I am beginning to lose patience with myself for reading certain magazines. I really think that the time I spend reading them would be better spent doing nearly anything else, including giving wedgies to orphans. I’m not particularly opposed to newsmagazines, or to those cerebral, highbrow periodicals that come out ‘quarterly’ and are filled with pithy little fiction pieces in which neither character in a love story has a name; the kinds with comics that you kind of want to laugh out loud at, and kind of want to punch in the face. No, I’m referring to the magazines, aimed especially at women in their teens to early thirties, that have the word ‘Butt’ somewhere on the cover more often than not. Sometimes it is followed by an exclamation point. Magazines on which the number of days or weeks to a slimmer me constantly varies but is always indicated. I think it’s time I gave these magazines up, or at least tried to figure out why I read them voraciously whenever they’re around, even though all they do is make me feel as though I don’t measure up in a number of petty little ways.
I mean, really. If my friends talked down to me the way Mademoiselle does, I would claw their faces with my ragged, un-manicured nails. And yet I am content to curl up with reading material that has the emotional depth of a salad, and read articles that assume a chummy, familiar tone with me, then tell me to tone my flabby arms. The ways in which the messages of different articles in a single magazine contradict each other, boggle my mind. ‘Learn to Love Your Body!’ is followed by ‘Hide Your Ugly, Ugly Flaws!’ There’s always the piece telling you how to ‘Be Yourself!’ which is inevitably followed by something to the tune of ‘Here’s How to Be Someone Who Men Will Find Attractive!’
Ever since I began reading Seventeen magazine at the tender age of twelve (which is the age of most avid Seventeen readers who are not in prison), I have gathered the pearls of wisdom which drop, along with subscription cards, from the glossy, all-knowing pages of magazines. I will scan advice columns and apply each situation to my own life, no matter its utter irrelevance: (“Her mom doesn’t approve of her fiancée?…I have a mom.”) My favorite example of the logic of these magazines is when a handful of random men are interviewed about an issue and their responses appear next to little pictures of them that are captioned along the lines of: Bob, age 17, CT. These opinions are helpful only if I happen to run into Bob in CT, in which case I’ll know that he thinks women who have sex on the first date are “weird”. Since I’ll probably never meet Bob, am I supposed to be taking his opinion as representative of the opinions of 17 year olds, or residents of Connecticut, or Bobs…or even men in general? The possibilities are endless, and I hate them all.
Is it possible that I am making these magazines out to be worse than they are? After all, no one is forcing me to read them, and they may serve a purpose in my life that I am simply unaware of. Perhaps as a young girl, I had too much self-esteem, and needed someone to inform me that I had unsightly circles under my eyes, and how to treat them. Maybe I simply enjoy the escapism of reading articles that assume that my problems go no further than hiding my trouble spots and figuring out what he secretly wants me to do in bed. All the same, I think I could do without learning which $300 fashion must-haves are hot this season, and which foods have hidden calories (Curse you, food, and your treacherous caloric deceit! Feh.) From now on, I’m not going to read anything that won’t help me achieve inner serenity, or at least give me answers to shout out during Jeopardy. It’s quality literature for me, or nothing.
1) Forgetting that I’ve already added 32 oz of water to the pot, and adding another 32 oz of water to half as much grounds, resulting in weak dirt-sauce.
2) Setting up the (non-automatic) coffeemaker the night before but then noticing that the coffeepot is a little dirty. Washing said coffee pot and leaving on the rack to drain overnight, assuming that I will remember to place it back beneath the coffeemaker when I manually start the coffeemaker the next morning. Then forgetting to place it back under the coffeemaker when I turn it on, resulting in four feet of delicious coffee traveling down the countertop while I am getting ready for work.
3) Setting the timer on the (automatic) coffeemaker, then instantly forgetting what time it said, and pressing the button on it again to read the time, thus automatically UN-setting the timer on the automatic coffeemaker, resulting in waking up the next morning to a darkened, sleeping coffeemaker what never turned on.
4) Adding grounds to the (automatic) coffeemaker, then filling the coffeepot with 8 cups of water, and placing it on the coffeemaker, still full of water. The coffeemaker went on automatically in the morning, poured several burny-hot dribbles of water on the grounds below, and heated up the 8 cups of water, resulting in me staring at it for twenty seconds in the morning and trying to figure out whether I actually have a brain.
Freshman year of college, I remember visiting a friend’s dorm for the first time and noticing that she had a small potted tree and several other plants in her room. I was impressed. As a young adult living on my own for the first time, I was barely getting the hang of keeping myself alive. My idea of cooking was using a plate; I cackled gleefully every time I left the house in winter without a hat. I was not a good candidate for the custody of anything with even basic needs.
A year after graduation, though, once I had settled into a house where I planned to stay for awhile, with furniture that hadn’t all been dragged in from the curb (some of it I carried), I began to pay a little more attention to the art of interior decorating. Plants lend elegance to a room, I decided. It is cheerful to surround oneself with living things that did not spring forth from overlooked supper dishes.
I yearned for my home to give an impression of maturity and sophistication, deserved or not. I wanted people to visit my room for the first time and think to themselves, “Now here we have a girl with a sense of style. I’ll bet she reads good books”, rather than the more probable, “Nice ‘Snoopy’ sheets. How long has that coffee cup been there?”
So gradually, I began to accumulate plants. It became something of a habit. An impulse purchase at the supermarket here, a baby spider plant acquired from a friend there. They grew larger, I repotted them; I bought more plants to fill the empty pots. Eventually, in a suspiciously healthy way, the urge leveled off. Something in me felt that I finally had a suitable number of leafy green companions.
Now, however, there are other problems to contend with. I have enough plants that some of them have come down with various planty afflictions. These illnesses are mysterious and frightening to me. For one example, there’s the hearty backyard tomato plant that I potted and brought inside to protect it from encroaching cold weather. It began looking droopy and wrinkly-leafed not long after it moved to my indoor back porch. “I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” I told a visiting guest. “It looks like Bea Arthur. Is that a known plant disease? Could my tomato plant have Bea Arthur?”
“Your plant has spider mites, you dummy,” she said. “Just look at it.” I looked closely. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of tiny red mites swarmed all over its poor little leaves, encasing them in debilitating strands of web.
“Gross,” I said compassionately. I turned to the Internet for help. Several websites recommended various chemical sprays that sounded toxic and difficult to pronounce. Others suggested wiping the mites off with a clean cloth. I shuddered. This plant-owning thing had suddenly become a little too intense, too real. I wanted to be a passive spectator in the lives of my vegetation, but I had been forced into the ring. Wincing, I did as the Internet advised, but it was to no avail. Tomato succumbed not long after.
Other leafy misfortunes have since followed. A sweet-potato left to its own devices on a table by the window in my apartment began sprouting leaves with great determination after several months. Upon discovery, I applauded its indomitable starchy spirit, and potted it immediately. A few months of vigorous growth later, I noticed that the undersides of several of its shiny green leaves were coated in what looked like small black dots. Several Internet searches for the source of the problem brought me to an unsatisfying conclusion: my sweet-potato plant had contracted what is scientifically known as “Black Dot”.
“Seriously?” I shrieked. Currently there appears to be no cure for Black Dot. However, against all odds, sweet-potato appears to be holding its ground, so to speak. I am pulling for it.
Through it all, I will readily agree that although plant-ownership has had its ups and downs, and has introduced me to some distressing ailments of the plant-kingdom, the joy and beauty that my silent and immobile friends have provided me have made them very worthwhile companions. Also, the forest of undergrowth in my place is excellent at hiding my bad decorating, dust, and clutter, which is really quite handy.
Speaking of past jobs, I made this picture back when my job was writing descriptions of cables for sale on a website. By which I mean, my job was “tweaking cable images in photoshop and making them look like faces that said weird things, in order to keep myself from jumping down an elevator shaft”.
At least I have had one job in which I was living up to my full potential.
I rediscovered this from my days as a Customer Service Rep for an internet company.
“One quote
Two quotes
Three quotes
Four quotes
I do not like making more quotes.
Can you fax it to my mom?
Do you people ship to Guam?
Would you, could you, ship it faster?
Would you, could you, add the casters?
I do not like to ship three day.
I cannot do it anyway.
One box
Two box
Sliced box
Diced box
You refused this damaged-twice box?
Did your brand new table splinter?
Did you order this last winter?
Did you tell us ‘pack it well’?
It’s got a snowball’s chance in Hell.”
I remember when I first learned that writing could be a fancy way of lying. I was in the third grade, and my classmates and I were given the assignment to “write and illustrate your favorite dream”. Lest the theoretical creativity of this assignment garner it any admiration, I should add that these written and illustrated dreams were assigned for the purpose of being raffled off en masse at a parent auction.
My elementary school had hit upon the brilliant discovery that they could force parents to bid for their own children’s artwork. No matter that Junior could produce an almost identical finger-painting at home at the kitchen table. The one he had produced in the fifteen minutes between Snack and Music periods was on the auction block, and for a school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, this meant that the bids flew fast and furious. The catch was that the work was offered only as part of an entire class’s ‘collection’. This meant that if you wanted to bring home your child’s sloppy, haphazard modeling-clay elephant, not only did you have to bid for it as though you sat at the kiddie table at Sotheby’s, but you had to bring home twenty-five other modeling-clay circus animals produced with varying degrees of enthusiasm and talent, by classmates of varying degrees of familiarity and obscurity to you and your child. Who wants to be stuck with twenty-six modeling-clay circus animals, twenty-five of which are made by children in whom you are not responsible for recognizing budding genius?
In any event, my written and illustrated dream was due. I was eight. I didn’t have that many dreams that made sense. The ones I managed to remember were hazy, meaningless fragments involving eating breakfast, sticker collecting and the Babysitter’s Club. They were no help. I needed a dream, and fast. I could drag my feet no longer. Quickly I came up with a concept, which may or may not have been quite blatantly based on a book I liked at the time, “Black Beauty”.
“At night, when I go to Sleep, I dream that I ride a black Horse through the Woods,” I wrote painstakingly in pencil. “My Horse and I gallop together all night through the forest, and I am not afraid.” That was only two lines. I needed more. What else could I say about my fake dream to make it believable? “I love my black Horse,” I went on. “After I ride my Horse, she goes in her stable.” This was some fairly sophisticated horse knowledge here, and I was proud. After all, what did I know about horses? I was born and raised in New York City. The closest I had come to horseback riding was the carousel in Central Park.
I illustrated my falsehood. I spent a good part of my time drawing horses anyway, as an eight year old girl, so the illustrating part was criminally easy. At the end of the period, I wrote one last finishing touch. “Each morning when I wake up, I can’t wait to go back to sleep and dream of my black Horse again.” Although to the observer it read like an earnest and wistful phrase, for me, it was one last jab of insincerity at adults who would never know that I had completely put one over on them.
The truth, although I didn’t realize it at the time, was that it didn’t matter what I said. What adult was going to question the legitimacy of my dream—particularly given its innocuous subject matter? Besides, my teachers were busy coaxing twenty-five other illustrated dreams out of my classmates to pack up for that evening’s auction. My glib lie went unquestioned. And the lesson, that if you’re gutsy, you can create your own reality in words and make it believable to others, was a good one to learn.
It is five degrees
How is this a world in which
I’m not home in bed?
Young private school girl
Wind-chill makes it five below
Wear some freaking pants
Early morning
pa rum pum pum pum
I’m back at work again
pa rum pum pum pum
I’d rather be in bed
pa rum pum pum pum
Nobody else is here
pa rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum,
rum pum pum pum
So, I’m bitter
pa rum pum pum pum
At my desk.
Today at a restaurant in Kennebunk, Maine, a waiter told my father he looks like Matt Damon in a dirty glass.
Charlie the dog is getting a new dog bed for Christmas. It arrived yesterday. My favorite thing about this is that I have told him several times that he is getting a new bed for Christmas, and he still doesn’t know.
I Heard Tell 