“P…A…N…T…S,” she intones. The chalk goes clack clack against the board. “Now.” She turns to face us. “Who can tell me what these letters mean when we put them together like this?”
No one raises their hand. My gaze flits from the teacher to the board. The teacher looks at me. “Rachel,” she says, “Can you tell us what word those letters make?”
I stare at the letters.
“Puh…paaaa……” I pause, my mouth hanging open slightly. I can feel the sounds on the flat of my tongue. “Paannnn…”
“She wasn’t here yesterday!” one of my classmates pipes up. I realize the class must have learned this already, when I was home sick.
“Okay,” says the teacher. “Can someone else tell us what these letters say?”
…pants. The word rings full and round in my mind. Pants!
“Anyone?”
Letters together become more than themselves. Pants.
]]>If it’s cute / pretty / interesting / shiny / red, I am immediately compelled to Get It Now. I shudder to think of the state my house, not to mention my bank account, would be in if I had no equally powerful impulse to Put It Away.
While I am not exactly austere in my home decor, clutter does drive me insane. The knowledge that I have only so much space in my home is often the only thing keeping me from scooping up all those “little gorgeous things”1.
Occasionally even the threat of insanity isn’t enough. I don’t really need the knitted hat I bought today, but it’s so cute!
Yesterday my beloved inadvertently revealed he had forgotten that September 1 is our anniversary; he was thinking it was on Labor Day. But I remember the date because the exact time of our declaration was midnight, and for years we debated whether we should celebrate on September 1 or August 31. But I forget who argued for which day.
Then this morning I twitted about how Kevin and I confessed our (at the time) true like a mere fourteen years ago, only to discover a few minutes later that, at least according to last year’s woo-pitching, I am a year behind. Chagrin, i haz it.
Obviously, I no longer consider myself a reliable source. Since neither of us keep diaries and the Rib wasn’t even a glimmer in my eye, my only point of reference for the year of our union is other people. I’ll have to ask my sister how old her son Ray is, because he was born in the same year. I am pretty sure.
]]>Which got me thinking about Lists and who is on mine and the fact that Mr. Pitt, as intergalactically hot as he is, is not. In fact, he has never cracked the top ten. He’s somewhere down in the thirties, though he rises temporarily into the mid-twenties every time I see Fight Club. Angelina Jolie, on the other hand…
Anyway, so what do I dream about last night? Apparently in an alternate universe, I am on Mr. Pitt’s List. In this dream, he follows me around some office building, trying to chat with me. Once he succeeds in that, he moves on to attempted snuggles. The whole time I am thinking, “Why are you hanging around? You are a big star and I hardly know you. And I have work to do.”
I must admit that he finally did win me over, to some extent, and snuggling did commence but it was very chaste. I began to wonder if I should kiss him, just to see if it was any good or if I was wasting time that could be better spent filing. So I kissed him and he looked surprised, which I found very amusing and prompted me to say, “It’s my evil plan!” and laugh.
Which is when I woke up. I lay there for a few minutes, thinking that dreaming about being pursued by #36 is a seriously WTF way to spend the night. But wait, there’s more.
I fell back to sleep and dreamed that I was at karaoke, except I wasn’t singing, I was doing engineering for these two musicians. One of them had some kind of instrument like a triangle from Mars — a silver rod all bent into a million contortions that she would whack with another silver rod and make music. Sometimes she’d tap the bent rod and it would keep playing a melody for several minutes. It was fascinating.
And then she is done playing and people start leaving and I pack up my engineering crap into this huge duffel bag and out of the corner of my eye I see Mr. Pitt and his entourage get up from a table and come toward me. I’m thinking, Has he been waiting this whole time? He’s wearing his big mirrored aviator glasses. He walks up and says hi and we both pick up the duffel bag at the same time. I’m like, Dude, I can carry my own duffel bag.
]]>Hopefully tomorrow I will have a pithy and insightful post about turning 42, but today I am too busy playing with my toy.
]]>Anyway, my office just moved into downtown Seattle and I am totally ‘naming.1
I worked in this area twenty years ago and, well, it was not a Mary “We’re Gonna Make It After All” Richards experience. I wore the pantyhose, but there was no joyful tossing of hats in the air. No grump-with-a-heart-of-gold Mr. Grant to whine to. No Rhoda.
When I worked downtown, I was paying my way through college, mostly through office jobs. I did spend 6 months cashiering at a bookstore which I enjoyed because employees could borrow any of the books for free. Oh, there was that one shift as a waitress which ended abruptly when my would-be boss mentioned that she wouldn’t be paying me for my first few days’ worth of work “until she knew if I’d be a good fit.” Other than that, I was an office drone because it paid marginally better than washing dishes.
But honestly, the 4-6 hours a day I spent filing and answering phones wasn’t the hardest part of life back then. The hardest part was being surrounded at school by students who seemed to live astonishingly care-free lives.2
These other students got to live in a campus dorm with their peers instead of a shitty apartment. They got to participate in sports and other extracurricular activities because they had actual free time. They got internships doing things they enjoyed because it didn’t matter that they were paid little or nothing, and hence got a huge head start on their future careers. They got to worry about their grades instead of their rent, food, and grades. They had health insurance.
Even at the time, I knew I couldn’t hold those kids’ good fortune against them. But the experience taught me that the other half – the “have-not-quite-as-much half”, if you will – does indeed often have to work harder for the same things.
It’s been an interesting few days, remembering that other time. I’m proud of Younger Uppity for sticking it out and getting that degree. Happy she didn’t let the hardness of it harden her heart, too. Glad she made it, after all.
If I haven’t been blogging much these days, you can be sure it’s not for lack of subject matter. Regardless of what’s going on in my life, I always have something to say about it. The horses in my head are always pawing the ground, pacing the pen, eager to run. When the gate swings open, they’re off, tearing joyfully if heedlessly across my crazy brain terrain.
On the page this translates to semi-coherent stream-of-consciousness babbling — the raw stuff of genius flows fast and furious. But to fashion that into something worth reading is a horse of a different color. Every five minutes of writing takes half an hour of rewriting. (Trust me, I do this for a living.) And who has that kind of time, when there are all those old episodes of Heroes to get caught up on?
I don’t know why I feel that every blog post must be a tiny work of art. I don’t think it’s necessarily because I’m a “writer.” I have a non-writer, non-blogger friend who feels exactly the same way about writing e-mails home to mom: that each one must be a thoughtful meditation on Where He Is In His Life Right Now or its not worth the bandwidth. Blurg. No wonder Twitter is so popular.
What I do know is that despite my passion for expressing myself in words, it is often difficult. Babbling is easy; writing can be hard. And when so many other things are calling me — gardening, housework, exercise, Netflix — well, it’s all too easy to just drag the doc to the trash and go lose myself in Sylar’s eyebrows.
But. I’ve got a big but.
I don’t want to bin the Rib. She reminds me of the importance of being creative, even when it’s work. That the alternative, at least for me, is to die a slow, painful, corporate death from which not even the miraculous Claire Bennett could resurrect.
So I apologize in advance if the horses thunder by once and a while. Or even maybe a lot. The last season of Lost will be available on Netflix soon.