Don't Try This At Home

When I was in college, I was presented with a microcassette recorder as a birthday present. I had a friend who felt we were out of touch with each other's day to day lives. His solution was for us to simply record little excerpts of our daily nothingness and then send them to one another. It was brilliant. Until he got married and I came to grad school. These things actually coincide, the same month or so, so it's hard to say which of these happy situations is to blame. He doesn't have time to create little gems of his life for me and I don't have little gems anymore. The last time I sent him a tape he said I sounded depressed and listening to me made him sad. So, I still carry around a little tape recorder with me, ostensibly to record thoughts about my dissertation (HA!), but really it has become my little personal therapist. After searching long and hard for a therapist here in this great city, I have finally closed the book on that endeavor and settled for this little piece of technology as my guide. And I was proud of my tape this time around. Except for a crying jag about two weeks ago, my tape was filled with lines that make me laugh – even now.

“I just went to this place and paid a bunch of money for dancing lessons to a woman named Tippin. Or maybe it was Pippin. Either way, doesn’t that seem silly? What were her parents thinking?” This was part of my Valentine’s Day preparation. I feel guilty saying I bought Biker Boy dancing lessons, because I didn’t buy HIM anything – I bought US dancing lessons. But maybe someday we’ll do a terrific salsa. Hee. (On a completely unrelated note, part of my Valentine’s Day present from Biker Boy was that he SHAVED THE BEARD!! YAY!! I can no longer call him the Bearded One.)

“I have just watched seven hours of Project Runway. In a row. I hate Santino. Seven hours. I don’t really like Tim Gunn much, either. He’s a bit obnoxious, in a different way than Santino, but maybe in an even worse way. I think I singlehandedly ate three quarters of the bag of Doritos. I think I’m going to puke.” Moosey Fate and I definitely had a good time that day. I don’t know if my digestive system will ever recover from the junk food. Yay for me that she’s staying in Minneapolis! I don’t know what I’d do if she left.

“I signed up to do a public speaking engagement that I thought would be in front of about a half a dozen people. When I got there, it was an auditorium filled with people. I simply took off my pink hat (!) and went about dazzling them with my good humor (HA!) and intelligence. I wish I had prepped more for the event.” I actually said HA! on the tape. I was wearing a pink hat. With a yellow scarf. Overall, I was quite stylish. I neglected to mention on the tape that I walked about ten blocks out of my way in downtown Minneapolis for this event, but that was part of the fun of it all.

“She does not have a penis!” I was recounting to myself a conversation I had with Biker Boy about Irina Slutskaya, the Russian figure skater, who was wearing the cutest jumpsuit I have seen in a long, long time for her short program at the Olympics. I think BB was just trying to get under my skin as much as possible and I can’t blame him since he was patient enough to not only record both the short and long programs of Olympic figure skating for me, then pretend he did not know the results until I could watch it, AND then actually sit down and watch them with me. He deserves a gold medal for being a terrific human being.

Last, but certainly not least. “They were going like bagels!” Thank you, Heidi Klum, for being so adorable.

The Sound of Silence

When I was a child, I never shut up. My mother and my sister are both quiet, shy, reticent - the kind of people I see as a personal mission to make laugh and/or explode in anger. My father is a natural salesperson - garrulous and rambling, at times, but in the face of the ice-cold silence that greets him around my mother and my sister, he shuts down. I remember that every weekend the family would go out to eat (I suppose, looking back, this was an expense that my parents could ill-afford, but that insured we would always eat one meal a week together) and on the car trip there and back and the entire time we sat down, I talked. It was my DUTY to make sure that there was no quiet. I talked about school, how I was doing, classes I hated, classes I liked, people my family had never met, changes in the landscape, what we were eating, what the news was, what books I was reading, the color of the leaves, how crappy the weather was, or whatever I could think of. There was no topic too insignificant for me to turn into a fifteen minute monologue. Yesterday, with the exception of a four minute phone conversation with the Bearded One and a request for my landlords to shovel the sidewalk, I didn't talk to anyone. The city was quiet, muffled by a recent snowfall, and I didn't feel like I should intrude on that sound - or that lack of sound. It's difficult to reconcile the two different people at different places and times in the world. Am I a chatterbox? Or am I the girl who is happy with my books and my silence? The Bearded One and I have oft been accused of a somewhat solitary existence. We would much rather walk around the lake than attend a social gathering where small talk might be required (at least I would, maybe I shouldn't make such claims for him). But I force myself to attend social gatherings because I like people and I want to be around. But sometimes I want to be around people who were a little less brash, a little less loud, a little less like people. And that's my personal failing. People are people and I should learn to live with them they way that they are with all their little faults. But I will keep my quiet Fridays where I can be with myself and my thoughts with no intrusions.

Cows?

In a restroom that I frequently end up, there is a picture of cows grazing in a meadow. Umm...this is a women's restroom? Could we consider symbolism before we put up such striking images?