Friday, May 28, 2004 My chosen career
When I was a kid, I read anything. I'd go to the library and get a stack of books, many of them marked with decals of dogs or horses, to show the subject matter. As I got older and read faster, I'd run out of books long before they were due back, so I'd dip into my mother's selections. She went for the books with the red skull decals.
Generally, a rose garden was involved, and gentility. People were killed in interesting ways with a variety of objects: jeweled daggers, pits of hot mud.
That kind of thing leaves an impression in childhood.
Later, I found out (from other mystery novels) that mostly, real private investigators have infinitely boring jobs; it's all insurance fraud stuff and divorce cases, so I scrapped any dreams of becoming a girl sleuth.
Then today I was talking with my one friend who's a bicycle messenger. He keeps encountering this one guy, who dresses in distinct and inappropriate manner. My friend recently shared an elevator with this man(I will call him WrongShirt)as WrongShirt regaled (this is a new character. Alias:)Hair-Do with patter about how he never went outside because he had a system of tunnels beneath the city, and how he had a special rat named Ben. And yes, the reference may have been cooler before the re-make, but it was more diverting than what one normally hears between floors, so my friend laughed and said, "You guys are the most interesting people I've met in an elevator all day."
WrongShirt sneered at my friend! He said, "Well! You must have a pretty boring life, in that case." My friend went and delivered the package, because he'd arrived at his floor, so he didn't have time to point out that 1)he'd specified that the gentleman were only the most intereting he'd met in an elevator 2)WrongShirt was dressed inappropriately.
My friend saw WrongShirt again today, standing outside the same building, smoking a cigarette, looking angry. "How's 'Ben'?" my friend asked. WrongShirt looked at him and sputtered, and my friend pedaled away.
Now that we know that he's forced outside to smoke several times a day, it wouldn't be so hard to seek out WrongShirt, and strike up a conversation. Why is he so angry? Why is he wearing the Wrong Shirt?
I could be personal private detective, like a personal shopper. People could hire me to question puzzling, anti-social people they have to deal with, in hopes of better understanding them. (And to satisfy morbid curiosity!)
I'd go on down there tomorrow, but I get the feeling that if I'm going to really speak WrongShirt's language, I have to study up on Dr. Who trivia. posted by Frenz | 5/28/2004 01:09:00 AM
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Wednesday, May 26, 2004 triumphant return
Sorry for the technical difficulties. I understand that the small bird that "hosts" the site was taken ill, but Helen fixed it. She probably got a new bird. I don't concern myself with it, although I do thank her very much for help.
Baltimore continues to treat me well, by flinging bugs at my face. For those of you who are not in cicada teritory right now, I tell you honestly that you're missing out. These cicadas are black with gold wings and bright red eyes. They don't fly right, and they die in droves downtown. Elsewhere, too, I'm sure, since they only live for 48 hours or so. Downtown, though, one notices them all over the pavement.
Right now I'm filling my days by moving leaves and garbage out of the backyard. I had no idea so many worms could survive in the inch or so of black dirt that years of decaying leaves have left on the pavement, but mama mia! they survive, and they thrive.
posted by Frenz | 5/26/2004 09:15:00 PM
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Tuesday, May 25, 2004 OK by me
I'm in Baltimore! It's hot a humid and nice here. I should be outdoors helping my housemate clean out the backyard, but I had to take care of a little business first.
Last night, we went out to a reservoir and listened to all the cicadas. They weren't kidding about those! As soon as I stepped out of the train station yesterday, one collieded with my chin. posted by Frenz | 5/25/2004 11:50:00 AM
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Saturday, May 22, 2004 society for cutting up muffins
Yesterday was my last day of work in Massachusetts. Some of my co-workers brought in muffins, and they said it was because my last day. Later, Helen pointed out that they were probably going to bring those muffins anyway, and they just said it was because it was my last day. Well, I told her, "That does not diminish a fact that I received a frosting muffin." I could have had two, but I held back.
I also got a big bouquet of flowers. I view it as mere coincidence that the office was right upstairs from a florist's shop. Surely, the purchase was pre-meditated.
On Monday, I catch the train to the city of V.D. and street crime. And row houses!
I figure that I'll probably go to another temp agency there, and that they'll send me to the Aquarium when the regular dolphin trainer gets the flu. Dolphins are beautiful animals: the trick is to build upon their natural behaviors, such as jumping through hoops.
posted by Frenz | 5/22/2004 01:27:00 PM
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Wednesday, May 19, 2004 My first blog
Early on in seventh grade, everyone in homeroom stood clustered up near the front of the classroom while the teacher went to get something from another room. Matt, the kid that nobody liked, elbowed past me and said something mean, so I took a piece of chalk and wrote "MATT SUCKS" on the blackboard. The kids next to me noticed and giggled, and as Matt was working his way through the crowd to tattle, I erased it, and they had nothing on me.
I tried to make this a story with a moral by adding the following true-life details: Mrs. Rasmussen, who taught life sciences as well as homeroom, was beginning the incubator experiment, so the reason everyone was up front was because we were examining the machinery while we waited for Mrs. Rasmussen to bring in the tray of one dozen fertile eggs. She set everything up and the semester continued. Sometimes in class, I'd look over at the light in the incubator, and I knew even then that it was wrong. What the hell were a class full of twelve year olds going to do with chickens? Between the Friends of Animals newsletter and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, I knew that pet chickens were doomed. But it hadn't been my idea, and I wanted them to hatch. I wanted a dozen baby chicks, yellow and peeping to disrupt class and stay in the homeroom for as long as they would let them.
Apparently, I thought about the incubator more than Mrs. Rasmussen did. Its presence was not part of a lesson, and although I remember once she got a well-liked boy to turn the eggs, otherwise, the incubator remained untouched.
Months later, long after it was time for the eggs to have hatched people bugged her about it, and she cracked shells open up at the front of the class. The smell was awful. Inside was something moist and gray. It was tufted with gray down over thin skin on one side and nearly liquid on the other, partially surrounded by hardened yoke. She cracked all of them, and the results were the same, one dozen times.
And this was where I was going to put the moral: I got to that school about seven years later than the other kids did, and I don't know whether that kid Matt was a jerk because people were mean to him or was mean to people because he was a jerk. I don't know what shaped him, who neglected him under the hot lights, and who insisted on cracking his only shell and walk around.
I know that I was not doing hero's work that day with the blackboard.
But here's the thing: the incubator was in late eighth grade, because Mrs. Rasmussen cracked the eggs when we were cleaning out the science room on the last day of school before the pool party. It was one of my final images of middle school rather than one of my first.
I have no idea what we were doing out of our desks on that day early in seventh grade, or really, whether anything at all provoked me to write "MATT SUCKS" on the board. My only absolution for that particular warcrime is that idiot Mrs. Rasmussen wasn't going to bring the incubator for another year and a half, so I didn't have the right metaphor yet.
posted by Frenz | 5/19/2004 07:31:00 AM
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Monday, May 17, 2004 eat loserville rutabegas
Summer colds knock me down, every one. I called out today, when I should probably have just gone in and worked the hours. I would have if I could've escaped being on the phone all day.
Blame lies with Decision 2004: Boston/Baltimore. Stress attacks my body. When I little, I used to get a "nervous stomach" (oh, my lands! and the vapors, too!) when I was upset. My senior year of college, pieces of one of my teeth started coming off in my breakfast snausages and in gooey candy. That's one way to figure out one is grinding one's teeth in one's sleep. If crowns weren't so expensive, I'd still prefer that over the "nervous stomach". A little cold seems like getting off easy.
My old college college just gave out the big cash prize for the best writer in the senior class again. They do it at the end of graduation. When they started giving out the prize in the sixties, they would quietly call the recipient in a few days before. Sometime in the late seventies, they decided that it was funnier not to tell the winner until his or her name is called out in front of everybody.
According to school's the press release, this year a really great girl won. My feelings of goodwill towards her are probably helped along by my lack of poisonous jealousy this year.
The Big Cash Prize is big, as far as windfalls go, about $50,000, but that's subject to gleeful taxation, and even if it wasn't, it's not a "set for life" amount. I wanted it so badly, though. I think I would've broken my teeth about it if it had been ten bucks and a gift certificate to Dress Barn.
The newspaper articles never discuss, "The losers: where are they now?" Maybe it's because there are so many of us, or because it seems a little cruel, like sports broadcasters who chase down the barely-composed bronze medalists as they try to flee the arena. Instead, the articles talk about how the winners tend to be overwhelmed. Many of them complain that winning the prize caused them to put enormous pressure on themselves so that they couldn't write for six months or a year, or really, ever again.
I hope the nice girl who won this year can ride that out. She always gave me the impression that she was wise and tough, and I think she can do just fine.
Still, there are days when I am perhaps less grateful than I should be that I was not burdened by an opressive 50,000. posted by Frenz | 5/17/2004 09:00:00 AM
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Friday, May 14, 2004 a parable for our time
My senior year of high school, I started sitting with the cool kids. The weather had changed, graduation was getting close, and there was as new-found camaraderie among the members of the senior class. People who had previously rolled their eyes when they'd seen me coming and made hilarious comments in my wake (at that time, I displaced enough mass to leave a fairly sizeable one) didn't exactly clap me on the shoulder in a hearty fashion when I sat near them, but they tolerated me.
Some of the cool kids, the ones with flattering clothes and decent haircuts, were even friendly: more so than some of my fellow oddballs. They started actively waving me over to sit on the Senior Deck and hang out. Is your mind blown? Mine was!
I'd transferred to that middling-snooty prep school the year before to little fanfare, and abrupt tolerance when I was nearly done with the place was nearly more than I could take.
I want you to know, this was not a movie, so this wasn't some elaborate set-up. This story doesn't end with pig's blood at the prom or any other kind of cruelty.
Instead it fizzles: graduation came, I walked with everybody else, and went to college. The end. It's not even a story.
I tell it now because it turns out I'm leaving Boston, which has been my post-college version of the Senior Deck. It's been very exciting to be here, and I'm amazed at the friendliness and help people have given me here.
Baltimore, however has made me an offer that I could refuse, but have decided not to. as my one friend put it, I wasted my "fucking around" year. Almost exactly a year ago, after a touching commencement speech from actress Linda Hamilton*, best known for her work in the first two Terminator films, college was over and I walked again, just like everybody else.
The next year passed in a dull blur. I don't consider it wasted, but I do kind of wish I'd backpacked across Nepal or something rather than working in a call center in my old hometown.
I needed to come up here to get out of my rut, but good friends and a low cost of living are calling me. My plan now: get a real Real Job that maybe uses some of my skills and talents, instead of a Bartleby-style office job that is a step up from the ol' call center but serves only to make me feel like my brain's been scooped out with a melon baller at the end of the day. This may be more possible in Baltimore than in Boston.
They know me in Baltimore, hon. They know my college, and in that oddball town, that's not an added liability! In some ways, I feel like I'm falling back, but that's only true if I don't make a reasonable life for myself.
Luckily, I have the internet to keep me honest.
*The previous year's commencement speaker had been Larry Hagman.
posted by Frenz | 5/14/2004 06:09:00 AM
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Tuesday, May 11, 2004 D.E.A.R.
This is what some people have to say about some books. I love you, internet.
Everything ______ does to survive seems sensible and what I would do if I got lost in the wilderness. At the bookstore, don't pass by this book. Pick it up and read the back.
And its not that I'm too lazy to read books that are a little hard to understand, I'll read a shakespeare every now and then, and you can't tell me that shakespeares are easy to read.
This is one of my favorite books. It provides information and more importantly photos on nearly 2000 fish. posted by Frenz | 5/11/2004 10:44:00 PM
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Monday, May 10, 2004 this is important
Today at work, all the phones broke, and everybody got to go home. I did it with my mind.
posted by Frenz | 5/10/2004 11:53:00 PM
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Sunday, May 09, 2004 Letter to my inner child
It may break your heart now that you can never find a tiny personalized license plate with your name on it when you’re at the beach or stopping for gas along the interstate, but trust me on this: I’m big now, and I’ve done a lot of checking around. Practically nobody else could find one either. You shouldn’t take that as proof that you’re weird. Those stores are just fronts for money-laundering operations anyway.
posted by Frenz | 5/09/2004 05:06:00 PM
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Saturday, May 08, 2004 TGIF
My favorite thing aspect of today being Friday is that I don't have to put together a set of clothes to wear to work for a full two days. Today I had to wear my poufy shirt.
A month or two ago, when I realized that my urchin-wear wasn't going to help me transition smoovely to a workplace setting, I bought some clothes that seemed reasonable at the time.
The poufy shirt had a couple of things going for it: it was a pretty color, and I figured it wouldn't wrinkle.
Unfortunately, I've since realized that, particularly when coupled with the pants I wear so much, it makes me look like a bull fighter of some kind. Also, it's in a color I like, rather than a color that looks good on me. I imagine the whispers: "That bullfighter has the sallowest complection on any bullfighter I've ever seen!"
On the way home from the train station this evening, I turned a corner and some 8 year olds on stunt bikes nearly ran me over. There is a certain machismo associated in tangling with a bullfighter: everybody's got something to prove.
posted by Frenz | 5/08/2004 12:10:00 AM
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Thursday, May 06, 2004 Where are you registered?
When I walk home from the train station, cars beep their horns sometimes, because the drivers have noticed that I might be a girl, and it's their coy way of letting me know that they know I'm probably female. If I go home the way by way of the overpass for the Lowell connector, this happens more frequently. It's a little annoying, and that way's longer, too.
If I go the way past the boarded-up factory, the empty lot full of garbage, and the giant red vinyl chair that someone has placed on top of a shining silver 18-wheeler truck trailer, the walk is more tranquil until I get to the intersection where the cobblestones begin. Then the drivers are beeping because I cross in between, not on the green, and I can live with that.
On that leg of the trip, I'm usually looking at the side of the street with the big chair, and later the gym that advertises a "Tuscan Spa." Sometimes I fantasize that I call Tuscany, and they sue. I figure I'd get a small finders fee, so I could hold off a few years on pre-emptively willing my body to science or whatever it is I'm going to do the next time I'm short on cash.
For a long time, I didn't notice the one scuzzy old red brick building in the row of other scuzzy old red brick buildings, even though it has the little grace note of the heavy wire grating that blinds all the windows.
Then a few weeks ago on the news they did this bit on "Violent and Dangerous Sex Offenders: Would You Prefer to Have Them in Your Neighborhood or Not?" where they mentioned that the next night, towns would have to take down their online photo galleries of registered sex offenders. Of course we went to the Lowell website.
Sticky ethical issues, yadda/yadda, but I reiterate: of course we went to the website. Are you saying you wouldn't?
All the guys on there looked exactly like sex offenders you see on fictional TV programs: either darting-eyed or beligerent, mentally disabled or creepy. Not a decent haircut in the bunch. No fashion sense. No brow grooming.
Next to their glamour shots, the site gave their addresses: again, not sure if this is reasonable. But it turned out that almost all of them live together in the scuzzy building on the way home.
Why HBO doesn't have an edgy dark sitcom set in a halfway house is anybody's guess, by the way. Comedy platinum!
I feel like I should avoid all those registered sex offenders on the way home, particularly because everybody in this town kind of looks like that. On the other hand, it's a shorter walk, but I need the excercise. So let's say I'm not being lazy to go that way: I'm just a good progressive who refuses to read "the man's" labels. posted by Frenz | 5/06/2004 11:34:00 PM
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Wednesday, May 05, 2004 Mean, girls
Clamshandy, Licketysplit or whatever she's calling herself these days inspired me with her middle-school post.
*I can't remember a lot of that kind of thing: I try to remember, and unless I try hard that era reads as a dull "whom, whom, whom" noise. Press your ear to a telephone pole on a hot day. That effect.
The only memories that I've carried this far, it turns out, may be related in anecdote form. Try this one:
On book day, the day before I started seventh grade and stopped being taught at home, my future English teacher ran out onto the sidewalk after my mother and I. "I understand this is a new experience for you!" she said. It was. I'd never seen teeth that gray in my life.
posted by Frenz | 5/05/2004 10:29:00 PM
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Tuesday, May 04, 2004 Sideways Stories from Jail
One time I was in this holding cell, and I was real tired. I'd been up all night flirting and breaking and entering and so forth, and all in the service of The Homeless, concurrent to my policy of personally housing said homeless, and dating them.
All I wanted to do, given the limited options I had, was to curl up on the jail bed, which was cheap hard metal like a cookie tray, and doze 'til my arraignment.
However:
*I was in there with one of my co-defendants, who had spent the past several years chaining her neck to stuff whenever she got upset. The only public hospital in town closes? You'd better chain your neck to the locked gates. Chain your neck to the mayor, if he'll let you. The mayor was out to get this woman. It had taken 8 months of following him around and personally insulting him, but he was out to get her. Also, every time she got arrested, it was worse for her. Jail terrified her. She wanted to work through this by disturbing my nap.
*When she would momentarily become distracted but a crafts project she was imagineering out of JailSnack (brand-x maple-flavored donut) wrappers, I still couldn't sleep, because just down the cell block was Legendary Leonardo.
Leonardo and I never spoke, and nobody else told me his name. He announced it in a bellow. He announced most things that way. He was the most cheerful guy in the whole row. Sleep through a performance opportunity like incarceration? Not he! Leonardo rhymed, hooted, and performed a variety of acts upon his person for a solid six hours.
An ordinary man's voice would have given out, but he wasn't called Ordinary Leonardo.
He did not become popular with the other people who'd been arrested that morning. They didn't necessarily enjoy watching anybody drop anybody's pants and gleefully enjoy "what GOD gave" anybody.
Now, for some reason, I and the lady co-defendant were off in separate cell from everybody else. Ours had cinderblock walls and a thick metal door, with a small mesh and glass window inset. I was almost drifting off to sleep, when I heard a commotion. Suddenly, the lady grabbed me by the arm and pulled me off the bed.
She hustled me over to the window and smooshed my face up against the glass. "Do you see that? That's ABUSE!" she yelled in my ear.
I could see a female guard in her mid 50's running away from the portion of the cellblock which housed a more-agitated-than-ever Legendary Leonardo, laughing hard, with a Dixie cup in her hand. She had apparently had enough of the ongoing performance, and thrown a cup of water on the star.
I don't recall what I answered, because Legendary Leonardo retaliated. He found his own damn Dixie cup, and the next time that guard came by to tell him to shut the hell up, he let her have it with a face full of fluids he'd dipped from the toilet bowl.
I've never seen a mid-50-year old lady move so fast, unlock a cell, and start beating on a guy before.
Later, she got bored, Legendary Leonardo resumed rapping, and we all got transferred to new jails in different neighborhoods anyway, and in girljail I got distracted by meeting new people and having to prove I wasn't concealing weapons and so forth. (You will never in a million years guess what they thought my criminal mind was capable of sticking where!)
I got released on my own recognizance later the next day. I was the last in the group to get out.
I wandered blinking into the sunny courthouse parking lot, picking the lice out of my beard. My codefendants were hanging out, waiting for me. "You'll never guess who we just saw," they said. "Legendary Leonardo!" they said.
Turns out, the US Marshals who run Central Processing, where they hold you before you go in front of the judge the first time, were some real progressive thinkers who believed in a holistic, all-natural, and drug-free approach to loud and obvious mental illness--a "wisdom of our forefathers" type approach.
They'd spent the better part of a lazy summer afternoon curing the shit out of Legendary Leonardo.
He was in good spirits when he got out, my codefendants said, even though that one eye was swollen shut and everything. No longer rapping, pants up. Some might say that no longer being forcibly confined might have helped his mental state, but that is a rather short-sighted approach. Jerks like us do not appreciate the delicate position law enforcement and prison personnel must fill.
It's exciting how far rehabilitation techniques have advanced in the last couple years: think of the benefits Legendary Leonardo could have reaped had he had the opportunity to participate in a nude human pyramid!
posted by Frenz | 5/04/2004 11:14:00 PM
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Monday, May 03, 2004 Well, I don't know about you...
...but when I work in a job I hate, I act out a little. If I've got a work buddy or two, that adds to it. We giggle. We clown. We come up with little art installations of our own. Maybe it's not entirely ethical, but it's understandable, I think. Everybody's done it in one form or another.
Sure is a good thing that most of us don't work with CAPTIVE HUMAN BEINGS!
Guarding prisoners seems like it's boring at the best, and terrifying at the worst. I'm not justifying the ridiculous, terrible things the US reservists caught on camera pulling wacky pranks like stacking the nude bodies of grown men in hilarious configurations have done. I'm saying that if anybody thinks this is kind of behavior is isolated to that one bunch of fun-loving kids who photographed their crime spree, they are probably high on rock cocaine.
Watch this space for the incredible true story of Legendary Leonardo. posted by Frenz | 5/03/2004 07:36:00 AM
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Saturday, May 01, 2004 ha....
For the past month or so I've been looking for housing in the Boston area, and I've learned harsh lessons about internet ads and so forth. Looking for a place in a reasonable location with roommates I feel like I could get along with has kind of become my interest and hobby.
Picking one option out of several different options has never been my strong suit. My secret talent is to con myself into believing that I can stand or even like a person, place, or concept that it is not reasonable to put up with (note: this is not a secret passive-aggressive message to anyone I know who happens to read this).
This works for about a year and half at the outside limit. That's why I had to take periodic breaks from my college career at the school in the middle of nowhere in the form of ill-advised trips to go and be a bum (or, you know, blackouts).
So last night I went and looked a room in a house in a neighborhood I'd been avoiding because it's off of one of the shittier train lines, because really, apartment leases are shorter than a year and a half, and every place in my price range in better locations had a tragic flaw taht even I couldn't overlook. For example: the place where the rent was cheap because the room was actually the living room closet (No, seriously. Also, they left me a message saying they'd found someone else: I didn't make the cut to live in the closet.) and the place where the rent was cheap because my roommates would have been creepy, creepy creeps into this weird middle-aged white guy version of "Native American spirituality," which involved cluttering the place with gourds and dream catchers and maize and every part of the buffalo, and playing tapes of tinkling native flutes. They were also into "massage" which, you know, I'd get for free if I lived there.
At the latest place, I met all the roommates, noted that the rooms available were indeed be intended to be used as bedrooms, and hung out for a while. I just got a message from them that they'd talked it over and would like me to move in.
However:
I found another room with really cheap rent that I can sublet for the summer: so cheap that I could pay for both rent and utilities for the entire summer on what I would pay for a single month for the house from the other night. The trouble is, this cheap place is in Baltimore. When your old college roommate asks you to sublet...
The voice of reason tells me that while these potential new housemates might be very nice people, I know I can happily live with J&J, and with the money I could save, I'd be able to get a better place still if I decided to come back to New England in the Fall, if Baltimore didn't, you know charm me. The only thing is that going to Baltimore feels like a cheating. I've been faithfully sticking to my semi-arbitrary set of plans to move up here and get my affairs in order, and it's been good. It is infinitely preferrable being tired at the end of the day to not knowing what to do with endless and pathetic free time.
In my head, the idea of living in Boston (or you know, the area) and the idea of making a life for myself are linked, even though I know it's not necessarily so.
All I know is, I have to finish flipping these coins pretty soon.
posted by Frenz | 5/01/2004 06:47:00 PM
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