The Guardian had a funny little piece on caffeine and coffee-culture that made me smile. Me and my coffee… as the writer opined, those of us who add enough sugar and milk to undermine the whole process of appearing as stern intellectuals end up drinking what looks like melted coffee ice cream. We need to regress as much as we yearn to evolve. That sounds about right.
So, I had a conversation with my sister. I do that from time to time, somewhat fruitlessly, as she’s sort of from another star system though undoubtedly from the same universe, as people occasionally can’t tell us apart. Mind you, they’re stupid people, but it does happen. Anyway. I was gabbing with her the other night about how weird it is to wear hats constantly, and the fact that it’s always so breezy/windy/cold that my hair is either bird’s-nest snarled, blowing straight up or split-ended and dry. “I’ve given up on my hair,” I laughed. “I’ve gotten false eyelashes.”
That led me to another story about my entertaining trip to the Stirling High Street to buy lip balm on a very windy and cold day when I was caught without, and chapped nigh unto lip-death, and I related how I’d seen lipstick in this gorgeous velvety Bordeaux shade, and had brought it and my black-cherry nail polish (see how these things add up? What had I gone in for: lip balm. What had I come out with? Too much…) to the counter, only to have the clerk dig through the bargain bin (“These are only £1.89”) to find me something close to the shade I wanted — and cheaper.
I was shaking my head at the whole thing — how crazy it was to have someone actually want me to buy something less expensive, and what kind of clerk does that, when my sister interrupted me.
“What you really need is a good foundation.”
“What?”
I heard a deep sigh. “Haven’t I told you before? If you’re going to wear lipstick, you need a good foundation. Otherwise, your lips just stand out too much. It looks too obvious.”
Foundation? Foundation? Did she not just notice I said I’d gotten fake lashes? Did she not notice my Ironic Image, my combat-boot wearing, slash-of-bright-lipstick donning anarchist ideology? What’s this foundation crap? Foundation. Followed by face creams and ‘Night Repair’ cream and wrinkle-fills and Botox shots …suddenly foundation sounds like a gateway drug to…old.
Of course, at the rate my adolescence is progressing, I’m well into my tweens now, and making the same geeky misjudgments I somehow escaped back then. This week, I was chatted up by a university professor and I didn’t catch on until he was passing me his email address with a meaningfully smoldering look.
It started well enough – he’d written a fairly brilliant paper, and I’d briefly discussed it with him, and then discussed American politics (yawn) with him, and he evinced actual interest in what I do (and you’d be surprised how seductive that is — anyone who a.) actually asks me what I do, b.) doesn’t think I’m an idiot because I write for young adults c.) is still there when I’m finished talking about publishing has my vote for Nice Person). We had quite a nice chat, with him running and refilling my tea and pointing out which cakes I should taste — me sitting perched on a radiator (happily ON!) and him leaning against the wall with his arm braced above me.
Now, I’m short. I accept that. So taller people do all manner of weird things in order to lower their ears into my general vicinity. I don’t think anything of people leaning close to me, and I accept that people from other cultures have different ideas of personal space… so this person leaning on the wall next to me, about a foot away? Okay. I’ve had people rest their elbows on the top of my head (usually they get bruised. Violently.). At least he wasn’t doing that, right?
We returned to session at this conference, and he sat in the row ahead of us, so I brought my notepad, handed it to him and asked him to write down some locations in his country of origin that would be great to visit. When we were in conversation, he’d told them to me, but my Polish… well, anyone’s Polish is just too hard for me to spell, so I wanted to be sure that my w’s and v’s and j’s were actual and not ‘y’s or something else. By the time he was giving me his email address and telling me to keep in touch, I had some small inkling I’d missed a cue. When he refused to relinquish the notepad, saying, “I’d like to be your guide and take you to my hometown,” complete with meaningful look I thought,”
“What?”
Oh, shush. I’m not naive, it’s just I never get “chatted up,” never. I’m not that type of person (not that there’s a type or there’s something wrong with people who do, etc.). I wear big boots. I hit people. I scowl. I intimidate people, and generally I’m pretty happy with that. (Okay, fine, it’s unintentional, and I get tired of people saying I sort of freak them out, but most of the people saying that were sixteen and under, and my students, whom I GLADLY freaked out.) I’ve worked hard on being really straightforward (meaning, difficult). That’s why I completely missed this. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know how I ended up with anyone — I don’t do this subtlety thing very well…
*sigh* In the great scoreboard of cluelessness, it’s Life, 134095684776034.7, T – Zilch. I can’t believe … ugh. I’ve never been so embarrassed …well, not this month yet. This is the most squicked out I’ve been this month.
Never mind the pseudo-intellectual coffee, the Bette Davis eyes, the scowl and the combat boots. I’m apparently still a dorky fourteen year old, longing to evolve, fearing that regression is the only thing left.
Sheesh.
It’s less easy to understand when we encounter shades of gray, things that don’t belong so sharply divided. It’s having my eyes opened to degrees of right and wrong that so made the fiction of Chris Crutcher so impactive for me. And so my poems today are from both edges of the spectrum in multiple ways. The first poem I memorized in high school (and I don’t think I entirely understood it at the time), the other I first discovered scrawled on a white board in a classroom, and it’s struck me with such thoughtfulness that I wrote it for years on other white boards in empty classrooms, hoping that it encouraged someone else to think as I had.
