Happy Days

1982

These are my parents before they were married. Whoa. Check out that double perm action.

Observation of the Day

I occasionally sleep with earplugs, which I buy in packs. Over the years I've periodically replenished my supply, but not without noticing that there is always a singular earplug remaining in the old bag. Hm.

One would think that since, you know, we have two ears the earplugs would come packaged in some even number. I suspect this is not the case.

Please note: I cannot confirm this because the cardboard packaging has long since been thrown away. I can only speak to my speculations and the lonely earplug remaining in the bag. I also do not care enough to earnestly look into this problem.

I Share Interests with a Four-Year-Old Boy

The other day I took a detour from my usual route to class and happened to walk past the childcare center at my college. As I walked down the hall, a man and (presumably) his son walked out the door. The boy could not have been more than four. The man was saying, “The Doctor Seuss (mumblemumble)? Is that what you’re calling it?” My ears perked up.

“Nnoooo, the Doctor WHO scarf”, the boy emphatically corrects the man.

I beam with pride, delight, surprise and suppress the urge to high-five this little kid.

“Oh, ok, here you go” the man says and begins to wrap a scarf (albeit not the Doctor Who scarf) around the boy’s neck. He says something about it being “really long, huh?”

By this time I am approaching and am about to pass them. I decide I must weigh in on this conversation. “It is an awesome scarf, isn’t it?”

The kid looks at me in the way little kids gape at strangers. The man, however, picks up my sympathies towards the scarf and gives a hearty laugh while saying, “Yes, yes!” I grin down at the kid as I walk past and wish that I had time to discuss the finer details of the scarf with him. I’m sure his opinions would have matched mine.

All in all I am pleased that the Doctor Who fan base reaches four-year-old American boys.

Postcards From Italy

I play Beirut as a votive for summer, in remembrance of sun and shine hot on my shoulders and of blindly bright noon days. He is my sound of summertime freedom and summertime love.

This Mercurial Life

Sitting cross-legged on a tiny, concrete deck many stories in the air. It’s sunrise, it’s still, it’s already warm. I cradle a cup of coffee, pressing it against my lips. I hear church bells. I smell wet stone, hot dryer sheets, rain-fragrant air. It is the pitch-perfect frequency and silent melody of early morning. I’m waiting for the shade-lines to reach the ground. I stare at the sun steaks and he quietly joins me, sitting down in pajama pants and his own cup of caffeine without a word.

***

Breezing out a store-front door on a busy city street. It’s raining, I’m hurried, I do not pause to look around. I straighten the strap of my bag across my shoulder, I blow on my steaming mug. The zssshhhsssss of tires on damp asphalt (and engine rumbling underneath) whisks past me. I tug at the collar of my long canvas coat and navigate the people. Car horns double-punctuate the white noise.

***

Cooking breakfast in my long flannel shirt with music playing in the other room. Dancing to the beat. Orchestrating my spatula among eggs, sausage, potatoes. Bare feet patpatpat-ing on cold linoleum. Two ceramic plates clinking and pinking and scraping in my hands.

***

Sitting in a sunlit room in an overstuffed chair. Window thrown open to midday weather, wind and street-sounds seeping through. Legs like pretzels underneath me, heavy hard-backed book alternatingly up to- then away from my nose. A white cat tightrope-walks along the chair’s back frame. Dust particles in sun shafts drift to the carpet, my skin breathes in prickly warmth. I pat the cat, the wind plumes the curtains. I hear keys jingle in and crunch open the front door’s lock.

I feel small and large against life, my life. Passive and active, swept up yet swept away. Flickering abstractions of an idealized life in cinematic resolution.

In Which I Believe I've Been Propositioned, Part Deux

While I remain stuck sheerly on the topic this conversation has turned to, he dives into an endorsement, nay, testimony about how he's been ahem a swinger for ten years. Like I said, I remain stuck on the fact that I'm now discussing my and my coworker's sex life at 7:00am.

Let me pause and place some of this oddity into context: Guy is, how shall I say... part Sheldon Cooper, part John Nash. He speaks higher-level mathematics. He programs software in 28-hour stretches. He's not quite asocial, but nearly. He has a lovely monitor tan. He single-handedly keeps blue-colored energy drinks in business. He's beyond brilliant and is as such a package deal: genius and eccentricity. I've hardly ever envisioned Guy outside of his cubicle and am now being required to envision him at swinger parties. Yes. Let us once again pause to place the aforementioned Guy into a meat market.

My mind wanders...I continue to blink. I think my brow is knit together in combination concern and confusion.

"...and it doesn't matter what they think because you're all gonna be naked in 30 minutes anyway!" ... Is the line that realigns my focus.

I laugh, against intention.

"It doesn't matter what they think?" I echo back.

"Nah. At first you're nervous, you're thinking 'Are they attractive? Do they find me attractive?' I used to be so nervous when I would meet a couple..." Again, I'm jolted with images of Guy at velvety bars and hazy swinger parties.

He continues, "You avoid all that hassle that is in dating. You don't have to stress about building a relationship that will inevitably fail, you just find a few people you click with and spend a few months with them."

My mind keeps wandering.... Hhmmm... I'm actually becoming curious about this. I listen to Guy's description of the lifestyle and honestly wonder if this is something that I would be capable of.

I then contemplate the terminology of "swinger". Since I am not married, could I really be called such? I'd really just be a slut, wouldn't I?

"You know, Guy, this sounds like skydiving to me: I just have no way of knowing if I'll be able to jump until I'm in that plane." He nods, knowingly. "I really have no idea if I'd be able to do it."

"Well, I can let you know when the next get-together is."

I may, or may not, have nodded vaguely.

"You don't have to make a lifestyle out of it; just whenever you want to come out and play." (Play. Did he just say "play"?)

Again, I think there was nodding on my part.

"Or I can give you my phone number. You can text me if you're interested."

*blinkblink*

"O-uh, o-ok..."

Was I just propositioned?

Courtesy of xkcd.com

In Which I Believe I've Been Propositioned, Part 1

Office workers everywhere can attest to the Monday morning ritual of How was your weekend, Bill? Did you have a good weekend Mary? It's part of the office Daily Digest and is uttered and endured with little to no thought.

Except- when it isn't.

I dressed this morning (Monday morning, to clarify) in a silky, turquoise pull-over blouse that has a plunged neck-line and gathers from four corners into a knot of fabric right between my breasts. This will be important momentarily.

I arrived at work early and found that my area was empty apart from my cube-mate; a guy who normally arrives many hours later than I. Since it's an oddity to see him so early, and since he and I usually have very little time to talk as friends, I sat down and begun the Daily Digest: "You're here early. How was your weekend?"

"Oh, fine" he said (par for the course). "How was yours?"

"By turns shitty and delightful", I said, casting aside the bland response of fine.

He gave me the look that I've come to know as meaning he is interested but is refraining from directly inquiring for politeness. I laughed.

While I began telling him that I've recently begun misadventures in dating, I stood to take off my coat and hang it up. I remained standing, describing the recent regrettable dates I've been on while Guy chimes in with "Ah, yes..." and "Mm-hmm...".

He settles in to respond, but before he's gotten two words into his thought he stops, as if struck with a newer, shinier thought, and says, "That shirt looks really good on you" (I smile and mummer thanks) and he nods in assurance. "It uh- really accentuates, uh-" and chokes off the rest of that thought with slightly wide eyes, an awkward smile, and noncommittal hand gestures in the upper torso area.

I suddenly become hyper-aware of the thin polyester that I've chosen to cover my body today. I bite my own cheek and do the faint breath-laugh of the embarrassed. I sit down and allow the cube wall to hide said accentuation.

We continue our conversation.

He is also single and he tells me that he shares my impatience for weeding out the immature, the neurotic, the unenlightened.

"Why am I even doing this?" I ask, rhetorically.

"Because you have certain needs and you find that dating is the way to satisfying these needs", he says, just a little too quickly. I nod and display my Consideration Eyebrows.

"There is an easier way, though, you know?" He lays this question down in a style reminiscent of bribes being slid across tables.

"Um..." I'm not sure if I do, actually.

He scoots his chair a little closer to the wall, so as not to be overheard. "Do you know what swinging is?"

*blinkblink*

Yes. Yes I do.

(That's right! It's a two-part story! Tune in tomorrow kids to hear the conclusion of Monday's proposition.)

Dreams of Better Fodder

I’ve recently begun dreaming of the sea. Dreaming of the white, ice-laced, cloud-hung, chopping glacial waters of the Arctic, Baltic, Greenland and Norwegian seas.

I dream of traveling over them, traveling to them, drifting in them. I sail and scale the waters as if inside an Escher drawing: a möbius sea of block-like oceanic levels.

The cold is the most memorable: stabbing winds and stinging rain. The kind of cold that whips you conscious, rudely waking the part of your brain that sleeps warm and cozy, cushioned and hidden away, rarely used. Crystalline perception, tuned only to the cold.

Faint images of maps float inside my mind as I float around my oceans. I mentally track my movement with these maps, none of which hold any accuracy to the waking world. Once, I was traveling north to reach my seas and I watched the passage of desolate land on my false map. I remember being eager, yet rattlingly nervous to reach my northern waters.

Familiarity and strangeness permeate the dreams; it is as if I am returning to a familiar place after a long stay away. I know these seas and yet I don’t. Perhaps they’re in my own country and I’ve never visited them, or they are my family’s roots and I’m just discovering them. Perhaps I sailed through here long ago and am only just remembering.

I woke last night from a sea dream. I’d passed over thousands of desolate, remote acres covered in ice sheets. I had been standing in my boat balancing the pitch and roll of a storm. As I slowly came to consciousness I could feel the wind lifting the roots of my hair and blowing icy furls down my neck.