Things We Find in Shopping Carts

My friend Tim found this in a shopping cart at Garwood Shoprite.
It is quite frankly the saddest little list I've ever seen. It says, "Metamusil, eggs, cat food."

Somewhere, a constipated cat lady is making an omelette and I hope she isn't as lonely as her list makes her seem.

The grocery list could be a man's, although I doubt it.

There is something oddly touching about how the 't' in cat and the 'f' in food are darker and outlined several times over. I can picture her on the phone with someone, idly tracing her list, maybe wishing she could buy Vodka and chocolate but knowing it's not good for her stomach.

Is it possible she really only bought those two things? Or are those the three things she was afraid she'd forget?

Sometimes when I'm food shopping I remember my mom practically crying in frustration while standing on a long line at the Matawan Foodtown. She said, "I feel like I've spent my whole life in this stupid store," with a subtle introspection she always surprises me with during ordinary moments. Isn't that a common fear...to be swallowed whole by the suburbs, your whole life swirling around displays of Cheerios and toilet paper?

What is worse, shopping alone for yourself and your cat, or shopping for your family, and going home, and thinking about the lady and her cat?

Right now I'm making chicken dipped in cornflakes and sweet potatoes for Dan. He bought the stuff on Sunday from our Shop-rite up the block where we both have probably logged already over five hundred hours of our lives so far. But everyone needs groceries, right?

I'm thinking about you, lady-list-leaver. All the people and things I can't know in the aisles of the world.

friday, friday

Sometimes, I know it's counterintuitive, I get oddly sad on Fridays. Something about leaving the fixed certainty of the workweek, where I know who I am and what my limitations are, for the weekend version of myself. The "me" that makes dentist appointments, organizes my clothes, hand washes pantyhose,returns pants to Kohl's, tries to makes grocery lists, makes social plans so I don't feel like life is boring and predictable, calls my parents, catches up on emails, looks for a cheap coffee table, worries about the mini-lakes in my backyard, frets about my lack of dishwasher, ponders washing the kitchen floor, shops for shoes, vacuums, and sometimes sits vapidly with a plate of French Toast and watches a lot of TV.

It's randomly stressful. Weekend life seems daunting on that drive home from happy hour on Friday. All the chores...the paper grading and planning...and the keen desire to do something fun, have fun! It's all too much sometimes.

Friday I got home at 5 and flopped in front of the TV in bed. Dirty Dancing was on, thank god! Underdog girl with pointy nose lands smokin' hot dance instructor. It was enough to quell that icky Friday feeling.

Looking back on the weekend (it being Sunday morning now) I feel so happy and relaxed now, I don't know how to account for the Friday ickiness except to say I'm going to consciously work on enjoying the weekend more and not angsting over my to-do list. By the way, I still haven't graded one essay.

Tom Morello Interview*

Alisa: Hi Tom, thanks for coming over!

Tom Morello: No problem. Always a pleasure.

A: Would you like some wine?

TM: No thanks!

A: I heard you will be a featured soloist on Bruce Springsteen's newest album; anything you'd like to say about that?

TM: Well, it's always an inspiration to work with hands-on artists like Bruce. I grew up listening to Bruce as...

A: (interrupting): I'm sorry, Tom, it's not appropriate to touch my leg that way. I'm a married woman.

TM: Please forgive me. I'm just taken by you. Your new bangs, your skin, your boots. You are just scrumptious.

A: I'm very flattered.

TM: I love your blog. Your poetry really resonates with me. The one you wrote about roads without names--

A: "Roads without Names"?!

TM: That's the one!

A: Wow!

TM: It's like you blogged your way right into my superego.

A: Wow!

TM: I feel like we're twins.

A: But I'm not half-Kenyan.

TM: We're emotionally identical twins.

A: (softly) OOOOOOOOOH!

TM: I would love to cut a song with you for Audioslave.

A: I could write some lyrics. Something about a doomed diaspora?

TM: Or about how we should arm the homeless?

A: Or home the armless?

TM: It's just you're so beautiful and so smart and your blog is so bloggy.

A: Thanks. Oh, my. You really are a delight. Will you do some push-ups and then help me grade some essays and then we can call Bruce Springsteen about going to the Melting Pot together for dinner?

TM: I'm not that into fondue.

A: Damn it, Tom. This is my irrational fantasy.

TM: Do I need to wear a shirt? Bring your dream journal! I want you to read the whole thing to me out loud.

_______
*Did not actually occur

Roads Without Names

My old boyfriends always had to hike
on roads without names.

They wore muddy boots,
had me reeling like a compass.

We picnicked on some crumbling wall
where the Picts or Celts

buried their wives in summer silt:
they, too, had no names.

One told me about a souterrain
on Station Island—
Caverna Purgatory—
they say is the mouth to hell

and he dragged his fingers on my palm
to chart our course:

a rhumb line across the Highlands,
by way of Canaan,
then we’ll meet in the lowlands.

II.
I lost their names somewhere there,
on the old Roman road, but remember when I see doors

without walls, walls over graves, the valley terra firma
where we slept.

Young explorers minted with Dr. Bronner’s soap:
you live for the
the downward descent,
on stone, over bone.

Now we're old, like Mercator maps,
and our shoes are clean.

Middle School Gym

You know how the Milgram experiment revealed that ordinary folks were capable of cruelly hurting one another with electric shocks just because "authority" told them to? Back in 1990 our the gym teachers re-created that experiment with volleyball.

Last night I watched some kids getting ready for a wrestling match at school and the squeak of their sneakers smacking the wood floor and the dusty slide of the blue mats and that hollow, piercing gym whistle was an almost-pleasant reminder of seventh grade gym. They had us trained like Maoist soldiers, not that we appreciated it at the time.

They lined us up everyday, hundreds of us, in tombstone-perfect rows. If you weren't in your spot, you were marked absent and punished accordingly for cutting. I had a purple T-shirt with my first name Sharpie'd on the front, my last name on the back, according to strict regulations. I lived in daily terror of having my sneaker's laces not being up to the teacher's standards: we had heard stories from kids a year ahead of us that if we didn't have our laces tight enough, the teachers made you sprint across the gym. I heard if you whined that you couldn't participate due to "your monthly visitor" the teachers hit you in the face with a box of Kotex. I heard that they were relentlessly cruel with occasional weigh-ins, shouting your weight across the room to one another so it could be recorded on a giant chart in the girl's locker room so everyone could see if you were "healthy" or "overweight" or "morbidly obese". These weigh-ins occurred in our underwear so they could also ascertain scoliosis and a back brace would be immediately issued and you would have to wear it outside your clothes until your eighteenth birthday.

Ah, rumors and memory! Marry those two together and you would think I spent two years at Rura Penthe* (see my footnotes at the bottom of this posting).

I was slow and silly and un-athletic; to survive, I had to lay low, not incur the attention, thus the wrath, of the two imposing women in charge of getting us ready for the Presidential Fitness Challenge. They wore tiny golf skirts; they appeared as mean and hard as human tennis rackets. I can't remember their humanity, but I know they weren't cruel. It was just...they really, really wanted us to play some serious volleyball.

They set up the nets in October and we played endless games until June. I know we must have played pickleball and at one point there was that awkward unit on social dancing, but volleyball dominates my memory. (Regarding the social dancing unit: the sincerest wish of my heart was to slow dance to Timmy T's "One More Try" with this one particularly special young man, but 'promenading' with him in sweaty gym togs was a real slow burn for me too). Anyway, the endless chanting of "we're gonna rotate/our team is real great" sung by a handful of popular girls with impressively high bangs kick-started each game. The rest of us plebians shivered in our canvas shorts and prayed that college and beauty would come to us soon.

When did it start to get ugly? With a wheeze of a whistle, the teachers' pressure and our general anxiety created a maelstrom of cruelty and betrayal. (I mean, at that age I was likely to collapse in tears if someone told me I had a little comma-size smear of pen on my face. Forget the agony of a missed serve in a playoff match).

First, we were divided into leagues and told to bond as to face the common enemy.

My comrades (completely on board with me in my general disdain for the absurdity of gym class and the utter seriousness it was treated) became Lord of the Flies when that volleyball game started. Your best pal from Math would scream and cry if you missed a ball; that nice, quiet boy on my bus with the Gumby T-shirt issued a grimace and silent treatment for my every missed serve. And I don't even want to talk about Renee, that exchange student from Argentina who had us in such terror of losing I think I faked sick the day of the "play-offs". I heard he was actually seventeen and still in seventh grade, but again, that could be rumor. It could also have been the mustache.

Speaking of exchange students, there was once this boy from Paraguay who visited us in third grade named Unito (Unido?). A rumor circulated that he was kissing girls on the rubber-tire dinosaur jungle gym thing on our playground, so he was deported back to Paraguay. Looking back, he probably was just visiting for a short time and just went home. But I think about that kid all the time, especially when I see kids in red shorts. What if....Unito really was sent away somewhere terrible? I can't really worry about that right now.**

You think you know where my volleyball memories are going. You think this is really about how volleyball messed me up for life, how I was bullied, etc. Well, all of that is true, BUT I will say: there was one game where all eyes were on me. It was my turn to serve. The boy I liked was cheering me on like orphans in Guatemala would be systemically executed if I missed; the cool girls were chanting my name in a creepy singsong, as if twenty minutes earlier in the locker room they didn't inform me that I needed to start shaving my legs; the teachers huddled from afar, hiding their mouths with clipboards, discussing the probability of my missing and the amount of time until happy hour. It was intense I tell you!

Guess what? I popped that ball cleanly over the net. Kenny on the other side of the net neatly hit it back; our team spiked it down and the game was over. We cheered briefly and shuffled back into the murky depths of the locker room. The moral of the story is: sometimes we exceed expectations. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition***.

Also: has anyone heard from Unito?

FOOTNOTES

*Klingon Prison Colony
**this is a random story I tell my students about the dangers of racial stereotyping/Othering/red shorts, etc.
***or Rura Penthe.

things to save, things to burn

I just watched the romantic comedy "Leap Year" and although it won't win any awards for originality, the moist-y open green landscapes of Ireland, as well as its spunky-and-hunky male love interest, captivated me long enough to ponder the big question of life: if I had sixty seconds to run around my house and grab things, what would I save? (this was a question posed by the guy to the girl early in the movie. the answer meant EVERYTHING!) Here is my response.

Things to Save

Daniel
Poundy (my pound puppy) (I am not a good namer of things.)
Gold earrings and cross from my grandmother
Diesel Jeans, size 30: still a chance. still a chance.
journals (actual entry excerpt 2000: I met another hot guy named Dave! whaddup with that! Had a great time at Freehold Chili's. He paid the bill. He IM'd me but hasn't actually called. But I have a good feeling about this one :) !!)

Things to Burn

all the furniture. cost so much and took so much time to pick out. all those trips to Raymour and Flanagin, Macy's, all the arguing. Up in flames! Second time around: weird modern stuff that Daniel likes that always looks like a neon, hovering orb.

diet books, so many. the body will be like the house, burning down: I will start over in a new home without anything at all that makes me feel bad.

fourteen half-empty bottles of shampoo I didn't like, currently in the closet.

hundreds of cracked CD jewel cases, actual CD's long missing or in my car, scratched beyond recognition

many, many socks without partners. They will turn and burn and writhe and perish in the flames. They will reunite with their long-gone mates in sock heaven. May god have mercy on their soles!!! Ha, get it?

state mandated benchmark essays I have to grade by next week. oh well!*



*just kidding. i care about the kids. that's why I keep my grading at school.

Have You Been to Boulder, CO?

I went to Boulder last summer to attend the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. It was a magical two weeks. I came home expecting full-on life clarity! All questions answered! Look at me, I'm a Buddhist now! Come read my soon to be published manuscript! All of my pants now have elastic waistbands! Where are my prairie dresses? etc.

Staring down the reality that I was way too excited to have a glass of seltzer Friday night (I just interpret that as meaning that I am craving more enriched, visceral experiences than that of beverages), I sat down to write this blog. I was missing Boulder all week, and dreaming and scheming my next adventures. Here are my best and worst memories.

1. I rented a bike, which had an ungainly front basket, and the first thing I did was careen into Boulder Creek and lightly scrape my knee. A guy who was fishing helped me climb back onto the path. "You can't be both, you have to choose," he said enigmatically, pointing at the path, then back at the creek. This struck me as funny and wonderful.

2. The reason I had to rent a bike from the tourist kiosk was because the "free" bike I was entitled to (with my Summer Writing Program tuition) was locked in the bike shack. No one had the key to the bike shack because the band who practiced in the bike shack supposedly broke up. That's why I couldn't get my free bike.

3. My friend Molly found a lost dog, a very scared and wet Golden retriever (later on I learned his name was Pete). She had to catch a bus so my friend Beckee and I walked around the neighborhood trying to find his owners. I approached a guy who was standing in his garden but was suddenly embarrassed when I realized he was actually showering in an outdoor shower. Not naked, but in a bathing suit. He had an ironic mustache and I stammered in such a way I definitely looked like I "liked him more than a friend". I was careful to work into our conversation that I was married, hoping not to disappoint the fit young man. Later on, he was my waiter at the bar down the block and didn't seem to remember me from what I thought was a deeply meaningful moment.

4. At the Boulder Tea House I read a 20 year old waiter three pages of shipwreck notes for a novel I might write. He offered some very good suggestions. He invited me to come up the mountain for some camping and good times*, but I was suddenly terrified he might murder me, so I declined.

5. There was a very serious ten minutes when I considered shaving my head. Thanks to my friend Annette who told me this might happen ahead of time, and said when it happens to give it a few days before I decide. I decided not to. It turns out, I'm super vain.

6. The dorm had no sheets or pillows or blankets. My room had no lamp. I thought the "spartan" atmosphere very Bohemian and cool. Until around midnight when I huddled under my suitcase and cried to Dan that I was coming home early. It turns out, I can't be sassy all the time.

7. The lost dog, Pete, was mine for a few hours. We fell deeply in love. I promised to bring him home with me and told him everything. Everything. Then two stoned kids drove up in a van. "Oh, man, is that Pete?!" they asked with hooded eyes. "Oh, that's Pete. We were looking for him." They took Pete back, just as Animal Control showed up. Pete lives around the block in a house that has tie-dyed Phish t-shirts as curtains.

8. I'm sorry, Pete.

9. I got to Boulder several hours before the dorm was opened. It was over ninety degrees and I was exhausted. I found an air conditioned coffee shop and fell asleep in the back, on top of my backpack, for at least an hour and a half. No one bothered me. No one asked me to buy anything. I was a little embarrassed and snuck outside the back, afraid of getting in trouble for some reason. When I started my classes the next day, three people said they recognized me as the girl who was "passed out in the back of Trident." For some reason I thought it was uncool to say I was jet lagged but never had to defend my nap specifically.

10. A Peeping Tom was arrested at the Naropa campus, drilling holes so he could watch girls go to the bathroom. I saw the cops apprehend a young guy in full-on Buddhist student attire, orange robes and all. It was so heartbreaking. Everyone gathered on the lawn; campus security (and lack thereof) was discussed; a few people delicately suggested that the open campus philosophy might be problematic, since it's hard to tell who is "homeless" or a "traveler" and a "student" or "both" because so many of the men at Naropa have beards, bare feet, etc. Everyone quickly agreed that the Peeping Tom incident was just a blip. It was incredible to see how one incident couldn't break the open minded spirit of the school.

*I'm sure his friends instructed him to "bring nerdy older women who like nautical research" to their bonfire that night.

New Year's Dresses, Taye Diggs, Dan's Yellow Sweater

Yesterday at Macy's, hoping to hand-pick some miraculous item that would soothe away all the bad ju-ju of returning to work, I quickly became lost amidst a sequined vortex. Bright party dresses, all marked down for the end-of-the-holiday clearance sale. One shouldered purples; strappy beiges; shimmering black satins-- all articulating, somehow, the night I didn't have, the night I don't think I ever had.

It's not as depressing as it sounds. I had a very pleasant New Year's, actually-- but those fabulous dresses always stir a little response in me.

It starts with this question. Who really dresses up for New Year's? My parents did, I think, a few times in the 80's. They would go to the Elks Lodge and see party bands play. My mother was so glamorous in her patent leather shoes with the ankle strap and her careful, plummy lipstick. My dad's red striped tie made a semiannual appearance, tucked away after midnight, ready for the next funeral or wedding.

Those nights out probably weren't as elegant as they seem to be in my imagination. A firehall, balloons. But still, a chance to wear something fancy. I have to ask them if those nights were fun. I bet they were. Even now, New Year's seems to be a big thing for my parents and their circle. Always a party, a cheeseball, tipsy dancing on the rug to Sam Cooke. Always that phone call just after midnight, "Alisa, it's so crazy here!!! Say hi to Aunt Joycie and Uncle Tommy!! Oh, I can barely hear you!!"

When I was a kid I daydreamed about kissing some wonderful stranger at midnight: a man in a tuxedo pulling me close. The dress of my adolescent fantasy was purple with a big sash and puffy skirt, similar to the style popular with girls going to bat mitzvahs...the dress I never actually owned, of course.

Because I never had a place to wear it to!

Now flash forward, say, twenty years and one day to that clearance rack. Where would I wear that sheath-y, champagne colored little flapper dress? Jazz club, in the city. No subway. Taxi there and back. Do I have my husband in this alternate timeline? Sure. He's guiding the small of my back through the crowd. We have a little velvet booth in the back, away from the music, so we can talk.

I think in this little alternate reality we are also good friends with Taye Diggs* (as seen in the movie Chicago). He's at our table and flirts with me until Dan gets the hint. My husband and I hit the dance floor, art-deco lighting softening every line.

The one-shouldered purple dress. Sorry, Dan-- that dress is for a sassy single girl. I don't think you can exist in this imaginary timeline. Maybe I meet you the next day?** That dress and me are going to the Tunnel with a gaggle of riotous girlfriends. We will cram into the ladies room and apply lip gloss and use face powder and complain all night about how awful the guys are at the club, how there's no potential good guys out there, how the drinks cost too much. In this timeline I get to kiss someone at midnight and will probably talk about it a little too much the next day and thereafter. The memory will dim a little each year and become grossly exaggerated and falsified so by the year 2067 everyone "remembers" the night I smooched James Franco.***

In my real life, I met my husband the day after New Year's Day. I wore my hair in cornrows**** and I do believe, if Dan had seen my get up for New Year's that year, he would have run for the hills (red satin halter top, mini skirt. and no, I wasn't especially thin in 2003 if you were curious. but I was looking pretty delicious if I say so myself). Who knew that was my future husband staring down the limp rope of an ill advised cornrow? One beer and a plateful of soul food later, though...it's the start of a life. And I'm so glad I didn't write Dan off because of his yellow sweater, which I found unusually bright*****.

After all, clothes don't really mean anything.

*Hey, it's my fantasy.
**I actually did meet you the next day in real life so stop complaining.
***It could have happened I tell you! I know someone who went to NYU film school who had a class with a guy who met him when he did "Freaks and Geeks".
****I sense you're judging me.
*****but aw, he was so nice. and cute.