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
