Too many knick-knacks.

Further reflections on moving:

There must be some kind of physiological reason that certain disturbed citizens like myself hoard junk long after familiarity has eroded away the novelty. Do I need you, oversized dice? Do I, a tone-deaf and lazy individual, require 4 different harmonicas? Today I tried to find space for silly hats, tool belts, statues of Korean people and a bronze goblet that I won years ago in a crossbow-shooting contest at a Renaissance Faire.

Maybe the thing proclaimed my status in some overwrought script and phrases like “Crossbow Winner” or “Robin Hood in Training” or something I would consider keeping it. Unfortunately, I know that these goblets are just given out to youngsters willy-nilly and without honor, their cost already covered by the hideously inflated prices of the Ye Olde Juice of Jamba served on site.

Can people even drink from bronze? If I wouldn’t want to win a medal of it in gymnastics, then I don’t want to risk my health on it. Plus, that sucker is probably heavy, which is a huge determent where moving is concerned.

I guess the going excuse for keeping these sort of things (things= Gargoyle book ends, llama toy with real llama fur, framed internet comics, Jesus candle from the supermarket) is that they might make excellent conversation pieces.

I’m still waiting for someone to walk into my home and ask me point blank exactly (yet…. conversationally) what my intentions are in keeping a megaphone from my high-school beside an American Girls Christmas ornament, a collection of unclaimed rocks, keys and bouncy balls found on the ground, stacked atop a pile of readers from every course I took at college. Perhaps the ensuing conversation would bring enlightenment.

In other news, I’m reading two short story books cyclically, with no confusion yet. We shall see how this develops.

The "OF" Complex

Moving makes me feel awfully weird. And I am fairly certain that it is not just a shock reaction to the strain of lifting things (being the sort who writes primarily in cursive to avoid excessive lifting of the hand) but is instead the product of a more intangible funkiness.

[Aside: Man, I just can’t believe that “funkiness” is a real word. As I was typing it I was steeling myself to ignore the red line of Word, so ironically wiggly for representing the rigidity of spelling within the oppressive Word-world. And yet, no red line. I guess there is no other way to say “funkiness.” I could have said “a more intangible thing with elements of funk included.” I'm getting quite out of control, I know. Maybe I miss school.]

But back to moving. It’s entirely probably that I always get a little unhinged about moving because I yearn for the epic imagery of cheese-ball novels. In my youth I saturated my brain with books from the vast field of novels featuring sprightly young women as heroines in a more moral provincial past. Think covers of a “grass in motion” motif.

You know the sort of books I am talking about. The female version of your epic boy-and-dog tale, which often boiled down to girl-and-horse because no child in their right mind wants to read a book about a kitten. I was never happier than if these whippersnappers occasioned upon a horse that was untamable to all hard-hearted men-folk and easily won over by the offer of an apple or the playing of a fiddle, or maybe just automatically because the horse cleverly realized that he and this chick were similarly misunderstood by society, horses being great sociologists. The horse theme in this kind of literature is optional, but that stuff is gold. I could watch The Notebook about 30 times and never cry as hard as I would reading My Friend Flicka.

To return to my point (if I did indeed have one), these books warped my impressionable young mind and thus I suffer to this day from an “OF” complex. Oftentimes these books include the the name of the whimsical farm or region where the saucy young heroine lives in the title of the novel. Looking back, I guess it's possibly because these books frequently pushed a theme of ownership and home-making and the space that's being claimed is as important as anything else. And because it is important, it becomes important that you are “Of” there, to use the hokey phrasing. Hence the “OF"complex.

The prime Canadian example is the epic Anne of Green Gables series, featuring 8 whole books using the “Anne of whatever” title structure. But there is also American stuff like Rebecca of Sunnybook Farm. Or the Little House series, which doesn't state the OF so blatantly, but instead completely eradicates the main character Laura from the title and makes the House the constant [Farmer Boy excluded, ewww] and connects it with a series of “on” and “in”s. In short, the literature of my childhood taught me two things: tame a horse with some sugar cookies and a fiddle; and your home is a defining characteristic, or in some of the Wilder [ha..ha..] cases, more important than you altogether.

So moving makes me feel weird, because it deserves due consideration and weight. I spent many formative years (and long weekends in college) reading about people drawing their identity from their home and only conceding to leave their home in when sheer desperation left no other option or when dragged along by the cruel bitch of Manifest Destiny. Maybe I'm being too American today, but I can't help but want some sort of great gurgling reliance on my home. And although I adore my apartment to pieces, I wouldn't risk any sort of prairie fire to keep it, and I don't feel too bad leaving it.

Mostly I am nervous about my job interview tomorrow and rambling on insensibly.

Salmonella outbreak rocks my socks.

My mexican food experience is always so much better when I don’t have to ask for pico de gallo to be left off of my burrito. Thank you, pesky innards-dweller who thrives on red fruits and raw chicken.

Series of mildly related thoughts.

While plodding away at work this morning I succumbed to a fit of procrastination and took the opportunity to examine my water bottle from all sides. I always give my water bottle labels a thorough peeling, so it's not often that I get to gaze on the exciting line-drawings of mountains and streams name-plates. I was thus occupied when I realized something disturbing: water is a total show-off.

To preface, I love tap water. People are always gabbing on and on about how the water in Davis is distasteful (too liberal?) and whenever I’m not too busy guzzling water straight from the hose I take the time to disagree with this. It tastes perfectly acceptable to me.

My boyfriend and I are in the formative stages of a plan that requires drinking several dozen bottles full of sparkling lemonade, with the intent of filling them with marvelous tap water and stockpiling them in the fridge, thereby enabling us to constantly be lumbering about swigging from a chilled bottle held by the neck. [To be clear, that last sentence is both the longest in my blog thus far and a blatant digression.] Obviously, I am no anti-water freak with an ugly rock lawn.

And yet, the unbridled liquid ego of bottled water rankles me. There is no need for a Nutrition Facts panel when the answer for every value is 0 percent (based on a 2000-calorie daily diet). If you need to include it, you might as well mention things like 0 % water snake particulate matter, or 0 % crawdads disease, both of which concern me more than the fact that water lacks carbs. So you have no sodium, no calories and no sugar. Stop showing off. You also have no color. And I think that Sierra Mist, semi-transparent N-64 game systems and albinos can attest that having no color is bad news.

So, while reflecting on water I was reminded of the Willa Cather documentary that I watched last night (because I’m that kind of crazy party kid). In addition to revealing Willa Cather’s suspect sex life and history of the risky hair decisions, the documentary featured several melodramatic voice-over excerpts from her novels against a visual of casually wind-swept prairie.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I like about documentaries, the low-budget reenactment feeling. I’m quite fond of long dramatic shots featuring someone’s hand writing with a feather quill while a lilting voice reads the Gettysburg address or the personal correspondence of some hella religious corn farmer. I’m also keen on panning shots of cannons and flags with the noise of bullets whizzing and swords clanging. I even like a repetitive circling of a gallows accompanied by a noisy courtroom soundtrack, complete with audience shuffling and pounding gavel.

Anyway, in this Willa Cather documentary featured one such reenactment. A man and his packhorse were picture from the knee-down roaming listlessly in the desert in search of water. The narrator was reading from the novel Death Comes for the Archbishop and explained that the priest was following his pack animal, hoping that the mule might sense water. There's some nonsense about a cactus casting the shadow of a cross, and maybe some metaphor about needing God almost (but not quite) as much as you need water. Eventually the super-star mule leads the priest to water.

It occurs to me that a water company might do much better to detail this story on the side of the bottle instead of including a Nutrition Facts panel.

PS, I'm reading The Way of All Flesh by S. Butler, which is very slow going, but offers important insights about the valuing your offspring. Por exemplo:

“His money was never naughty; his money never made noise or litter, and it did not spill things on the tablecloth at mealtimes or leave the door open when it went out. His dividends did not quarrel amongst themselves, nor was he under any uneasiness lest his mortgages become extravagant upon reaching manhood and run him up debts which sooner or later he would have to pay.”

Something afoot in the Great Clips.

This morning I got the best Great Clips hair cut of my life. Well, the cut itself isn't that great, sort of a botched job of taking two inches off all the way around [Is there ever a time when you feel more ignorant about the metric system than when getting a haircut? Is an inch one hundred centimeters or ten?]. Really, I rarely bother to brush my hair, and I'm not too picky about symmetry and weird things like body, when considered in hair seems like a contradiction in terms. I have been rocking the same middle-part hairstyle in a variation of lengths for the past, let's say, 7 years and I'm widely immune to the screw ups of hair cutteries that start with Great or Super. But this morning was entirely different.

I entered the Great Clips with mixed emotions. On one hand I was feeling gleeful and self congratulatory, since I had managed while biking through the shopping center to get close enough to the Office Max to cause all 4 of their automatic doors to open as I cruised past. On the other hand (the hand that isn't so easily swayed by the good omens reliant on biking prowess and the fact that no one patronizes Office Max) my last trip to Great Clips yielded a particularly awkward experience.

During my last haircut, I was asked by my very chatty and petite [read: midget-y] hairstylist to stand up for the majority of my haircut, so that she could get an even cut. Though I was inclined to point out that my slouching posture was hardly more conducive to cutting majesty than the chair, which I was mildly certain had been designed for the cutting of hair, I tend to be very shy with protests [read: a sucker]. So I stood, and tried not to feel like Zordon from the Power Rangers movie after he gets attacked and it is revealed that when Zordon is not encased within his grandiose smoking pillar he looks like an old man with a wrinkly garbage bag on.

Alas, it gets weirder. After a few moments of tip-toeing and chit chatting around, the stylist then requested that I remove my lumpy sweater, to prevent its scruffy and uneven exterior from interfering with the precision of the cut. Again I should have protested, explaining that since I am likely to be always somewhat disheveled, that it would behoove her to just cut my hair in its normal habitat. But, because I am an utter pansy, I soon found myself feeling like quite the woman of scandal, as I presume that only a woman of scandal would choose to take her haircut standing up wearing an undershirt and a very uncomfortable expression. Hence my overall reluctance.

Today however, my hairstylist was marvelously indifferent to me. She yanked the comb through my hair without the slightest remorse and without asking whether it hurt. Instead of reminding me several times to "keep your head down, please," she simply nudged my head back into place whenever I got twitchy. And, best of all, she never asked me my major.

This is the sort of customer service that I desire. A vast, unfeeling indifference that expedites the process by removing the presumption that I want to leave feel like I've left behind both hair off my head and some emotional weight off of my shoulders. Having lived in a very small town, I always endured the chatting of haircut-ladies about my sisters and community sports and grades with a bleary eyed (I never get to wear my glasses during a haircut) good humor because I thought that chatting during a haircut was a mandatory event, like tipping or the no-charge-blow-drying that you have to brush down once you get in the car.

But today I was quite liberated from my provincial notions by stylist at station number 3, who never bothered to pretend that she cared about me, my finals, my ambiguous future, my political agenda or the shitty windy weather, in the least. And since I didn't care too much about my haircut, we got along marvelously.

[See how non-nostalgic and irrelevant I'm being? I've heard that I'm getting out of control with the weeping over old term papers and wearing my old dormitory T-shirt underneath all of my clothes. I didn't even mention that I'm getting this haircut because I fear people will try and take my picture at graduation].

Just when I discovered a good away message for being in class...

Today I attended my last lecture. I also picked up my graduation outfit, but as the sentimental realizations there were limited to the chagrin of knowing that I was paying 40 buckeros to rent a gown that has shoulder pads and smells like hot-dog wienies in BBQ sauce, I'll skip the weepy descriptors.

I spent my last lecture drawing a robot man with square eyes on the desk and after giving him (the robot) six legs and adorning each foot with a hiking boot I wrote very melodramatically "Last Lecture" above him. I am well aware that I should have been listening to the Professor discuss "The Deserted Village" by so-and-so Goldsmith, and as eighteenth century poetry goes it's really not bad (the best couplet: "His best companions, innocence and health/ And his best riches, ignorance of wealth"). However, I was fairly distracted and felt that the last lecture of my career was hardly the best time to begin acting studiously.

Okay, that last bit was sort of a lie. I am largely very studious. I even re-read "The Deserted Village" before going to class, despite the fact that I abhor haughty English poetry and I vaguely recalled having read it some time ago in some Masterpieces class. When is comes to being a geek, I summon all other geeks to proclaim me as their overlord and pay me a yearly tribute in Buffy comic books. Geek though I may be, I just feel that there is no real reason to behave in such a fashion during lecture.

Chronological Development of my Lecture Behavior Patterns:

1)Falling asleep in class, in bold defiance of twitching motion that implies the weird falling sensation that characterizes these sort of naps. Oddly this has not happened to me since Freshman year.

2)Forming back-row coalitions of sarcasm. It's difficult to find the right mix of disaffected youth and slacker in the back-row, because there's no fun in forming a coalition of suffering with someone who never shows up. In fact, the only thing that is worse is forming a coalition with someone who always shows up but never wants to shoot the shit. A good unit of measurement is to try to locate someone who always looks around incredulously whenever that kook in the front-row who looks like Uncle Joey from Full House opens his mouth to bring up 24 again. Disdain for active participators is a serious plus.

3)Doodling. I started with boxes, moved on to cubes and finally settled on drawing circles and shading them to look like Easter eggs. For awhile I was daily re-drawing a reindeer with wings on this particular desk in my totally bitchin' Manifest Destiny class, because on the desk in front of me the words "Beer Run" had smeared to look like "Deer Run." I had high hopes that someone in another class who sat in my seat might respond to the weirdness of the Deer Run phenomenon, but the only thing that ever happened was some jerkwad inked in a joint for the deer to smoke, adding some tacky subtext to my flying friend.

4) Struggling to conquer the crossword. This very well might be the ideal lecture leisure activity. Firstly, it is deceptive, because your look of confusion and your furious scribbling suggests that you are zealously taking notes. Secondly it embodies the perfect level of lecture socializing. It doesn't require chatting and the exchanging of phone numbers to set up study groups, but there is an unspoken solidarity between crossworders. You know that if you are working on the crossword beside a fellow crossworder that there will be some healthy peaking going on, and perhaps even some collaboration. Nothing brings people together more solidly than the realization that "A Flower from Holland" is a tulip.

You can't trust people in Hawaiian shirts.

Excuse me if I seem a little too provincial, but it occurs to me that there are few things as marvelous as a well-proportioned peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I just had one such jellied marvel, sitting in my car on my lunch break and reading from the very thrifty book of Willa Cather stories purchased for me by my quite obliging boy friend.

I am not usually quite that anti-social in my lunching habits [a combination of chattiness and a fear of the weird spider webs that always develop inside my slick ride] but I had just emerged from a morning of finding misplaced files and was feeling mildly distrustful toward my fellow-clerking-man. It’s not that I’m an automaton of productivity and phone-voice pleasantries. No, I’m surly as hell, and I spend just as much time gossiping with my co-workers about how weird those spam messages in Chinese characters are as anyone.

However, lately at work I have been assigned to a very unfortunate task that involves moving many cheerfully colored folders and files into the dark bowels of the building. Trapped in this chamber of exposed wiring, the only company I have is the mistakes of my co-workers, a pink boom box and a piece of hulking machinery that I will refer to as a furnace, as I do all electronics bigger than a microwave and uglier than a Gameboy.

On further consideration, it might actually be a furnace. All I know is that it is hot as the dickens down there and even my heartiest green Dual-Tip HI-LITER dries up in about 3.5 seconds. But I digress.

So after a morning of cardboard cuts and the numbing knowledge that there are people in the world who will use a Post-it will a happy face on it to mark their filing turf, I retreated to my grubby drivers seat with my grub. Shortly afterwards I retreated further still to the passenger seat, because it was less sunny than the drivers side.

A short pause and I will get back to peanut butter and jelly. I just realized (while considering whether or not it was appropriate to amend the word “note” to the end of “Post-it”) that I have mentioned the commercially volatile names of the Hi-liter and Post-it in this post already. Soon I will be whoring myself out to Staples and receiving my blood money in color cartridge refills.

As might not surprise you, given the violently one tracky way my brain has been working as of late, while relishing my peanut butter and jelly the evil specter of graduation-and-related-concepts reared its hideous head. It’s not entirely my fault; it’s only that I was planning on returning to my computer and ordering my cap and gown, while simultaneously thinking about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I was likely to have for dinner.

Suddenly it occurred to me that the cutely dingy habits of a college student (disdaining bleach, stealing napkins from Chipotle and printer paper from work, eating only carbs, getting back-pack shaped sweat markings while biking) will slowly regenerate into just dingy habits. Without the redeeming aura of half-baked education, it seems that college students are just plain uncivilized.

As a good friend of mine shouted into the phone on Monday, “When we graduate, we will stop being poor college students, we are becoming the regular poor!”

The thought was almost enough to disturb my utopian lunching experience. Thankfully I was reading nice story where the model small town people were predominantly near-sighted and sought to torment the wild-eyed romantic boy. Thus my joy of easily grasped symbolism overcame my fear of PB/J based poverty and the consequences of actually buying tissue, and my panic subsided to await another meal.