I Work Alone

I often spend my days working alone in a 4,000 square foot warehouse-like woodshop studio with poor ventilation and an ancient heating system that makes the back of room, where precisely no one goes and exactly nothing happens, feel like a toasty kitchen on Thanksgiving afternoon. My personal workspace remains somewhere in the low 50s, and I stay comfortable by practicing my moonwalk from station to station wearing four layers of long underwear and Carhartt jacketing. 
  
One day a homeless man wandered in asking for work. This was disheartening, as it had just taken me two hours to figure out how to invert the doorknob on the front door so that the lock was on the inside instead of, quite stupidly, the outside. With the lock on the outside, any silly passerby could have themselves a hearty laugh by locking me into the building, which wouldn’t be so bad except for the poor heating, ventilation, and loneliness.

It’s days when I am gassy when I truly appreciate working alone. And because I bike to work- on a hot pink electric bike that garners much attention because it is so stupid-looking, I am able to pass gas freely as I ride. I experience gratitude as I think of the whole day of flatulence freedom that lays ahead of me, where I will not have to worry about stomach aches from holding it in or fart stigma from co-workers, even though I could probably blame it on a guy. Because no one would think to blame the only girl in the room, am I right? When I ride home on my bicycle after a day of being alone, sometimes I will sing or fart or say aloud big, existential things like, “I will never fully understand life, because my only context for living is as a human on Earth, a tiny percentage of the possibilities for life in this entire universe!”

When I come home from a typical day of working alone I will eat dinner with my girlfriend Ruby, the first and last person I’ll generally have spoken to all day. My word recall dulled and my listening skills limited to hearing Edith Piaf on my headphones and attempting to mimic her French while moonwalking around the shop all day, conversing with Ruby will feel a little like giving a lecture on the definition of the word “irony” while jogging, and will ultimately sound like a mild bout of diarrhea.

An example of this is that I have been told that I often skip proper nouns entirely, moving right along to pronouns. I generally refer to my boss simply as “He,” confusing people and implying a sort of God-likeness on his part. I do not think that God’s vernacular includes the words “retarded” and “numbnuts,” but in the way that he knows carpentry and that he discharges what appears to be an indestructible air of confidence, there is in my boss a tiny pinch of Jesus.

I find myself becoming worse at all of this socializing stuff and wonder, at the delicate age of 27, if it might be the start of Alzheimers. As Ruby proofreads this her eyes widen. She tells me that Alzheimers is not funny and I tell her that I think it sometimes can be. I wrote this whole entry because Ruby thought it would be a good idea for her to actually have an idea about what my days look like, but I think I maybe failed because all I talked about were farts and Edith Piaf and moonwalking, which is what I always talk about.

The truth is, any information about what I technically do, which is woodworking, is generally met with a tilted head and partially opened mouth. Even though it’s a good day for me when I am able to successfully get a beautiful hollow grind on an ⅛ inch chisel, it bores the shit out of people to hear about. See? You don’t know what I’m talking about. And thus, my days spent focusing my attention on creating pieces of functional art are downgraded to me having to talk about my farts, which I guess for now, for Ruby, is something she can at least relate to.

Mr. Glass, I am looking for sperm.

Dear Ira Glass,

Over the past year I spent approximately 225 hours on the New York to Boston/Boston to New York Chinatown bus, splitting my rides between the famously unpleasant Fung Wah bus fleet and a slightly less-but-not-by-much pee-smelling bus line called Lucky Star. Roughly a third of that time I spent listening to archived episodes of This American Life, a blessing in the form of a distraction from bus operators’ mercurial driving habits, particularly those of the gentleman who drives the Lucky Star bus between Boston and New York at 3pm on Fridays.

But anyway, let’s get down to it. Mr. Glass, I am looking for sperm. Not for right now, but maybe in six, seven years? I am asking you because I believe that nobody’s sperm could ever possibly be as wonderful as yours, except of course mine, if I could only produce it. In any case, I’ll take the second best to me, which again I’ll clarify is you. I assure you that your sperm would be mixed with prime, nonpareil eggs, those of my partner, Ruby.  She is a teacher, dedicated and passionate in dealings with youth and education, and is, in my opinion, attractive.

I realize that you are married and have children of your own, but this detail is one that we find minor, as we need only your sperm and not the rest of your life. It has also occurred to us that you might not be interested in assisting a couple of lesbians in their quest to find sperm from good stock simply because of the potential logistical issues that may come about from us having to pester you for your biological goods over and over should my partner Ruby not get pregnant on the first, second, or third try.

At the ultimate least, please know that we are paying a compliment. We are coming to you for sperm because we adore your demeanor and general good reasoning. We do not have our sights set specifically on our having a baby journalist prodigy, but we are in love with the idea of having a child with any of the good qualities you portray via your radio programming. We would be overjoyed to have you in our family without actually having you, you know, in our family. 

All the best,

Marie D.

Boston, Ma

Strawberries and Cool Whip

I am happy to report back to my reader-less blog after spending the last six weeks at an all-women’s pre-apprenticeship trade school in Chelsea. I will sum this experience up in the following words and will subsequently provide short explanations of each: Mud buckets, Tendonitis of the foot, Strawberries and cool whip, “This is a particularly loud class,” and of course, Lesbian.

Mud buckets: Much of trade school, at least this one, consists of people hurting themselves by picking up really (fucking) heavy buckets of mud and slinging them over their shoulders. I am not sure I will ever actually be put into another context where I am required to pick up buckets of mud, especially in the weirdly dramatic way of crouching down, lifting and plopping it onto my knee, then slowly, pathetically, and gruntingly pushing the mud bucket onto my shoulder while the class hoots and hollers and sometimes laughs at me. Or maybe just towards me… or maybe I’m just really paranoid and they were laughing about hammers or combination squares or something. I felt really good about my physical strength, at least in respect to my smallish size, until I had to do this.  The mud bucket was a huge source of anxiety for me. Like, my therapist heard about it- a lot. And, admittedly, because of this anxiety, every time I even hear the words “mud bucket” I feel the urge to defecate. This may be too much information for some, but I thought I needed to just drive the anxiety factor through. Anyway, the subject of mud buckets leads me to the next point:

Tendonitis of the foot: Basically what happened when we switched from the heavy mud bucket to the even heavier one. I can thank the glorious mud bucket for giving me my first opportunity to wear something in the Dr. Scholl’s line of foot support. Now I have finally have something to talk about with my grandmother! 

Strawberries and Cool Whip: When it came up in conversation that I happen to be allergic to strawberries a woman sitting next to me in class gave me the same look that you would get from people when you're describing your first enema experience, leading me to wonder if maybe she has some auditory processing issues. But anyway, her actual response was, “…Even with cool whip?”

“Even what with cool whip?”

“I mean you can’t eat strawberries with cool whip?”

Man, did she nail it. How did she know that the secret to safe consumption of strawberries is to pair them with Kraft’s famous and partially hydrogenated heaven-in-your-mouth white fluffiness?

“This is a particularly loud class”: Although my class was generally hilarious, supportive and more or less a cohesive unit, boy could they fucking talk. And I mean talk all the fucking the time. I wondered a lot about how we ended up with such a freakishly disproportionate number of people who had voices that could somehow carry in a room with acoustics as poor as an airplane’s.

Lesbians: As a friend recently stated, [all-women’s trade school is] basically a dyke paradise. And boy golly was it ever! I’m proud to be able to list trade school under the same dyke-related activities such as softball, rugby, reading every Sarah Water’s novel, not eating meat, and having sex with women.

So what next? Probably working at another coffee shop while I daydream about working in a cabinet making shop with other woodworking women. And probably having nightmares about mud buckets and then waking up to discover that I’ve crapped my pants. Maybe training my cat to give me massages, as best a cat can anyway.

In other news, it is snowing. I am not sure what to do when it snows as I’ve never lived in a place where that happens. I’ve just been watching the snow from the window and thinking, “What do I do now, exactly?” Because anytime I’ve ever been anywhere where it started snowing there has always been hot chocolate, marshmallows, and a cabin involved. But this is just not conducive to my lifestyle just yet. Any snow-related advice would be seriously appreciated.

Cheers and happy blizzarding,

Marie

I want a bean feast.

Veruca Salt really wanted a bean feast, whatever that is. I imagine what many presumably would: a huge, Last Supper style table adorned with every type of bean found in the United Kingdom, Asia, Africa, and the Americas mounded onto expensive white china. With two dozen twelve year-old girls in velvet party dresses and white stockings rushing the table, scratching their way to the garbanzos, ripping the oversized bows out of each others' hair to get to the adzuki beans first, and pushing the unpopular girl's face into a mountain of kidney beans while chorusing, "JEANIE CANNELLINI! JEANIE CANNELLINI!" 

Though I'm not especially interested in bean-feasting, what I do want, in an undeniably vain and Veruca Saltish way, is Fiestaware. Fiestaware, for those who do not regularly read the kitchenware section of the Macy's catalogue, is an irresistibly colorful outfit of platery. Platery is not a word but I like the way it sounds, so I'll keep using it. I suspect that Fiestaware has a sort of cult following. And I suspect that I am part of this cult. Well, in any case I really hope that there's a cult so that I haven't been fertilizing an irrational platery fixation by making my girlfriend drive me to the mall, out of her way, to compare prices of the "Shamrock" 10 1/2 inch dinner plates to the ones priced on Amazon.com.

I think that Fiestaware might induce in me some sort of chemical brain reaction. It's the novelty of its bold uni-coloring. It's sleek and unassumingly sexy like that boy in high school who the entire student populace giddied over; the guy who performed better-than-decently in a non-quite-fabulous sport like pole-vaulting. Or golf. No, probably not golf, but maybe lacrosse. But not in Canada because lacrosse is too, you know, en vogue there. I think they have lacrosse players printed on their money, actually.

If you haven't yet checked out Fiestaware, 'tis almost the season to watch A Christmas Story on TNT- repetitively. Ralphie's family dines on some Fiestaware dinner plates! Clearly this is not the most memorable part of the movie for most fans, but it makes me seriously happy.

Ta for now,

Marie

Wedding Ring Into The Hole.

I often think about the time I watched a wedding ring get flushed down a toilet. It was in the middle of seeing The Reader several months ago at Kabuki Cinema in San Francisco. I ran to the bathroom, not wanting to miss any more shots of the German countryside and female prisons, and found a group of women huddled around a toilet stall chanting, "DO IT... DO IT... DO IT" in regards to a consumed and ardent lady who was knees-down in front of the seat, who, as it happens, had recently discovered her husband was cheating on her with Calista Flockhart's older sister, apparently an old family friend. Practically a cousin, in fact! Which was essentially incest! Which was disgusting! She held a blank and serious gaze, the kind of blank and serious gaze you see in poorly directed movies when women characters find out they're being cheated on and are deciding what to do next. She pulled her ring off of her finger, for reals because I'm not talking about movies anymore, then dropped it into the toilet and flushed it alongside the raging cheers and victorious fist-raising of the women gathered around the toilet in support like some crazy, backwards bachelorette party.

...

This did not happen. Actually, I flushed it. I flushed a wedding ring down the toilet, but it wasn't mine. Maybe it was a woman disavowing her marriage, but I think it was probably just someone who didn't realize that their wedding ring had somehow fallen off their finger and into a toilet at Kabuki Cinema. How it went was- I ran to the bathroom, made pee-pee, and just after I pulled to flush I looked down and spotted a gold wedding band sitting at the bottom of the bowl. It was sort like when you see trees toppling onto people in movies and you yell, "WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST GET OUT OF THE WAY?!" I could not move, and I watched, petrified, as the ring shot up the little dark toilet hole. I immediately mourned the chance I'd had to be the anonymous heroine who stoutly gave up eight minutes of her oscar-nominated film to not only stick her hand in a toilet that is used every two minutes and currently had pee in it but potentially get it back to its rightful place by way of the lost and found. 

"Yeah, she found it in the toilet near theater 6. Fished it out with her bare arms and everything," the theater employee, official keeper of the lost and found, would say to the grateful and alleviated ring owner. "This is one of the most impressive finds I've seen, and I've been here since 2005!"

And just thinking about this potential interaction would suffice. But, I lost my chance. And a wedding ring, which is sitting in sewage twenty something miles outside of the city.

In other news, my mother is coming into town next week. I am not sure what to do with her other than the usual drinking of froo-froo cocktails. And I have not yet told her that the guest room often rumbles due to whatever it is the downstairs neighbors are doing. 

Anyway, take care for now,

Marie