The mother-in-law has complained for ages that she does not know what her son – my Mista – does for a living. My mother has the same complaint, about both the Mista and my good self.
At the recent family reunion, my uncle tiptoed across eggshells (figuratively: he’s been in a wheelchair since he was 16 thanks to someone exercising his 2nd amendment right) when he asked, “I know I should know, but can you tell me again, what is it you do?”
The mother-in-law overheard this exchange and laughed. I laughed with her.
“See! You’re not the only one!”
Immediately my thoughts turned to The (eagerly anticipated)Book, and I wondered if The Magnificent Peach and her magnificent, beautiful, blogging comrades had infiltrated my mind. I hoped they had, for then I would be a better blogger! Whether they had or not, I was reminded that in many circumstances – great, small, horrible – you’re not the only one. I look forward to reading about the great, the small, the funny, the tragic and will take comfort in my good company.
You can too. Buy the book, support a worthy cause (Warchild), and have a laugh or a cry!
The mother-in-law has complained for ages that she does not know what her son – my Mista – does for a living. My mother has the same complaint, about both the Mista and my good self.
At the recent family reunion, my uncle tiptoed across eggshells (figuratively: he’s been in a wheelchair since he was 16 thanks to someone exercising his 2nd amendment right) when he asked, “I know I should know, but can you tell me again, what is it you do?”
The mother-in-law overheard this exchange and laughed. I laughed with her.
“See! You’re not the only one!”
Immediately my thoughts turned to The (eagerly anticipated)Book, and I wondered if The Magnificent Peach and her magnificent, beautiful, blogging comrades had infiltrated my mind. I hoped they had, for then I would be a better blogger! Whether they had or not, I was reminded that in many circumstances – great, small, horrible – you’re not the only one. I look forward to reading about the great, the small, the funny, the tragic and will take comfort in my good company.
You can too. Buy the book, support a worthy cause (Warchild), and have a laugh or a cry!
The lady with the bad habit has no idea she’s conjuring up memories. She’s dressed in a woman’s suit, black, ill-fitting and frumpy. Cheap. Not the slick, well-fitting ensemble of rich-textured cloth you’d find in the City. More the style I think you’d find in the solicitor’s offices around Holborn, where I’m certain she has caught this west-bound Picadilly train.
Her head is tilted down; so from my vantage point – the seat opposite hers – I have an aerial view of her nose, the only visible feature of her face is only partially visible. With one hand she clutches a clump of her unkempt hair; the fingers of her other hand work through the individual strands in the captive clump. She is searching for split ends.
She pauses, releases the strand of hair, pushes her hair back and away from her eyes, and looks up. I’m shocked. While scouring her head for split ends, she had had the air of a mentalist, a fringe element, possibly homeless, definitely crazy. Yet, once the search has been put on hold, she looks quite normal, sedate. Big blue eyes in her unmade-up face.
She reaches into her bag for a pen and notebook; I breathe a sigh of relief. Her moment of obvious and outward neurosis has passed. She opens the notebook, but the cap stays firmly on the pen. She reaches up and chooses another clump of hair, eager to examine it’s contents, eager to find split ends to delve apart.
I look away. I can’t look, but I have to look. I look down.
On the floor I see her bag. It’s such a normal looking bag. It looks like it belongs to a normal looking person. Not this self-grooming monkey. An empty Tupperware sits visible in her open bag. It’s the same style Tupperware container I use.
She’s got my Tupperware. She’s just like me. Oh, please call off the search for split ends – right now! You have no idea how unattractive it makes you look.
The memories come flooding back. The mentalist-looking, self-grooming monkey in a solicitor’s office suit has become a conjurer.
I wonder if Tupperware is a brand they had in England, and consequently if it is a catch-all word like hoover or band-aid or kleenex or xerox* but to describe plastic containers of various shapes and sizes. I think how different Tupperware used to be to our modern versions, which probably have different brand names. I think about the yellow tupperware in my kitchen. It’s been used to store sugar for over 38 years. I stole it from my mother when I left the United States. I knew it would be a memento of my mother and of my childhood. I think about my mother taking the yellow tupperware from it’s place in the pantry in order to mix sugar with cinnamon, the first step in preparing what was my favourite breakfast: cinnamon toast. (memory 1)
The woman is picking up a new clump of individual strands, each a split end candidate.
Stop, stop, stop. It makes you look so tacky!
My mom was right. I praise her for breaking me of any habits that would have me mistaken for a mentalist once I was all grown up. I remember I used to search my hair for split ends. I was eleven or twelve, on the cusp of young womanhood. I remember mom chauffeuring me from piano lessons, from school, from friend’s homes. She drove a Datsun 280ZX with T-tops (a Z car!). Made me feel like Smokey and the Bandit. I used to love finding a split end and carefully pulling it apart from the two respective ends. 1 destroyed, a headful left to go. I remember mom telling me to stop. “So tacky.” she would say. (memory 2)
Despite mom’s disapproval, I continued to occasionally peruse my head for a splittable split end. I remember being on such a mission in my final year of high school. I sat across the room from Robert Cohn. He went on to become a big deal at Harvard University. In high school he was a nerd, an affable nerd who could sit at my lunch table any time he wanted. (memory 3)
I haven’t thought of Robert Cohn in years. I stopped looking for split ends because he told me he found it funny to watch me going cross-eyed from across English class.
Train of thought thanks to lady on the tube with the bad habit.
*I think I’ve noticed ‘xerox’ as a common noun and verb is falling into disuse.
This post is supposed to be about female depilation (as opposed to male depilation or just depilation in general). It’s supposed to gross out the squeamish Mister Jimmy Page and his trousers.
But, I don’t feel like blogging about my recent bikini wax.
I feel like blogging about the thoughts in my head, which right now are jumping all over the place from 1 silly place to another, but all with a common theme.
Like I notice my last post didn’t have any labels, so I’ve gone in to edit that post and assign it some categories. I wonder why I’m always forgetting to assign labels to my blog posts. Then I wonder if each time I edit an already posted post, does this cause readers like bloglines to think I’ve posted something new? In other words, can the Internet distinguish between a new post versus a simple edit to a pre-existing post.
I think about how I cannot get enough of Muse. I listen to them over and over and over again. For some reason, Muse makes me think of The Overnight Editor, for whom I have the utmost respect and fondness, and I don’t even know him and that just seems weird.
And why on earth am I so damn certain that OE likes Muse?
Then I think of OE and the lovely Isabel, and I wonder how many moments together have they been able to steal from the distance or is it just an Internet thing?
I trawl through my blogroll, — and the moment of typing ‘blogroll’ makes me think, “why is it blogroll. why not blog role or blog list or list of blogs. and is it one word or two?”
I’m always wondering about 1 word versus 2. Headstart or head start.
I think about how sick and tired of being a Slimy Mollusc I am. When will I evolve? I’m sick of checking my stats and wanting more and more and more. I should be satisfied.
I reread my last sentences. I laugh at myself. “I should be satisfied?” I ask myself and laugh at myself because the implication is that I am not when I so totally am.
I sit in my garden chair listening to The News drone on unintelligibly from a neighbour’s open window. I haven’t got much interest so I do not try to exercise my Jamie Summers-style super sense of hearing. A baby in my kitchen alternates between squeals of laughter, silence, and desperate wails. Silence. Wail. Silence.
“Papa!”
Silence. Laughter. Silence.
I have an admission to make: I do not have a super sense of hearing.
What is true: my current interest level in The News and my inability to make head or tails from the jumbled noise coming from my neighbour’s open window are aligned this morning. I don’t care what the inaudible gray noise, which I know to be a television man’s voice, has to say. I’ll read the paper or watch my own television later today, if my interest level shifts gears. Right now, the droning is just a part of early morning summer-ish ambience. As is the baby in the kitchen.
I sit in my garden chair and think about what summer brings to London.
Have we really had 5 straight days of sunshine and warmth?
I can’t be bothered to dissect the past week to verify the sunny day count. I don’t need to justify the feeling that summer is here. London summer advent has signs. They are here.
First of all the open windows. My windows, the neighbours’ windows. Not to mention the chair in my garden, and the fact that I’m sitting in it. The baby in the kitchen is also a sign. The baby in the kitchen is not my baby. You should know better by now. I do not have, nor have I ever, had a baby. The baby in the kitchen is a visitor. Visitors abound in London Summer.
I think about the other signs I’ve witnessed over the course of the past week.
The abundance of cleavage. Skin. Exposed. Everywhere.
Itchy red eyes and tissues in all of my pockets and increased trips to Boots or Superdrug or the local chemist for packets of Claratin or Zirtek or the one that starts with a P but I never remember the name.
The increased need for a lead when Butters and I go to the park anytime that’s not very early or very late because there are scads of picnic-ers or sunbathers or picnic-ers-slash-sunbathers (and even readers!) littering the normal way. These people – especially the picnic-ers – excite Butters to a point of socially unacceptable friendliness.
Summeresque sunshine also brings out the freaks. The man in a dress shirt and shoes wears shorts to practice Tai Chi in the middle of the pavement.
Summer is here. Finally.
I pass Richard as I’m going up the stairs from the basement to the ground floor. I’m going to get my midmorning coffee. He’s coming down the steps, getting in late. I think to myself, “There’s Richard.”
I really should catch up with him. He’s one of mine*, but he’s not been on any of my projects or directly involved with my customer so he’s easy to bypass. The general impression among the managers is that he’s having a harder time finding his footing than we normally expect. I don’t really know whom to believe. I’ve probably not taken the time with him that I could have, or should have.
This isn’t what I’m thinking when I pass Richard on the steps.
Instead I think “There’s Richard.” A thought followed by a sense of surprise that this isn’t the first Richard. There’s another Richard, one with whom I interact much more frequently. My sense of surprise at finding I’ve got multiple Richards in my professional life takes on a philosophical bent.
How can he be Richard and the other Richard be Richard too? How can the same name designate such completely different people. I think there’s even a third Richard somewhere around, and he’ll be completely different too. At least I’m the only Clarissa around me, but certainly there are more in the world. How can we be so unique but have such a limited repertoire?
The words are reeling through my head as I walk to the coffee shop.
The words – these words – I think, are perfect for the blog. These are thoughts. Thoughts I’m having. You must remember to blog about this.
I get my coffee, drink my coffee, have a few meetings, have a few phone calls, and then I go out for my lunch hour.
On the way to the coffee shop where I will nourish myself with 3 more shots of espresso mixed with a hot cup of soya milk, I try to recall my train of thought from the morning. I sometimes use my lunch hour to blog.
What was I thinking this morning?
“Goddamn it!” I think to myself. “How could you have forgotten?” But, before I get to the café, the blog topic I thought of this morning comes back to me.
What drivel!
I have had a change of heart.
I think about my month of daily blogging and the momentum that came with it – the increased number of thoughts. There were so many, and even when I stopped to take a break, the words would fill my head, generally in the morning. I ask myself, “Did they come because of my reading or did they come because of my daily blogging, and are they interesting anyway?”
No, no, I do not think they are interesting, after all. These thoughts. These strange, disjointed thoughts. These aren’t things, aren’t events, aren’t real. This is vanity. Egotism.
I chastise myself for not stepping away from myself to focus on something real, like the recent chaos at Terminal 5. That was a post I started this morning, but I bored myself so I stopped.
I could go on and on, but I think I should stop. Myself. Again.
*Direct reports.
This morning I pretended like it was the weekend.
What does that mean?
It means I ignored the alarm that would normally have me up and going to the gym. It means when I couldn’t sleep any more and my mind started drifting to the coffee jar I sang the lines of a partially “true” (meaning published and widely recognised) and a partially “made-up” song that has, since 1995, heralded the onset of morning coffee making in my house. The song is my way of telling the Mista that I’m getting out of bed to make coffee and that he should give some sign that he is ready for his morning cup.
I’ve been told that the tune of my coffee song comes from the Musical, Hair. I cannot confirm this since I have neither ever seen the musical nor owned a copy of the soundtrack. The tune was given to me in Madrid (when I lived there) during the visit of a Swiss-English friend who was a real Hair aficionado. I believe the first two lines also come from Hair, but it is the special twist I’ve put on the song that makes it mine.
Don’t tell me to stop crying, please just hold me when I do.
Don’t tell your girlfriend about me
Or she won’t want to have some coffee
The ‘some’ in the last line is sometimes ‘no’ because sometimes one needs to improvise when in the throes of musical inspiration.
There is a low-toned chorus of “waa woo woooooo” (coming after ‘girlfriend’, ‘me’ and ‘coffee’) that the Mista used to sing. He doesn’t participate so much anymore: just looks at me with an adult’s patience with a child. If I egg him on do his bit, he generally digs in his heals with a ‘no’ because he doesn’t like singing on command; although from time to special time he indulges me.
I pretended it was the weekend this morning because last night the Mista got home from a business trip and asked me if I was going to the gym the next morning (this morning) in that way which I know means, “don’t go to the gym tomorrow morning because I want to be with you in the morning”. My gym bag had already been packed and was waiting at the door, and I’m really keen to get ripped and cut like one of those girls on Lost who manage to maintain their fit figures despite all the junk food that seems readily available on the island, so it was a difficult decision to stay in bed with the Mista this morning and pretend it was the weekend.
Some decisions need to be made.
*I wonder if I’ve changed the nature of this song by posting it here. Is it now 100% “true” since it has now been “published” or does it still fail the ‘widely recognised’ category – no disrespect to my blog’s audience.
**To make up for not going to the gym, I made the coffee whilst standing on one leg. This “works the core” presumably.
Like any good Easter Monday, I woke up naturally this Easter Monday without the jolt of an alarm rushing me into consciousness. The sneaky, seeping-through-the-crack-in-the curtains, gray morning light of Saturday (and indeed Sunday) has been displaced by a shiny, newer, more yellow variety. This yellow strain is not strong, and I wonder how long it will last.
Before I even have a chance to think about coffee, I feel a dull, mildly painful (annoyingly uncomfortable) throbbing near the fingernail I partially bit, partially pulled off last night. I’m not normally one to bite my nails, but occasionally, when the proper equipment isn’t available and a particular nail has gotten too long or awkwardly shaped I might (do) pick at/ play with/obsess over the damn thing until, before I know it, I’ve got a loose nail hanging from the little socket at the corner of its nail bed, and I have no choice but to yank it out. More often than not, this results in a quick shot of endurable pain and a little blood.
God damn it!
That’s why this morning my finger is throbbing, and my early morning attention dwells on my hands rather than drifting to the kitchen where the coffee jar awaits. The thumb on my left hand automatically moves under and across the adjoining palm where it expects to twiddle with my wedding band. This is a habit. Relatively discreet. This morning, this relatively, discreet, and hitherto unconscious habit jolts me into a fuller, more heart-pumping consciousness than my work week alarm clock normally does. My wedding band is not there.
Filed under: 2005, cultural conundrums, mista, problems, stream of consciousness
Before I had met Bobby Charles I would not have thought George Hounslow could have existed. I would have chalked him up to the over-active imagination of a fiction writer. Over 35 years of exposure to the rougher gender hadn’t prepared me for the unabashed misogynistic, sensualist that lived in Bobby Charles.
I like to think I know men – that I knew a thing or two about men even before I met Bobby Charles. I think I did. Bobby Charles was an outlier.
The Mista says I’m a guys’ girl. I like being a guys’ girl. I like drinking pints and not worrying (so much) about plucking my eyebrows and painting my nails. I attribute this way of my being to having grown up under the influence of two older brothers. I trailed after them, watching all the naughty things they did*. Although their boyish misconduct wrought me with ambivalence – I was equally indignant and envious of their misbehaviour – it was conduct that grew familiar. As we grew up, and the nature of my brothers’ naughtiness changed, I learned to be wary of every man’s ‘inner dirty dog’.
They all want to get into your pants.
The topic here is not feminism. I’m not going to get into whether it’s a bad thing for men to want to get into your (women’s) pants. Or investigate the whys and why nots women should or shouldn’t want to get into men’s trousers. I have no interest in exploring the societal double-standard, a subject, which frankly, I find hackneyed.
The topic here is an extraordinary man, a man who is described in the book that I’m reading, a man who I wouldn’t have believed existed except that I met him and had to work with him in the square mile protected by Griffins.
The topic here is trouble; the topic is Bobby Charles, a man, I suspect, who is trouble for any woman with whom he ‘gets involved’.
*Like sending lizards ‘into space’ by taping them to bottle rockets or setting booby traps for speeding cars (in the form of fishing line strung across the road) or TPing** the house of the neighbours who were chosen to be ‘the enemy’ for some reason or another.
**Toilet Papering: an act of ‘soft vandalism’ in that no permanent damage is caused, but there is often a hell of a mess to clean up.
Filed under: 2005, cultural conundrums, observations London, Odd, stream of consciousness
I’m reading a book.
It happens to be the very same book that the woman who stood next to me on the tube in the rush-to-get-home-hour was reading. She had the look of a cliche: mousey, librarian, prim, proper, bookish. I imagined she lived alone. Or with a cat. Or maybe with a same-sex flatmate. Certainly a flatmate would wear on her nerves. She (our mouse) would pine for the peace and quiet in which she could pamper her brain with books, books and more books! Even the most considerate of flatmates would cramp her style, I imagine. Unless, her flatmate is a sister spirit! Birds of a feather who twitter over Ideas and who rarely drink, but when they do they get drunk on a glass of wine.
I was imagining a sad life for the not-quite-dour, but certainly-serious-faced young woman next to me on the tube. I noticed she was reading a thickish book. Then, I noticed it was the same one I was reading. She had probably bought it on the same 3 for 2 sale at Waterstone’s that I had, though the orange, circular sale sticker had been removed.
I had just finished reading the following passage when I noticed the girl was reading my book:
George’s approach to women was clumsy, over-humble, and he might even stammer. (But his stammer always sounded as if he were doing it on purpose.) Meanwhile his deep-set brown eyes would be fixed on the women with an almost bullying intentness. And yet his manner would remain humble, apologetic. Women got flustered or angry, or laughed nervously. He was a sensualist of course. I mean, a real sensualist, not a man who played the role of one, as so many do, for one reason or another. He was a man who really, very much, needed women. {…} When George looked at a woman he was imagining her as she would be when he had fucked her into insensibility. And he was afraid it would show in his eyes. I did not understand this then, I did not understand why I got confused when he looked at me. But I’ve met a few men like him since, all with the same clumsy impatient humility, and with the same hidden arrogant power.1
The girl was much further along in the book than I. She had already read this passage.
What did she think of George?
I wondered if he (or the prospect of him) excited her? Or scared her? Or did she doubt his very existence? I wondered, because I thought she must doubt George.
A girl like her wouldn’t accept that a man like George is true.
I wondered because it struck me that there was a time that I would have doubted George too. Now I know better.
1 Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. p.126.
