Random Thought

March is the month for maladies.

Eliot had a catchy idea with that whole "April is the cruelest month" bit and all. And I've got nothing against him, what with Prufrock and all. But March is much worse than April.

Of course, I might say differently when April comes.

Temporarily Lacking Parentage

My parents are leaving tonight for a stint in Provo: they are attending a family history conference in Provo and will be gone tonight, tomorrow night, and pretty much all of Saturday. They aren't gone yet, but they will shut the rather squeaky back door behind them any second now. As a girl who enjoys peace, quiet, and a good deal of time alone, I'm looking forward to solitude. In fact, there is no way to duplicate the phhh sound I made with my lips over dinner this evening every time they mentioned they thought I might be scared or lonely or some other similar, related (equally silly) emotion while I spent this weekend by myself.

They seem to have forgotten the following: I will not be spending much of tomorrow, if any, alone. After all, I do work for a living these days. It means I leave the house at 7:40 in the morning, embark on-and disembark from--a bus, enter an office at 8, spend the day there until 5, hop another bus home . . . that kills my day till just before 6. And tomorrow there is a South Davis area singles ward activity I'm debating attending. If I don't attend that, I've got a Gilmore marathon in the works. Complete with Chinese food and Cadbury mini eggs. I won't be lonely. Rory and Lorelai are excellent company.

Tonight will be my solitary night, but I'm perfectly okay being in the company of nobody-but-myself. It gives me time to think. And if you haven't noticed, time to think is a commodity that I enjoy. Besides, I have a task on my hands. Not a big one. But I'm twenty-three and my mom has no faith in my memory, so the house is peppered with yellow Post-It notes for things she thinks I should remember while they're gone: to set my alarm clock, to lock the front door tomorrow when I leave the house. Pull two packages of hamburger down from the freezer. Open the blinds in the morning. Close the blinds at night. Do my Pilates. Walk on the treadmill. Clean the bathroom . . . I watched her post them all, knowing that I would take a quick tour through the house when she left, filing them into memory as I pull them down (I might leave the hamburge note up--she wants me to do it on Saturday, and it's the only thing I'm liable to forget; everything else she posted is something that is a matter of habit).

I had an eery feeling as I watched her post them around the house before she left: the strange sensation that someday, twenty years or more from now, I will walk around a house doing the same thing when I leave for a weekend . . .

Birthday Memories

Though my birthday was actually last Friday, my family celebrated it on Sunday--as we always do, with a dinner and the exchange of presents. Except my mom decided that it would be fun to mold the topic of the dinnertime conversation. We were to stick strictly to one thing, she decided: my family's memories of me.

I had a pretty good idea of where this type of reminiscing would go, considering I spent most of my childhood curled up in one particular corner of the living room with my nose stuck in a series of books. My mom would start off with one of her ever-famous stories about the difficulties in potty-training me . . . how I insisted on telling her when I was going to the bathroom in my diaper, but refused to do it in the bathroom until I decided I felt like it. (Guess I had my own timetable for things even then)

My older brother? I didn't know if he had any memories of me. When I gave him the chicken pox, maybe. I was almost positive that my sister would regale us with tales of how I used to eat dirt (once! it was once! and I was two . . . people think it's cute to eat dirt when you're that little).

Instead I learned that my family considers me, more or less, The Sickly One. As soon as my mom proposed the idea at the start of dinner, the stories came tumbling: "Do you remember when she had that goose egg on her forehead? It was huge! The size of a WHALE or something! And she got it on the way to school and she wanted to go to school and she wanted to go home" and "Do you remember that chicken fight when she broke her arm?" and "Do you remember when she fell over the retaining wall and broke her arm?" and "Do you remember when she had to stay in the hospital?" and oh my heavens! To hear their stories, it's a wonder I didn't die when I was a kid.

Granted, my right eye is blind. I have been in and out of the hospital a few times in my life. I've broken my right arm at least three times that I can think of. I started a minor chicken pox epidemic in my family. But if that's all that I'm remembered for by the time I die (which, granted, should not be any time soon since I'm not suffering from any particularly malevolent form of ill health), I am going to find a way of coming back to haunt my family.

Happiness in Hermitage

My co-worker thinks I'm depressed. He pops up in my office at infrequent intervals with popcorn, with worried looks, with blonde jokes. (Yesterday's: Three blondes who decide to go hunting come across some tracks. The first blonde says, "These are rabbit tracks. I'm gonna kill me a rabbit." She pulls out her rabbit gun. The second blonde says, "No. These are deer tracks. I'm gonna kill me a deer." She pulls out her deer gun. The third blonde says, "No. These are bear tracks. I'm gonna kill me a bear." She pulls out her bear gun. Ten minutes later, the train kills all three of them.) He asked me today if, in all honesty, I enjoyed my job.

This man does not seem to understand one word: fatigue. I'm tired. Not depressed. Tired. Sometimes busy. But not depressed. Getting vaguely annoyed. But not depressed. Interestingly enough, he is not the first person to think I'm depressed when I am, actually, tired. The symptoms seem similar: a certain lack of social interaction, droopy eyelids, a less lively lilt in my voice . . . When I get tired, I tend to forget my people skills. Or, at the very least, let them hang by a miniscule thread. I try not to get snappish, but I don't make any effort to be welcoming. You know what I mean.

But I have discovered an advantage to my interactional modes when I get as tired as I have been lately. I have more time to write, resulting in a somewhat less lonely and more thought-filled hermitage than many people would expect. Lunch becomes a time for composition. The bus ride home, a unique opportunity to mull.

The bus got caught waiting for a train today, and someone had graffitied on the side of a boxcar: The killer in me is the killer in you. I thought about it the whole way home. I sense several poems coming on. The impact of the statement, in large part, is lost by not knowing who sprayed it across the gravelgrey surface. The me has much less power as a fourteen-year-old than as, say, the Unabomber. (Yeah, yeah. I know the odds of the graffiti being from the Unabomber are about 70 bazillion to .3, but I don't care)

In a very rare moment for me, I envied Thoreau today. I envied him his Walden, his sucking the marrow out of life, his grand experiment. I envied him all that time to think.

Stepping Outside My Comfort Zone

Most people don't like to live in boxes. In fact, every time I have recently ventured into Salt Lake, I've heard at least one person living in a box who didn't much like the situation. Of course, cardboard does get soggy, and this man knew this. I don't doubt that he would love to have a more suitable situation. But he doesn't. Meanwhile, I (who has a perfectly comfortable home--well, perfectly comfortable when my dad isn't controlling the thermostat, anyway) have difficulties venturing outside my box.

But I am trying. Last week, I did something monumental for me. I wanted to flags to fly, Barbra Streisand to give her final concert (Again! Okay, that's a lie. I would prefer to see several million other musical acts before I listened to Babs in concert), people to give me a standing ovation as I walked past. I wanted overtures to play, bells to ring (in the non-death-tolling celebratory fashion, of course), and people to shower me with praise . . . because I signed up for driving school.

If you don't know me well, you obviously don't understand how huge this is. This is bigger than meeting J.K. Rowling in person. Bigger than getting a novel published. Bigger than an invitation to move out of state. I'm a turkey about cars.

Many years ago, a sitcom whose name I can't recall ran on the WB. (It was short-lived. And since it was both short-lived and on the WB, that means there are many, many to choose from. Thus the lack of remembrance.) Anyway, the daughter in the sitcom was ecstatic about learning how to drive. However, her father took every opportunity on lecturing that, "You are not just moving around in a fun vehicle. You are operating a vehicle of death!" I sympathized with that father. I was more a proponent of his ideas than his daughter's; I shuddered every time I saw someone my age get a license and then crash a car (I had the distinction of being one of the few sixteen-year-olds on the planet to crash the family van before even obtaining a license); I still stiffen--read instant rigor mortis--any time a car behind the one I'm traveling in gets too close.

In short, I'm a paranoiac. But I'm trying to overcome it! Look, I'll even practice:
Driving is fun. Driving is fun. I'm not operating a vehicle of death . . .

My First Paid Holiday EVER

. . . and I was sick yesterday. So I did not go anywhere fun. I did not spend any money that I felt I was somehow recouping because I was getting paid not to be at work. (Which actually was still a great feeling. Hooray for getting paid on a day you're not working, and still receiving 80 hours' worth of money for the two-week pay period!) Anyway, you know you really don't feel well when the highlight of your paid holiday is watching Star Wars Episode 3 with your dad. Not that I have anything against my dad, of course. Quite the contrary.

But you know the Dayquil has officially kicked in when you watch Natalie Portman deliver the line, "You're breaking my heart" with her eyebrows all scrunched and a pained look on her face, and you think that the acting in the movie may have actually improved from the time you saw the film when it first came out in theaters (and snickered at the Portman line, much to the chagrin of the Amidala- and Skywalker-shirted people sitting on the row in front of you). I should have known better--and rested--instead of looking at Hayden Christensen and convincing myself that perhaps, just perhaps, there was a look on his face that did not resemble anger. (I don't care what some of the film critics said, taking back their jibes at his performance in Episode 2. Because even on the Dayquil, I still couldn't quite convince myself that he actually looked in love, or happy, or sad, or tortured. Just angry at best, and more or less like wood at worst.)

I am not the only one who spent my paid holiday sick. A couple of my co-workers did as well. Something, it would seem, is going around. But since I have yet to be gifted any sick leave (that doesn't happen until the beginning of March, which actually isn't terribly far away), I would much rather be sick on a paid holiday than on a weekday; after all, weekday sickness would require that I use vacation time in place of sick. And I can't think of anything that, for me, would be a greater tragedy right now. I'm anxiously awaiting actually using my vacation for a vacation. To New York, I'm thinking. But maybe to Chicago for the umpty-billionth time--I think Chicago is habit-forming. For this year, I only get five days. So England is out of the picture, because I need much more than five days for a vacation like that. And, because I am twisted, I don't want to use sick for vacation either. That's just wrong.

Another thing that is also wrong is the pain in my feet. Granted, it's entirely my fault. And granted, today my shoes were cute and in fashion (this happens less than once in a blue moon). But they were heels. And heels are not comfortable, even though these heels did me a courtesy by keeping my too-long pants (why are dress pants tailored longer anyway?) from dragging on the ground. In fact, I am now firmly and unmovingly convinced that whoever first described something as "walking on pins and needles" was, in fact, describing the sensations in a girl's feet when she wears heels.

Thankfully, I am home now. Which means I have exchanged the actually fashionable office attire for my favorite ratty jeans, a hooded sweater, and slippers. Why does no one make office wear that feels this comfy?

Big Furry Hat People

My former Russian lit professor used to joke that Russian novels were so long because the Russians needed to entertain themselves through multiple long winters.

When I read Doctor Zhivago the other day, I had a loose idea for an exchange that I would someday like to stick in a novel.

Lit Lover 1: I am interested in reading more Russian literature.
Lit Lover 2: That's kind of a heavy topic.
LL1: But there are so many good ideas in all of those novels. Don't you agree?
LL2: I suppose. I'm not sure; I've had a difficult time making it through my Russian lit collection.
LL1: Really? What's in it?
LL2: War and Peace.