Giving Offense

I was walking home the other night from choir, somewhere in the vicinity of 11:45pm because I live on the outermost edges of the world, when I saw a huge, burly man lumbering toward the footpath that leads to my house. Fellow pedestrians don’t usually trigger my spidey sense, but this one was leering at me. I could tell that if we both continued at the pace we were going, we would meet at the footpath at the same time. No way in hell.

So I slowed down. And he slowed down. So I sped up. And he sped up. So I pointed my pepper spray at him, gave him my most withering glare, and said: “You’ll forgive me if I’m a little skittish at night.” And he said: “I can understand that.” He waited a few beats more, continuing to leer. “I’m just heading home.”

Good. Good for you. You do that.

I have always fervently hoped that I will never have occasion to use my pepper spray, and I’m thankful that this encounter ended without much incident. And truthfully, I wasn’t scared at all, thanks to my “armed weapon,” as my dad would call it. (Yeah, that’s right, I pack some heat. That’s how I roll.) I’m the sort of person who walks in the middle of the street, keeps twenty feet away from all shrubs and trees, and constantly looks around. Unless some dude has had Special Forces stealth training, he’s probably not going to surprise me. But still.

This city has definitely made me more aggressive. In some cases, this is bad. Cursing at cars that nearly run you over is bad. Sighing impatiently at little old ladies in line who are counting $0.73 in pennies is bad. Kicking pigeons out of the way is bad. But sometimes a little aggression is good, especially when it helps to counteract your natural tendency to soothe, comfort and mollify everyone, even the undeserving. There was a time when I would have been reluctant to pull out my pepper spray for fear of offending this man. Offending him!

Today on the metro, a man sat down next to me and, as seems to be the case with many men, proceeded to take up his seat and half of mine. I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice guy, but I didn’t want to sit for a half hour with my thigh pressed against a stranger’s. It creeped me out. And where once I would have silently fumed but done nothing, out of concern for offending him, I decided I didn’t care. I simply moved my umbrella, which was hanging from the seat in front of us, and wedged it between our knees. Problem solved. Maybe he’ll refrain from sitting on ladies in the future.

In My Mind, At Least, I Am a Rock Star

Our newest roommate is – oh, how to put this diplomatically? – a pain in the butt. I won’t go into details. Better people than I would refrain from bitching about her on the Internet at all, even if they can excuse doing so with the fact that nobody ever reads their blog. But someone might, theoretically, read this, so on my journey to becoming a better person, I will confine myself to one incident. Not to cast aspersions on her character, of course, but to illuminate mine.

My roommate (we’ll call her The Troll in order to protect her identity) has trouble getting out of bed in the morning. She has two, possibly three, alarms that go off alternately over the course of an hour and a half, and we’re not talking about the wee hours of the morning here, either. By the time she gets out of bed, it is at least 9:00, and I’m on my way out the door.

One morning, after brushing my teeth, I opened the bathroom door to see her standing there, all groggy-eyed and disheveled as if someone had awoken her at three in the morning.

“Um, Renee?” she said. “I’ve been wanting to bring this up ever since I moved in. I really need the bathroom to be available at 8:30.”

Pregnant pause, as I contemplate why.

“Why?” I asked. “You don’t get out of bed until nine.”

“I do! It’s just that I’m waiting in my room for you to get out of the bathroom.”

This is such a load of crap, I don’t know where to begin, but since she caught me off guard I agreed to get out of the bathroom by 8:30 from there on out.

Here’s where my thoughts and my actions begin to diverge. I spent the train ride into work that morning planning what I was going to do the next day. Imagine me rubbing my hands together, gleefully, and cackling. This is how the scene was going to run:

8:30am. Our heroine rinses her toothbrush.
8:31am. Our heroine walks up to The Troll’s door.
BANG! BANG! BANG! – she knocks on the door.
“Oh ROOMMATE dear!” she chirps. BANG! BANG! BANG! “I just wanted to let you know it’s eight THIRTY! And I’m out of the BATHroom now!” BANG! BANG! BANG! “It’s alllll yours!”

But of course I didn’t do this. And the next morning – and every morning thereafter for the past five months, as a matter of fact – I listened as her alarm went on and off until 9:00 or later.

I always have deliciously devilish ideas, but I hardly ever act upon them. This is why people mistake me for a nice person.

Isn't it Loverly?

Is this not just the coolest picture ever? If my success in photography were due to anything beyond luck, I might consider becoming a photographer.

It was definitely worth the climb of approximately 2,354,997 steps to the tippety-top of St. Paul's Cathedral to be greeted with a vista such as this! I must have taken a hundred photos, partly because the light kept changing in amazing ways (I see now why Monet painted haystacks and cathedrals over and over again) and partly because my thighs were burning and I didn't want to go back down until I had caught my breath.


And here, a view from the river Thames. One of the most simple pleasures of visiting a new city is just wandering aimlessly around, learning its side streets and admiring the architecture. And getting lost. I got lost a lot.

El Oh En De Oh En

I'm going to London! Huzzah, huzzah!

And yes, that means I'm missing Thanksgiving this year. This would be very depressing indeed if my family continued to celebrate it, but with cousins off starting families of their own, the guest list has splintered down to my parents, my brother, and myself. Occasionally my grandmother will take me for two hours the day after Thanksgiving, approximately the time needed to go out to lunch and play a game of Scrabble. But mostly I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere for five days, with no car and nobody to talk to. And since we shovel our food in our mouths in five minutes or less, with a stinkin' football game blaring in the background, I thought this year I would rebel and do a bit of traveling instead.

Still, being a (somewhat) good daughter, I'm trying to feel bad about it. I had meant to call my mother before buying the ticket so I could feel guilty for awhile, but United was having a sale, so carpe ticket. Wouldn't you know, mom is ruining my attempt at feeling mopey by being excited for me.

So what shall I do in London? I have no idea. I'm visiting a friend whom I haven't seen in over a decade, so a good part of my attention is diverted by the following questions: Will she still like me? What will I do if she doesn't? Will it be awkward? What if her cat doesn't like me? What if it tries to sleep on my face? I hate cats. With my thoughts thus occupied, I haven't decided when I'm going to visit the Queen or where to have tea or whether I should buy a weekly pass for the Tube or not.

Oh well. I'm a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants sort of girl when it comes to travel. So long as I don't get too lost, or mugged, or sick, it will be a successful vacation.

Cheerio!

Twenty-eight is Pretty Great

It’s official. I am in my “late twenties.” No amount of justification or questionable math can gain me another year in my “mid twenties.” As depressing as this is, though, I find that for the second year in a row, I’m enjoying my birthday once again.

This has not been the case in recent years. Post-college, as my friends went on to medical/law/business/graduate school, got married and/or had babies, traveled the world, started on their career paths, or in general did something, I felt stagnant. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I didn’t do much of anything. And every year on my birthday, (birthdays being a sort of natural “milestone” whether you like it or not) I was reminded of that fact. I felt like I was wasting my life. I thought about the march of time, and how the years were going by faster and faster, and soon I’d be – oh my gawd – thirty, and after that it was a quick jump to wearing diapers and living out the end of my days in a raisin ranch. And then I would die.

It’s no wonder I hated birthdays.

But last year, something changed. I don’t know, maybe it was because twenty-seven is an inherently cool number. It’s three, cubed. It’s sassy. It’s confident. It says, “I am simultaneously far away enough from the foolishness of my early twenties and from the impending doom of 30 that I can enjoy being this number.” For the first time in a long time, I enjoyed my birthday. I was comfortable in my own skin. I was liking life. Twenty-seven would be My Year.

Well, I didn’t make the leaps and bounds in the self-improvement department that I had anticipated from My Year, but I did do a lot. And therein lies the key. In order to have joie de vivre, you have to live. I realized that if my life loomed long and tediously boring in front of me, it was my own dang fault, and I would just have to fill it with things to enjoy. For the first time since childhood, I finally allowed myself to embrace all my passions and give full reign to my creative impulses. Choir. Music lessons. Italian classes. Potter’s wheel classes. Writing. Travel. Drawing. (I keep adding things to this list, so I've got plenty to keep me busy until I'm an octogenarian.) Unlike the quagmire of my early twenties, I was actually doing something. Lots of somethings. So many somethings, as a matter of fact, that unless I win a hundred million dollars or find myself a rich benefactor so I can quit my job (one can dream) I’m going to have to cut back on the extra-curriculars a bit.

I am even prepared to admit that turning thirty isn’t so bad. Well, I almost am. It’s not as if I can prevent it. Since the alternative to turning thirty is dying within the next two years, I prefer to see thirty. It’s still hard not to think of thirty as a Big Milestone, however. I feel like I should have at least bought a house or something. I can only hope that I will have finished maturing by that time, and don’t work myself into a fit over it.

So, happy birthday to me. I think twenty-eight is pretty great.

The Constantly Frustrated Gardener

My grandmother had a green thumb. My mother has a brown thumb. Mine is somewhere in the middle –a green thumb with brown, wilted spots around the edges. Not unlike the plants I’m taking care of this summer.

My experience with gardening is limited, mostly concentrated around cacti and other hardy, moron-resistant plants. For example, I had an aloe plant all throughout college, and aside from its tendency to tip over and fall into the sink, it seemed to be a happy plant. I also had a marvelous shrub of some sort in elementary school – I think it was called an elephant plant – that would wilt dramatically if it needed to be watered. I need reminders like that. I named it Lazarus, because it always revived from the dead easily enough.

The neighbors have taken quite an interest in my surrogate garden, and an even greater interest in me, the house-sitter-cum-gardener. They expect that because I stand in the front yard every morning at 6:30 with an unruly hose, punctured along its length with holes, I must know something about what I’m doing. A typical conversation goes like this:

“What’s that plant?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about that one?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ooo, that’s pretty. What’s that one called?”
“I don’t know.”

Sometimes, if I’m bleary-eyed and have been bitten by one too many mosquitoes or if the hose dripped all over my pant leg again, I start to feel ornery and then just make up crap about the plants. Oh, this? Why, this is an African baloolau. It’s carnivorous. You might want to keep your little dog from peeing on it; they’re known to eat small mammals.

Locating all the plants has been a problem. I was in this house for a week and a half before I discovered a new crop of them hiding out behind the shed. They were a collection of brown twigs by the time I found them, but they’ve come back from the dead, too. That has been my saving grace. Despite detailed instructions about watering plants every third day, I know the truth: water them every spare minute you have. Preferably for hours. Once you soak the front yard and the back yard, if there’s still daylight, go back to the front yard and start over again, because guaranteed something will have died in the interim.

Think a raging thunderstorm will give you a brief respite from your watering duties? Ha, think again. I made the mistake of not watering the garden one day last week, because surely the torrential downpour was enough. No, no. The plants decided to mutiny, and all drooped pathetically. By midday, the neighbors, the cleaning lady, and the mother-in-law all reported to this family (who are in Italy, I might add) that I was not to be trusted with their garden, all before I had even arrived home to learn the state of affairs myself.

The mother-in-law, especially, terrifies me. I have not even met the woman, and I’m frightened of her. She’s in the society pages. She called me up the other day and scared me out of my wits.

“Hello, Renee? This is Mrs. X. Maria tells me that you’re not watering the house plants.”
Maria? Who the hell is Maria?
“I’ve only been here three days, Mrs. X. I’m still trying to find all the houseplants.”
And how does Maria know about the houseplants, anyway? Is she peeking in the windows?! I peered between the blinds to see if she was still there.

It’s enough to give a person an anxiety disorder. But I’m learning. For instance, the unidentified woody bush by the side of the house is, in fact, a rose bush. I learned this as soon as the roses bloomed, which naturally was just after I had thoroughly drenched all the leaves, thereby subjecting them to leaf rot.

But caring for a garden can be immensely rewarding as well. Despite a few minor setbacks, the garden is thriving. And even though I have never willingly gotten out of bed before 8:00am in my entire life, I find I rather like watering the garden in the early morning. I get to enjoy an hour or two of cool air, watch the sun rise, and be outside before the mosquitoes wake up. It’s hard to think about the past or the future, either, when you’re watering a garden. It’s the ultimate Zen experience. Well, it’s a Zen experience until Mrs. X calls me.

Guacamole Expert

I have been dubbed the Office Guacamole Expert. This befuddles me. True, about once a week I putter around the kitchen, mashing an avocado and chopping up tomatoes, cilantro, chili peppers, and scallions, sprinkling it all with a healthy dash of lime juice and salt, but I never expected to develop such a following. To my colleagues, who grew up eating things out of boxes, it is as if I perform a small miracle in the kitchen each week. All hail Our Lady of the Avocado. They like to stand over my shoulder and watch the entire process. They like stealing nibbles of my gwak-a-mole even more.

My reputation as a guacamole-maker has grown quietly but steadily, so that recently I have been giving guacamole lessons to my colleagues. I have been called upon to squeeze avocados, sniff cilantro, and pronounce other various ingredients as “ready.” I could market myself as a Guacamole Consultant and make a bundle. Or maybe I could quit my job to set up a guacamole stand outside our office. I’d probably make more money.

All of this causes me to wonder, what is an “expert”? Shouldn’t that title be reserved for people who have mastered difficult things? Guacamole is about the simplest dish you could make. (Not the quickest, mind you, at least for me. I may be a fearless cook, but I am also a slow cook. I blame my knives. My fingernails are probably sharper.) Shouldn’t “expert” be reserved for people who have followed and covered events in the Middle East for forty years, or who have read all the major works of Jung or Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, or who have built their lives as a sommelier and could tell you what year a bottle of wine was by sniffing it? Surely an “expert” should not be someone who was looking through her cookbook one day and said, “Oh, dude, score! I have avocados!”

But maybe an expert is just someone who knows something about something which you do not. And a smart expert is someone who charges you a lot of money for that knowledge. Me? Heck, I don’t even make people buy the avocados when I give lessons!