Four-thirty a.m.
Some New Hampshire interstate
GPS goes dead
Cell phone GPS
Your new destination is
My Garbage Can Street
Medford Square I wish
You had stores that I could use
Unlike ‘Pure Hockey’
Bus driver leans in
“Do you have a bus schedule?”
Yes he asked me that
Recycling Day
A man scavenges our cans
In his new mazda
My entire department had an 8 hour training session on Wednesday. I brought my little mini-legal pad, prepared to take notes. I mostly doodled. At the end of the day I was so excited to escape training, that I left my legal pad on my chair.Today I found it in my inbox, with a note from the VP of Production that said, “Molly? Could this be yours?”Written on the pad– in various types of script, supplemented by a picture of a weird little pig with a rainbow behind its head, a kilroy-ish face, and various other doodly lines:
“ChangeChange
Change used to be bad
Line……………Oklahoma
Katherine Goldenrod
Meep Fried
weeeet Powderhouse Powder House
Live Cross Cross training ”
Out of all the windows into my mind, this is probably the most innocuous and least bizarre one I could have left on my chair for a VP to find. Whew. Just, whew.
I am trying to
Eat less sugar day-to-day
But my will is weak
Peanut M&Ms
Lurking in my boss’s desk
Why did she tell me?
I know they are there
And I hear their siren song
We melt in your mouth
My brain is not dumb
Knows damn well that tea is not
Peanut M&Ms
I moved out of my apartment of three years last month, and the experience made me never want to move again. Still, though I like my new place, I’m not sure I want to stay here for the rest of my life. My ideal solution is to have a number of furnished houses across the country that I can move to and from as my mood dictates, packing only my toothbrush. If anyone would like to donate to this worthy cause, I promise you can come visit me in one of my many houses someday.
I already own enough kitchen implements to fully outfit several kitchens. This is a problem, since I moved into an established household of three people who already have enough spatulas, coffeemakers and cake pans, and have no interest in mine, even if I think they are nice. I tried to integrate a few of my things into my new kitchen in the beginning—can you ever have too many spatulas? It turns out you can. I recently calculated that all four people in this house could hold a spatula in each hand at the same time. I can’t imagine a situation in which we will need to be able to do this, unless we are under attack by a mob of angry pancakes.
In the days leading up to my move, I began to grow alarmed at the number of possessions I actually owned. Where did all these things come from? I wondered, digging piles of long forgotten junk out from under my bed. I lead a simple life! How did I end up with nine different kinds of lip balm (all indispensable)? Do I really own four down vests?
In desperation I tried that useless exercise where one sorts into two piles all of the things one didn’t even remember owning until Moving Day rolled around: You are supposed to make a Save pile, and a Toss pile. At the end of this exercise I had a Save pile, a Maybe pile (which is really a sneaky Save pile for things you don’t want to admit you’re going to keep) and a Toss pile made up of newspaper clippings from articles I wrote in high school. I ended up keeping those, for their sentimental value. Ah, sentimental value. The lifeblood of Moving and Storage companies.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (see above paragraphs), in my head, I pictured the move taking around forty minutes. In my head I think I may also have pictured the move involving a young Angela Lansbury and I climbing on my bed, turning the bed knob, and disappearing in a flash of primitive special effects, only to reappear in my new bedroom, under the sea. Then we would use cunning and magic to steal my security deposit back from my landlord. None of this went according to plan. As a matter of fact, I’m still waiting for that deposit. Thanks for nothing, Angela.
Moving Day came. It became Moving Weekend. And finally, Never-Ending Moving Weekend From Hell. My bedroom was like a clown car. Garbage bags filled with winter coats, piles of blankets, and boxes of books seemed to regenerate and multiply behind my sweaty, aching back. I would lug one downstairs and load it into the van, only to find another two in its place when I returned.
Of course, as tends to happen, the moment I finished putting everything in its place in my new and fabulous bedroom, my nightmarish memories of Moving Weekend began receding into darkness. This convenient, human ability to fade out troublesome recollections is probably the reason why we gradually begin to wonder if we shouldn’t think about finding a place closer to work; maybe one with a little more closet space. Traumatic memories of hefting a queen size mattress alone up three flights of rickety stairs and packing and unpacking hundreds of books gradually diminish, and we begin to consider what our next move will be. I am not sure whether this trick of memory is a blessing or a curse. All I know is, next time I’m shooting for my own bathroom.
I can remember exactly when it was that I stopped believing everything I heard on television.
I was eleven, and sleeping over at a friend’s apartment. She was a new friend. It may have been the first time I saw her place. Everything about it dazzled me. She had a dog! I wasn’t allowed to have a dog. She had a bunk bed—even though she was an only child! My bunk bed came with a little sister in the top bunk who always took the good pillow. There was a balcony on the far end of my friend’s living room with sliding glass doors, which offered a view of the entire city! Our windows at home faced a brick wall and still had childproof gates in them when I went away to college. My friend’s apartment was a world I could barely comprehend. And then, that night before bed, I took a shower in her bathroom.
The walls of that shower were lined with expensive fruity shampoos and gels and soaps and scrubs. Mud-masks and pore-cleansers and pumices filled the medicine cabinet. It was an adolescent girl’s wet dream. Everywhere I turned I was confronted with beauty products I had seen in commercials and coveted but could never afford. I uncapped bottles at random and inhaled, then stood panting on the bath mat. I didn’t know where to begin. I wanted to use everything! I wanted to come out of that shower with blindingly shiny hair whose bounce had a deadly force. I would scrub the calluses from my heels and leave them smelling like coconuts dusted with talcum powder and wrapped in rose petals. My skin would be clear and I would glow like a radioactive fairy princess.
I turned on the water. I reached for the first bottle and opened it. The air crackled with excitement and smelled like passionfruit.
And then I stopped, and thought about my friend.
She used these products all the time! She probably always had! Very likely her scalp had never felt the cloying embrace of a chemically scented, molasses-textured Family Dollar Brand shampoo. But when it came down to it, her hair looked more or less…like mine.
This realization hit me like a waterlogged sponge. It didn’t really matter what these shampoos and cleansers were supposed to do. They weren’t really going to make your hair shinier, or your skin glowier. My friend was a pretty girl with decent hair and skin, but I’d never noticed it particularly before, and that was the whole point of these products as far as I was concerned: making people jealous. ‘Who is that beautiful girl with the gleaming, bouncing hair?’ Women want to be her; men want to take her to the top of the Eiffel Tower in a private jet. The story of television ad after ad involves the heads of strangers turning in admiration and envy. What was the point of spending $14 for a bottle of conditioner that wasn’t going to cause your hair’s shine to sear the retinas of innocent bystanders on a sunny day?
I chose a shampoo and began to wash the glamorous, seductive world of false advertising out of my hair. It slipped down the drain, along with soft, ginger-lime scented suds.
I Heard Tell 