality, to say nothing of manners.

While I was lying there thinking about those early parties with a mixture of nostalgia and chagrin, someone down below started playing the bongos. I sat bolt upright; I may have been noisy and heavy-footed as a young adult and I certainly exposed my neighbors to an ungodly amount of The Flaming Lips at unseemly hours, but I’ve never played a bongo drum in the dark of the night. Bongos aren't standard good-times procedure — they’re a parody of a good time. But as vindicating as I found that realization, I was still acutely aware of a shift in roles as I assured a newly-awake Kevin that I would go down and ask them to holster the bongos.

I was also acutely aware of the fact that I needed to find a bookmark for my sad, nonfiction prairie book before I went to rain on the parade of some boisterous young people.

Questionable Judgment in Questionable Bathrooms

I’ve always been the kind of person who makes illogical answers to what should be easy questions. If you were to ask me what I do for a living I might name, instead of giving a pat one-word title, an inconsequential aspect of my job (i.e., precision date-stamping). And if you were to ask me where I live, I would certainly describe the prominently attractive features of my abode before I got around to the cross-streets. Thus, if you were to ask me if I moved last week from the house that I spent so much time (and text) lauding, and from which I predicted I’d never move, I would probably start by explaining that my new place has a very dramatic bathroom with a claw-foot tub. And then I would probably change the subject to something really, horribly enthralling — like how I accidentally learned from Wikipedia that the entire final season of Roseanne was a dream sequence. (You can use this one for your own awkward conversation lulls; consider it a gift.)

My internal barometer of conflict-avoidance would probably also urge me to skip a description of how quickly after moving in we decided to move out and how I developed a careful, casual attitude for telling people that we’d put our house on the market. The fact that I learned, when pressed, to shrug and say “You know how the market is” is actually fairly hilarious. It may not seem like much, but for me — a person whose only economic education prior to the adventure of homeownership was a much-skipped high school course taught by man who wished he made enough as a summertime river guide to ditch the teaching gig — the plain logistics of the thing were hardly enough explanation.

Or maybe I’m just not used to being able to shield my impulses (because our decision to move was fueled by more regret than the convenient suicide-dive of dividends) with logistics. This time, strangely enough, the sentimental impulses were actually capital-R-Right on both sides of the transaction. When we wanted to buy the house it was undoubtedly the Right and Rational thing to do; the market had collapsed; we were gainfully employed; I was drunk on a caustic mix of homesteader blogs and the American Dream ala The First Four Years. Less than a year later, when we were regretful and woefully underwater, putting the place on the market was the upstanding choice. So we moved, gleefully and ever so responsibly, to a place with a claw-foot bathtub and a coffee shop down the block and a built-in bookcase above which my sad buffalo print looks classy without seeming to try too hard. But this time I don’t plan to be quite so vocal and fatalistic in my praise of the place. I’ve had a hard time eating my needlessly italicized words.

Bathtubs aside, it hasn’t been an idyllic couple of months. Moving is always hard, especially for spaztastic types like me, and its particularly trying when you’re a compulsive reader who packed all of the reading material prematurely because you were worried about finding room for all of the books in the packing crates. (To risk two The First Four Years jokes in one sitting, I spent the last week in our house bemoaning our hastily disconnected internet service and rationing a single magazine like some frontier person isolated for the winter. Like Lincoln. Only I was spending every waking, post-work moment on my cell phone trying to get our internet service up at the new place.) Lately I’ve been rushing and wrapping and avoiding explanations; I haven’t been answering my phone, which is hardly unusual, but I’ve also been letting my emails sit unattended. That's usually a bad sign.

I’ve also neglected my little blog-friend, only to return in a blaze of melodrama and regrets and promises of better judgment and kinder bathrooms. Now that’s a hella blogging cliché.

Flat Brain Stoppage

Over the weekend I was reading Terry Castle’s essay collection The Professor when I came across this little gem: “So what if Jo didn’t want to be a professor anymore? Fine: I did. I wanted to read Edith Wharton novels…”

The sentence goes on to describe all manner of middle-class academic clichés, but my brain stopped flatly at Edith Wharton. Prior to this little nugget I wasn’t exactly attending carefully to the memoir — I was rushing a bit, eager to get to this Virginia Woolf biography (which has turned out to be pretty plodding, not nearly as saucy as The Professor). Don’t get me wrong; I was gobbling up the writing, but I just wasn’t jiving with Castle personally. And then the Edith Wharton joke. I suddenly remembered how much I love Hudson River Bracketed (heavy-handed ending and all) and how I once relished the idea of academia for the very reasons Castle outlines: I sort of used to think that reading things like Edith Wharton novels was what professors did, like, professionally.

I’ve long since been stripped of this fallacy. Plenty of my friends went into teaching and the time devoted to lesson planning, plagiarism patrol, and, you know, teaching, seems to outweigh the quietly-thinking-and-reading parts of the job. (Not at all the impression a doe-eyed college freshman gets wandering into a professor’s office; all they see is a poster depicting all of the different flowers mentioned in Shakespeare.) But older and wiser as I may pretend to be, I’ll admit it: when I read that sentence in that Terry Castle essay, I had to take myself firmly in hand. Of course reading Edith Wharton novels (and perhaps chatting about them) isn’t really the job description of a professor.

I had this whole plan to write a long and (presumably) hilarious retelling of the exact moment that I canned the possibility of being a professor, but I've tried typing it up a couple of times and it just won't stick properly. Suffice to say it involves sitting in the back row of a lecture hall listening to a couple of back-rowers riff on the professor's pathetic enthusiasm for a certain lady novelist. This professor was a short, disarmingly earnest woman; she was a little on the chubby side, and sported a rather unsightly Emily Dickinson tattoo on her upper arm. I admired her terribly and she unwittingly did me a good turn by turning me — a shy, stuttering, Edith Wharton enthusiast — away from a disastrous career path of, you know, prolonged public speaking.

As I sat eavesdropping in the back row I realized something very important about professorship: it isn't all about reading novels. Some of it is actually about dealing, fairly and sympathetically, with the youngsters in the back row, the very ones who spend the lecture mumbling about your haircut being awfully Peter-Pan-ish. And since I have a feeling that I'll become a middle-aged lady of particularly Peter-Pan-ish haircuts, this observation stuck with me. Another career path canned because of the possibility of cutting remarks from gents in trucker hats.

Less Than Twelve

As usual, I managed to take fewer than twelve photos on my vacation. And Tahoe is beautiful, too, so I can't do what I usually do and blame the landscape. And after I subtracted all of the pictures that made me wince and ask myself what exactly I'd been intending to do with my face, I had like seven left. None are of the birthday-lady and some of them aren't even very good. I'm a flaming, blogging wreck. [But at least I'm a wreck who got a picture of that weird bear-family-v.-eagle-family fight statue. All the clean air and bright sunshine up there makes people (brass artisans?) wacky.]

(Immediately after this picture was taken we had to leave the dock/bar. I was getting embarrassingly sea sick while trying to balance on my stool and drink my fancy beverage.)

Deserving It

I’ve been gone for awhile, I know, and what’s worse is that it was premeditated: I’ve known for months that I was going to Tahoe for the days surrounding my mother’s 50th birthday. My mother, though carefully assuring everyone that she wanted to be surprised and relaxed and certainly not the hostess, has been planning the event for almost a year. The longevity of the plot was supplemented by plenty of emails with the cap-locked subject line “TAHOE,” all full of links to dinner cruises and spreadsheets showing the inflow of guests into the cabin she was renting. Most were signed, faithfully, “Or am I micro managing?” And somehow in the face of all this I managed to completely un-manage my blog. And I’m no small micromanager myself.

See, I meant this to be a nice and earnest blog and already I’ve slipped into a tone of gentle mockery. My mother is a wholly pleasant person, as mothers go, a real open-hearted chatterbox; it’s unfortunate that she birthed and raised four daughters of a more cynical bent. We’re adults, sure, and fairly affectionate ones, but we were also raised in the constant influence of sitcoms — laugh-track booms as her luggage is revealed, enough for a good, long stay — so we tend to josh my mother quite a bit. She joshes us too, in her way, mostly with wheedling emails about how many grandchildren her girlfriends have and text messages on glaring Sundays mornings that read, “ARE YOU ALIVE?”

We reply in kind and usually en masse, which may be what has me feeling so wobbly in this post. My sisters and I may not agree on much, but we agree on a few things about my mother, namely eating all of her food and doting on her in this confusing way. We harass her about her Navaho print couch and her daily FB check-in to Pete’s Coffee, how she named her convertible “Fancy” and how she claims she stayed skinny in the ‘80s by only drinking Dr. Pepper. She chides us to settle down and pop out some children, to call more, and not to get so riled when she accidentally includes us on one of her email forwards about guardian angels. We, in turn, remind her that she has a denim jacket covered in pins from the Hard Rock café.

This is all a ruse, of course, the kind of elaborate misdirection that chicas in their mid-twenties perform to distract from the fact that their laugh sounds exactly like their mother’s laugh, their calves are starting to look suspiciously like their mother’s calves and they keep crying during music videos for country songs like a certain you-know-who. It’s intended to fend off the specter of your own inevitable denim jacket.

There is some evidence, at least in my case, that these similarities shouldn’t be taken too seriously. I struggled alongside my three sisters to turn out a spread for my mom’s party — a spread that I must note was dictated by my mother before she politely averted her eyes and pretended not to know what we were up to — something that my mother does at every major family event. We heaved and sawed at giant red onions while my mother and her friends giggled and ironically sipped boxed wine from enormous goblets. (I think I should note that I don’t think I could fill a cabin as thoroughly as my mother did; a possible correlation between kind-heartedness and number of friends accumulated? Surely not.) Hours later, when the food was cleared and the store-bought cake presented with a little embarrassment, we too took to guzzling cocktails and playing cards. I felt exhausted and mildly accomplished.

But in the morning when my sisters and I were laid low by lite beers, griping about our stomachaches and how one of us accidentally slept in her sneakers, my mother was up, calmly cooking pancakes, clad in a matching set of pajamas. She was nice enough not to make fun of us, though we certainly deserve it.

Hobo Coffee

Ever since I broke the vase on my coffee press and tried (and failed) to replace it, I've been making my coffee using this hobo system. I know it's not sustainable; I'll eventually run out of cheesecloth and have a hard time buying another roll for this ridiculous purpose. But it's works for now. And it'll keep working until I figure out the precise size of my broken vase (the one I ordered online using my apparently faulty sense of volume was the size of a thimble) or until I break down and replace the whole press.

When I do replace the Mason jar and cheesecloth method, I'm pretty sure it will be because of it's inherent silliness and my tendency to burn my fingers when smooshing the grounds into the cloth, not because of the quality of the brew. The coffee is surprisingly un-hobo-like in taste. Probably the influence of those Mason jars -- they really class up a slip-slod coffee process.

[Weirdly I don't remember when last week I took these pictures and the time on the clock is distressing me. I don't recall drinking coffee at 9:13 at night (I don't know what "night sweats" are but I'd probably get them if I drank coffee at that hour), and yet I start work at 7:30. This has to be a leisurely cup of weekend hobo brew.]