Miss Smartypants

Okay. That's two 1984 references in two days. What's with that? I probably just need to read more true literature. Sigh.

Right now, I'm in the middle of Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot. Really, really good book of essays, and I'm not commenting on its claim-or-lack-thereof to greatness here. But Sarah Vowell herself, besides being my hero and all, is also hella-smart.

Smart as in learned. Learned as in: Read Camus in the original French as a teenager. It's true! I read it last night, and she wasn't being flippant or hyperbolic!

Question: If one read Hollywood Wives in its original printing at the age of eleven, is that comparable?

Discuss.

If you are home alone overnight, I do not suggest passing the time by renting and watching Gimme Shelter, the documentary about 1969’s Altamont music festival.

After doing this last night, I slept fitfully, imagining myself packed in with three-hundred thousand drugged-out people in garish lighting. Bludgeoning pool cues and knives and no escape for miles, either, because the only way out is this beguilingly bucolic two-lane road. It looks like rural Spain, but it’s crammed with parked cars, so no one’s getting anywhere.

And when I woke up this morning--too early--the first image I saw before opening my eyes was Mick Jagger’s youthful profile, with the face of a young guy in the paroxysms of a scary acid trip just behind him, who is then grabbed by a Hell’s Angel and shoved back into the surging crowd.

Watching this documentary was my 1984 rat-attached-to-face. Worse though, it’s not fiction.

I’ve found one reason I’m glad I live here.

In the U.S. of Aye-yi-yi, that is.

I’m glad I’m an American because I can spell s-k-e-p-t-i-c with a "k," instead of the British "sceptic." God! I can't stand to even see it here; it's just so strangely without the cojones that the term requires to mean doubter, questioner. Always freaked me out in my philosophy courses when we came across British readings with the strange, eunich-like spelling of such an intentionally muscled word.
I think.

On the other hand, I like to spell grey with an "e," because I just prefer it aesthetically to "-ay." It just feels--greyer. And damn it, you know what? I’m jotting this out in Word, and the program tried to change it to "-ay," just now.

God damned big brother.

How do they spell these things in Canada? I know they’re sorta-kinda British there, kind of. Right? Err. Or. Something?

(No, Alice; you can’t defect: Your historical cluelessness re. our Neighbor to the North exposes you: So American.)

By the way, don't have much of an opinion on the "–our" versus "-or" endings, but I’ll keep ya posted.

The ironies of real life would seem contrived if you wrote them into a short story or a movie.

Last night, I went out with a good friend who’s moved out of town this year, and the bizarre little mirror-actions in the turns in our lives have taken were uncanny.

Above and beyond that jarringness, however, we had the best time. I feel like this is an event that must be reported upon. If it’s boring for you, sorry.

Other people find their fun going dancing or shopping tchotchkes, but for me, it is the way-too-freaking-rare experience of a good, long conversation. A really good conversation. I have kept so few truly close friends as the years have passed, and this is something I mourn, hard. There are so many people I miss, and I think that was probably one of the reasons I started up this blog: If I can’t talk about real things with people on a regular, daily, weekly, monthly basis, at least I can write about them as if I’m having a conversation, right?

My friend proposed that she and I have both found it hard to keep close friends in part because we’re ambitious people who’ve moved around a lot. We’re also both pretty introverted, and have a tendency towards the morose at times, and these things do not make for the Great Big Party every day.

But as we talked, it also became clear that neither of us likes to settle for superficial relationships. I don’t like meeting the same group of people at a bar every week and talking about work, or even politics. Those things are all fine, but they only go so far in the conveying The Real Emotional Exchange, you know? So I tend to bow out some, when Hunter goes out with some big group of people. Sometimes I just end up feeling lonely. Not always, but when my, err, I guess, emotional batteries need a boost, talking about movies is just not gonna truly do it for me.

And I’ve got to add, here that I don’t think of myself as an intimidatingly intense person. When I dated my college boyfriend, we’d have frequent cook-outs at his house in the summertime, and my role at those events was always sort of greeter social butterfly, while he hung out at the grill or in the kitchen. And that was great; it was a lot of fun. Those were really good days. I mean, it was college—and there’s never, ever going to be a time like that again. Insta-friends, all on the same page, right away.

I guess we all just have to find our niche, and I’m not there right now. To anyone reading this who’s feeling the same way, hold on, okay? You’re not alone; there’s nothing wrong with you. With persistence, I believe we all can get there.

And to my Baltimore friend: I drove home last night more content than I’ve felt in ages. More well-rounded, somehow. Thanks.

Livin' a world of reheated restaurant leftovers...

...and it’s got me so’s I just can’t see !
However, Mr. Buddy Holly Danger Cat’s pawing at something that evidently just crawled under our stove, so for now, it’s probably best to subsist on food cooked in someone else’s kitchen.

Unless I decide I need a protein boost.

I’m eating some sub-average Indian food from Sunday night. (You're intrigued, huh? It is lyrical prose such as this that keeps you praising the miracle of Internet Free Speech, huh?)

It smells so freaking good though; it's easy to forget it did me (ever so slightly) wrong, the first time. Oh Indian food, Indian food: why you gotta do me like you do? (Note to anyone who was previously thinking of to taking me out for Indian cuisine: This is not All Indian food, just food from the middling Touch of India in Toco Hills Shopping Center.)

Anybody else remember that old public service announcement with the pregnant woman sitting on her bed trying to light a cigarette over and over again, but the matches all go out when she touches them to her cigarette? Then this deeply authoritative voiceover comes on and says, “Maybe someone is trying to tell you something.”

Well, I was trying to get our gas stove to light, to reheat this food, and I kept lighting matches and holding them up to the burner, which would light up, and then immediately go out. This happened no fewer than three times. And I swear I heard that voice-over. Only that “someone” is my stomach.

But I ignored it, because I’m a bad girl. Reckless and uncontainable and a bad mommy to my own digestive system. I shouldn’t be allowed to decide for myself what I eat; someone should strictly monitor that. Clearly, I can’t handle the responsibility.

At home with the dogs
Every Sunday morning, we go to this illegal dog-park that springs up at a local baseball field around the corner: i.e., a dozen to twenty neighbors show up and we let our dogs off-leash to play (and totally freak out the entire walk there, too, in our dog's particularly-excitable case), while we sip coffee and squint. And talk about real estate and home improvement.

Oh, wait—That last part only applies to everyone else at the dog park. And I mean, everyone. It’s as if they arrive, and, by setting foot on the ballpark’s green grass, some strange mind-control takes over and they are moved to talk only about The New Deck, The New Addition and property values. And suddenly, I’m twelve.

When we first started going to Illicit Dog Park, I kind of suspected I might be twelve, anyway, since everyone else who shows up are house-buyers, many of them newlywed-ish and in their thirties. See, our neighborhood is one of those Euphemized with the phrase: “In Transition.” Meaning it used to be a lot of black people, here, and now the black people all live on one side of the main drag, and the computer-programmers live on the other side, fixing up the houses of what used to be the neighbors.

And then there’s Hunter and me. We rent. We live in the apartment complex behind the main little row of shops on the main drag. Hunter’s a coffeeshop clerk going back to undergrad, and I’m starting out as a writer for a small publication that can’t afford to pay me to work there full time, and so I sometimes work at a shop that sells knick-knacks. And I’m kinda too scared to look at my bank statements too hard, to find out if I’m actually getting by.

Hunter doesn’t really like to go to dog-park at all anymore, because he swears he’s gotten the fish-eye from other people there who’ve asked him where we live. I’ll still go. I adore watching our dog frolic with the other dogs more than anything else, although the conversation still does bore the living hell out of me.

And sometimes offends me, just a little: among a certain number of people who come, there’s an awful lot of pleasure derived from stories about how they called 9-1-1 when, say, there was this drunk guy sitting on their lawn in the middle of the night. One man likes to point out that he has a gun a lot when having these discussions—and there’s a lot of, "I went to the door with my gun and I called out to this guy—" All right, Indiana Jones! Or freaking Hernando de Soto, Georgia pioneer.

Apart from all this, there is a part of me that feels again, ever-so-slightly pathetic; to be closer to thirty than to twenty with zero money saved, trying desperately to piece together a future/career/geographic location, who can barely afford the apartment she lives in with her small live-in circus of boyfriend, dog and cat: a 2-bedroom from the ‘50s, with an ancient gas heater in the front wall, no screens in the windows, and mold growing on the walls of every room. I can’t even afford a dehumidifier.

Sometimes I don’t like those people very much, but what I envy is their confidence about who and where they are. You know: “I am Phil, Young Physician! And this is My New Neighborhood! That is My Golden Retriever--and My Wife is pregnant with My Baby, whom I shall raise here and who shall attend the elementary school down the street! And we shall live here quite happily for many years to come.” These are the folks who run the neighborhood leaflet that talks about successful kindergarten plays and upcoming wine-crawls. There's a relaxed-ness that comes with this sort of confidence. An ease of gait that comes from feeling like you've earned the right to spend the afternoon reading and drinking lemonade in your backyard hammock. From knowing that you have the right to relax and shouldn't be working on figuring out how you're going to start saving enough to start thinking about oh, maybe, moving out of your crummy apartment, for starters.

I feel miles from this, and saddened by it a lot of the time.

I want a real house that is mine. I want to have stability and I want to keep in touch with more friends; hell, I want to make more friends where I live. It’s true that somehow I still can’t imagine myself exactly hanging out on a Friday night with our dog park neighbors. There would be eyebrows raised at our Sandinista dolls from Mexico, at any rate. But sometimes I think anything would be better than this current feeling of flux.