Love & War

Why do we like pain?

Why do we pursue what confuses and makes us angry?

Why is it so exhilarating and thrilling when we are confused and momentarily set back?

I think it is our instinct to be enchanted with the stories of humanity; it is inbred in us to be heroes and victorious, to hope when we see no hope; to thrill when we are in a fight. I don't understand it in other people -- I don't understand my dad and Little Sister, who sometimes make eachother crazy and who consistently find the optimism to try again without any diminishment in the reckless fondness they possess for one another whenever they are not squabbling. I do not understand it, because I am nothing like that: my relationships are tepid and cautious, non-confrontational, mildly sentimental, and reasonably formal. I never fight with anybody, and I never fight with myself about anybody. I do not at all understand my boss who, in all of his marriages, has been with the same person: critical, unimpressed, combative, querulous, and strictly out of love except for in brief, petulant moments of hopeless, irresistible, crazy, affection. I am mild you know: I don't torment folks, and I don't like people who torment me; I am baffled by anger and I try consistently to either defer or give the benefit of the doubt, until it is almost impossible to make me lash out about anything to anyone. I don't understand witchy women at work, who are forward and ugly, who take liberties and boss folks around and criticize them unabashedly to promote themselves so shamelessly that they cannot be liked by anyone, but are slowly given greater positions and coddled by managers who love that security is as easy as hiring an insufferable secretary. I am a model employee: I never question the wrong decisions; I support my boss by quietly suggesting alternatives when I must; I smile, and take wrongs; I am sweet--I am so incredibly sweet--and I choose humility. I have as many opinions as anybody, but absolute control over them.

I hate all of these things in everybody, and I hate all of these things in myself. I see how being a good girl is never as rewarding as being a prodigal; and I see how the goodish boys always fall in love with the girls who they can hate as often as they can love; I can see that conflict is so much more exciting than peace, and yet I cannot seem to stop being given to peace. Lately, I have broken my rules about all of this. I have written to my lifelong guy friend, although I keep disapproving of him more and more as he continues to hurt me more and more. Every time I hear from him I think, he is the worst! I am never talking to him again!--and every time I am five minutes off, I think, If I try a little bit harder, I can fix this. It seems like each time I am defeated I am more disgusted with myself, but each attempt, however futile, keeps me alive, until I am actually convinced that I can change things. That if I try, if I keep trying and hoping, things will be better. After all of those years of friendship I finally hate him as often as I am glad to know him, and it is awful, and terrible, and lovely, and exhilarating. I am the same way with everything that I cannot understand. I love my horrible former boss the longer she resists God, because I am convinced that it will work someday. I am exhausted with people whom I do not understand, and I claim to be so aloof and impervious to the wild joys of untamed people, but eventually, I am just like them. I love the chase and the story; I love the chance that I will be new and different, that I will change somebody. Do you suppose that, after all, the story is behind everything?

Why, again, do we love pain? Why do we find conflict so exciting and dashed dreams so exhilarating? I think that it is within us to be more enchanted with stories than anything else: to thrill at the struggle and to rejoice in the fights because ultimately we love battles (however so awful) better than we like endings (however so happy).

Guacamole & Victoria's Secret

Today I was typing away I was typing away at some financial document or another, while my boss was talking to himself, about some girl the guys had met that day; I tuned him out, until he said, ".....[so-and-so coworker] knows how to work the system, because she dresses just enough like a, well, a whatever, and she displays just enough of that tramp stamp to make everyone think that they have a chance of taking advantage of her...."

"You're saying that she uses her body to make people give her free stuff?"

This is one discussion that I hate. I can never quite resolve myself with it.

"Oh, come ON!" Boss said, "You always act like that surprises you."

"It doesn't surprise me," I said, "It just seems wrong; it seems sad for guys, and sad for her. And sad for good girls. I guess it's probably saddest for good girls, when we always see that so often goodness isn't rewarded."

He launched into a big speech, about me and other good girls. He said that the guys at work that day were just talking about my outfit:  how they had searched for a word for it and had finally come up with "elegant," how they thought it was odd that when I dressed nicely it made them notice me in the opposite way that they would notice that other girl, and he reported moreover that one of the less-smooth guys at my work had declared that, "When Jane dresses like that, she's so classy that we don't want to get into her pants." That is a very crude statement, and I am sorry that I repeated it here, but it is what he said.

I said: "Well, being classy and elegant never got anybody free chips at Chilis."

"THAT AGAIN?" Boss asked me, "Why is it always back to that one screwed-up homeschool girl who you can't stop tormenting from one stupid Facebook post? Why is it always back to her?"

 

----

 

My token lifelong guy friend has several friends whom I can't stand, and I try to always speak kindly about them in his presence, because they are his friends, and because he believes that I dislike all people. When I dislike anyone, I am reluctant to tell him. It makes no sense: just because I dislike a few of his friends does not mean I dislike humanity, and does not mean that I should be afraid to tell him about these things. But that is neither here nor there. One of his friends whom I have always disliked is a brunette who is obsessed with Victoria's Secret sweatshirts and sweat-pants with words plastered on their rear-sections, Tim Tebow, and Ulta. She is vain, reasonably pretty, and thin. I never really disliked her for being pretty, because her younger sister was the equivalent of the Homeschool Barbie, and married before she did; and because there is an unconfirmed rumor that once, a desperately romantic acquaintance either did not recognize, or else declined, a first date with her. If the romantically-effervescent friend like he was turns you down, you know that it is a very sad state of affairs, and therefore I have never disliked her, but have only felt a little sorry for her, year after year, as she continues to be in love with Tim Tebow (she literally has a Facebook fan-club page) and to display her lingerie choices on the outside. (I should note that I have no problems with Victoria's Secret, and indeed I feel pretty and confident when I wear nice things, but what I wear and what I don't will be the business of a maximum of two people in my life: myself now, and my spouse later. Being a public tease is hardly a virtue.) She is not as bad as I am portraying her: she loves Jesus, sings beautifully, and supports her parents even in older life (she's closeish to 30 now?).

That's why it's complicated to like her. And that's why I was very disappointed, shocked maybe, when she posted a Facebook post a year or two ago that has never been more than a few heartbeats away from getting dredged up again. She posted that she hated getting female waiters at restaurants because then she never got free stuff, and mentioned that her waiter at Chilis that night had been a female and that therefore there had been no free chips. This was accompanied by a pitiful sadface emoticon, and everybody from her father to her hangers-on commented with similar sad sentiments and wishes for better luck next time. The status was appalling, for several reasons. First, how would you feel if you were reading that status as a girl who had been in the presence of her fair share of male waiters her whole life, and had never been comp'ed free chips? I am in that category, you know: I am a good tipper, I am a sweet person, I make excellent eye contact as of this year, and I am a very sweet lady, but have I ever been comp'ed free chips & guacamole at Chilis because I'm a girl? Noooo, of course not. The arrogance and cluelessness of poor Jane is initially astounding, because does she not understand that her poor fangirls have never had such a similar experience and that, even if they have, it is not the routine?  Also, the status made me angry because it throws poor men under the bus; is Jane so pretty and airheaded that she imagines that Chilis designates an endless supply of free chips + guac to waiters, so that they may pass them out at will to girls? Her lack of grasp on the simple logistics of the matter makes me think that her expectation of "male waiter = free stuff" must have in some way affected her actual behavior at restaurants. What types of things has she done to pressure guys at Chilis into either lying about her order, or else in spending their tip for her table on buying food for her to munch on while she waits? If she is willing to post a Facebook status like that in front of her bajillion friends, her dad, God, and everybody, do you suppose that she has ever said anything similar at a restaurant? Don't you think she has batted her eyelashes and said, "Oooooooh, you're a cute waiter! Yay! Now we get free chips!"

Of course, the biggest problem is that now every time I go to Chilis, or every time I see a pretty girl get something free when I know she expected it and got it, I end up feeling a little less pretty. While Jane has this supposed ministry to young girls, encouraging them to be lovely and gorgeous in their own way, she slaps them in the face with her own experiences, and renders them not good enough. I have often considered writing to her to talk to her about this; and indeed I had a whole letter planned in my head, which has slowly been revised on five-mile runs over the last year, until it is a dazzling piece of pithy rebuke. I won't send it, because what, really, am I trying to change? A pretty girl who accidentally let it slip that she gets everything she wants based on her looks? I cannot change that. And ultimately, I have no desire to, because although I do not understand beauty, I am glad that there is beauty in the world.

 

-----

 

We heard guys in the hallway, talking; I didn't mean to over-hear them, but I did: ".....There's no way! Jane’s too classy to wear something slutty to the gym."

"SEE?" Boss said, "I'm right. Who cares about free chips when you have control of people's minds?"

I care. I care, because every time a girl acts a little edgily to get free chips, it gives good girls less motivation to be good, and more motivation to do what works. Boss was right, but not about that: he was right that it is always back; back to that one home-schooled girl whom I cannot stop tormenting, and whom I cannot allow to stop tormenting me. Isn't that sad?

 

___

 

Of course, what I did not say at work is: when you make everything raw and objective, isn’t the point of being a girl, ultimately, and crudely, that what makes you a girl is the fact that guys want to get in your pants?

Wherein Jane Becomes Brave

This Sunday afternoon, I received a call while I was napping. I like Sunday Naps. When other things are going on around me in the world, and when I am quite busy, I still take Sunday Naps; they're somewhat of an institution. (An exception is last week, when I worked through the afternoon and into the night creating these.) I awoke from sleep, briefly, to ask Little Brother to silence my phone, and then I went back to work, and was startled awake at 6:45 pm--later than I ever nap--to a sort of disoriented haze. My first thought was: I have slept through the night, and I need to leave for work in seventeen minutes! But I hadn't. I checked my phone, as a matter of course, and saw the Google Transcription:

 

This is ABC security services with a message for Jane. We have received a burglar alarm at the residence of John Doe, 18000 Main Street, Small Town, Big State. If you have any questions, please call back at this number. Authorities will be notified. Thank you.

 

I panicked. I have been watching my bestie’s house while she’s on deployment and everything has been so benign there. When the burglar alarm went off on this particular day, I slept through it. I was still sleepy and disoriented, so I called back the security company and they confirmed that since I didn't take the call, the police were dispatched to the house. "We didn't hear back from them," the bored-sounding alarm lady told me, "Which is customary in cases where no threat is found."

I called Bestie’s Google Voice number, which she can access occasionally, and left a voice-mail keeping her apprised. I felt that I had failed her in some way, although I had not, and I woke up my Big Brother (who has no policies against sleeping after 6:45 pm) and dragged him over to the house with me. We both forgot our phones, which is odd because we are never anywhere without our phones. I told him that we would just cruise through the house and make sure nothing was missing. Anyway, when we were laughing and talking on the way up to the door, I paused, heart suddenly thudding: behind the security screen, the front door was open.

THE FRONT DOOR WAS OPEN!

I am not the type of person to display any degree of courage. I shrink from adventure, and I pretend that conflict does not exist. Big Brother said, breezily, "Let's clear the house." I followed, because I have been becoming a follower; sometimes I don't recognize myself anymore. I have been more trusting, more vulnerable, more willing. WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING TO ME? It is a good thing in my pursuit as a lady, but a poor thing for safety & security in the face of potential home invaders. The alarm went off when we pushed the door open, so I typed in my code, and then Big Brother grabbed a pool stick, broken down, with the screw-end out and the girthy end in his hand, while I walked behind him, silently, as he went to each room and each closet.

 

I’m adventured out.

 

Pampered Chef Magic

I wish that I could adequately explain to you the horror I feel concerning multi-level marketing. Marketing in general scares the daylights out of me, but asking your friends for money, and preying upon their friendship to request money, makes me squeamish in a way that very few things do. Unfortunately, because of this, I am particularly susceptible to marketing, multi-level marketing, and am likely to preserve friendships by showing up at parties when I would rather be almost anywhere else. It is all very convoluted.

 

I have a friend whom I’ll call Jenny, and for about the last eight months she has relentlessly invited me to Pampered Chef parties at her house. I haven’t the foggiest interest in Pampered Chef: I’m twenty five, I live with my parents, and we have a well-stocked kitchen. That’s what I should tell her when she asks me. It would be so simple. But I never do that. I just make up excuses (of which there are plenty of good ones, thankfully) and she seems to regard me as a social butterfly and admire my continual lack of availability as an indication of social standing, which only makes her more zealous in pursuing me to attend her parties. It’s a vicious cycle. Finally, a few weeks or months ago, she came to my office and cornered me in such a way, and at such a time, that I could not offer a single excuse, and therefore agreed to go to her party. Two days ago, she called me up, giggly, to remind me “about Monday!” I had totally forgotten the party, had other events tentatively scheduled (funny, right?), and my car is currently in the shop, so I am driving a borrowed mini-van that is basically NOT MINI AT ALL, and who wants to roll up to a Pampered Chef Party with a borrowed car, making it look like you borrowed a soccer-mom van JUST TO FIT IN AT THE PARTY??

Laaaaaame.

It was just.....I am SUCH a hermit that I was so not thrilled about going. That’s all there is to it.

 

BUT.

As it turns out.

IT WAS A MAGIC SHOW.

 

I went through the catalog immediately and flagged a few pages where there were cheap, non-bulky items my mother wouldn’t mind introduced into her kitchen. Meanwhile, the hostess began to address us, while shoving pizza dip at us.

PIZZA DIP.

Like liquid pizza, I am not even kidding.

 

She was a formidable, bejeweled manifestation of a “Pampered Chef Consultant,” was wearing numerous diamonds and bracelets apparently to show off her lucrative commission checks, she made endless jokes about her own weight (which has got to be among the surest ways of making everybody awkward), and she showed us various important items that we would never use in our real lives. Meanwhile, Jenny’s million cats were around me creeping me out by scratching the couches from the inside out, and I felt like the room was claustrophobic and snobbish. Too, I think it was a throwback to my childhood, when my mother was invited to a Tupperware party. We were legitimately poor and my mom bought six small cups, and I felt like everybody looked down on her because she just bought six plastic cups. (We still use the cups to this day; they are about twenty years old.) There are few things that make me angrier than one of my mother’s so-called “friends” acting in such a way that makes her cry. She is a beautiful, thoughtless, unselfish woman who is diligent and has a good spirit, and when someone makes her cry I always feel helpless, and particularly helpless when I was young. Around the time that the room was closing in on me, the Consultant began a miraculous show by pulling out sundry overpriced cranberry-colored stoneware and walking over to the microwave.

“Do you want to see a TRICK?” she asked.

NOOOOO, GET ME OUT OF HERE!

“SEE?” she said, popping a large raw chicken into the pot and sprinkling it with herbes de provence. “SEE?” She covered the pot, with only the chicken and the herbes de provence inside, threw it in the microwave, and proceeded to talk about her commissions and sales until she opened the door, whipped the lid off the pot triumphantly, and presented to us a roasted chicken, as though it was fresh from the rotisserie at Costco.

 

It was exactly like a magic show in Vegas, only instead of making live birds appear out of a hat, it was a very-much-deceased bird in a clay pot, and we were all digging our forks into it.

 

IT WAS SO MACABRE YOU HAVE NO IDEA, naturally, but it was SOOOO delicious too, which is basically unfair, and it was the finest chicken I had tasted in a very long time. I thought: My mother would love that pot, and we would eat chicken-and-herbes-de-provence twice a week!

 

It was the finest Pampered Chef Party anybody has ever been to. I purchased four things: a microwave rice-cooker, a microwave vegetable cooker, a mini muffin pastry shaper, and herbes de provence.

 

In conclusion: I AM GOING TO SCOUR eBAY THE INSTANT I GET HOME BECAUSE THERE IS NO WAY I AM PAYING EIGHTY DOLLARS, EVEN FOR A MIRACLE POT.

But boy, was that chicken delish.

 

 

How To Wind Up Dead In An Alley Somewhere

I am about to tell you a story outlining why I believe that my female coworker will shortly wind up dead. She met a gentleman on the internet (back to the Plenty Of Fish sludge) last Saturday night – meaning four and a half days ago – when he sent her a message, noting that her profile was “gorgeous” and that she appeared to be his soul mate. She found nothing odd in this declaration, and they struck up conversations using his Yahoo Messenger (!) where he went by a handle with any number of romantic epithets (to include lover, soul, and romance) in a continuous string ending with @yahoo.com.

He launched into his life story and the searching out of her being, by declaring that he was successful in business as a structural engineer from London, residing in Hollywood, currently residing in Hong Kong because of a job upon which he could not elaborate, and did not want to elaborate upon why he could not elaborate. By Sunday morning, when she texted me, she had adjusted to Hong Kong time and having a boyfriend, and they were calling eachother, Love and Babe.

By Monday, he was writing her poetry and explaining how they were indeed two parts of a whole. Moreover, the emails were beginning to repeat themselves, as I noticed, although Coworker seemed oblivious of the fact and when I gently mentioned it, she cited those notorious Hong Kong internet servers. Parts of emails do not repeat themselves, clearly, but I sit next to Coworker, and she receives enough grief from everybody else about her sketchy love life, so I kept my mouth shut and smiled at intervals. She declared that she was worse than a school girl, and although that is difficult to quantify, she was.

Monday night she gave him her physical address and accepted his challenge to ‘trust’ him by forwarding secret papers to her, for her safekeeping. She agreed quickly, of course, and showed me the papers, outlining his three million dollar contract to plan a bridge in Hong Kong. The documents were scanned in, guaranteeing their virtual permanence, however she printed them off and kept them in her safe. By that time I had begun to worry, because I had a nagging feeling, at the back of my mind, that I had heard a similar story too often before; of insecure women, of men who invest less than a week in readying their weaknesses without so much as one sext, and of getting them to give their hearts (which Coworker has: she is planning outfits for the Christmas party, quite literally, as well as honeymoon destinations) before sending secret documents managing to suggest wealth, claiming to be across the ocean (so as to put at bay healthy inhibitions about divulged personal information), and eventually arrive with shadows and knives and death. At Boss’ request, I already had a discussion with Coworker on her re-entrance into what he calls “the game,” after her thirty-year monogamous spell, and safe sex practices. But this seems too much, especially for a good girl like myself, and I find myself unsure of how to proceed. They say men are stupid when it comes to sex, but women are worse, when it comes to flattery.

Isn't that sad?

Happy Endings

I usually run Monday nights, but this particular night, I parked in the parking lot of “Winco Foods” – an employee-owned company – and picked up my Bestie. I always wanted to be in a wedding, and the only time I was actually asked, I came down with the pox (chicken) on the day of the rehearsal. Now, I am in three weddings, upcoming. Bestie is one of the brides, and instead of behaving as normal people do and asking folks to select appropriate dresses from David’s Bridal, she opted to buy dresses from a private shop in a big metropolis city. If you know anything about my homestate and this particular big city, you’ll know that it is the type of town where white girls do not go. I went there with Bestie, who is Hispanic and does not speak a word of Spanish, so I was less of an oddity than was she. We talked on the trip, planned, and laughed, without any hurry.

 

When we got to the small shop, its proprietor and, I suspect, sole employee was watching us, politely. She had a $.49 college ruled notebook with a number of small pictures and scribbled notes, in Spanish, cursive. One of the notes said, “Jan” –(me?) she pointed to it. I nodded, and her expression did not change. She glanced at the photo I’d brought, from Google Images, of a Temple Dress, and blinked slowly, as though she was bored. “Ok,” she said.

“That’s all she needs: to just look at the picture?” I asked Bestie.
Bestie said the, I’ve Seen Her Work and the, I Know She’s Good: Why Do You Suppose She’s Charging Ninety Dollars? I thought there was some confusion, certainly: bridesmaid dresses are not supposed to be as inexpensive as ninety dollars, even in sweat shops; and for someone to design a dress from that scrap of a color photo seemed unrealistic.

“Ok,” I said.

The woman was done measuring me, then, and we went to Bestie’s family’s houses, scattered across the city. They spoke in English and didn’t seem to treat me as a friend or a stranger: I was just there, and we dialogued openly. Bestie did not introduce me. I ate something they called ice-cream cake, which was neither. I politely regarded a cat named Cardboard (?) and a dog that didn’t seem to have a name. Then I got a call from Katie, another of “my” brides, who was talking, through hysterical tears, about her rehearsal dinner. Katie, characteristically expressionless, has been transformed into a pool of emotions upon her engagement, and I patiently listened while Bestie went into a small Chinese restaurant to buy us food.

 

I looked up at the sign; it said, “HO-HO CHINA.” The window had a sign with a “B” rating. The car was dark, so I ate the food, half of it anyhow, and saved the rest for my mom, then drove home in the rain. We’ll see how the dress comes out. When my mother ate my leftovers, in the daylight, she found all sorts of odd pork skins, with the chicken; they were crackly and had little black dots, where the spiny hairs should have been. It was, most certainly, something other than the sign implied, that of Chinese with a happy ending.