Foot Fetish

I saw a girl today with beautiful feet. I notice this kind of thing now. She was wearing flip-flops and slouched down in her seat. The sides of her feet were so straight and clean, there was no curve at the big toe joint at all. It's like, she's physically incapable of ever developing bunions. I just stared at her feet in awe.

The Blouse

I bought a new blouse that on someone else would show some cleavage. On me, there is no cleavage, so it just reveals an expanse of upper chest. The whole time I'm wearing it, I have to throw my shoulders way back and keep my chest inflated, or the top of it sags loose and you can see my bra. I like the color, and it looks good on me, but by the end of the day I'm just tired of having to stand up so straight. I can see the micro-flickers in people's eyes, too, flitting down from my face to my chest as they're talking to me to see if they can see anything. How do women who actually have cleavage deal with it?

Steppenwolf

I'm reading Steppenwolf. The back cover bills it as "a savage indictment of bourgeois society," and it's supposed to be a classic. I had trouble getting into it - the first 50 pages were really repetitive, describing again and again what steppenwolves are. I thought Hesse needed an editor. OK, OK, we know already that the Steppenwolf feels like an outsider in society!

But then it started getting really good. The main character, this lonely old guy who spends all his time reading literature and moping in his attic room, runs into an old acquaintance in the street, a professor he used to know. He doesn't have any friends and it's been so long since he even talked to anyone, that he feels really wooden and fake even standing there in the street talking to the guy. He feels like the "wolf" part of him is standing there laughing at him for trying to be sociable. When the professor invites him to dinner, he says yes but immediately starts freaking out about going. He knows the evening is going to be weird.

He goes back to his room to shower and dress, and the whole time he's wishing he could just stay at home and read his book - the evening looms ahead of him like a terrible chore. Eventually he forces himself to go, and yeah, it turns out pretty bad. He feels totally repressed throughout the whole meal because it's clear the professor's politics are the opposite of his, and he has to keep biting his tongue. After dinner, there's an awkward silence, and in desperation for something to say he ends up saying something insulting, and the professor gets upset with him, and he leaves in a huff.

The whole time I was reading this scene, I was enthralled. I know exactly how he felt. I am not a steppenwolf, but I am shy to a degree that I've never quite been able to overcome. If it was a pure and simple choice, I would much rather read a book than be social on any given evening. But I know being social, in the long term, makes me happier, so I usually talk myself into going. There have been many occasions where I basically browbeat myself into going to some party where I knew I'd be out of place, because I knew I needed the practice, and besides, if I didn't go out, how was I ever going to meet someone? I didn't usually insult anyone, but I'd generally go home afterwards feeling a combination of "whew, glad that's over" and "I'm so bad at this." It's so fascinating to me that Hesse was writing, in 1927, in German, something that speaks to me on a core level, something that makes me say, "ahh! He understands." Like he reached across the ages and squeezed my hand.

Americans and Loneliness

According to this survey, the average American has only one or two close friends, and most people confide only in their spouse. Twenty years ago, the average was three good friends and several confidants, including friends from the neighborhood or other groups outside the family. Commentary on the article speculates about why this is happening - there are plenty of places with social opportunities (the bus, the coffee house, the gym). But for the most part, we don't make connections with the people we see in these places. And in fact, if people approach us there, they're generally a little weird. It's safer, and more comfortable, to email people instead of talking to them, and watch NetFlix at home instead of going out.

Here are my theories about why:
- Transience. No one stays at the same address or job for long enough to really build connections. Maybe twenty years ago there were neighborhoods where people grew up together and all knew one another, like Sesame Street. Or companies where people started out at the bottom rung and spent their whole career working their way up. Now, you move into an apartment building and no one knows their neighbors. Even if you wanted to become friendly with them, it's not easy, either because of language barriers or just basic personality differences. And it's pretty common to change jobs every few years.
- Too many people. If you came in contact with just one or two strangers a day, it would be natural to strike up a conversation. You might be pleased if a stranger asked to share your bench in the park. But when you come in contact with perhaps a hundred strangers a day, it makes more sense to avoid connections. The ratio of "good" interactions with strangers, vs. bad, is pretty low. Now, chances are a stranger who approaches you in the park is a little mentally unhinged. Or wants money. Or both.
- Finally, the types of things we do for fun these days just aren't...well, fun any more. Like house parties where the music is so loud you spend all your time shouting "SO HOW DO YOU KNOW [host]?" and "WHAT?". Or happy hours with coworkers where you sip overpriced beer and try to pretend that these people are your friends. I think they cater more to edgy, kind of aggressive people who live and thrive on pop culture. Which, I think, is not most of us.

I'm not sure what would be better - but something that presents a comfortable environment and facilitates interactions. Something that the edgy cool people think is dumb, so they've replaced it with more demanding social activities where only they can compete. Maybe we need to bring back roller rinks and square dances.

Papering Over A Leak

I'm struggling a lot not to be envious of friends of mine who have real estate and kids. That's where I want to be, but I'm so far away from it right now, it seems like I'll never get there.

The real estate has to come first because our apartment is way too small to raise kids in - already we're tripping over stuff all the time. But we can't afford to buy a place right now, and probably never will, unless I can figure out how to get a job that pays about twice my current salary. Meanwhile, I'm scared of waiting because I worry that I might have trouble getting pregnant, and that childbirth might be more than I can handle...and it's only going to get harder as I get older.

But I made a decision just a couple days ago to stop fussing about this stuff. And I feel bad about even bringing it up in conversations because I don't want to stress out my husband. He has enough on his plate, getting his career going. This is supposed to be a chill time when we just relax and enjoy being married. I shouldn't be pushing him for more.

So, it's like constantly papering over a leak. There's a hose behind it, turned on full-force, but I keep laying fresh sheets of paper over it, trying to calm myself down. "Everything is fine."

The Call

It was 4:30 am and the phone was ringing. I leaped out of bed with my heart pounding, but it turned out to be just someone outside at the call box, wanting to be let in. She said, "Lemme in, I forgot my key." Lightning pause while I digested this. I thought of the episode in Seinfeld where Elaine says, "I didn't know it was a jewel thief," and the other girl lisps, "That'th why there'th a buzzer!" and about reciprocal altruism, how the costs of helping her were low, and the benefits for her high. I felt irritated with people who aren't together, who have kind of a disorganized hedonistic lifestyle and come home at 4:30 am without their keys. On some level, I think I knew it was the girl next door, who's always blasting her music at all hours and keeping us up. All this happened in an instant. Then I said, "I'm sorry, I don't know you," and hung up.

It turned out it was her, because we heard her coming in a few minutes later - I guess someone else let her in. I haven't met her face-to-face but I hear her through the wall a lot. She's really loud, she always seems to be having these angry confrontations with people on the phone. She also likes to have the music blaring and TV on at the same time, in competition with one another. I probably would have let her in if she had apologized for calling at that hour. Or if she wasn't so loud all the time. The thing is that she knows which apartment she called, and now she's probably thinking black thoughts about me. But I don't care.

My husband rolled over in bed and laughed at me. "You're funny," he said. "You said, 'I don't know you.' It's like...'I don't even know who you are any more!'"

The Deluge

Yesterday I decided to walk home, which is about three miles. About halfway there, the skies opened up and I got caught in a terrific downpour. I didn't have an umbrella so all I could do was just keep walking. Pretty soon I was soaked to the skin. Water was coursing down my face and into my eyes, my shoes were squelching with every step, and my clothes were totally plastered to my skin. It reminded me of times when I was a little kid and I would run out and play in the rain for the sheer joy of it. Being caught outside made me feel like a kid too - all the grownups were riding in their cars, or had sensibly checked the weather report and brought their umbrellas, but I was heedlessly out in the rain. After I got home and dried off, apparently my will-power had also retreated to juvenile levels, because I immediately tore into the bag of potato chips I'm not supposed to eat. They were really yummy.

I'm going to make an effort to stop worrying about finances and housing and my job and the tick of the tell-tale biological clock, and just take my pleasure in simple things. Life's too short to worry so much.

Feeling Humble

One day last week, I reread Lord of the Flies, which was assigned reading in high school. I always liked "children on their own, without grown-ups" adventure stories as a kid - The Boxcar Children, Five Children and It, the Narnia books, and the wonderful Far-Distant Oxus*. Those are happy-go-lucky stories, of course, and Lord of the Flies is really dark. But I still liked it.

The second time through, I particularly appreciated the writing. The descriptions of the tropical heat, the shimmering of the humidity on the beach, and the intense quality of the light, are so vivid. You really feel like you're there. Golding describes the beach as being "fledged with palm trees, their green feathers a hundred feet up in the air" coconuts being "skull-like", a wild sow "fringed with piglets," and those are such interesting, fresh words to use. Simon's encounter with the Beast is so spookily written you almost hear a hypnotic kind of drone in your ears as you read it. All of this is just icing on the cake, though, for the moral message the book is trying to get across, which is heavy enough to provide grist for any number of English class essays.

It's so much better than anything I think I could write. I could write something decorative and of interest to a few people, I think, but I'd have to really push myself to get the descriptions up to that calibre. And I just don't think I have it in me to write a "great" book that deals with human morality and society. Golding tosses it off like that's the whole point of writing. I'm awed.


* Far-Distant Oxus: No one has heard of this book, but it's really great. It's about six English children in the summer holidays riding their ponies around the countryside, totally unsupervised and having a glorious time. It's a good read by any account, but especially considering that it was written and illustrated by two girls who were 15 and 16 at the time of publication.

Filing And Its Discontents

Life is all about filing things. I've realized that's pretty much all I do, in my job, and at home. File the budget paperwork in the purchases folder. File the newsletters in the envelopes. File the groceries in the fridge. File the clean socks in the sock drawer. File the guinea pig poops in the trash. On my tombstone, it will read "She worked against entropy, a lot."

Entropy always wins in the end though. And while it gives me some measure of satisfaction to clean and organize things, I feel like these aren't really worthy activities I should be spending my time on. So what if the floor needs sweeping? I should be reading great works of literature (and writing same), improving myself instead of making these incremental gains in household orderliness that will only be lost over the course of the coming week. I often clean as a method of procrastination, because it's easier than self-improvement. But I ought to break myself of that - and at the same time, of the nagging desire to clean when I see something that should be cleaned. So what if the trash is overflowing? I ought to be able to ignore it and do more important things, instead of filing it down the trash chute. Someday, I'll regret that I spent time keeping things orderly instead of wildly, exuberantly, living.

Birdies

Today the weather is the type that makes me feel glad to be alive. It's summery with a light breeze, and most importantly the air smells good - warm and fresh like clean sheets. I went outside for lunch and sat in the park, where there was live music, and where there were sparrows dust-bathing. They are so adorable. I love the way they hunker down in a patch of bare soil and vibrate all over, shivering their wings in the dust. They almost look like wind-up toys gone nuts.

Worry, With a Side of Doubt

I've been worrying a lot about money lately. It's all just because I've moved up in the life bracket. Like tax brackets - you jump up to the next income level and suddenly the taxes are a lot fiercer. I was in the late-twenties-young-professional bracket, which is characterized by intermittent employment, a lot of transient living situations, Internet dating, and periodically having to go back to your parents' house to do laundry and pick up your mail. Not a lot of expectations because you're figuring things out.

Now I'm in the just-married-nesting bracket, which is all about investing in real estate and parenthood. I feel way behind the other people in this bracket. They already have their big houses in the suburbs and their pre-schoolers. I don't think we can afford to have either for a while. My job isn't prestigious enough, so I don't earn enough to pay my share of a mortgage, let alone childcare. And when I floated the idea of staying home with my kids to a friend, she just burst out laughing. "Honey, she thinks she can afford to stay home with the kids, and live in this area!" she told her husband, who also started laughing. Maybe that is only something Midwesterners can afford to do.

I never used to care about having a "prestigious" job. I guess before, it didn't matter because it was just me. Suddenly now I have responsibilities to my husband, to hold up my end of the finances, and to our future kids. Not earning very much money suddenly isn't OK any more.

The Perfect Job

I wonder, does anyone ever really like their job? I mean, in the sense that they actually enjoy being there, and would choose it over leisure activities, at least some of the time. I'm not sure I can imagine a job that I would prefer to go to over, say, sweeping the floor or clipping my nails or some other mundane task like that.

Right now I'm sure there are people out there who would say they genuinely like their jobs. Even people with jobs I would consider really hard and socially stressful, like youth camp counselor or reporter or public relations agent. But these are the sorts of blandly happy people who are just a lot more sunny about everything. I'm not sure I can trust their pronouncements, their happiness scale is so far out of whack from mine. These are people who run marathons for fun and give blood all the time, and are good at teaching martial arts to four-year-olds.

I always think that it's just a matter of finding the right job, that fits my personality and skills just perfectly. So I make lists of things I like doing. The lists usually have things on them like this:

- talking to and interacting with (gentle) animals
- cleaning, in moderation
- reading fiction
- being outdoors at least some part of each day
- being around people who are smart, but not competitive
- watching animals
- learning about structure/function in the natural world, and taxonomy
- writing, in moderation
- not having to be "on" - aggressive, competitive, concerned with hierarchy, politically aware, ready to defend policies, etc.

So this would basically qualify me to be some kind of Victorian naturalist or maybe run a nature center in a secluded location that no one visits.

I pretty much like my current job except it doesn't pay very much, and it does sort of carry a requirement for me to be "on". Which I am working on, but I'm awful at it. And afterwards I just go home and feel like I'm trying to shake some kind of poison out of my system from having had to act that way. So maybe I just have to accept that work is something you don't like doing (that's why they pay you), and just get through each day with the minimum of friction.

A Meeting at Dusk

Sorry my posts have been erratic lately. I had to travel for work, and then I got food poisoning, so I've been out of commission this week. My in-box is sky-high. But I want to write about the donkey I met a few days ago.

I was wandering around in the twilight, feeling kind of out of place and sad, and found this farm with a pasture (actually more of a mud-pit). I leaned on the fence railing watching the inhabitants - a horse, a mid-size pony, a donkey, a mule, a Shetland pony, a Holstein, and a boar - sharing a pile of hay. I've never seen such a diverse group of farm animals housed together before. The Shetland was kind of a rabble-rouser, starting up play-fights with the pony and sometimes the mule. They would cavort around the pasture together, chasing each other and even rearing up on their hind legs. It was adorable to see this little pony, just a muzzle poking out from under a haystack of mane, charging playfully at the bigger animals and then racing away. All the equines and the pig came over to see me at some point, but wandered off when they saw I had no food.

Except for the donkey. She was a sad-looking creature (like all donkeys), spotted brown-and-white, with a swayback and terribly overgrown hooves. I noticed the hooves right away because she was stumbling with each step as she made her way toward me. They were so long they were starting to turn upwards, and she had to practically walk on her pasterns. I felt a lump of tears in my throat looking at her - her suffering was so apparent, and borne so patiently. She was very cautious about approaching me, she'd come forward a step and then just wait, watching me, so it took about ten minutes for her to get close enough for me to touch her. I started rubbing around behind her ears and scratching her shoulder, and she just leaned into the touch. Every time I paused, she would press her head against my hand, so I kept going. She seemed totally starved for affection.

It was getting dark, but at some point I decided, "I'm not going to walk away from her. Everyone else walks away from her, but I'm going to stay with her, until she decides to leave me." So I stayed there talking to her and petting her for an entire hour. I felt kind of a sympathy with her because she was the out of place one in her group, too (the other equines occasionally acted aggressive toward her, laying back their ears and snaking their heads as they passed her; each time she flinched and jumped away, then came back to me). Plus, we both have foot problems. She still had such longing for human contact, even though she's being neglected and crippled by some farmer who can't be bothered to give her the care she needs. Finally it was full dark, and I was kind of worried about being out so late, so I said goodbye to her, gave her a final pat, and walked away. She lifted her heavy head up and rested it on the top rail of the fence, rolling her big eyes to watch me go. It was a look to break your heart.

I don't even know whose farm it was, but if anyone had walked around the corner of the barn and offered to sell her to me, I would've bought her on the spot. It's so sad to me that now that she's at the end of her useful life, they're just going to ignore her and let her be crippled - when one visit from a farrier could turn her quality of life around. It's so wrong.

Repeat Performances

Since we got back, lots of people have been clamoring to hear about the trip. We had a wonderful time, we loved Australia. I was excited to tell my family all about our adventures. But after spending a day talking with them, I kind of got my fill of talking about it. Now after a couple dozen repeat performances for the benefit of people at work, friends, and even neighbors and random acquaintances who want to know where I've been, I'm getting a little burned out on talking about it. I feel like I've recited our travel itinerary, and the major things we did, and the fact that we had fun, about a million times already - and we have yet to get together with most of our friends.

The clamoring for pictures is particularly strident. Before we left, everyone at the wedding, and my coworkers, and other random friends, all said, "Congratulations! Have fun in Australia! Take lots of pictures!" (like, those exact words, over and over and over on the day of the wedding) and we said, "Thanks! We will!" and now it is coming back to haunt us because they all want to see said pictures. There almost seems to be an obsession with the pictures. It's about the first thing people say to us now. ("So how does it feel to be married?" comes first actually.) Then in short order, "I want to see pictures of your trip!" We did take some, but I'm already tired of doing the show-and-tell narration, and I've only done it once. I am probably going to start telling people that we focused on the experience and didn't take that many pictures, to throw them off.

This is why I can't be a professional musician or actor (well, besides the talent thing) - I just can't do repeat performances. I do it once, and then if I have to keep doing it, I just feel interminably bored, and frustrated. But, everyone is really nice, and it's nice of them to take an interest, so I am doing my best to keep answering with a sunny smile, "Yeah, we had a great time!" and run through the whole thing, and agree to show them the *#&% pictures.

How It Feels

Everyone keeps asking me if it feels any different being married. I usually say, not really. We've known each other and have been living together for a long time, so it's not as though it really changes the fabric of everyday life. But, there is a subtle difference. I feel more like we are a team now, more confident about making decisions together. I feel happy looking forward to our future, knowing that there will be one. Every time I look at him and see that ring on his finger - or hear him say the words "my wife" - I feel proud and excited, that we've made this commitment together.

There used to be a tension and an underlying feeling of sadness in our relationship, I think, that had to do with me wanting to move forward and being afraid he didn't feel the same way, and worrying that all the little things I did that were annoying or dumb were ultimately being tallied up against me in some cosmic subconscious decision-making process. He never gave me any reason to worry - it was just that I never knew where we stood, and I was afraid of thunderbolts from the blue. Now, that tension is gone, and I just feel simply...happy.