I don't know her name. No one knows her name; none of us can even remember whether she ever told us. All we know is that she comes in to the public library twice a week, with her ill-fitting jeans and her overbite, and she's nothing but trouble.
She's not the only incompetent volunteer the library's ever seen, she's just the most consistent. Usually the ones who don't know what they're doing are kids who need school credit. They come in once or twice and don't have the opportunity to do a lot of damage. Alternatively, our “regulars” tend to be older, and have a firm grasp of alphabetical organization.
This woman appears to be in her early fifties, although it's difficult to tell. She obviously immigrated to the US from a Central Asian country, India or Pakistan, but exactly which one is also mysterious. She wears her hair in one long braid down her back, as most women from that part of the world seem to do (her hair is black but her roots are gray—I see that a lot in Asian women, do they dye their hair or does it grow out that way when they get older?), but her clothes are western, obviously cheap and badly sized; she has neither the Hindu forehead dot nor the Muslim head covering, so there are no clues about her life there, either. We literally know nothing about her except that she's a walking apologetic smile of incompetence.
When she first came in over a year ago, we started her off with audio/visual materials. We keep these only loosely alphabetized and most people find them to be the simplest items to shelve. But we soon noticed that she couldn't tell the difference between regular audio books and teen audio books (the teen audio books are marked with a large blue dot on the spine—even if you're colorblind, you can see the giant dots) and would consistently put the teen materials in with the adult materials. When we tried to gently correct her, she switched to putting the adult stuff in with the teen stuff, which was worse. She does not take well to instruction, either; if you repeat an instruction (and she realizes it's something she's been told before), she gets huffy, declares that she has a college education, and sulks. But she never leaves.
What we can't figure out about her, aside from everything, is why she wants to volunteer at the library at all. One of our clerks told me that her family just brings her and leaves her here twice a week, to force her to get out of the house (For her sake? Or theirs? Again, unclear). But if that was all it is, she could sit with a magazine for a couple of hours, or use the public internet. Instead, for reasons known maybe only to herself, she wants to be helpful. My theory is that she somehow got the idea that shelving books at the library would help her to improve her English language skills. This might be the case, if she were reading the English books or conversing with English-speaking people. Instead, she is bringing me books marked with the letter F, because they were written by, say, Jonathan Franzen, or Ford Madox Ford, and asking me where she should put them because she doesn't know where the books go that are written in French—which, admittedly, also begins with F.
My personal relationship with her has evolved since we've known each other. At first, I was happy to show her around and explain where everything was supposed to go. I didn't mind answering her questions. Asking questions is how you learn, after all. But after the third or fourth time she would ask me the same question and then get offended at the phrase, “Remember when I told you...”, she gave up asking me. And shortly afterward, when I realized she would just ignore me if I came to help her unsolicited, we basically reached a silent agreement to ignore each other. Except that she hasn't figured out how to walk around a bookshelf if someone is in her way, so if we're working in the same area at the same time, I end up getting squeezed past far more often than is comfortable for me. Which is to say, at all.
Now she and I are at a stalemate. The librarians refuse to ask her not to come back (their philosophy being that any volunteers are better than none, which would make sense of we didn't have a couple of dozen others to choose from), so they keep just trying to think of different new tasks that she might not fuck up. But she always finds a way. She's wily. She kept putting books in the wrong place, so they asked her to put the books on the shelf with the spines facing up instead of out so that we can check them when she's done. But after about one day, she learned to only face the spines upward when she knows the book is in the right place—if she's not sure, she puts it in normally. She thinks that by doing this we won't be able to figure out that she's the one making all the mistakes. But we did. We thought that maybe she was getting things wrong because English is not her first language (although no one knows what is), and so maybe she's just having trouble with the alphabet. I wouldn't trust myself to alphabetize correctly in Greek, or Chinese. So we asked her to put the non-fiction books in order, because they are arranged numerically. For some reason she's not into that, though, so she does about a third to half of the numerical arranging (usually poorly), and then goes back to fucking up the alphabet again.
I myself have been reduced to following her from a distance while she's in the library, like some kind of crazy detective. If I try to do my own work, she'll take the books I'm working with and put them out of order, or she'll trip over me trying to walk through a narrow passage instead of going around. If I get too close to what she's doing, she gets super defensive and offended. All I can do is trail far enough behind her to hope she doesn't notice, and repair the damage.
I wonder how I could suggest that she'd rather volunteer at the UCLA library?
Showing posts with label power struggles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label power struggles. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
Steve Strong: Shanghaied in Shanghai
It seems that every time I go to China something traumatic… or at least unusually dramatic happens. I was almost carjacked once. There had been an accident and farmers were commandeering vehicles to take injured people to the hospital. They stopped our car and had me by the shirt, yanking me out of the car, when they saw how tall and big I was they realized I was a foreigner. They dropped me and yelled at us to pass through.
On a different trip, I had some free time and took a water shuttle from Hong Kong to Kowloon to get a suit made. I was in Kowloon until after dark, and I just hopped in the boat to return to the hotel. But it turns out there are several water shuttles and they all looked alike to me, so I got dropped off in a totally different part of Hong Kong. It was 11:00 at night, and the city was almost deserted, but I was able to flag down a car of young people who understood English well enough to help me get a taxi and were kind enough to explain to the driver where I needed to go.
On some trips I’ve had to eat scorpions. I’ve eaten dogs, frogs and cold goose stomachs. Since they didn’t have English or American songs in the Karaoke machine, one night I had to do an a cappella solo of the lullaby, “Baby Mine” from the movie Dumbo. Since I don’t drink alcohol, I was the only sober one in the room, and I felt like an idiot singing alone on that microphone. My only hope was that they were too drunk to remember my performance the next day.
A few times I’ve had to wear a parka, hat and gloves indoors for a business meeting in a conference room with no heat in December, and I’ve had to take a shower with no hot water in an unheated hotel room. After traveling without a hotel for several days, once we made a deal with a local fitness center for us to go in and use their shower facilities. And remember, I’m not in my youth doing this. I’m a middle-aged businessman who made the mistake of letting my Chinese business partners make all the domestic travel arrangements.
Once we traveled through the night and we got a sleeping berth on the train. Unfortunately I was too tall for the bed, so my feet stuck out of our room and into the hallway where they were bumped by passengers all night. Our berth only had a curtain for a door, so I was told to sleep with my hand on my luggage all night.
Another time I was in Beijing at some kind of street festival enjoying a barbecued sparrow on a stick, when this girl came up to me and asked me if I were an American. I thought she was friendly, so I told her I was. She asked me if I was staying in a local hotel, and I pointed to the hotel I was staying at – It was just a short walk from there. Then she asked me the craziest thing. She asked me if we should go to my hotel room. I thought that was so rude of her to ask that.
Why should she be trying to send me back to my hotel? I was enjoying my little sparrow on a stick and I was having fun right there. Then she told me she would go with me to the room, and said we could have a party. That’s when I decided she must be the rudest girl ever, and I told her I was staying at the party out there in the street. Later, my Chinese business partners told me I missed the point completely.
So you see, sometimes I just didn’t seem to be on the same page as the good people of China. And for me, the craziest of all was the night I lived through my own version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride through the streets of Shanghai.
It happened on my first trip to China. I flew China Air, and they lost my luggage on the way over. Because we were traveling by train and car all over Eastern China during the week, there was no way for my luggage to catch up to me for eight days. I finally met up with my luggage the night before I was traveling home. I had spent eight wretched days squeezing into little, tiny Chinese underwear and a long-sleeved shirt that went just past my elbows. I was forced to wear the same pair of tennis shoes and blue jeans that I had worn over on the plane because there were no others that could fit me.
So when I finally got my luggage, and took a long hot shower in the Shanghai Holiday Inn, I felt like I was in Los Angeles. The place was so modern that everything just felt right and I was excited to be there.
My business partners had left me and I was on my own that night and to get to the airport the next morning. From the hotel, I could see the bright lights of a shopping area so I told the English-speaking bellboy at the Holiday Inn I wanted to go there and he explained to the cab driver, and I was off.
I spent a couple hours buying knock-off name brand stuff until I got hungry for dinner. I saw a McDonald's. Judge me if you will, but what I did next might make you uncomfortable. I went into the McDonald's and ordered a Big Mac, fries and drink. I ate it at the table upstairs. Then went back down and ordered another Big Mac, fries and drink.
It just felt so good! I felt like I was safe. The world was right. People weren’t making me eat horrible things. I was full, and it was a great feeling.
I walked out of McDonald's to get a cab back to the Holiday Inn. But first a Chinese man came up to me and said, “Are you American?” I said yes. He said, “You want a Chinese girl?” I said, “No thank you.” He said, “Ah… you want a Chinese boy!”
I yelled “No!” and ran for the street. A taxi saw me and swerved over and slammed on the brakes. I jumped in and he took off very fast.
Now… I found it odd that he would race off with me when I hadn’t told him where I was going, so I said to him in English, “Holiday Inn, please.” He replied in Chinese and kept driving straight. I said again in English, “Yo dude. I’m staying at the H-O-L-I-D-A-Y I-N-N. Do you know where that is?”
This time he started looking over his shoulder and speaking in Chinese very fast, and kept driving straight. I handed him my room key, which had the Holiday Inn logo on it, and asked again if he knew where the hotel was. The more I spoke, the more agitated he got, and now he was driving very fast on those Shanghai streets. He tossed my room key on the dashboard.
I started saying things I knew for sure he couldn’t understand, but I was getting a little concerned by this point. “My man. Are you kidnapping me?” “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” “Are you nuts, or what?”
We came to a huge intersection with a blinking red light, and I figured I’d jump out when the car slowed down. He saw me start to open the door, and he started reaching for me, and yelling in Chinese.
And then he hit a woman on a bike!
We both got out of the taxi to see if she was OK. She seemed unhurt, but was furious and yelling at the driver, who seemed to be apologizing profusely. I took that as my sign to get out of there, but he saw me leaving and ran around and was trying to push me back in the car.
I said in English, “Man, you’re out of your mind. You don’t have any idea where we’re going. You’re just racing through this town. Are you on drugs?” Of course he couldn’t understand me, and just kept speaking that same agitated, worried Chinese.
Who knows why, but I did get back in the taxi. Off we sped in that same straight line down that street. Now, probably five or six miles from where he picked me up.
I saw the light of a small hotel up ahead and the driver started pointing to it. I thought this guy must be crazy if he thinks I’m staying there. But we headed to that hotel, and he sped up the driveway to where a nice bellhop in a fancy uniform stood. The driver and I both jumped out of the cab and ran up to the bellhop and both started telling our stories in our native tongues – each trying to be louder than the other as we fought for the bellhop’s attention.
The bellhop motioned for both of us to settle down, and first the driver, and then me, we both got to tell our story. The bellhop was very cool and had good English. He told me the taxi driver was so excited to see an American that he wanted to pick me up even though he had no way to communicate. He didn’t want to lose the good fare.
So he was trying to bring me here so the bellhop could speak English to me and find out where I needed to go.
The bellhop thought it was all rather funny. After a while the taxi driver and I did too.
He took me to the Holiday Inn and I gave him a hefty tip for all I put him through that night.
On a different trip, I had some free time and took a water shuttle from Hong Kong to Kowloon to get a suit made. I was in Kowloon until after dark, and I just hopped in the boat to return to the hotel. But it turns out there are several water shuttles and they all looked alike to me, so I got dropped off in a totally different part of Hong Kong. It was 11:00 at night, and the city was almost deserted, but I was able to flag down a car of young people who understood English well enough to help me get a taxi and were kind enough to explain to the driver where I needed to go.
On some trips I’ve had to eat scorpions. I’ve eaten dogs, frogs and cold goose stomachs. Since they didn’t have English or American songs in the Karaoke machine, one night I had to do an a cappella solo of the lullaby, “Baby Mine” from the movie Dumbo. Since I don’t drink alcohol, I was the only sober one in the room, and I felt like an idiot singing alone on that microphone. My only hope was that they were too drunk to remember my performance the next day.
A few times I’ve had to wear a parka, hat and gloves indoors for a business meeting in a conference room with no heat in December, and I’ve had to take a shower with no hot water in an unheated hotel room. After traveling without a hotel for several days, once we made a deal with a local fitness center for us to go in and use their shower facilities. And remember, I’m not in my youth doing this. I’m a middle-aged businessman who made the mistake of letting my Chinese business partners make all the domestic travel arrangements.
Once we traveled through the night and we got a sleeping berth on the train. Unfortunately I was too tall for the bed, so my feet stuck out of our room and into the hallway where they were bumped by passengers all night. Our berth only had a curtain for a door, so I was told to sleep with my hand on my luggage all night.
Another time I was in Beijing at some kind of street festival enjoying a barbecued sparrow on a stick, when this girl came up to me and asked me if I were an American. I thought she was friendly, so I told her I was. She asked me if I was staying in a local hotel, and I pointed to the hotel I was staying at – It was just a short walk from there. Then she asked me the craziest thing. She asked me if we should go to my hotel room. I thought that was so rude of her to ask that.
Why should she be trying to send me back to my hotel? I was enjoying my little sparrow on a stick and I was having fun right there. Then she told me she would go with me to the room, and said we could have a party. That’s when I decided she must be the rudest girl ever, and I told her I was staying at the party out there in the street. Later, my Chinese business partners told me I missed the point completely.
So you see, sometimes I just didn’t seem to be on the same page as the good people of China. And for me, the craziest of all was the night I lived through my own version of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride through the streets of Shanghai.
It happened on my first trip to China. I flew China Air, and they lost my luggage on the way over. Because we were traveling by train and car all over Eastern China during the week, there was no way for my luggage to catch up to me for eight days. I finally met up with my luggage the night before I was traveling home. I had spent eight wretched days squeezing into little, tiny Chinese underwear and a long-sleeved shirt that went just past my elbows. I was forced to wear the same pair of tennis shoes and blue jeans that I had worn over on the plane because there were no others that could fit me.
So when I finally got my luggage, and took a long hot shower in the Shanghai Holiday Inn, I felt like I was in Los Angeles. The place was so modern that everything just felt right and I was excited to be there.
My business partners had left me and I was on my own that night and to get to the airport the next morning. From the hotel, I could see the bright lights of a shopping area so I told the English-speaking bellboy at the Holiday Inn I wanted to go there and he explained to the cab driver, and I was off.
I spent a couple hours buying knock-off name brand stuff until I got hungry for dinner. I saw a McDonald's. Judge me if you will, but what I did next might make you uncomfortable. I went into the McDonald's and ordered a Big Mac, fries and drink. I ate it at the table upstairs. Then went back down and ordered another Big Mac, fries and drink.
It just felt so good! I felt like I was safe. The world was right. People weren’t making me eat horrible things. I was full, and it was a great feeling.
I walked out of McDonald's to get a cab back to the Holiday Inn. But first a Chinese man came up to me and said, “Are you American?” I said yes. He said, “You want a Chinese girl?” I said, “No thank you.” He said, “Ah… you want a Chinese boy!”
I yelled “No!” and ran for the street. A taxi saw me and swerved over and slammed on the brakes. I jumped in and he took off very fast.
Now… I found it odd that he would race off with me when I hadn’t told him where I was going, so I said to him in English, “Holiday Inn, please.” He replied in Chinese and kept driving straight. I said again in English, “Yo dude. I’m staying at the H-O-L-I-D-A-Y I-N-N. Do you know where that is?”
This time he started looking over his shoulder and speaking in Chinese very fast, and kept driving straight. I handed him my room key, which had the Holiday Inn logo on it, and asked again if he knew where the hotel was. The more I spoke, the more agitated he got, and now he was driving very fast on those Shanghai streets. He tossed my room key on the dashboard.
I started saying things I knew for sure he couldn’t understand, but I was getting a little concerned by this point. “My man. Are you kidnapping me?” “Do you have any idea where we’re going?” “Are you nuts, or what?”
We came to a huge intersection with a blinking red light, and I figured I’d jump out when the car slowed down. He saw me start to open the door, and he started reaching for me, and yelling in Chinese.
And then he hit a woman on a bike!
We both got out of the taxi to see if she was OK. She seemed unhurt, but was furious and yelling at the driver, who seemed to be apologizing profusely. I took that as my sign to get out of there, but he saw me leaving and ran around and was trying to push me back in the car.
I said in English, “Man, you’re out of your mind. You don’t have any idea where we’re going. You’re just racing through this town. Are you on drugs?” Of course he couldn’t understand me, and just kept speaking that same agitated, worried Chinese.
Who knows why, but I did get back in the taxi. Off we sped in that same straight line down that street. Now, probably five or six miles from where he picked me up.
I saw the light of a small hotel up ahead and the driver started pointing to it. I thought this guy must be crazy if he thinks I’m staying there. But we headed to that hotel, and he sped up the driveway to where a nice bellhop in a fancy uniform stood. The driver and I both jumped out of the cab and ran up to the bellhop and both started telling our stories in our native tongues – each trying to be louder than the other as we fought for the bellhop’s attention.
The bellhop motioned for both of us to settle down, and first the driver, and then me, we both got to tell our story. The bellhop was very cool and had good English. He told me the taxi driver was so excited to see an American that he wanted to pick me up even though he had no way to communicate. He didn’t want to lose the good fare.
So he was trying to bring me here so the bellhop could speak English to me and find out where I needed to go.
The bellhop thought it was all rather funny. After a while the taxi driver and I did too.
He took me to the Holiday Inn and I gave him a hefty tip for all I put him through that night.
Josh Grimmer: Sabotage
Most divorced parents fight for the exclusive rights to the love of their children. Bribes, presents, lenient curfews, et cetera. My parents split up right about six weeks after I was born, and my mom did her fair share of fighting for my affection. My dad was never around to fight back – he ran off for Florida, never to be seen or heard from again. That really should have ended the argument, right? My mom wins, 1 – 0.
My mom spent most of her time explaining to me that my dad never loved me. He was a bad guy. An alcoholic. Emotionally abusive. He lied about every single thing he ever told her. He claimed to have no friends or family. She basically married a drifter. I get it, mom. He sucks. Of course he sucks, he abandoned his wife and child. I get it. Really.
My mom, terrible at making friends and even worse at dating, really only had one person to love her – me. Rather than actually being a good parent, she decided it would be just as effective to convince me to hate my dad. She burned a lot of calories making sure I was thoroughly aware of how wretched he was. Eventually I really empathized with my dad. I wanted to run away from home, too.
As I grew more and more distant from my mom, she tried harder and harder to eliminate anything in my life that I loved more than her. As I got older I realized she wasn't actually interested in me – not even a little. She figured hey, what the hell, this kid is supposed to like me, right? Anything that I liked more than her was a threat, and as time wore on that became a longer and longer list. Pets – I had a cat named Leon once, who I loved very much. I went on a vacation to (I know, believe me, I wasn't thrilled about it either) Ohio. Nine days later I came home to no cat.
“Where's Leon?
“Who?”
“Leon. My cat.”
“I'm pretty sure you don't own a cat.”
I had a Hyannis Mets baseball cap that was specially ordered to fit my gigantic head. I barely had a week to wear it before she took it from my room, ran it through the washing machine and shrunk it. I know I sound paranoid, but it was a pattern. Anything that brought me any kind of happiness was gone. Broken action figures, dented baseball bats, a video game that mysteriously got returned to the store. The sad part was that she really thought she had me Gaslit.
The destruction of my stuff was bad, but it really paled in comparison to her absolute disdain for anybody I dated. She doesn't love you. Why are you with her? You should date Alicia. You shouldn't be dating a Jewish girl. She lives so far away. You know she's using you. (For what?)
Every moment I was in a relationship, my mom would try to break it up. She still is, for that matter. That doesn't really surprise me – if there's a more concrete example of somebody or something I love more than my mom, it's my wife. I mean, first of all, I love my wife even a little. Some at all. Very much, actually. That puts her ahead of my mom from the very start. I moved away from home to be with my wife. When I'm sick, my wife takes care of me. She (occasionally) cooks and (occasionally) cleans. (Probably about as often as I do – not often.) Those maternal duties – the doting, the caring, the aw honey-ing – my wife does all that now. My mom never really did. She was replaced as the most important woman in my life, or would have been if she ever was to begin with. My mom is obsolete. She fought with the entire universe for my affection. It shouldn't have been a close match, but she lost.
Josh Grimmer lives in Hollywood with his wife and cat. He kinda sorta runs this blog, and has another one at http://mousebed.blogspot.com. Twitter him up at http://twitter.com/JoshGrimmer
My mom spent most of her time explaining to me that my dad never loved me. He was a bad guy. An alcoholic. Emotionally abusive. He lied about every single thing he ever told her. He claimed to have no friends or family. She basically married a drifter. I get it, mom. He sucks. Of course he sucks, he abandoned his wife and child. I get it. Really.
My mom, terrible at making friends and even worse at dating, really only had one person to love her – me. Rather than actually being a good parent, she decided it would be just as effective to convince me to hate my dad. She burned a lot of calories making sure I was thoroughly aware of how wretched he was. Eventually I really empathized with my dad. I wanted to run away from home, too.
As I grew more and more distant from my mom, she tried harder and harder to eliminate anything in my life that I loved more than her. As I got older I realized she wasn't actually interested in me – not even a little. She figured hey, what the hell, this kid is supposed to like me, right? Anything that I liked more than her was a threat, and as time wore on that became a longer and longer list. Pets – I had a cat named Leon once, who I loved very much. I went on a vacation to (I know, believe me, I wasn't thrilled about it either) Ohio. Nine days later I came home to no cat.
“Where's Leon?
“Who?”
“Leon. My cat.”
“I'm pretty sure you don't own a cat.”
I had a Hyannis Mets baseball cap that was specially ordered to fit my gigantic head. I barely had a week to wear it before she took it from my room, ran it through the washing machine and shrunk it. I know I sound paranoid, but it was a pattern. Anything that brought me any kind of happiness was gone. Broken action figures, dented baseball bats, a video game that mysteriously got returned to the store. The sad part was that she really thought she had me Gaslit.
The destruction of my stuff was bad, but it really paled in comparison to her absolute disdain for anybody I dated. She doesn't love you. Why are you with her? You should date Alicia. You shouldn't be dating a Jewish girl. She lives so far away. You know she's using you. (For what?)
Every moment I was in a relationship, my mom would try to break it up. She still is, for that matter. That doesn't really surprise me – if there's a more concrete example of somebody or something I love more than my mom, it's my wife. I mean, first of all, I love my wife even a little. Some at all. Very much, actually. That puts her ahead of my mom from the very start. I moved away from home to be with my wife. When I'm sick, my wife takes care of me. She (occasionally) cooks and (occasionally) cleans. (Probably about as often as I do – not often.) Those maternal duties – the doting, the caring, the aw honey-ing – my wife does all that now. My mom never really did. She was replaced as the most important woman in my life, or would have been if she ever was to begin with. My mom is obsolete. She fought with the entire universe for my affection. It shouldn't have been a close match, but she lost.
Josh Grimmer lives in Hollywood with his wife and cat. He kinda sorta runs this blog, and has another one at http://mousebed.blogspot.com. Twitter him up at http://twitter.com/JoshGrimmer
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Coco Higgins: Waking Up
Livejournal Extract:
Saturday, August 5, 2000: (18 years old)
Yesterday, we saw Coyote Ugly and it was actually a really good movie! I liked it a lot. Hopefully that doesn’t make me a lesbian.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Coco Higgins was born into a fairly conservative Christian family. She was forced to keep her hair long and to wear skirts on Sundays. She hated these things.
There was something a little peculiar about Coco, and she did a commendable job of hiding it for 20 years. An integral part of her identity remained concealed behind a facade of heterosexuality during this time, all while the two voices of Jess and Min conducted an internal power struggle unbeknownst to anyone but Coco.
Curiosity: 10 years old
A new girl transferred and joined Coco’s class. They didn’t become very good friends. In fact, Coco hardly spoke to her, choosing instead to observe her from afar.
Min: Why do you keep staring at her?
Jess: She’s very pretty.
Min: No she’s not! And you shouldn’t even be having those kinds of thoughts. It’s beyond wrong.
Coco didn’t tell anyone that she was fascinated by the new girl. Min won.
Discovery: 11 years old
Coco’s older brother was 18 years old and hid Playboy magazines in his room. He stashed them in a secret cache under his bed. Since this wasn’t a very clever hiding place, and Coco was naturally a nosy little sister, she stumbled upon them one day. She was immediately captivated.
Min: What the hell are you doing?
Jess: Umm... being aroused for the first time in my life...?
Min: But you can’t be! This is disgusting! How could you even look at this? These are women. And plus, if you were ever caught doing this, you’d probably get into so much trouble from Mom and Dad. You need to feel DIRTY and ASHAMED of yourself because this goes against nature!
Jess: But...
Min: No “buts,” IT’S WRONG.
Coco “read the articles” just a few times more, but ultimately listened to Min and stopped. She never spoke of this to anyone and even suppressed it from her own memory for ten years. Min won.
Conformity: 13 years old
Everyone in junior high started having their first relationships and experiencing their first kisses. The school was filled with pre-teens holding hands.
Min: You should have a boyfriend too.
Jess: But I don’t want a boyfriend. I’d rather have...
Min: Oh shut up. Everyone else is doing it. Don’t you want to fit in? Besides, it’s natural.
Coco “went out” with a cute Mormon boy. He was a Kurt Cobain wannabe, and she liked Nirvana, so this was tolerable. Her first kiss tasted like cinnamon rolls. He walked her home from school, tried to show off with tricks on his skateboard, and even sang “Interstate Love Song” to her. It was short-lived though, as all junior high relationships are wont to be. Kurt broke up with her. He couldn’t look her in the eye, and he uncomfortably told her that she wasn’t “feminininine enough.” Nonetheless, Min won.
And Min won time and time again in high school too.
While Coco was dating boys to fit in, Jess was quietly harboring secret crushes on girls. But whenever Jess tried to say anything about it, Min would throw a hissy fit and condemn those thoughts. Jess’s voice slowly diminished until it was completely silent. Min won.
For the six years encompassing high school and the first half of college, Coco forgot that Jess even existed, until one day a boyfriend broke up with her.
Failure: 19 years old
Coco was in what she considered a serious relationship. She actually even liked him as a person. But after about five months of dating, meeting each other’s families, and “taking it to the next level,” he broke up with her. Coco was devastated. She sequestered herself in her dorm room and cried for weeks.
Min had no reason to speak because she saw this extreme reaction as confirmation of Coco’s heterosexuality. But a soft, whispery, familiar voice did venture an opinion.
Jess: You’re only sad because the relationship itself failed. You’re crying because you desperately wanted this one to work out just so you’d be normal. But these tears are NOT for him. They are for the lost idea of him. You know the truth.
Min: Don’t be ridiculous...
For once, Min didn’t have a strong enough counter jab. She could no longer play the morality card because Coco had stopped going to religious functions years ago and had since been exposed to a wide variety of people at her liberal school 400 miles away from home. She was even a fag hag.
Coco heard Jess’ voice but was too afraid to admit it. Jess won.
Standstill: 20 years old
Coco became really good friends with Shane, a lesbian. They had several classes together and would even wait for each other after classes that weren’t shared. They would sit on patches of grass on campus, smoke cigarettes, people-watch, do crossword puzzles, and genuinely just enjoy each other’s company. After the school day, Coco and Shane would regularly go to coffee shops to study, followed by a night of unwinding in true Berkeley fashion: altered states of consciousness, Fleetwood Mac, Fiona Apple and Junior Mints.
One night, Shane slept over because the two of them were to attend an event early the following morning. They slept on Coco’s twin-sized dorm bed together. And the shouting match between Min and Jess raged on. There was a cacophony of heated voices fighting in Coco’s head as she lay there centimeters away from Shane.
Jess: She’s RIGHT THERE. Do something!
Min: NO! Why would you do anything at all?!
Jess: You know you want to. You’ve wanted this for months and you know it. It’s true!
Min knew it was true, but took a different angle to discourage Coco. She came up with other excuses to prove that this was a bad idea.
Min: But she thinks you’re straight. What if she’s not even into you?
Jess: There’s only one way to find out! Make a move!
Min: NO! Think about this long and hard. If you do something now, you can’t take it back. It will CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
Jess: But you’ve known your whole life. This is who you are.
Min: That is most definitely not true. What about all those boys you dated?
Jess: That was a lie. This one is real. You LOVE her.
Min: ...
Jess: Admit it. You’re in love with her and it’s not wrong to love someone.
Coco finally fully acknowledged both voices in her head. It was overwhelming and incredibly confusing. She admitted that she did indeed love Shane, but did nothing at all because she was too afraid. Making a move, in addition to this newfound self-realization, was too much to consider all at once.
Both Min and Jess were quiet, and it was now up to Coco to synthesize this 20 year-old mental exchange. Coco herself dared not tell anyone until she could figure it out. Jess and Min reached a stalemate.
Dreaming: 20 years old
While her friendship with Shane was developing, Coco was also taking a class on 19th Century French Art History. For the course, she read Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, a complex work that dealt with the dialectical nature of modernity, commodity fetishism and most importantly, the development of consciousness. Coco spent an excessive amount of time neurotically obsessing over this reading because she too was finally coming to terms with her own consciousness.
“Representation is dreaming,” Benjamin wrote. “Dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.”
For 20 years, Coco was was putting up a representation of a straight person, pretending to be something she was not. Acknowledging the opposing voices was the first step in her dialectical thinking. She realized she was dreaming and something must be done.
Awakening: 20 years old
Coco woke up. She admitted to herself that she was a lesbian, and has been her whole life. She told all her friends, and subsequently her family. Some friends were shocked, and Coco’s mother wept. But in the end, Coco experienced only love and acceptance from her family. They ultimately knew that Coco was just being herself.
The voices stopped bickering.
Coco won.
Coco Higgins is an aspiring art historian, post-hipster, obnoxious Twitterer, proud owner of delusions of grandeur, has a knack for remembering useless trivia of all kinds, all in all an extraordinary machine.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Emily Idzior: Making the Bed
Everyone, you think, has trouble making the bed. It’s a dance that the actresses on TV commercials make look smooth and easy but it’s a fight. It’s Monday and in one corner is you, five foot tall, in the other corner is the mattress, so large and so tall. It’s almost comedic--like a skit on TV about over-sized chairs and toys with a normal sized person sitting among the giant things to look like a child. You’re the size of some children, except with hips and a fully developed love of naps. You will win this fight but you will walk away with sore arms, out of breath, in need of a glass of cold water. The cat makes it fun, she runs under the sheets and is cute, you think that will make it fun every time. Today, though, the cat is off watching the leaves fall of the trees and is more interested in a cat-bath than the human chore of making the bed. At moments you pretend you have it easy, some people do this for a living. And then the fitted sheet isn’t fitting anything today. So you’ll pull and pull and then gather and walk over to another corner and pull and tuck. Soon it will be done, one corner will be sticking up and the others will look taut and perfect like they should. One side will have less sheet than the other side but it’s done. And then the next sheet, which is admittedly easier but still a problem. The cat decides to come in and wants to sabotage your hard work. So you’ll play with the cat to humor her, let her run and jump and get cat hair all over even though you’re only slightly allergic. And then it’s time to finish the work. Smooth the sheet out, shoo the cat out. Maybe today you’ll do things differently and fold the top of the quilt over to make a cute “hotel” quality bed. Except not “hotel quality” because you’ll be able to move freely without fighting to undo the bed. So it’s done. The pillows are placed where they belong and the bed is made. Tonight it will become unmade. And next week the laundry will need to be done. But right now, in this moment: perfection. You own this moment. You deserve something. Go eat a slice of pie. Drink a hot cup of coffee with a lot of cream and sugar in it. Delight in the fact that it’s over and you don’t technically even have to do it next week if you don’t want to. But you will. The cat’s just too cute.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Aurora Nibley: Spine vs. Spine - Espionage in the Stacks
I don't know her name. No one knows her name; none of us can even remember whether she ever told us. All we know is that she comes in to the public library twice a week, with her ill-fitting jeans and her overbite, and she's nothing but trouble.
She's not the only incompetent volunteer the library's ever seen, she's just the most consistent. Usually the ones who don't know what they're doing are kids who need school credit. They come in once or twice and don't have the opportunity to do a lot of damage. Alternatively, our “regulars” tend to be older, and have a firm grasp of alphabetical organization.
This woman appears to be in her early fifties, although it's difficult to tell. She obviously immigrated to the US from a Central Asian country, India or Pakistan, but exactly which one is also mysterious. She wears her hair in one long braid down her back, as most women from that part of the world seem to do (her hair is black but her roots are gray—I see that a lot in Asian women, do they dye their hair or does it grow out that way when they get older?), but her clothes are western, obviously cheap and badly sized; she has neither the Hindu forehead dot nor the Muslim head covering, so there are no clues about her life there, either. We literally know nothing about her except that she's a walking apologetic smile of incompetence.
When she first came in over a year ago, we started her off with audio/visual materials. We keep these only loosely alphabetized and most people find them to be the simplest items to shelve. But we soon noticed that she couldn't tell the difference between regular audio books and teen audio books (the teen audio books are marked with a large blue dot on the spine—even if you're colorblind, you can see the giant dots) and would consistently put the teen materials in with the adult materials. When we tried to gently correct her, she switched to putting the adult stuff in with the teen stuff, which was worse. She does not take well to instruction, either; if you repeat an instruction (and she realizes it's something she's been told before), she gets huffy, declares that she has a college education, and sulks. But she never leaves.
What we can't figure out about her, aside from everything, is why she wants to volunteer at the library at all. One of our clerks told me that her family just brings her and leaves her here twice a week, to force her to get out of the house (For her sake? Or theirs? Again, unclear). But if that was all it is, she could sit with a magazine for a couple of hours, or use the public internet. Instead, for reasons known maybe only to herself, she wants to be helpful. My theory is that she somehow got the idea that shelving books at the library would help her to improve her English language skills. This might be the case, if she were reading the English books or conversing with English-speaking people. Instead, she is bringing me books marked with the letter F, because they were written by, say, Jonathan Franzen, or Ford Madox Ford, and asking me where she should put them because she doesn't know where the books go that are written in French—which, admittedly, also begins with F.
My personal relationship with her has evolved since we've known each other. At first, I was happy to show her around and explain where everything was supposed to go. I didn't mind answering her questions. Asking questions is how you learn, after all. But after the third or fourth time she would ask me the same question and then get offended at the phrase, “Remember when I told you...”, she gave up asking me. And shortly afterward, when I realized she would just ignore me if I came to help her unsolicited, we basically reached a silent agreement to ignore each other. Except that she hasn't figured out how to walk around a bookshelf if someone is in her way, so if we're working in the same area at the same time, I end up getting squeezed past far more often than is comfortable for me. Which is to say, at all.
Now she and I are at a stalemate. The librarians refuse to ask her not to come back (their philosophy being that any volunteers are better than none, which would make sense of we didn't have a couple of dozen others to choose from), so they keep just trying to think of different new tasks that she might not fuck up. But she always finds a way. She's wily. She kept putting books in the wrong place, so they asked her to put the books on the shelf with the spines facing up instead of out so that we can check them when she's done. But after about one day, she learned to only face the spines upward when she knows the book is in the right place—if she's not sure, she puts it in normally. She thinks that by doing this we won't be able to figure out that she's the one making all the mistakes. But we did. We thought that maybe she was getting things wrong because English is not her first language (although no one knows what is), and so maybe she's just having trouble with the alphabet. I wouldn't trust myself to alphabetize correctly in Greek, or Chinese. So we asked her to put the non-fiction books in order, because they are arranged numerically. For some reason she's not into that, though, so she does about a third to half of the numerical arranging (usually poorly), and then goes back to fucking up the alphabet again.
I myself have been reduced to following her from a distance while she's in the library, like some kind of crazy detective. If I try to do my own work, she'll take the books I'm working with and put them out of order, or she'll trip over me trying to walk through a narrow passage instead of going around. If I get too close to what she's doing, she gets super defensive and offended. All I can do is trail far enough behind her to hope she doesn't notice, and repair the damage.
I wonder how I could suggest that she'd rather volunteer at the UCLA library?
She's not the only incompetent volunteer the library's ever seen, she's just the most consistent. Usually the ones who don't know what they're doing are kids who need school credit. They come in once or twice and don't have the opportunity to do a lot of damage. Alternatively, our “regulars” tend to be older, and have a firm grasp of alphabetical organization.
This woman appears to be in her early fifties, although it's difficult to tell. She obviously immigrated to the US from a Central Asian country, India or Pakistan, but exactly which one is also mysterious. She wears her hair in one long braid down her back, as most women from that part of the world seem to do (her hair is black but her roots are gray—I see that a lot in Asian women, do they dye their hair or does it grow out that way when they get older?), but her clothes are western, obviously cheap and badly sized; she has neither the Hindu forehead dot nor the Muslim head covering, so there are no clues about her life there, either. We literally know nothing about her except that she's a walking apologetic smile of incompetence.
When she first came in over a year ago, we started her off with audio/visual materials. We keep these only loosely alphabetized and most people find them to be the simplest items to shelve. But we soon noticed that she couldn't tell the difference between regular audio books and teen audio books (the teen audio books are marked with a large blue dot on the spine—even if you're colorblind, you can see the giant dots) and would consistently put the teen materials in with the adult materials. When we tried to gently correct her, she switched to putting the adult stuff in with the teen stuff, which was worse. She does not take well to instruction, either; if you repeat an instruction (and she realizes it's something she's been told before), she gets huffy, declares that she has a college education, and sulks. But she never leaves.
What we can't figure out about her, aside from everything, is why she wants to volunteer at the library at all. One of our clerks told me that her family just brings her and leaves her here twice a week, to force her to get out of the house (For her sake? Or theirs? Again, unclear). But if that was all it is, she could sit with a magazine for a couple of hours, or use the public internet. Instead, for reasons known maybe only to herself, she wants to be helpful. My theory is that she somehow got the idea that shelving books at the library would help her to improve her English language skills. This might be the case, if she were reading the English books or conversing with English-speaking people. Instead, she is bringing me books marked with the letter F, because they were written by, say, Jonathan Franzen, or Ford Madox Ford, and asking me where she should put them because she doesn't know where the books go that are written in French—which, admittedly, also begins with F.
My personal relationship with her has evolved since we've known each other. At first, I was happy to show her around and explain where everything was supposed to go. I didn't mind answering her questions. Asking questions is how you learn, after all. But after the third or fourth time she would ask me the same question and then get offended at the phrase, “Remember when I told you...”, she gave up asking me. And shortly afterward, when I realized she would just ignore me if I came to help her unsolicited, we basically reached a silent agreement to ignore each other. Except that she hasn't figured out how to walk around a bookshelf if someone is in her way, so if we're working in the same area at the same time, I end up getting squeezed past far more often than is comfortable for me. Which is to say, at all.
Now she and I are at a stalemate. The librarians refuse to ask her not to come back (their philosophy being that any volunteers are better than none, which would make sense of we didn't have a couple of dozen others to choose from), so they keep just trying to think of different new tasks that she might not fuck up. But she always finds a way. She's wily. She kept putting books in the wrong place, so they asked her to put the books on the shelf with the spines facing up instead of out so that we can check them when she's done. But after about one day, she learned to only face the spines upward when she knows the book is in the right place—if she's not sure, she puts it in normally. She thinks that by doing this we won't be able to figure out that she's the one making all the mistakes. But we did. We thought that maybe she was getting things wrong because English is not her first language (although no one knows what is), and so maybe she's just having trouble with the alphabet. I wouldn't trust myself to alphabetize correctly in Greek, or Chinese. So we asked her to put the non-fiction books in order, because they are arranged numerically. For some reason she's not into that, though, so she does about a third to half of the numerical arranging (usually poorly), and then goes back to fucking up the alphabet again.
I myself have been reduced to following her from a distance while she's in the library, like some kind of crazy detective. If I try to do my own work, she'll take the books I'm working with and put them out of order, or she'll trip over me trying to walk through a narrow passage instead of going around. If I get too close to what she's doing, she gets super defensive and offended. All I can do is trail far enough behind her to hope she doesn't notice, and repair the damage.
I wonder how I could suggest that she'd rather volunteer at the UCLA library?
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Katie McMahon: I Could Have Drowned
It all comes back so quickly, not just when you step off a plane, but when you simply crack an egg incorrectly. Someone might be eating that shell later and they won’t even know it. Someone’s jacket smells like cigarettes and the glass spins and tips, beer dripping off the table and onto the tip of your toes. The sound of phones with cords that drag from room to room, all around the house and back again. The taste of foods you were never allowed to eat before. Somewhere, deep under my skin, I am still sixteen and I have to look into at least three different mirrors to see the differences between her and me.
Someone somewhere has compiled a list of all the things you’re not supposed to do. You’re not supposed to pick favorites. You’re not supposed to get drunk and call your children. Don’t make a fool of yourself. Don’t cheat or lie. Don’t steal from anybody, especially yourself. You really shouldn’t leave the Christmas lights hung around the house until Spring. The chair goes there. Fold the towels like this. Put the socks behind the couch.
Then, there is the incessant list of objects to fix that will never get fixed. Parts missing. Broken, irreparable things. Unrealistic lists of damages that do not even exist.
But maybe when they were lying in bed, picturing stars on the ceiling, they decided what I would be like. Maybe my hair was lighter and my eyes were green. I would be tall and thin and tap dance around the house and not just in the basement. If I stepped on glass, I would never bleed. My teeth would be white and straight. I would win prizes and cure diseases. We would all have too much money and buy each other fast cars and silk pajamas.
I won a prize in the third grade. It was a book about a moose with mood swings. This was the only time I have won anything in my entire life. At school, I always raised my hand. I always knew answers. I sang louder than anyone else and laughed at all my own jokes. At home, I was nervous to let words fall out of my mouth. I could not be alone without throwing up. I sang in the closet, behind the umbrellas and the box of winter gloves.
So when I am disappointed, I remember that maybe they are disappointed too. The banging of pots and pans in the morning is her first husband. An untied shoe is the first time he tasted whiskey on his lips. Maybe she has to look into six mirrors to understand that she is not the same person who said the words she used to say. That her feelings don’t have to stay the same, no matter what other people feel and no matter how much it hurts someone else to see that people are not at all what they are supposed to be. Maybe he cries when he parks in the parking lot. Maybe he fears that asking questions will be more embarrassing than the answers he refuses to hear anyway.
Disappointment is not the worst feeling. The worst feeling is not letting go. The worst feeling is building up ideas and frantically holding onto those ideas; using all your strength to hold it together, when you could just use it to swim to the other side.
What we have expected in each other is impossible to attain. If I tried their path, my pants would be too small and my lips and teeth would be purple from drinking too much wine. If they understood me better, then I wouldn’t exist.
Bitter resentment. Never apologizing. Saying you can’t do something because no one ever taught you how. Pretending that you know the answer.
We could all be strangers, but we’re not. Maybe none of us had a say. When I don’t know where I am, I ask for directions. If my car gets too dirty, I wash it. I use an electric toothbrush. I don’t go to church. I find the matching socks immediately. I eat ice cream behind your back. I wear sandals in the rain. I make eggs that are not scrambled. Sometimes, I put sugar in my coffee. I cry when I am hurt. I shave my legs above the knee. When I tell a lie, I admit the truth within minutes. When I need help, I make a phone call. I walk alone in the dark in safe neighborhoods.
And I swim and I swim and I swim.
Katie McMahon is a lady who lives in the North Hollywood area. She has a bachelor's degree that she keeps on her bookcase and looks at sometimes. She is getting a master's degree to put on her nightstand. Sometimes she takes pictures which you can look at here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/katiemcmahon/sets, but you don't have to if you're busy right now.
Someone somewhere has compiled a list of all the things you’re not supposed to do. You’re not supposed to pick favorites. You’re not supposed to get drunk and call your children. Don’t make a fool of yourself. Don’t cheat or lie. Don’t steal from anybody, especially yourself. You really shouldn’t leave the Christmas lights hung around the house until Spring. The chair goes there. Fold the towels like this. Put the socks behind the couch.
Then, there is the incessant list of objects to fix that will never get fixed. Parts missing. Broken, irreparable things. Unrealistic lists of damages that do not even exist.
But maybe when they were lying in bed, picturing stars on the ceiling, they decided what I would be like. Maybe my hair was lighter and my eyes were green. I would be tall and thin and tap dance around the house and not just in the basement. If I stepped on glass, I would never bleed. My teeth would be white and straight. I would win prizes and cure diseases. We would all have too much money and buy each other fast cars and silk pajamas.
I won a prize in the third grade. It was a book about a moose with mood swings. This was the only time I have won anything in my entire life. At school, I always raised my hand. I always knew answers. I sang louder than anyone else and laughed at all my own jokes. At home, I was nervous to let words fall out of my mouth. I could not be alone without throwing up. I sang in the closet, behind the umbrellas and the box of winter gloves.
So when I am disappointed, I remember that maybe they are disappointed too. The banging of pots and pans in the morning is her first husband. An untied shoe is the first time he tasted whiskey on his lips. Maybe she has to look into six mirrors to understand that she is not the same person who said the words she used to say. That her feelings don’t have to stay the same, no matter what other people feel and no matter how much it hurts someone else to see that people are not at all what they are supposed to be. Maybe he cries when he parks in the parking lot. Maybe he fears that asking questions will be more embarrassing than the answers he refuses to hear anyway.
Disappointment is not the worst feeling. The worst feeling is not letting go. The worst feeling is building up ideas and frantically holding onto those ideas; using all your strength to hold it together, when you could just use it to swim to the other side.
What we have expected in each other is impossible to attain. If I tried their path, my pants would be too small and my lips and teeth would be purple from drinking too much wine. If they understood me better, then I wouldn’t exist.
Bitter resentment. Never apologizing. Saying you can’t do something because no one ever taught you how. Pretending that you know the answer.
We could all be strangers, but we’re not. Maybe none of us had a say. When I don’t know where I am, I ask for directions. If my car gets too dirty, I wash it. I use an electric toothbrush. I don’t go to church. I find the matching socks immediately. I eat ice cream behind your back. I wear sandals in the rain. I make eggs that are not scrambled. Sometimes, I put sugar in my coffee. I cry when I am hurt. I shave my legs above the knee. When I tell a lie, I admit the truth within minutes. When I need help, I make a phone call. I walk alone in the dark in safe neighborhoods.
And I swim and I swim and I swim.
Katie McMahon is a lady who lives in the North Hollywood area. She has a bachelor's degree that she keeps on her bookcase and looks at sometimes. She is getting a master's degree to put on her nightstand. Sometimes she takes pictures which you can look at here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/katiemcmahon/sets, but you don't have to if you're busy right now.
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