(I reworked this one some since I last posted it a few days ago.)
As a child who spent most of the 80s sitting six inches away from the TV, my world was populated with many exotic and fascinating creatures, thanks to cereal and snack-food commercials. The myths and legends of Toucan Sam and the Quik Bunny were as real to me as any bedtime story.
Mind you, I had nothing against books—I enjoyed being read to—it was just that the beings I saw on television encouraged me to eat marshmallows for breakfast, something none of the characters in The Wind in the Willows ever did. And can you name a single fairy-tale inspired breakfast cereal? Show me Little Red Riding Hood Flakes, and I’ll show you a cereal that no child ever threw a tantrum in a supermarket aisle to make her parents buy. I’ll bet it wouldn’t have chocolate-covered Grandmother’s houses, let alone marshmallow wolves.
Snack-food mascots usually fell into one of two categories: they were anthropomorphic animals with crippling snack obsessions (Trix Rabbit, you poor bastard), or vaguely creepy people with questionable back-stories and crippling snack obsessions. (There was something off about dead-eyed Lucky the Leprechan. I can’t imagine any of the other cartoon mascots ever wanting to hang out with him outside of work). They sometimes had some sort of magical power—although often it was just the power of being chronically able or unable to obtain the object of their snack obsessions. Not the most enviable or inspiring power.
Having grown up with these rather petty food-related archetypes, I was pleasantly surprised when I visited Japan for three weeks in high school. There I was introduced to Anapanman, Japan ‘s most popular superhero. He has a giant round head, a big red nose, and small, kind eyes. “His name means ‘Bread Man’.” My host student, Mariko, explained. “His head is made of bread filled with bean-paste. He goes around rescuing hungry people by letting them eat his head. Then a new one is baked for him by his creator.” This was certainly a new spin on things.
The only remotely edible characters that come to mind from my childhood are the California Raisins. Even so, I can’t imagine them, as hip as they were, ever taking off their shades and letting themselves be gnawed on, even by the hungry. You didn’t mess with the California Raisins. Their success as spokes-food was also dubious; they didn’t make you want to eat raisins as much as they made you want to be a Motown singing raisin with tiny arms and legs and a slamming hat. Which is not beneficial to the raisin industry, although it is beneficial to my imagination.
It seemed that Anpanman’s premise was not to promote bean-paste filled bread, but to feed and empower the hungry. It was strange and exhilarating for me to see a food-related entity with its own liberal, humanitarian agenda. Rather than endorsing greed and selfishness, as the characters of my youth did; encouraging children to obsess over food and even withhold it from their others(those Trix commercials clearly scarred me), Anpanman gives up part of himself for the good and nourishment of those in need. Deep stuff for a cartoon superhero whose posse is made up of creatures with giant food for heads. (I particularly like his companion Tendonman, whose head is a bowl of rice with shrimp Tempura sticking out of it). And Anpanman’s lack of affiliation with any sort of brand name or sponsorship is a vital part of his appeal. A regenerating loaf-man who feeds the hungry? That really is magically delicious.
“You should spend a winter here on Cape Cod, sometime,” my coworker Matt tells me with a strange grin. “It’s fun, in a crazy way. It gets so quiet. There’s snow everywhere. You get to the point where all you want to do at night is dress up and have dinner parties at your friends’ houses and drink yourself into oblivion.” This doesn’t sound unappealing. It’s probably something I could get into for awhile. But I’m not sure I trust myself. I was not wired to appreciate alone time; I’m just not used to it. By the time I was four and my parents could begin to think about leaving me to my own devices once in awhile, I was already being shadowed by a little sister who followed me everywhere for the next 13 years of my life. Until graduating from college, I’d never had my own room for any length of time, with a one year exception.
I want very much to be the kind of person who doesn’t mind being alone. Doesn’t even notice it sometimes. The kind of person who sinks back in a leather chair, wiggles their toes in a pair of heavy wool socks and spends the entire evening absorbed in a yellowed book with miniscule type. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s something I could ever manage. Within 15 minutes I’d be up making nachos and flipping around to see what was on VH1.
Growing up in a bustling city, I took for granted from a young age the idea that someone, somewhere nearby, is always awake. Frequently, they are setting off car alarms, kicking over trash cans and yelling down the street in the middle of the night, but at least they are living proof that the world is open 24 hours. Everything doesn’t stop just because most of the shops are closed, the traffic has died down, and the city feels hushed. The validity of this idea was not disputed during my four years at Bard, when whomever was awake always seemed to be out in the hall with a kickball at two am, or in the room above mine, playing Abba at six-thirty in the morning.
Now that the summer tourist season has come and gone on Cape Cod, however, and most of the houses closest to mine are shut down for the Fall, there are many times, late at night, when the windows up and down my road are dark and it feels like I am the only one awake in the world. When you live in a city, no matter what time it is, there is always a 24-hour convenience store clerk a short walk away who will have no choice but to interact with you. Up here, at night, I frequently drive for long periods of time on stretches of dark, lonely road without passing another car.
Matt insists that winter on the Cape is the perfect time to catch up on all of the projects you’d always been meaning to get to, although he warns that “sometimes, you’ll spend an entire day rearranging your living room, and when you leave and come back, it barely looks like you’ve done anything at all.”
“See, I’d never survive,” I tell him. “That’s exactly it. I would start to lose it. I barely made it through a year of living alone in college, and this time I’d probably crack. I’d start folding my underpants into origami swans and storing them in the bathtub. I’d take my vodka martinis with ketchup. One day you’d knock at my door and I’d greet you wearing a giant bread dough penis. ‘Oh, this?’ I’d say. ‘I’ve just been catching up on so many projects this winter. It’s been great.’
“Matt laughs and shakes his head, but I can’t stop thinking about it, long after the discussion has moved on. Sure, in theory, I could spend a winter here. I’m sure that eventually I would discover a rhythm, work out a routine, find things to occupy my time. I could do a lot more reading. Maybe write a few letters. I could explore Cape Cod more fully than I ever have during nearly 10 years of working here during the summer. Meet more local people, spend more time hanging out in coffee shops and taverns in town, learn more about the way things work in East Orleans, MA during the cold, isolated, slow winter months. Freeze my ass off, and follow the course of events in “The Real World: Philadelphia” just a little bit too closely.
Maybe next year.
Saying that I went to a fiercely competitive all-girls’ high school is like saying that I am going to graduate in seven months and be thrown into an unfriendly job market full of people who will laugh openly when I mention my creative writing portfolio. In other words, it’s true, but the horror of that truth is difficult to convey on the printed page.
It’s not that I didn’t like most of the girls I went to high school with, I just liked other things better. Like applesauce, for example. Especially since applesauce didn’t spend four years asking me, “What’d you get on the Biology test? Uh-huh. Oh, I got an A.” If it ever did ask me, applesauce would probably add something like, “Well, that was a really hard test though. I’m pretty lucky; I totally guessed on a lot of it.” Truthfully, applesauce probably would have stood a good chance of doing better than I on a Biology test. Especially if it had actually studied, and not just flipped through its notes and then wandered off to watch The Simpsons.
Every year in March my high school had EXAM WEEK. A few months before Exam Week, teachers would start referring to how certain things they were teaching were going to be on the Exam. (Cue thunder, shrill screams, fainting of strong men.) A hushed silence would fall over the room, and everyone except me would take a moment of silence to tremble over the imminence of Exam Week, the Armageddon for neurotic prep-school girls who had been taking practice SATs since before they could focus their eyes. I was usually too busy composing haikus about how I wanted to be eating lunch or making out with David Duchovny instead of sitting through double history.
Ooo, Exam Week. I’m so scared, I’m trembling. Don’t let Exam Week get me! That was my reaction to Exam Week when I was listening, especially after I read in the student handbook that the Exam for any given class counted for not more than 1/7th of our grade in that class. One-seventh? I wasn’t one for numbers, but one-seventh seemed like not very much. If you divided a dollar up into seven equal amounts, each amount was only about…oh, forget it. The point is, nobody else in my class seemed appropriately impressed by my discovery that we really didn’t need to worry about these exams, as they didn’t count for much. Although now that I think about it, I have since taken Finals in college that counted for a healthy 25% of my grade for a class (now there’s a percentage I can both tabulate and respect) without getting too worked up about it. Perhaps I just lack a healthy fear of education. In any case, despite my protests, Exam Week continued to inspire fear and anorexia in those around me.
There was no middle ground. Either you gloated over your academic achievements and measured your self-worth by them, or you gleefully showed off the reading quiz you failed in English class because you hadn’t bothered to read Wuthering Heights and had written that Heathcliff was Catherine’s cat. I was the only girl in my grade to drop Math after two years of hard-earned 69’s on all my tests, which gave me five extra free periods all to myself each week. My comment that ‘Not taking math is like having a 40-minute orgasm every day’ found its way into the yearbook, where I hope the math department enjoyed it. I’ve generally found my failures to be funnier than my successes. And, you know, I’ve learned more from them. Or something.
“Molly.” My friend Rose explained patiently. “If you are over the age of 21 and no longer live at home, you need a double bed. Don’t even think about getting a twin.”
“But I’m the only one sleeping in it. I don’t need all that extra space. When I sleep in anything larger, I just take one side anyway! What’s the point?”
Rose would not be swayed. “Someday you’ll be glad you have it,” she insisted. “Besides, it’s not even like you’re buying a new bed. You’re taking one from home! Take the big one! God willing, it’ll come in handy.”
“See, that’s the thing. What if I jinx it? What if by bringing a larger bed I unwittingly guarantee that one side of it will always remain empty?” Or, worse, that it will be permanently cluttered, first with books and clothes, then with cats and recipes clipped from Women’s Day, and eventually with old bridesmaid dresses and moldy Hope Chest linens. It seems a little presumptuous somehow, starting out with a big bed like that.
Certainly, I have nothing much to live up to this time around, in terms of both my furniture and my living space. I arrived at my last apartment to find it unfurnished, with cinderblock walls and a kitchen so small you couldn’t fully inhale while standing at the stove (not that I ever wanted to, when I was cooking). I had brought with me no more than I could carry, having spent the last year traveling from New York to California and finally to Honolulu.
In Hawaii, the first piece of furniture my roommate and I managed to acquire was a mattress box spring from the street corner. We figured a mattress would eventually follow. Eight months later, it still hadn’t. We’d gone to a mattress store early on to discover that our idea of a cheap mattress was drastically different from anyone else’s. “All right,” the salesman had said finally. “I’ll give you those two twin mattresses for only $325. I’m being a huge pushover here. You can shop around, but I guarantee you’ll be back.” A pawn shop a few blocks away begged to differ. There we found two thin foam camping mattresses, one used, one new, for $28. I slept underneath a stolen airline blanket on that camping-mattress for the duration of my lease in that apartment. My desk was a broken television we’d retrieved from the curb across the street. Don’t ask me why my roommate and I assumed that someone would leave a perfectly good television on a street corner. We lugged it optimistically up three flights of stairs and plugged it into several different outlets before we finally accepted the fact that it didn’t work. The story of that broken television is an excellent example of the complete naiveté with which we entered the real world. Really, it’s a miracle we’re alive today.
It’s certainly a nice change of pace, moving somewhere a few hours away from home, rather than a few thousand miles and several time zones. For one thing, I get to raid the house, looking for things I’ll need in my new place; things my parents hopefully won’t miss until I’m far enough away. For another thing, I get to bring furniture with me. This is a whole new world. This time, my roommate (the same one as before) came equipped with a couch, a love seat, a bunch of lamps, and a whole mess of end tables. A few hours after moving into our apartment, the living room looked like the set of the Cosby show. It was almost too much for me to handle. Last Fall it was weeks before our living room stopped looking like the set of an off-off Broadway play whose set designer went for ‘severe’. There’s a little fun lost, having things fixed up right away. But there are also fewer used camping mattresses involved, and I can live with that.
I am beginning to recognize the dangers inherent in the optimistic, happy-go-lucky fashion with which I approach temping. Whenever I am offered a temp job, any sort of temp job, my mind immediately flashes forward to imagine what that job might entail. For anyone else, this imagining would certainly offer insights into whether or not the job should be accepted. For me, this flash never has any bearing whatsoever on reality. It is probably based more on what I’ve eaten most recently than on any of the details I am given about the potential job. For example, when in Honolulu I was offered a part-time administrative position at a local YMCA, I somehow assumed that this job entailed holding hands with a line of smiling children and jumping into a swimming pool. My first day of work, twenty minutes into a box of donation cards I was told I would spend the month alphabetizing, I saw the error of my ways, but it was too late. Sure, there was a swimming pool at that Y, but it was always full of old people doing Aqua Aerobics; and my help was neither sought out nor appreciated.
So it was most recently with Exam Proctoring. In my brief disillusioned flash, I pretty much pictured myself being handed free money. “Sounds good!” I told the temp agency. “Sign me up!”
My first day of proctoring, I had to stand up in front of twenty-six stone-faced law students and squeak at them to turn off their cellphones and watches, and to leave their exams face down until I told them they could begin. Once they did, the pressure was mostly off, unless, like me, you happen to find it overwhelmingly stressful to keep yourself from making noise lest you disturb the intense concentration of twenty-six scowling, furiously scribbling law-school students.
I spent the time writing letters to friends which I‘ll probably never bother to send, and stealthily eating candy. Whenever I tried to read, a hand would shoot up imperiously from the back of the room in a silent demand for a fresh bluebook. Toward the end of the exam, I gave up on my quiet activities and instead sat staring at rows of fresh-faced, ambitious law students. I imagined recognizing one of them across a courtroom, years later, when I am brought up on a public urination charge. “You can’t do this to me! I made you!” I’d cry. “Remember how I brought you extra scrap paper when you needed it? Remember how I lent you a pen to use the bathroom sign-out sheet? What if I hadn’t? How long could you have held it? Huh? Huh?”
At the end of that test, I noticed that the boy I had been eyeing with boredom-induced lust was the last to gather his things and leave. Quick, say something! I thought, and said the first thing that came to mind. “So, could you tell it was my first time proctoring?” The boy gave me a strange look. “You did fine,” he said, shaking out his hand, cramped from three straight hours of answering questions about Family Law, and I was stricken with shame. This guy finishes a three-hour law exam and my first question to him is, “So, how’d you like my proctoring?“ It was the equivalent, my friend noted, of a funeral director coming up to the bereaved after a service and asking if they liked his flower arrangements.
My second time proctoring was both less stressful, and worlds more bizarre. I had only one student, a serious, bearded young man whose test was supposed to last for six hours. That’s right: six hours. During the course of the exam I tried to remember the last time I’d spent hours alone in a room with a boy I barely knew, the awkward and total silence between us punctuated only by the occasional sigh. Then I remembered– the previous weekend. I tried not to look over at him too often, partly because I didn’t want to unnerve him, and partly because any sort of supervision seemed completely unnecessary. I couldn’t for the life of me understand why one solitary student needed a proctor to supervise his open-book exam. Is there really any way to cheat on an open book exam– especially when you’re the only one in the room and you can’t even sneak a peek at someone else’s open book? Short of his smuggling in a magical phone booth ala Bill & Ted, then using it to go back in time and find Socrates and ask him questions about Insurance Law, I couldn’t imagine anything illegal that my presence in the room was preventing.
Toward the end of the exam, I began to wonder whether any sort of strange bond was going to develop between this student and I as the result of spending so many silent hours together, and then decided it was unlikely. We had been in the same room all right, but while he had been struggling with essay questions and flipping anxiously through highlighted textbooks, I had been knitting and eating Chewy Sprees. This had clearly not been a shared experience.
“So, did everything go all right in there with Alex?” my proctoring instructor asked me when I brought him the lone completed exam at the end of six hours. I assured him that everything had gone smoothly. “I only had to take him down twice,” I joked. He didn’t seem to think that was funny.
I have never in my life been so glad I had a boyfriend as I was during my three week visit to Japan. Not because of the specific boyfriend– it didn’t matter who he was, nor did it matter that ours was a relationship forged upon mutual convenience and desperation, your average highschool romance. In fact, I broke up with him a few weeks after I returned to the United States. He had served his purpose, which was allowing me to answer in the affirmative the first question on the lips of every Japanese girl my age I was introduced to: “Do you have…boyfriend?” It was clearly important to have boyfriend.
I was the only one in our exchange student group who DID have a boyfriend at the time, and since I had no particular fondness for any of the five other girls I was traveling with, that was fine by me. Actually, it was great by me, especially when I got to hear the others have to awkwardly explain, in as clear and concise English as their interrogators could understand, why they didn’t in fact have boyfriends. Since we went to a girls’ school back home, no one expected us to ever have boyfriends, and thus it was not a question we were prepared to handle. Questions like, “Do you have…grasp of Heathcliff’s motivations in Wuthering Heights?” or “Do you have…inordinate crush on your gay science teacher because he’s the only attractive male you see on a regular basis?”; now those we could have gladly expounded upon.
I would have needed far more than three weeks in Japan to even begin to understand the relationships between the teenage girls and boys there. Certainly there was a lot going on below the surface that I missed, and above it, which I also missed. What I did pick up on fairly quickly was the predator-prey dynamic.
“They like blonde boys here,” Karen, a British foreign exchange student told me. “The whole light-haired, blue-eyed, All-American thing. It’s really big with the girls.” She had been living in Japan for over six months, attending the same highschool that I accompanied my host student to. Karen was tall and pretty, with a strong jaw and a blonde pixie cut. “I get mistaken for a boy all the time, because of my short hair,” she said. “Japanese girls come right up to me and ask me out all the time– they’re very aggressive about it.” It would have been difficult to believe her, had I not had a chance to study this phenomenon up close.
After only a few days spent following my host student around her highschool, I came to the following conclusion: all preferences for foreign blondes aside, it appeared Japanese boys had to do very little when it came to the dating game. In fact, the only game it remotely resembled was Hungry Hungry Hippos.
Perhaps I should give credit where it is due, however. I suppose in their own way, these boys did work tirelessly and with an admirable determination– their unifying goal being the pursuit of awesome hair. In Japan teenage boys tended to carry hand-mirrors in their pockets, whipping them out automatically and without a trace of self-consciousness at every stop on the train to make sure nothing was out of place. At school their jeans were ironed into deadly sharp creases, their jackets worn with devastatingly cool casualness. They stood waiting for the bus, posed against brick buildings like they were shooting an album cover. They were clearly meant to be appraised, admired, and cunningly pursued within an inch of their hip lives. And against their steely-eyed, knee-socked female pursuers, they didn’t stand a chance. They were like delicate fawns with stylish glasses, tripping shyly through the forests of highschool in really cool sneakers.
That girls were the aggressors most of the time was as strange to me as it was compelling. The myth of the quiet, submissive Japanese schoolgirl was put to rest for good the day my host-student Mariko and I stalked a group of boys from Wisconsin for an entire afternoon at Tokyo Disneyland. “There they are!” we’d say in excited whispers, clutching each other, then strolling past them for the tenth time, whistling casually. There were half a dozen of them, all blonde and wholesome and clearly unnerved enough already. It’s no small feat to enjoy yourself at Disneyland in your native country; let alone in Tokyo where a giant costumed Mickey Mouse can come up behind you at any time and yell at you in Japanese. We didn’t leave those poor doomed boys alone until that evening, when we finally got up the courage to approach them and ask innocently if they would to pose for a picture with us. It was too dark for the picture to come out very well, but the glint of triumph in Mariko’s eyes was unmistakable. I was mostly amused by the whole thing. Amused, and slightly terrified. Don’t think I am ungrateful; I certainly enjoyed my time in Japan and still value the lessons I learned from the (female) friends I made there, but it was nice to return home to dynamics between the sexes that I more or less understood, and to boys who didn’t scatter like quail at the slam of a locker door.
I’ve been thinking about food more often than usual lately, probably since I’ve been spending a lot of time in the cafeteria the last few weeks. It may be senior year phenomenon, because I’ve noticed many of my senior friends doing the same thing. Perhaps it’s because we’ve discovered that sitting in the cafeteria for hours at a time is far easier than doing almost anything else, except maybe for lying down in the cafeteria. In fact, if you’re reading this column in the cafeteria, stop and look around, I’m probably here somewhere. Please don’t wave, because I probably won’t like that.
The cafeteria is a great place to be to feel productive without actually being productive. I’m drinking juice, you can think. I’m hydrating my body. Now I’m getting up to get more juice. I’m exercising. Now I’m elbowing people out of the way to get to the wing bar, which is also exercise. Man, remember exercise?
College has definitely put a strain on my relationship with my body. I alternate between treating it like a temple and treating it like a gas station bathroom. It never knows what to expect from me anymore; one day I’ll eat vegetables at every meal and drink eight glasses of water, and the next day I’ll eat an entire avocado in one sitting, wash it down with peanut butter cookies and jug wine and call it dinner.
Last week I woke up at five in the morning and was so thirsty that I almost drank applesauce. It was either that or warm Bud Light (which had most likely already contributed in part to my great thirst). At least I’ve gotten better at eating less junk food. If you are what you eat, then freshman year I was the vending machine in the campus center.
I tend to become obsessed with certain foods the way normal people have crushes; this week it’s avocados. Ooh, they’re so good. I was slightly ashamed the other day when my friend used my computer and discovered that I’d been to Avocado.org, even though I was only there for the articles. Actually I’m rather proud of my avocado obsession, because at least they’re relatively good for you (or so say the good people at Avocado.org. They’re high in fat, but it’s ‘good’ fat. I don’t really care what that means.)
I usually just get crushes on bad foods, the ones with no nutritional value that attract you with bright wrappers that say ‘Now Even More Great Chocolatey Taste’ (can there ever be enough great chocolatey taste?). These foods make you fall for them and then treat you badly, only to leave you for your best friend and get her pregnant. Don’t tell me that hasn’t happened to you.
When I first moved to Boston, I made the exquisitely poor decision of including my experience as a founding member of the Bard College Cheerleading Squad on my resume. I then spent six months sitting on the couch and wondering why potential employers weren’t knocking down my door (or looking me in the eye during the few interviews I actually got). When you are past the age of fourteen, including cheerleading on your resume (even if it was funny, see, because my college was so not a cheerleading-type college, haha) is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot…and then having your other foot wrest the gun away from you and shoot you in the face. It means I spent a winter eating Ramen, sleeping in a hooded sweatshirt under four blankets to keep down heating costs, and considering toothpaste a vanity purchase. All this, so that potential employers could be aware that in college, I had a sense of irony and owned pompoms. Possibly that resume was an accurate depiction of my character, but accuracy doesn’t pay the rent or keep you in toothpaste.
When I applied for my current job, I think leaving the skill of ‘decision-making’ off of my resume (among other edits) was a good decision. Probably one of the better decisions I have made. Really, I excel at making decisions; it’s just they’re usually bad. Although if I make them quickly, shouldn’t I at least get points for speed? Accuracy is overrated. (I should probably not have listed that as a bullet-point on my resume either, but by the time I realized that, I had already gotten it all printed out, so it was too late. If need be, I figure I can always white it out, and in doing so, showcase my liquid paper skillz—and add to each copy a unique, personal touch).
Certainly there are those who make decisions which seem good at the time, but which are eventually proven to have been mistakes. That is not really what I struggle with. My problem lies in the fact that many of the choices I make do not look good at the time, before the time, after the time, at the time but on drugs, or at the time but from a different dimension. They are impossible to defend. No lawyer would take their case. They don’t even deserve plea-bargains.
I flew to Minneapolis for a week recently, and I brought my laptop so that I would have internet access in my hotel room. This laptop was huge and heavy; an ancient piece of equipment I inherited as a second or third degree hand-me-down. I say ‘was’, because said laptop is no longer with us, and it is due in part (or in full) to the latest in a series of life episodes I have entitled, ‘Seriously, What Were You Thinking?’ On the flight there, I carried the laptop in my carry-on backpack, but, shamed by the guard who had examined it at security with his nose wrinkled as though it were a dead mackerel or my tennis shoes, I decided to pack it in the suitcase I was checking for the flight back.
Of course, when we were reunited at Logan airport, it was done for. Little laptop, you didn’t deserve that. You may have been a bit archaic, a tad behind the times. Your spell-check program may have dated itself by asking, “You wrote ‘Old’. May we suggest ‘Olde’?” So what if Goody Paperclip the Office Assistant was burned at the stake by the rest of Microsoft Office under suspicion of being a practicing Witch? I didn’t miss him all that much. The keyboard’s having ‘F’ key and not an ‘S’ key was a little tirefome at firft, but I got ufed to it, and even became rather fond of it.
Another problem with having a history of bad decision-making is that word tends to spread. I offer a coworker my arm to cross a busy intersection and nearly get us both run over one little time, and suddenly word spreads throughout the office that I’m ‘unreliable’. I ask directions from a stranger on a front porch only to realize it’s a stuffed scarecrow posed in a chair, and suddenly I’m ‘in need of psychological evaluation’ and ‘a ditz’. It seems a little unfair to me.
At least, if nothing else, I am learning from my poor choices. Particularly I am learning to hide them and pretend they never occured. At least, now that I have written this column, I’ve realized that probably that’s what I should have done here. So, you can go ahead and forget everything I just said, if you don’t mind. Especially that thing about asking directions from a scarecrow. That totally never happened.
For me, watching televised sports is a lot like reading fictionalized first-person historical narratives. I’m enthusiastic at first, but after ten minutes I completely lose interest. “Hey,” I’ll think, examining a dusty book. “This is a chance to learn what it might have been like for a Minister’s wife in the time of the Puritans. What a great read this will be.” Or, “Wow, the first game of the World Series is tonight? Of course I’ll check that out. The whole world’s going to be watching.” But no matter what happens in the first ten pages or during the first two innings, my excitement inevitably dwindles and, eventually, I wander off to make a sandwich and browse internet personals in search of creepy, socially incompetent people with bad pictures that will make me feel better about myself.
True, the whole, “my good intentions are larger than my attention-span” thing is more frequently a problem when it comes to watching sports. I’ve irritated my share of friends by noisily picking all the peanuts out of the Chex Mix, tooting on my half-empty Corona bottle and attempting to make chatty, unrelated conversation without waiting for commercial breaks during heated sports events. It’s certainly harder to bother anyone else by dropping a fictionalized first-person historical novel on the floor as you trudge over to the TV for blissful delivery from the pain of conscious thought. But I’m sure it can still be done.
The idea of getting really involved in watching sports is incredibly appealing to me in theory. But in practice, I find the games themselves to be generally without drama. I reach more emotional highs and lows watching “Saved by the Bell” reruns than ice hockey; I experience feel more urgency when rooting for a particularly slow-moving parent sliding around in a kiddy pool filled with sour cream on “Family Double Dare” than I do watching a baseball player chase a ground ball. And the rules and stats that flash across the screen during games make me both sleepy and anxious.
Watching as pictures of players’ little heads and crabbed, unexplained numbers zoom across the television at random intervals tends to leave me scowling. (This may be due to the fact that, ever since graduating, staring at columns of numbers is something I do right before writing out heart-shrinkingly enormous checks and mailing them to The Student Loan Corporation). Worst of all is that I know I must be missing out. I have to be. How else can these games bring such joy, such pain, and such endless hours of chips-and-salsa-eating entertainment to so many of my loved ones? My inability to appreciate televised sports leaves a void in my soul, a void that can only be filled by VH1 celebrity-worship shows, Lifetime movies starring Antonio Sabato Jr. as an amusement-park owning single dad with a jealous stalker, and commercials where elderly people querulously use contemporary slang, with hilarious results.
Come to think of it, I guess it’s not a very picky void.
My little sister recently remarked that she thought most people had a better idea of what they wanted to do with their lives in the beginning of college than at the end. Of course, this is the same sister who used to tell me that I would die before her because I was three years older. I don’t listen to everything she says, particularly the phrases that begin with the words “Please stop-” or “Can I borrow-.” I think that in this case, though, she might be right.
Rather than narrowing my field of interest, college has introduced me to a number of different disciplines that I have a passing interest in but am too lazy to really pursue very far. I suppose I should be of the mindset that it is never too late to begin studying something completely new and unexpected; think of all the sixty-year old women who take up painting every day. Well anyway, I like thinking about them.
However, at some point I became convinced that if you didn’t begin pursuing something at a very young age, there was no point in taking it up later on in life. Perhaps I got this idea from hearing about adolescent Olympic gymnasts who were doing back flips at age three while everyone else was falling off the balance beam to tinkly piano accompaniment. Maybe it was from hearing about virtuoso musicians who played Carnegie Hall when they turned seven because they’d had violins placed in their tiny webbed hands at sixteen weeks of age.
In any event, this idea of mine is a problem, because most of the things I began studying as a young child led not to Carnegie Hall, but rather to my learning how to eat with a fork and put on pants. Not to demean the skill of putting on pants, I’m sure that at this point I can do it with the best of them. In fact I only wish I had more of an opportunity to demonstrate my aptitude, but Carnegie Hall has not been returning my phone calls.
I’m really not sure what I want to do when I get out of school. I am open to suggestions, but will seriously consider only those that are written in the margins of hundred-dollar bills. I have tried looking to the past to give me ideas for what I might want to do with my life, but that hasn’t been very helpful. The last time I remember having a passionate goal in life was when I was six and wanted to marry Bugs Bunny. It isn’t that I lack direction, it’s that I…ok, so I lack direction.
I’ve always been jealous of those people who, when asked to talk about their careers, say things like, “I’ve always wanted to be a bus driver. Always.” Or, “Ever since I began studying chemistry in highschool, science has been my passion.” Science was my passion after I saw the movie Ghostbusters, but again, only briefly.
I do have passions, they’re just not compatible with paychecks. Ever since I first discovered sleeping late, I’ve known it was something I wanted to devote my life to. The same was true for Tetris, Ramen, and 80’s rock. In some ways, it’s really a shame I’m graduating. College has really allowed me to accomplish many of my goals.
I Heard Tell 