Date Night

I impulsively bought a Groupon last weekend for a "chocolate making course" for two at an Italian heritage center in Scotch Plains. I thought it would be a sexy and romantic couples thing for me and Dan. You know, licking chocolate off each other's faces etc. and maybe having impulsive, sensual encounters on a private kitchen counter in a restaurant kitchen. Like that scene in Ghost with the clay only with fudge.

We ended up in an Episcopal church hall with about 100 other people, carefully chopping up marshmallows and sticking red sugar on each bit, then squishing it into frosting for a rose-petal themed cupcake. I was immediately impressed with Dan's skill with candy making, and felt the spark of love ignite when I licked each marshmallow so the candy would stick to it.

"I am going to do such naughty things to you later," I declared.

"Oooh, I can't wait!" said Dan.

"I was talking to the cupcake," I replied. (insert sitcom laughter here).

The room was filled with quite a few other random couples of various ages, undoubtedly lured to this strange night out by the Groupon. I tried not be to overly threatened by the very sexy, thin young Italian woman, Francesca, who circulated around, offering frosting-piping advice with a caramel accent.

No worries on that front; my husband was focused on the candy workshop with the same precision and attention to direction that he probably has doing client service support at work. I also disturbed him by eating sprinkles off the table.

Still, it was a good time. I was thinking about The Bachelor and how the whole premise of the show is adrenaline and novelty; the contestants participate in ropes courses, bungee jumping, and African safaris together...no wonder they fancy themselves in love after one day. Then they come back to reality, back to work, back to the United States, marooned together in normalcy. No wonder they never stay together. I could find myself loving even the most ordinary moron if we'd spent two days tribal dancing in the Brazilian rain forest.

So it's better to work backwards. Shipwrecked together in real life where sometimes the most interesting thing we have going on is Battlestar Galactica coming in the Netflix queue, we have to inflate the ole life raft and sail away.

I think I'm too hard on myself, too hard on life and what it should be. It's probably enough to sneak away every now and then and see yourself and your mate in a new context. It's not an African safari; it doesn't even make a great blog posting, really. It's just life. A little messy and a little sweet and little random. Sometimes I get rebellious and try to lick the table. And there's always my husband, shaking his head and handing me the most impressively imperfect truffle he rolled himself in cocoa powder.

shame

Something weird happened in school yesterday that I only thought about when I crawled into bed late last night.

In class, we were talking about a segment from Primetime Live, which I showed in the context of helping the kids understand the Milgram experiments. The series showcased a recent news story in which a McDonald's employee, a female high school student, was cruelly tricked into being strip-searched by her manager and the manager's security guard boyfriend because the girl thought a cop on the telephone was ordering her to do it by proxy.

As it turns out, it was a scam perpetuated by the security guard, who wanted to humiliate the girl and intimidate her into giving him oral sex, which she did, because she terrified and thought it might get her out of trouble. The "cop" on the phone was some kind of accomplice; the manager, who was a woman, claimed to not know it wasn't a real cop and got fired. The security guard got five years in prison.

The angle of the story was an exploration of how people are so afraid of authority, they find themselves doing all kinds of things they wouldn't "normally" do...that even the idea of a cop, not even in the room, could have a girl disrobe and do a degrading act without even questioning it. It's very disturbing.

At first, a lot of the kids dismissed the story, saying the girl was abnormally stupid, that no one of average intelligence would tolerate those outrageous orders. "It's just McDonald's. She could just say, I'm leaving, I quit," they all said. That led the discussion towards the idea that our fear of authority is so deeply ingrained it overrides those logical notions, that maybe this girl decided at one point she'd do anything to not lose her job for whatever psychological or economic reasons, etc. Typical class discussion pattern, but a few levels up in intensity.

It got interesting when one very bright girl pointed out that girls do all kinds of crazy things to keep the attention and approval of boys, and that men don't understand that women spend their whole lives in fear of them, because women can be raped by men (they have that one crucial thing to lord over us, their physical strength which can come out of nowhere and hurt us). In other words, for women, men have a kind of institutional "authority" that somehow enables them to issue orders that even the most intelligent women find themselves following.

It kind of blew everyone's minds, and everyone started talking at once. Everyone resisted her at first-- typical "I-don't-want-to-believe-the-world-is-like-that" denial. But I was pleased at the level of discussion.

So pleased, I found my tongue loosening, and confessed something to the class I never shared before with anyone, with the exception of my husband. Even with him, I hadn't really touched upon the long lasting and complicated effects of the experience.

I found myself telling the class a very general version of this story:

There was this guy I used to sometimes date; I was so enamored of the idea of having a boyfriend and keeping him as my boyfriend, that is, keeping his approval of me, that I tolerated certain behaviors there is no way in hell I would tolerate now. Not "abuse" in the very obvious, after-school special way, but the other kind of abuse, the subtle kind, the most scary kind, because they don't really know how to teach girls how to detect it, because it oddly overlaps with behaviors that don't seem, on the surface, to be abusive. He used to pinch me, for example, and when I would tell him to stop, he would keep doing it, and call me a baby, suggesting that it was my problem and not his. He used to hold me down and tickle me, which I always hated, and seemed to take pleasure in it. I look back on myself back then, and I'm ashamed that it went on too long before I broke up with him, that I wasn't self-actualized enough to understand that I don't have to be treated that way, that I own my body, and that I don't have to submit to anything that violates my own code of how I should be treated.

Like the McDonald's girl in the news story looking back on herself on the security tape--later used to convict the security guard-- I can't believe what I did (or didn't do) because I was...intimidated? Afraid? Weak? Vulnerable? I am in awe at her courage in the sense that she spoke openly to the media about her ordeal. She knew people would say, "that wouldn't be me, I would never be that dumb."

I told the class, looking back on my own experience, I wish I could go back and be stronger then, but I think all of us of capable of disappointing ourselves in that regard. The power dynamic of authority and submission is very complicated, but of course, being educated about it ensures that we can break out the pattern.

When the bell rang, I felt totally nervous. Had I gone far, gotten too personal? It just happened. Sometimes when you're teaching, you forget about the persona and become your "real" self, for better or worse. That story is something I think I sort of buried. How strange it should get unearthed in the classroom where I typically construct my identity in a very specific way: knowledgeable (hopefully), understanding, sometimes zany...but never the 'real' me.

I'm calling this posting "shame" because I think shame is what informs every source of angst I've ever had: the long and twisted history of my body, and how I usually loathe it. My stubborn refusal to believe my husband when he says I'm pretty. And always...the distrust and dismissal of men, whom I sometimes find, unfairly, to be sources of the world's injustices.

Last night, I had an allergic reaction of some kind. I got these irritating little hives and started scratching. Dan applied cortisone cream to my back with this wonderful, feather-light touch. With this tenderness so much a part of his nature, it was like his wife was made of paper.

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.