Tag Archives: humor blog

Nothing Really Happens

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If you’ve been reading along of late, you already know that I’ve been trying to live a bit louder. I have been experimenting with some new things in an effort to outgrow my personal borders. Mostly I’m concerned with being a person who doesn’t always say, “I won’t,” in favor of being someone who can say, “I have.” Even if they become my lasts, I am determined to set some firsts.

So running out of gas on the highway fit nicely into my new paradigm.

No car I have ever driven has run out of gas before. I have run out of windshield wiper fluid. I’ve run out of good CDs. I’ve even run out of gas money, but that was easily enough worked around by actually getting a summer job instead of just talking about getting one. To run out of gas while driving was a totally new experience, and one I had wondered about for much of my behind-the-wheel life.

I have a storied reputation of awaiting the illuminated gas tank symbol before bothering to fill the tank. Even when its glow attracts my eye, my tendency is to believe that I still have a few hundred miles before I need to pull into the station. When the needle droops glumly to the Empty line, I raise my eyebrow at it and think, “You were made by an American car manufacturer who surely accounted for my preference to remain seated and my life outlook that gas is an inalienable right,” before returning my gaze to the road ahead while trying to remember to hold my speed at the rumored optimal gas-metabolizing rate of somewhere between 20 mph and 70 mph. I can never remember exactly.

I recall very nearly running out of gas while riding with my father once. We were traveling the lonely expanse of highway that connects Phoenix to its desert cousin, Tucson. We had made the trip to see Eric Clapton perform, one last homage to father-daughter activities before I would leave the state for college. My dad, of the same gas tank-challenging ilk as I, was confident his old Land Cruiser would reach home on the well of petrol we had. His bravado began to erode as the exit we needed loomed an uncomfortable distance ahead. Like an airplane pilot preparing for a hairy landing, he began to systematically switch off all the dials, stripping our road-bound fuselage down to the essentials. The radio was grimly silenced. The air conditioning was ominously gagged. I clutched the undersides of my seat for fear that I might be shed as unnecessary cargo especially given the extra pounds I’d picked up in the lethargy of senior year.

As we barreled toward our off-ramp, the neon beacon of an Exxon lying just beyond, the lights on the dashboard began to flicker. At least I remember it happening that way. Though I also remember asking my dad if we had time to stop at Arby’s first. My mind ranged into the morbid, and I began to hope we would run out of gas, if for no other reason than I would finally see what happens when you do. Surely a villainous cackle rings out through the car before a hazy demon billows out of the steering wheel to damn our souls. Maybe the gas tank explodes in a fiery display of orange and Michael-Bay-film-slow-motion? Or perhaps an automated voice informs us that the car will begin drawing fuel from an emergency reserve that only the dimwitted drivers of the world ever get to learn exists. I imagined that the instant the car swallows that last droplet of gas, the glove compartment automaticall fills with hydrofluoric acid, burning your proof of insurance and car title and stripping you of all the medals and privileges of driving. At the very least, Keanu Reeves would come into play.

I didn’t find out that night since we made it to the pump before any of those outcomes came to pass. It took fifteen more years of pondering, of challenging the convention that cars even need gas at all, to learn what really happens when the gas runs dry. Are you ready to hear what happens?

Nothing.

Nothing happens. There are no violent shudders, no wizards, no explosions, no confetti. When the gas tank empties while you are driving, nothing happens to your car other than it begins to decelerate. You press your foot upon the gas pedal but instead of speeding up, your car is slowing down. The forward inertia that you are losing is so gradual, however, that no one else in your car is even alerted to it. The cars behind you won’t even notice because – much to my surprise – no banner announcing This Dipshit Just Ran Out Of Gas unfurls across your back windshield. In fact, the whole event is so peaceful that even you, as the driver, scratch your head and wonder what is going on. Then that banner that doesn’t appear in your window suddenly unrolls in your head as soon as you glimpse the level of the orange and disappointed-in-you needle.

Once your car slows to its unavoidable resting place, all you can do is wait. You make a few phone calls to see if a friend or a mechanic can rush to your aid with a portable container of gas. That’s all you can do, really. Because if you are the sort of person who fails to drive to the gas station in the first place, you’re sure as shit not going to walk to it.

—

10 Reasons You Should Be Glad I Didn’t Blog In My Twenties

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I had taken a short hiatus from writing to work on my comedy show, which I performed this past week. Finishing it has led to that day after Christmas feeling. I need something new to sink my teeth into. Then I remembered I have this blog that I had been neglecting. My funny friends decided we all needed a boost and a writing prompt so we’re linking to each other and listing the 10 reasons you (and I) should be glad that we were not blogging in our twenties.

1. My capri anxiety was at full-tilt, leaving little time for even basic needs.

2. The entire Internet did not need to know that if you drank two glasses of wine rapidly and then crossed your eyes just slightly before looking at one of my boyfriends, he looked exactly like Ben Affleck.

3. Twenty-something friends are way less cool than 30 and 40-something friends about reading ‘to protect her privacy, I will refer to her as Schmessica’ in posts.

4. Every month there would have been a post entitled This time I really seriously must have Toxic Shock Syndrome.

5. Every other sentence would have included the parenthetical aside: (Do you think my boss knows about this blog? If yes, do you think he also knows that I never lock the door when I’m the last to leave and that my Sun Chips habit was probably responsible for the mice?)

6. How many times would you have really wanted to read, “I’m writing this from the bathroom of a restaurant where I am trying to pull the Tampax dispenser off the wall in hopes that there is an escape tunnel behind it that I can use to avoid returning to this first date.”

7. It would have been much more awkward to have to bang on the wall of my apartment and yell, “Can you two move it to a hotel room tonight? But first remind me of your wireless password!”

8. I related every milestone, achievement, and setback to the TV show Felicity. Now I only do it in my head.

9. Every post would have ended with a vote on the question, “Given all this information, who would you say broke up with who first?”

10. It’s difficult to be creative when the oxygen flow to your brain is restricted as it is when you have to wear a bra. Every day.

—

Now click over to visit my funny friends:

–

Finding Cheesus

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I have been thinking that I’d like to go back to church. It’s been a vague desire in my mind for a few years, but one that has been amplified lately by the increasingly verbal state of my children. I cringe every time they wrongly identify a church as a school, a cross as a plus sign, or a priest as a Knight of the Round Table. I knew that we were really in spiritual arrears when I overheard my oldest say about the supposed son of God, “Do you know why they called him Cheesus? Because he loved cheese.”

I didn’t want to tell him that he was wrong because it’s possible that Jesus did love cheese. He loved a lot of things after all. I tend to favor the cheeses that hail from France or Spain, but Bethlehem might have been a glimmering bastion of dairy for all I know. I am certain it smelled like it anyway.

The problem with returning to church is that I don’t know how. I’ve fallen away from the Catholic church, the faith in which I was indoctrinated to the ways of the divine and the mysterious. The fissures began the way they do for all youths on the brink of adulthood. Too little time. Too much sleeping till noon. Too many friends luring you into misadventures. Too few mothers to steer you back toward the straight and narrow. The complete break with the church happened when I learned that the priest whose booming sermons had reverberated inside my eardrums for most of my life had been charged with sexual misconduct with young boys. My entire religious inculcation was defrauded with one glance at his mugshot emblazoned across the paper. This was different than the times the facade had crumbled before, revealing the Wizard of Oz within. When Milli Vanilli was exposed as lip-synching, I kept their tape in my boom box for another couple of years. I couldn’t do the same with the Catholic church. It didn’t help that they’d stopped serving donuts after the Sunday masses either.

I have returned to church for the occasional Catholic wedding. It’s unavoidable when one has a disproportionate number of Italian and Latino friends. But there is a comfortable anonymity in sitting before a priest I will never again hear in a church that I will never again visit. Attending these weddings is a stark reminder of how far down the totem pole of priorities religion has slipped. I no longer know the hymns by heart and I’m always a beat behind the other parishioners in the never-ending rituals of standing and sitting and kneeling. My husband, who grew up in a household devoid of any traditional religion, is certainly no mentor in matters of genuflection and signing of the cross. When the people in the pews stood to receive the sacrament at the last wedding we attended, G whispered, “Hey, I’m hungry. Grab me a cracker.”

And so I’ve become that modern phenomenon of spiritual but not religious. I don’t know what that means, however, since all of my spiritual beliefs are unavoidably clothed in the religious trappings I was exposed to. It seems to mean, for the lot of us, that we believe in a higher power but we’d rather go to brunch as opposed to church on Sunday morning. That probably also explains why I see God in the flaky crust of pastries. It means we want to go to Heaven, if there is one, because Hell, if there is one, sounds really unpleasant. It means we prescribe to the notions of good will toward man, but we can’t actually summarize the Commandments beyond don’t do anything weird with your neighbor.  We know who Jesus is and some of his great works, but Peter, Paul, and Mary are just members of an aging folk band.

This time of year especially, though, and even more so in the shadow of a grisly crime directed at the most innocent of our race, I am feeling like being spiritual but not religious is not doing much for my enlightenment. It’s like being on Weight Watchers but never counting points, which is a sin I am also guilty of. I want to believe in my spirituality and the idea that I can revel in God at any turn and in any place. I’d like to think that I am capable of teaching my kids about the invincible force of love, and the cohesiveness of community, and the salve of kindness apart from the dogmatic shrieks of false prophets.

But I also want answers from someone who sees more clearly and devotedly than I. I need to look upon the face of someone whose eyes are not ensconced with the glaze of doubt that covers mine. I need to hear from a person who can claim insight into the human condition that feels entirely alien to me at this moment.

Mostly I need my kids to see a cross and know it to be the emblem of something bigger than mathematics.

And, Jesus Christ, I need some donuts.

I’m Nearsighted, Not Clear Sighted

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I recently learned that a friend of mine is a clairvoyant. A psychic clairvoyant, to be precise. I don’t yet know the distinction, but I’m sure it’s better than just being a brunette clairvoyant or a tall clairvoyant. Although being any kind of clairvoyant, which I discovered to mean ‘clear vision’, is impressive to me in light of my recent astigmatism diagnosis.

I’m sure they come in all makes and models, but in my limited experience with mediums, they only look like Whoopi Goldberg. Yet this friend of mine looks nothing like Whoopi Goldberg. Or even Nicole Goldberg, who I knew in high school and who always had so much gossip on the rest of us that I sometimes wondered if she might be clairvoyant. It was startling to me and disrupted my grasp of space-time to learn that my decidedly non-Whoopi-or-Nicole-Goldberg-looking friend is a clairvoyant.  The experience is similar to that jarring scenario in which you find yourself walking beside someone you know pretty well when they suddenly light up a cigarette and you had no idea they smoked. You want to play it cool, like maybe you, too, smoke and no one knows about it, but you just can’t stop staring at the smoke billowing from their mouths and coughing in between pauses in the conversation.

The way I came to realize her post was what really stopped me short. It just came up casually in conversation. And no one freaked out. Everyone behaved as though she’d said she was an accountant or a public safety officer. I only have to mention that I used to work for the company that created Gossip Girl and at least 3 women fall to the floor in an immediate seizure. I once was at a cocktail party at which a man introduced himself as a professional puppeteer and in no time at all people were handing him throw pillows and salt shakers and asking him to make characters out of them. I even once shared an apartment with a stripper, a fact that I soon came to overlook given she knew the best places to get a burrito in the middle of the night. The point is that while these jobs may seem unique, anyone can do them with a little work or some exotic oils. These people are not born with a gift.

In truth, I didn’t respond in a grandiose fashion either. But that was because I was intensely preoccupied with the worry that she knew I wasn’t wearing underwear. Later in the week, after I had time to compose myself and to launder some undergarments, I approached her about it in the schoolyard. I broached the topic distractedly, in that casual way one might try to get the Dermatologist at a party to eyeball an errant mole without having to book an appointment. I waited for her to transmute before me into a Madame Slovinka, swirling her fingers atop her crystal ball. Instead she fished a business card out of the middle consul of her car and pressed it into my hand. At the moment our hands collided, I expected a jolt, an unfurling of images, at once familiar and new, to shudder through my mind’s eye. As I turned, it occurred to me that just because it hadn’t happened to me didn’t mean it hadn’t happened to her.

I called back over my shoulder, “I just might call you.”

Climbing into my own car,  I wondered if she already knew that I would. And that I would make sure to wear underwear when I did.

Despite my piqued curiosity to know what she sees when she looks at me, I haven’t called her. I suppose I’m afraid of what I might learn from her. Never one to look away from a roadside crash or a naked celebrity picture gone viral, I’m concerned that I won’t be judicious in parsing what I would benefit from knowing and what should remain mysterious to me. I’m stricken with a wave of panic when the receptionist at the dentist asks me if I’d like to book the date for my next cleaning six months from now. I can only imagine my dread at the foreknowledge of cataclysmic life events.

And, above all, I’m terrified that I’ll start doing braless pottery and listening to Unchained Melody.

—

(Seriously, would you call? Because I really want to call…)

Not The Acid Trip I’d Hoped For

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The dentist hunched over the X-rays of my teeth, which were magnified and back-lit for everyone in the office – but me – to see. He furrowed his brow and methodically stroked his mustache before swiveling his stool in my direction. He looked at me emphatically, and I braced myself for the revelation of something dentally grave.

“You have the same X-rays as the truckers I get in here who are drinking Monster all day long.”

My jaw fell open or at least as open as a jaw can fall when held in traction by flying buttresses of cotton rolls and clamps. I shook my head vehemently, desperately trying to convey non-verbally that I never drink soda nor have I driven an 18-wheeler. He began dismantling the hardware inside my mouth so that I could offer a spoken rebuttal to his cruel assessment of my teeth. My mind roiled with citations of flossing and usage of ADA-approved toothpaste and assertions of sugar-free gum. While I meant to verbalize all these things, when the last clip was lifted from my mouth, something more along the lines of, “How dare you? I’m wearing a cardigan,” escaped my lips.

He waved in reinforcements in the way of hygienists who began silently mixing concoctions and placing shiny metal objects upon the sinister tray hovering above my heart. He pressed my shoulders into the plastic of the reclined chaise and gazed into my eyes with an intensity that made me fear I was seated in the chair of the demon barber of Fleet Street.

“Some people inherit a condition that makes their mouths an overly acidic environment,” he began slowly. “Do you have any questions?”

I thought for a moment.

“So this is my mom’s fault then?”

He snapped his gloves into place and asked his harem of hygienists for the swab. He dredged the shallows of my mouth with a cotton swab before dipping the wet end into a small desktop machine. He clucked his tongue and dropped his head in defeat at the digital readout.

“A good number is anything under 500. Do you know what yours is?”

I’ve never been good with numbers. At a conference, I once guessed a jar held 45 gumballs when the actual total was something like 500.

“Your number is 7,000.”

I winced at the number and the judgment that hung heavy in the air. I shrank into the seat much like the time my college counselor had told me I was lucky I had scored so high in the Reading and Writing sections of the SAT because my Math performance had been downright simian. My dentist nodded solemnly at his staff, a silent cue which sent them scuttling toward cabinets and supply closets. I ran my tongue over my teeth, recoiling at the thought of seven thousand grams or milliliters or knots of crud tumbling off my teeth like a rock dislodging from a scraggy mountain.

They returned holding a tote bag packed to the gills with products. A veritable suitcase of cleaners and rinses that no TSA official would grant passage to. I was discharged minutes later, tote in hand, after paying a sum of money I only hand over for products that counteract aging, not acid development. I lugged my baggage to the door. I turned to the counter around which the entire staff of the dental office seemed to be perched, watching my exit. I dropped the bag to the floor before striding quickly back across the waiting room.

“I just want to understand,” I faltered. “Do I need to use these products forever?”

My eyes darted from face to face of the employees before me, desperately seeking enlightenment and comfort. After an interminable silence, one voice spoke for the rest.

“If you want what’s best for your teeth.”

I lifted my chin and straightened my cardigan as though to remind them one last time that I was a lady regardless of the fact that my mouth was the Wilt Chamberlain of bacteria. I turned away from them and hobbled upon leaden legs toward the door, pausing to collect my bag of products, a maneuver that required the use of leg muscles instead of back ones to lift.

Once home, I opened the bag to inspect the bottles within. There were rinses, spritzes, pastes, and strips. To dig a little deeper revealed measuring cups and mixing sticks. Then I spied the thing that sent me over the edge: Chewing gum.

I had become one of those people with their own special chewing gum. This is a far worse fate than being one of those people who carries their own salad dressing. Because no one ever watches the person who carries their own salad dressing and says, “Oh man, could I have some of that?”

I felt a sob coming on, but I stopped short for fear that the tears made in my body of uneven pH would be like acid rain. I didn’t want to wind up looking like Seal and being the person who can’t share her special gum. After all, it’s going to be tough enough to hold onto my friends once I have to spend my evening hours shocking my mouth like they do the YMCA pool after a toddler craps in it.

—

The Stripper

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If you read my last piece then you know that I recently attended a bachelorette party, and that the role of guest of honor was not really reserved for the bride, but for the male stripper who was booked for the occasion. I was privy to the fact that he was reserved and it became a source of near-constant anxiety and yo-yo dieting for weeks. The knowledge of his impending performance eclipsed all the workings of my daily life to the point that if the librarian said, “Erin, do you want to check this out?” my forehead would bead with sweat and I’d whisper, “Am I supposed to check it out?”

Despite it being on the forefront of my consciousness for several weeks, the instant the party host entered the room, her eyes slanted with concentration and fingers clasped around the phone, to say that the neighbors had phoned in a noise complaint, I immediately forgot about the jig. “Seriously?” I panted. “The music isn’t even that loud; We’re using toddler speakers.” She shot me a look that could only be described as, I know you’ve never seen a male stripper and you’re freaking out about balls in your face, but for Christ’s sake, we’ve gone over this a hundred times now.

I steadied my body and silently chastised myself for being the weak link in the chain of seasoned spectators of exotic dancing. I returned my attention to the bevy of tipsy ladies twirling around me and swirling drinks with penis straws so realistic they even had veins molded into the plastic. I sidled up to the dessert table to cut a slice away from the phallic cake, which resembled a maple long john donut atop fuzzy tennis balls.

A woman I did not know well appeared beside me and whispered, “Did you hear his name is Animal?”

I dropped my fork, the only implement not made to look like a penis for miles, and murmured, “That has to be indicative of a lot of body hair.” The thought of it darkened the skies inside my head, but gratefully made me forget about the fact that I was shoveling coconut shavings that were meant to be pubic hair into my mouth.

It was in the next moment that I noticed my friend, and sister to the bride, dart across the floor and launch herself into the couch positioned furthest from the center of the room. I may not always know what direction in which the sun rises and sets or what to do when gangrene takes hold, but my survival instincts rang out loud and clear: It was time to stand far, far away from The Animal.

Before I could even summon the motor coordination to climb a tree, or run in a zig-zig, or play dead, he had entered the room. There was a flurry of movement as squealing women flung themselves at the perimeter of the living room, like newly captured wild animals testing the fences of their zoo enclosure. I held my plate of penis cake defensively, as though it could project a force field if the real thing tried to mount my leg. As he strode to the center of the circle, I backed into an ottoman and lowered myself into the sliver of space between two women.

Something felt off. Not that I had a precedent against which to judge the rightness and wrongness of male strippers, but the figure that stood before us was unlike anything I had seen in movies or heard about in bachelorette lore.

I looked at the woman beside me, unable to utter my grievance, yet she answered with full understanding of my dilemma. “He’s twenty.”

Twenty years old.

I would have reacted better to the revelation that he had twenty balls or had served twenty years hard time. Twenty years of living was an entirely different affront. There was a time when a man twenty years of age in various stages of undress would have been enticing, but I was still wearing braces and talking on a phone that was shaped like lips then.

I looked at his face, which was hard to do, since he was, at that moment, engaged in one-armed pushups with his feet in the lap of a fellow party-goer. As my head moved in rhythm with his dipping body, straining to get a glimpse of his profile, a feeling of dread slapped up against me like an errant wave against the breakwater. I felt anxious and antsy. I could feel the underside of my arms getting wet. I’d had these feelings before. Many times. These emotions well up inside me every time I’m faced with planning a…playdate.

That is exactly what this young boy inspired in me. A need to schedule him a playdate. An urge to fix him a snack. An appetite to pull up his pants, tighten the belt buckle, and say, “My dear, show this stuff to one woman at a time. Preferably one who is not pulling Canadian bills out of her Spanx and wondering if she forgot about an acupuncture appointment today.”

I stood up from my seat at exactly the moment he fatigued of his pushup routine. He rose to his feet, and we made eye contact for a brief moment, before I shot across the floor as though I were avoiding an overturned basket of cobras or the white guy who has decided to start breakdancing at a party. I took shelter behind the kitchen counter with a few other shell-shocked women. We looked on at the spectacle through eyes half-closed by pain and chagrin before one said, “You know, I’m gonna go.”

I watched her turn and make toward the back door. A movement in the periphery of my eye caught my attention and I swiveled my head toward it. There was Animal. Banging his twenty year old equipment against the backside of a woman so blindsided by his predatory moves that all she could do was continue to swipe her carrot through the tub of hummus.

“Wait for me!”

—

Life Changers

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I’ve arrived at the precipice of something very, very big. A crossroads of such personal import that the only way I can begin to order the upwelling of emotion is to write about it. My entire existence has been building to this crescendo so the realization that I am now staring down the barrel at it has left me unmoored. I am adrift, bobbing without reason and rationality, in a sea of infinite possibilities and outcomes.

See, for the first time in my long life…

I am about to see a male stripper.

Ever since the part of the brain that is responsible for picking up on details like a male stripper will be attending your friend’s bachelorette party exploded in a dazzling fireworks display of neurons, I haven’t been able to compel the other lobes of my brain to keep on coordinating my basic life functions, like eating, speaking, and using my hands to pick up things. For the sake of my family, I need to return to the days before the promise – or specter, I’m not entirely sure which – of male strippers entered my life. I long to go back to the days when every male I was to encounter would undoubtedly be clothed, a simpler time when occupations that included the word ‘male’ were followed only by ‘nurse’ or ‘teacher’.

It’s kind of like the time before I’d ever eaten Eggplant Parmesan. I didn’t really think about the fact that everyone else was eating Eggplant Parmesan. Ordering Eggplant Parmesan. Seeing Eggplant Parmesan at parties. Once I became of a certain age, it began to rattle those around me and steeled their resolve to make me one of them, an eater of Eggplant Parmesan. My life became a hollow existence plotted around Italian restaurants and family reunions haunted by Eggplant Parmesan. Until one night I was out to dinner with my parents, and I opened the menu, to find it listed – boldly and nakedly – in the Primi section. I pointed at it meekly, unsure I could even utter the name of something that had risen to such culinary prominence in my mind. My stomach lurched just slightly when the waiter slid it off his arm onto the vacant space of table before me. This is it, I thought as a rivulet of sweat cut a path over my left temple. I remember no more as the sweating and digestive grumblings were the precursors to a stomach bug that ushered Eggplant Parmesan out of my body, and my life, as though I were never fit to receive it in the first place.

I’m quite sure the same fate awaits me with the male stripper. The sweating and the gastrointestinal agitation, that is. Not the ingesting of something long denied although I am a very nervous eater. I only know that public rituals such as these quickly become a very graphic National Geographic episode for people like me. In the opening frame, the herd munches mindlessly on the desiccated grass of the Serengeti as the lion they’re blithely unattuned to crouches out of view. There’s a sudden ripple in the matter and the collective is up and sprinting. Except for one. Me. The slow Gazelle. The slow Gazelle wants desperately to be with the others, to be grazing and drinking, but she was too busy thinking about how stupid she looks in a Maxi dress when she is caught alone and vulnerable and staring at the lion’s advancing genitals which are, at this moment, eye-level. Well aware of the futility but game enough to try, the Gazelle turns to run, but the lion’s incisors land squarely upon her haunch.

I don’t know if I’ll actually be bitten by a male stripper, but I’m afraid of it just as I am afraid of being touched and leered at. And all the other verbs that appear in reports of sexual harassment allegations. I’m concerned about how to hold my hands and where to direct my eyes. I’ve felt crippling waves of anxiety over knowing the sort of occupation he will enter the room as so that I don’t mistake him for an actual plumber and begin discussing the winterizing of pipes. I’m wondering about whether I need to introduce myself and establish some mutual boundaries, like a safe word, which I’d like to be ‘Manischewitz’. I’m curious if Weight Watchers points are still tallied if there’s a naked, orange man bumping and grinding on the hors d’oeuvres table. I want the other party goers to understand that I’m prone to strange behaviors while watching displays of pageantry, like returning phone calls from the dentist or alphabetizing the gift cards in my wallet.

I know very little about what lies ahead. The only thing I can count on is that I will never again be the same. And that he will be better waxed than I am.

—

 

 

 

 

 

Fall-ing

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I’m panicking over Fall. I always panic over Fall. Every year it whips into town with its brisk air and unnatural gourds and quietly transforms everyone around me into employees of industry. People who know how to do stuff. I assume they all knew how to do this stuff in the summer, as well, but there was no need to put it on display. We were all too busy showcasing our abilities to do nothing for as many hours as the sun hung in the sky. I was happy with this because I’m very comfortable with the expanses of nothing. I excel at the nothing. Give me hours of nothing and I will show you, in return, a glistening obelisk of nothing. Summer adds foot soldiers to my Nothing Army. Troops dedicated to marching – or just walking really slowly – bravely into the abyss of nothing.

Fall changes all that. The plummeting leaves are the harbinger of human productivity. Autumn ratchets up the output to a level that sends the Curators of Nothing into an early hibernation. In an unmade bed, of course.

Those who were perfectly content to languish in the idleness of summer have now snapped to attention, hungry to fill the cool days with all forms of -ing. Canning. Planting. Spicing. Baking. Knitting. Baling. My time is devoid of -ing’s. I am eternally hopeless in all verbs of -ing outside of eat-ing and swear-ing. Where my phone used to buzz with invitations to get together to do – well, nothing – there is now an empty cache of voicemail memory. And I can no longer reach anyone because their cell phones have been forsaken along with their nothingdom now that their hands are occupied with needles and yarn or they’re off hiking to a scenic overlook where they can fully register fall’s majesty.

And it’s not just the humans. It’s the animals, too. Especially the poster rodent of Fall, the squirrel. Skittering through crackling leaves. Posturing with the hubris of a species that knows how to dismantle an acorn. They’re irritatingly busy. Annoyingly entrepreneurial. They gather with a sense of urgency I can only muster for the deep discounts at annual department store sales. I jeer at the squirrel and mock its expedient way of filling its stores. I stare at them through the window and muse: Your life is statistically probable to end in the next four days due to a faulty telephone wire or a 16-year-old who doesn’t even realize you’re revolving with the wheels of her car because she is too busy texting the world about how fucking busy she is now that it’s fucking fall.

School is like the great pyramid scheme of Fall. The kids return wielding a new and dangerous vernacular with words like bounty and maize and deciduous. They come bearing leaf imprints and stories of the first settlers. They look snidely upon me as if I know nothing about pioneering, but I watched all six seasons of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, fools, and I’m about to hold this cloth soaked with ether over my nose if you ask me to take you on a hayride one more time. Their bleating to do something ‘fall-like’ is fulfilled. I take them to an apple farm where they pick for what seems like an entire autumnal equinox. We arrive home with enough apples to fill the Mayflower, but this is not enough to satiate their fall appetite. They stare at me blankly. Why am I not transforming these apples into a cobbler? Or a crisp? Even those stupid fucking squirrels outside could make a pie.

I run through my contact list, desperate to find a friend gifted in the arena of apple crisp-cobbler-for Christ’s sake pie making. Friend after friend is unavailable, because of their myriad -ing interests so messages of an alarming timbre are left. “Hi, my car and my kitchen and my guest bathroom are full of apples. Any shot you want to come over and show me how to make something – anything! – with these? I can repay you in mud clots from the underside of my shoes or with the alpaca that seems to have followed us home. Call me!”

And so another fall day passes while I do the only other -ing thing I know how to do: waiting.

—

Just My Friend

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I closed the front door and began backing toward my car. With each tentative backward step the kids waved more fervently from their perch at the kitchen window. I returned their farewells with grandiose pantomimes of kisses caught and blown. I eased into the driver’s seat of my car, my gaze still fixed on their faces.

I wrenched the key in the ignition, steeling my resolve to put the car in reverse. As the Jeep shuddered down the driveway, I glimpsed in the rearview mirror the three carseats along the back. They were startlingly vacant. I pumped the brakes as the thoughts of “I should at least take the baby,” began to invade. I reached across the passenger seat and grabbed my bags. I heaved them over my shoulder and into the carseats that seemed to be aching – as I was – to be responsible for something. I slid the gear shift into drive.

Your friend needs you. And you need you.

I arrived hours later, brittle from travel, but curiously energized by the distance that passed with music or silence instead of questions about Crustaceans and why Nathan is allowed to drink Dr. Pepper. I had time to kill until my friend could escape work. I flitted in and out stores, marveling at the irony of having occasion to shop but still none to wear any of the things I wanted to buy. I stumbled into a cosmetics store where the employees clad in black were reminded, presumably on account of all my free radicals, why they ventured into this line of work. While they paraded serums before me and forced my vow to begin doing everything I could to make my pores stop looking like pores, I noticed a bottle of perfume I had once owned sitting on a shelf. I watched the spray land against my wrist and inhaled its familiar bouquet. Memories of the high heels stored under my work desk, and never having taxi fare, and the neighborhood Thai menu floated behind my eyelids. I drew another breath and remembered all the nights that began across a table from a date and ended across a couch from a girlfriend.

Despite buying some other products dedicated to minimizing things about me, I left the store clutching the perfume that had maximized the long-shadowed facets of my identity.

When the time rolled around to meet my dear friend, we found ourselves facing each other across a pulsing avenue. We grinned over the rushing cars as if it were just another one of the many nights after work that we had shared, but when we grabbed each other, I felt the ache of too much time between hugs. We walked with the easy amble of people whose bodies had learned long ago to synchronize their strides and to accommodate the hand gesticulations of the other. The concrete flowed underfoot as quickly as the words left our mouths, and the weekend was underway.

The next two days were spent luxuriating in the consumption of meals and the other’s memory of how something really happened. I reveled in that clear feeling that chases time spent between real friends. Talking with full mouths and slapping tables in recall of something funny that was nearly forgotten. Conversations that continue through an open bathroom door even after the other has begun to shower. Parallel reading the revolving pages of magazines. Choosing meals to share with someone who knows you’re only looking at the appetizers and desserts section of the menu. Hearing and shrieking the phrase, “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you this,” more times than you thought possible and thrilling at each time it happened.

It felt good to be with my friend. Just my friend. Not My Friend Who Calls During Bath Time. Or My Friend From Where I Used To Live. Or My Friend Who Doesn’t Have Kids Yet. Just my friend.

And it felt good to be with me.

–

Decaffeinated

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I don’t drink coffee.

When I tell this to people, they react as though I’ve revealed that I like to set fire to photo calendars of naked babies sleeping on lily pads. I never meant for coffee to become the cause célèbre of my life; I just never acquired a taste for it. It wasn’t for lack of trying either. I’ve tried on several occasions to enjoy a cup of Joe. But, see, even in writing ‘cup of Joe’, I find my pulse quickening in response to the anxiety that surrounds caffeinated lexicon. I’m not sure if I’ve spelled Joe right. If it is capitalized? If it should be written ‘cuppa’ instead of ‘cup of’? Why is it even called Joe? Is it a cup of Joseph if it’s poured into a fancy cup?

Long seduced by the spicy habits of older kids, those in my life and on my television, I could often be found taking a long drag from a pretzel stick perched loosely between my pointer and middle finger. I’d let the invisible billow of smoke escape my lips while I did my best to look tired and disaffected. And not bloated with sodium. It was the same story with coffee. In high school, I toted a portable coffee mug to my classes, drawing cautious sips from it whenever the teacher directed a question my way. I’d narrow my eyes at the class as the liquid slid down my throat as if to say, “I may still be using Clearasil, you sons of bitches, but I like coffee. And I like it strong.” The only thing more laughable than my answers to the problems of Advanced Physics was the fact that my mug held only water.

College was no better. Every study group I joined, which were several considering I was the most intellectually handicapped of the Pre-Meds, came with a coffee mandate. I kept my eye closely trained on the sub-groupings of students, applying my deductive reasoning to parse the Non-Javas from the rest. I knew to avoid the White guys. Already at a disadvantage for getting into Medical School, they were imbibing coffee the way an addict indulges in heroin, hopeful the rocket fuel might launch the Human Physiology right into their brains. The girls were scant better since they used their oversized coffee mugs to shield their notes as though they contained the nuclear launch codes instead of the Organic Chemistry equations I was even less likely to know what to do with. I steered clear of the Persians since they hailed from the cradle of coffee. The Europeans were a losing choice since they were rarely compelled to leave the campus coffee shop to attend class. The Indian kids wanted nothing to do with me, knowing I was the very personification of dead weight regardless of whether I could assimilate their coffee culture.

In the end, coffee is why I was in a study group of two Tibetan exchange students and a Mormon. And why I never went to Medical School.

For a brief time in my twenties, while living in New York City, my aversion to coffee worked in my favor. Men interested in asking me out would tentatively offer a casual first meeting over coffee. Knowing that I was going to have a difficult time constructing the facade of a self-possessed career woman if I had to order a hot chocolate, I would frankly tell them that I didn’t drink coffee. Dinner was counter-offered, which I graciously accepted since the only thing I was worse at than coffee was cooking.

My run of good luck continued when I began reporting to a boss who only took his coffee black. At last liberated from complex decisions between creamers, set free from the do-it-yourself table of sticks and spoons and powders that purport to be sugar but not SUGAR. I could finally look at that Barista directly in the eye, buttressed by the je ne sais quoi that comes with placing an order encapsulated and delivered in one word only: Black.

The ordering of black coffee is never met with any questions as everything the person behind the counter needs to know to complete your drink is assumed. It would never be decaf. Of course it should be a large cup. Like we give a shit about Fair Trade. Don’t even dream of putting one of those cardboard sleeves around it because we’ve been drinking coffee warmed to 220 degrees directly out of our palms since we’ve been out of diapers.

My coffee phobia further abated with the advent of the Keurig machine. With the addition of a simple appliance to my wedding registry, years and years of hot beverage paralysis were undone and no longer did I try to asphyxiate myself with a paper filter while my guests sat coffee-less in the other room. No longer did I need to warn people who had come to stay to bring their own coffee (and dinner). I could insert a cup, and with the push of a few buttons, watch coffee slosh into the mug. When I remembered to put it there.

It occurred to me recently that I might actually like coffee if I were to try it now as an adult. I grew into minivans and Farmer’s Markets. Perhaps a taste for coffee had crept up on me, too. I decided to test my theory. I stood in line at the neighborhood coffee shop, straining to discern the menu which was written entirely in calligraphy and chalk. I prayed that the selection of cup sizes would be offered in English instead of a Romance Language. I shuffled toward the counter as the person in front of me issued one of those lengthy coffee orders that makes everyone behind him want to set the world’s arabica fields on fire. His treatise included adjectives about temperature and richness as well as verbs about pumps and stirs.

When the Barista, now sweaty from toil over the last order, looked up at me expectantly, I said in a meek voice, “I will have a La…” I faltered. “A lat…”

“A lemon bar.”

—