A subway story

Two middle-aged women on the train:

Woman 1, complaining about her husband’s kissing style: “I want all lip! Nothing but lip. Did they get BIGGER in the last seven years? I did not sign up for this. I shouldn’t feel teeth. I don’t want to feel your goddamn teeth!”

Woman 2, making best efforts at sympathy: “Well, James is not the best kisser. He’s a sucker.”

An exchange

Me to young student: “What do you want to write your poem about?”

Student: “Well, I thought of three options: a princess, a stuffed lamb, or my hatred for Donald Trump.”

A cartoon idea

Young crow rolling eyes at old crow while group of other young crows loiters by: “It’s called a squad, Dad! No one says murder anymore!”

A definition

Snackered: exhausted from eating too many finger foods

Some options

Everybody wants to:

A) Feel important

B) Be a cat

Cure is a good word for:

A) Meat

B) Feelings

C) Diseases

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You can make almost any title better by taking a cue from nature TV and bestowing the subtitle “Spy in the Huddle.” (I actually wish they had confined that brilliance to Penguins: Spy in the Huddle rather than extending it to a trope. Spy in the forest! Spy in the nest! Kind of dilutes it.) But I also like to play with the Lifetime Original Movie structure and add “The __________ story.” E.g. Serious Colors: The Claire Dunnington Story. Or Herd Subjectivity: The Internet Story. Or what have you. Why do I like that calculus–phrase, colon, the (person’s name) story better than the repetition of Spy in the _____? I can’t say. Maybe the placement.

In addition to having titles swirling around us at all times, it would be fun to have chyrons floating around us with our personal brand slogans, like TV networks do. By fun I mean interruptive, and Philip K Dick-y, and cluttering to personal space, but also fun. I guess chyrons and slogans are two separate things. We could have both: a logo and a phrase.

Once we have all of these things…we should probably each have our own four-note (or thereabouts) personal jingles. I am still baffled when I think about how much major companies pay for those. Every time I remember I spend the next 20 minutes thinking about why certain things are valued so highly and others are not. (But really: the first four notes of this cost an absurd amount of money. Or am I wrong? Maybe that amount of money was for the entire 21 second songlet?)

None of this compares to my ultimate childhood dream of all people having their own combination barbershop quartet/Greek chorus to follow them around and sing about their lives. Don’t worry; you could make it disappear if you tired of it. Possibly by clapping. It would function under the same technology as “Clap On” (clap clap) “Clap Off” (clap, clap clap) lights. And I’m sure the jingle for THAT one was a kingly sum.

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Every Valentine’s Day–or when I realize it’s coming–I put on Outkast’s “Happy Valentine’s Day,” and every year I find myself wishing for more date specific songs. There’s Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “September,” which narrows down to the particular day (21st) within its lyrics, and there’s “Oh What a Night,” which never actually specifies which night in late December but does get bonus points for naming the year (1963). I’m sure I could find others via Google, but I guess I’m content enough to let them come to me one by one.

“Date-Specific Songs” joins a number of half-populated playlists in my iTunes. I think I like coming up with categories more than I like actually curating the lists. I have totally empty playlists titled “Killer Key Change” and “Kick in the back of the knees” and “Spin around in desk chair songs,” along with “Questionable Life Decisions,” though I have to say that one actually has a fair number of songs in it.

I also enjoy the Venn diagram union of themes + specific dates in the clothing arena. Holidays are a great excuse to dress monochromatically, or in a combination that wouldn’t ordinarily present itself. It’s like having constraints put on your writing: it makes getting started much easier and is paradoxically freeing. Sometimes I give myself a color assignment on a random day just to narrow things down. Sometimes I title a playlist and never put anything in it.

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Being a child is confusing, and there were numerous things that confused me as a kid, but only a few that truly baffled me.

One was Groundhog’s Day. Okay, if he sees his shadow he gets scared and goes back in the hole, and that means six more weeks of winter? But if he’s seeing his shadow, that means the SUN is out. If he DOESN’T see his shadow that should mean more winter.

Also: poinsettias. It was utterly beyond me, when I was five and my aunt told me that poinsettias are poisonous, why they were poisonous. “But no one eats them!” I kept saying, which must have been really fun for her to try to rejoinder. “What’s the point of a flower being poisonous when no one eats flowers?”

The greater than and less than signs really gave me fits in first grade. I understood what “greater than” and “less than” meant, but I couldn’t figure out how you could tell the two signs apart…wasn’t one number always greater than and one always less than? The crux of the issue was: I didn’t realize that you were supposed to read them left to right. So 4 < 12 … sure, I know four is less than twelve. But twelve is greater than four. So which is it? A greater than or less than sign? I couldn’t articulate my problem to my teacher, so I think that remained a mystery for a while longer.

Then there were the things that didn’t confuse me because I had no idea I was getting them wrong, or that there was a different – correct – interpretation. I believe I was in my twenties when I realized that the lyric “Call it sad, call it funny – but it’s better than even money! – that that guy’s, only doing it, for some doll!” was making a gambling reference: even money. Until then, I thought they were saying gosh, it’s just so great, it’s even better than money!

…I also thought that my devoutly religious relative’s car had an LED screen on its CD console that said “LORD” in digital type when the car started. It actually was commanding the driver to “LOAD” a CD, so I may not be the most reliable narrator.

(Come on! I figured you could probably program it to spell out whatever you wanted, or something along those lines! It was the 90s.)

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Last weekend I made a vision board, an activity I also partook in last year with a group of other ladies. Any time I told someone what I was doing on Sunday, I felt the need to hastily tack on “not that I’m a believer in The Secret or anything!”

And I’m not (I feel ornery about The Secret, but I have to admit I kind of sort of believe in a branch of magical thinking that could be described as the reverse, e.g. that if you worry enough about something highly specific happening, it WON’T, so I’m aware that that’s just the inverse…I’m also interested in the phenomenon of only getting a thing that you want when you stop pinning all of your hopes to it; again, somewhat the opposite of The Secret, which I guess I should also admit I haven’t read), but I’ve always felt that vision boards, tarot cards, and other talismans/crafts that have to do with The Future serve a function regardless, as Rorschach tests.

The phrase you often hear associated with psychics, palm readings, and tarot cards is “You hear what you want to hear” – which I think is great, not a shortcoming, because sometimes you don’t know what you want – or what you want to hear – until you hear it. You learn how you’ve been interpreting your life when you project its narrative onto the combination of cards that turn down for you, or choose the pictures from magazines that draw your attention and arrange them to form a story. Tarot cards and vision boards are ideal vessels for metaphor.

I also like making vision boards because I like to think about the various absurd ways the things depicted could indeed manifest themselves in the coming year, outside of however you may have intended them. Mine has some elephants. Some kayaks. Books. Last year I put two adorable babies, who happened to be wearing knit hats that looked like pandas, on my board and guess what?! Now I own two panda suits.

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I noticed the seasons shifting a couple of years ago, when October started to stay in the 60s and my birthday, at the end of April, was no longer guaranteed to be warm. When was the last time March came in like a lion and went out like a lamb? May has taken that over; April if we’re lucky.

It’s not that climate change has been a secret, but the last few years have been the first times I’ve noticed not just the changes in weather–polar vortex, unseasonable warmness, tornadoes in Queens, what have you–but also the shift toward those interstitial months lagging behind the seasons I associate them with (Granted, they are now more in line with the solstices and equinoxes…November actually still feels like autumn and March like winter).

At the same time, seasonal displays in stores have inched their way even farther forward, in the opposite direction of the weather–Valentine’s Day cards for sale in early January, back to school in July, Christmas decorations put on as Halloween costumes are taken off…the image that leaps to mind is of the year as a pepper grinder someone is twisting, wringing it out.

(I titled this post before I wrote that paragraph and realized…but I’m just going to leave it there)

I read plenty about life changes and milestones shifting later and later, and I think of that as I think about the seasons…but when those are delayed, they aren’t pushing something else back to the beginning. The seasons are on a strange conveyor belt.

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Linguistic superlatives from life recently:

Best appellation:

12-year-old student: “Do you like the snake I won? I named it prefrontal cortex.”

Best Venn diagram intersection:

The shaded region where “gummy snacks” and “popular sperm bank choices” meet: Trader Joe’s “Scandinavian Swimmers” Swedish Fish knock-off.

Best portmanteau of more than two words:

Boyfriend describing the zombies who live in a video-game subway station: “Deadizents”

(citizen…denizen…resident…dead!)

Best observation about words’ failings and shifts:

Friend talking about how hard it is to adequately describe what you see when traveling: “It’s hard to use words like “amazing” because we’re always using those words. We’re using extraordinary words for, like, a fucking taco, so to describe Egypt I have to come back around again and just say, “I was happy.””

Best mixed metaphor:

Roommate on shooting one’s self in the foot/burning bridges: “She salted the well!”

…which births a slightly different interpretation of events. You can salt the land; you can poison the well; if you salt the well, perhaps you really just wanted to improve someone’s iodine levels.

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I’ve been trying to get rid of things. Mostly tangible things–clothes that itch or that I got in high school, lightbulbs for lamps I no longer own, tutoring materials from the old SAT–but also digital detritus.

Items that exist only as files do take up literal space–on my hard drive, Dropbox, Google account–but I’m not generally lacking for that (at least not since I got an external hard drive). What I’m lacking is the ability to ever listen to all of the songs I have on iTunes, or flip through all of the pictures stored in disparate places, or the right keywords to find the email that I remember receiving but can’t locate…

Digital clutter is a sibling to mental clutter, which seems to proliferate during the winter when the outside world has fewer variations, is less welcoming, and encourages turning inward. Mental clutter like: How much do I need for retirement? What’s about to go bad in my fridge, making me feel like an asshole for wasting food? Which diseases do I need to keep in mind in case I ever contract a mysterious, hard to diagnose illness? Is it less wasteful to throw out that difficult-to-wash bottle or to use water to wash and recycle it?

It may not help that I’m in various places in five books*–due to losing interest for the moment, needing to finish this one first because it’s due back at the library, leaving that one at home because it’s too heavy to carry with me, and on. None of them are books I intend to give up on, but I usually limit the books I’m holding in my mind at one time to two.

*(The Only Ones by Carola Dibbell, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Infested by Brooke Borel, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, and The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman)

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