Molly: hi mama!
SHKESPEARE: It’s Dad, but I haven’t learned how to do IM yet!
Molly: Hi Dad! You’re doing fine!
SHKESPEARE: I’m taking an Internet class at the “Y” but we have only had one calss. I gotta go. Bye, Bye!
Dad
Lately I have been thinking about money a good deal. Isn’t it funny how you always end up thinking about the things you don’t have? Nope. Especially when those things are either money or sex. It is funny when those things are rickets, though. Rickets.
I’ve always envied those famous and wealthy people who say, in television interviews, that they are the luckiest people alive because they get to make money doing the things they love. I suppose anyone could pull that off in theory, by learning to love whatever it is they’re stuck doing. However, I’ve noticed that it’s mostly writers and actors and rock stars who say that kind of thing. Have you ever heard a dentist tell an interviewer, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.”? Then again, how many dentists do you see interviewed on television? Not too many. Maybe they have bad publicists.
In the beginning of my junior year of college, after working long hours at two separate summer jobs which left me exhausted at the end of the day, it began to occur to me that in a lot of ways, Money and Fun appeared to be mutually exclusive. By this I mean I couldn’t have the one if I was working to get the other. But, if I didn’t work to get the other, then the one often meant going to a movie at the $3 theatre and eating sugar packets.
After careful deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that right now there are four ways for me to get more money.
1) Work hard at an honest job and build a career.
2) Inherit.
3) Marry rich.
4) Search the pockets of all my pants.
The last idea is definitely the most appealing at the moment. In fact, I think I’ll go and do that right now. It isn’t that I don’t want to work; I would just prefer to already be successful. I really think I’d have a talent for coasting. Give me a critically acclaimed bestseller under my belt and I’ll spend my days in Italy eating omelets and struggling with writer’s block while the tabloids whisper about how I might never write the Great American Novel again. It’s not the success and fame I fear, it’s the effort it takes to get them.
I do have a job right now, but it’s definitely not in the field I studied in college. In fact, my college degree (in Literature, with a concentration in Creative Writing) feels a little less impressive with each relative and stranger alike who asks, “But what are you going to do with it?” I got the damn degree, shouldn’t that be enough? Nobody asks you that question when you have a baby, and that takes less than a year. Fine, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with it. But first I’m going to go rummage through my pants.
-roll of duct tape
-spare pair of socks
-unopened thing of Mrs. T’s Margarita Salt
What’s inexplicably (or explicably, if you just let me explic, please, I can explic!) in your desk drawer?
I did four loads of laundry last Sunday. I even did one load that was only bathroom mats. This meant washing the mats from my roommates’ bathrooms along with my own so that I would have a full load. I was concerned that this was creepy, but was also secretly proud of my thoughtfulness, and part of me hoped they would notice. They didn’t. Or at least, no one approached me to say, “My bathroom mat was so fuzzy and clean when I stepped out of the shower today! Did you wash it? I’m slightly unnerved, but grateful.” I guess I’m glad no one noticed, but on the other hand, it was a lot of effort for little reward. I didn’t want to dry the mats in the dryer for fear of melting their rubber backs, so I spread them out on the grass in the back yard to dry in the sun. This way I figured they would also be fresher, and have a ‘sun-dried’ appeal. I came outside to check them often, flipping them over when I thought one side was getting dryer. I tended to them like a shepherd, watching over a flock of brightly colored bathroom mats that weren’t going anywhere.
That very same day I gave the dog a bath, swept the house (at least the parts where the dog wanders, which necessitates sweeping), and tended to the backyard garden. That evening, I found a recipe online that looked good, picked up a few groceries, and cooked dinner.
Until relatively recently, none of those activities would have occurred to me naturally—except perhaps the laundry part, and then only if my pile of dirty clothes had reached Orange Alert status, also known as Code “Bedroom Door Won’t Open”. I am not sure what has changed. I was more or less content to live in squalor while I was in school and then during my first year or three out of college. In my first post-college apartment, the linoleum floor in the living room generally had the gritty consistency of cat litter, and I slept on a camping mattress for eight months. The closest I ever came to cooking was heating up leftover takeout, and adding water to cans of frozen juice concentrate. With that standard of living, perhaps I had nowhere to go but up?
Granted, at that point mine was not an apartment that invited even base-level maintenance. It more invited murder. We were living in scenic, beautiful Hawai’i, but our seedy Honolulu apartment lacked an ocean view. It did offer a view of an alley strewn with trash, and the occasional wandering chicken. More than once we came home to find the police parked haphazardly in our parking lot, lights flashing. Years later I would watch on TV as Dog the Bounty Hunter busted junkie after junkie in apartments that looked exactly like the one I had lived in. No one was ever impressed when I pointed that out, though, so I stopped.
My roommate and I knew that anything we put up on those unevenly painted cinderblock walls was mainly in an effort to cover them. This set the bar for our decorating standards embarrassingly low. We endured months of visitors noticing our arbitrary “23rd Annual Honolulu Beer Fest” poster in the living room and asking, ‘Hey, how was the Beer Fest?’ We couldn’t tell them. Had they seen our apartment? We were clearly on a budget. Fancy beer, like legitimate wall-art, was well out of our price-range. We preferred to sit on our concrete balcony and drink coconut slurpees laced with cheap rum and pretend we were pirates. I hope my mother isn’t reading this.
But since she probably is, let me point out once again that I have clearly matured. My wall decorations now reflect my taste in art and entertainment, rather than my ability to peel flyers off of walls in public places. I drink snobbish imported beer occasionally. I walk around my house in bare feet without risking tetanus. Sometimes though, I am not sure how to feel about this domestic maturity. I almost don’t want to admit to myself how much I like sweeping the beautiful old wooden floors of my current house. Washing the dog gave me a feeling of great satisfaction, until he did that thing where he walks around the bed, rubbing himself against it on every side and leaving enormous amounts of wet dog hair on the comforter. Washing the comforter gave me decidedly less satisfaction. Damn dog.
Perhaps it is my improved living arrangements that have caused this change, making me take notice of my surroundings and look after them with a new respect. Perhaps it is the acquisition of a job that doesn’t pay me in large wads of singles at the end of the night, meaning that I am able to spend money on where I live. Possibly I just got tired of sticky floors and leering piles of laundry, cheap liquor and streetcorner furniture. I suppose I can get used to this new me. Whatever caused this change, though, I hope it lasts, because although my roommates don’t appreciate clean bath mats, they probably really won’t appreciate rum slurpees.
My boyfriend inherited a fish when one of his roommates moved out. He is in a huge tank in the bedroom which needs to be filled with water or the filter makes a splashing noise all night long which fills my nightmares. He is an impressively large white fish (about the size of a pot roast) with teeth, and he can see you from outside his tank and follows you as you walk along it, particularly when you have just gotten out of the shower and are groping for a towel and feel at your most vulnerable. In the mornings he likes to sound a gentle, loving wake-up call by banging against the filter in his tank which makes a noise like a gunshot. Sometimes he will do this a dozen times in the course of an hour if you have decided to sleep in because it’s a weekend. He doesn’t eat that much and he’s great otherwise. If we had more that just the bedroom of this shared house to put him in, i.e. if he could go in the livingroom or the basement or pretty much anywhere else, he would make an excellent and fascinating pet. But as it stands, he gots to go. Let’s make a deal.
Location: Medford
Molly: godzilla vs. grandma godzilla!
Dave: grandma godzilla vs. the crushing weight of impending mortality!
Molly: godzilla vs. his inner critic!
Dave: godzilla vs. monsters! and his own shame!
Molly: godzilla is never going to be good enough!
Dave: godzilla should just give up and go back to bed!
Molly: Why isn’t godzilla doing something more with his life?!
Dave: when will godzilla find love?
Later that day…
Molly: It’s the new black!
Molly: It’s the new Thursday!
Molly: It’s the new bowling!
Molly: It’s like wearing white shoes after labor day, and then punching pigs in the face and then eating their bacon!
Molly: I should perhaps limit my caffeine intake after 3pm.
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 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 may not be in school any more, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get a Fall Break this year. It’s not a very ostentatious break, the one in Fall. It’s a little darker, a little shorter; you generally don’t get to go that far away during it. Girls don’t squeal its name as they rip off their tank tops and do the Froog. It’s not necessarily an excuse to drink, unless it’s a brandy-in-your-tea, hunkered down in your wool sweater, muttering under your breath as you watch dried leaves swirl in the icy wind that rattles your closed window kind of drinking. Not that there’s anything wrong with that kind of drinking, but wouldn’t you rather have sandy legs and a sunburn and down a $9 cocktail with the word ‘Tiki’ in its name as you giddily anticipate the end of the school year? Of course you would, and Fall Break knows this. Fall Break is Spring Break’s wizened, gimlet-eyed grandfather. You may have a week off, it warns, but Winter ain’t going anywhere. It’ll be right here, waiting for you when you get back. And you’d better have found a decent coat by then.
This Fall Break was different. I spent the second week of October in Miami, staying in the fanciest hotel I’ve ever not just snuck in to use the bathroom of; lounging by the pool and sipping complimentary icewater. The trip was a graduation gift to my friend from her grandmother, and I was the lucky friend in tow. It was a bizarre mix of extreme luxury and shameless cheap-skatery. The two of us shared an enormous, king-sized bed in a suite with a marble bathroom and a closet with real, removable coat hangers. Every morning we sat cross-legged on the thick carpet and spread peanut butter and jelly on Saltines with a swizzle stick. I had brought my hotpot, and we made Ramen and ate it out of the ice bucket, passing the tongs back and forth. We tiptoed around the mini-bar, fearing we would be charged for leaving fingerprints on the $3 Kitkats. It was like Pretty Woman; if Julia Roberts had pushed Richard Gere off the balcony, then snuck her best friend into the room for a week. Having never spent any time in a hotel that didn’t have vending machines in the hallways and hideous carpeting, I often felt like a fish out of water, or perhaps like a fish in a ratty t-shirt and flip flops suddenly swimming in temperature-controlled Evian and finding its bed made up a different way every time it comes back to the room. Everywhere I went, people with nametags smiled warmly and asked me if I needed fresh towels.
It was great fun, if a little strange. Sometimes it’s nice to see how the other half-percentile lives. We watched, round-eyed, as a fat, balding man with a shaved head and a mustache cavorted by the pool with a young, tanned brunette in a bikini. He had a white towel around his waist. She was wearing shades and a baseball hat, and her long, red, manicured nails flashed in the sun. We got priceless looks from the front desk by asking where to get good takeout Burritos and whether there was a Marshalls nearby. We strolled through South Beach on Friday night, sneering at the long lines of wannabes waiting to get into nightclubs whose bouncers, had we tried to get in ourselves, probably wouldn’t have bothered to disguise their laughter with fake coughing fits. At another nightclub in Coconut Grove, a one-armed lawyer told me I was born to dance in Miami. And last but not least, a pair of uniformed Miami police officers sitting at the table across from us in a restaurant, after learning where we were from and that we were on vacation, casually inquired as to where we were staying. When we told them the hotel, they asked for the room number. “They probably just thought you were hookers,” my mother said flatly. What a vacation. The memories will last a lifetime, and the stolen mini bottles of shampoo will last at least a few weeks.
I Heard Tell 