I enjoy the bizarre. Lately, my life has been a little bizarre with some “sky is falling” craziness from people with decision-enforcing power. I comfort myself knowing that these experiences will one day be great stories. But as I muse over my current crazy, I am reminded of some of my past crazy that I haven’t written about yet.
One day back when I juggled multiple jobs and grad school, I woke up and headed to the coffee maker to start my leisurely morning. Sitting on the counter in front of the coffee maker sat a note: “The doorknob broke when I left this morning.” Since my roommate and I enjoyed opposite schedules, leaving notes by the coffee maker was our most reliable means of communication. Having read her cryptic message, I logically started brewing coffee, glanced at the closed door (which had a doorknob on it), and continued on my merry way. After breakfast and yoga, reason prompted me to check the door. After all, my roommate is logical. She would not leave me a note unless it merited action. I walked down the hall. The doorknob seemed fine. I turned the knob, and it came off in my hand. Startled, I stood there for a moment, contemplating the doorknob in my hand until the ramifications hit me. If I were holding the doorknob, how could I unlock the door? If I could not unlock the door, how would I open it? I called the apartment office to request maintenance. The automated recording instructed me to leave a message unless the maintenance problem were an emergency, in which case I should call a secondary number or call 911. That gave me something new to contemplate. Was this an emergency? After all, our lease outlined what maintenance emergencies were: water leaks and such. The lease also explained our options for being locked outside of our apartment, but, strangely, it mentioned nothing about being locked inside. Finally, I decided to call the maintenance emergency number and text my manager that I might be late to work due to a sudden need to impersonate Rapunzel. The Eastern European man who answered the emergency number had a very thick accent, and we did not successfully communicate. He kept assuring me that I should just open the door or put the knob back on the door. I kept assuring him that the knob was back on the door, but it was delicately balancing on the bolts, and no matter how many times I turned the lock, it wasn’t attached to anything inside the door anymore. I managed to convince him that he did, in fact, need to come rescue me. First, he went to the wrong apartment and called to ask why I wasn’t answering the door. Once he got to my door, he again asked me why I wasn’t answering the door. Calling through a sliver of light between the other half of the doorknob and the hole, I explained that I couldn’t open the door. Still crouched by the door, I watch his feet as he contemplated the door for a while before telling me that he needed my housekey. “Throw it out the window to me,” he said, and I saw his feet walk away. Rather than knocking a screen out of the window, I went out onto the balcony. After a few moments, an elderly man stepped into the backyard. He was the embodiment of a tourist’s stereotypical idea of a Santorini grandpa. “Throw down the key,” my Greek Prince Charming called. Like a good fairytale princess, I obeyed and dropped my key, hoping it would not get lost in the bushes three stories below. Armed with the key, he walked up the steps to my tower to rescue me. He let himself in and set to work on the doorknob. In a remarkably short time, he announced that he was done. The doorknob was fixed. Not convinced, I asked whether it were tightly on the door. To prove his point, he came inside and animatedly demonstrated the working doorknob, locking, unlocking, and opening the door. As he pulled the knob to open the door, once again, the knob came away in his hand and the door stayed closed. In stunned silence, he looked at me, then his hand with the doorknob, and finally the closed and locked door. He turned to me, surprise still slowly him. “My tools,” he managed to say. I looked down at the ground. There were no tools there; he had left his tools outside the now closed door. A hint of a smile grew around his eyes as he asked, “Do you have enough food for dinner?”
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So lately, I’ve been thinking about doctors. Not because I haven’t had other things to think about, but because I’ve been visiting them. As with most normal routines, it’s not until you experience them in another culture that you realize how much your own culture forms your expectations. For example, my expectation when I go to the dairy section of the grocery store is to be walk up to the shelf, grab a tub of yogurt, and walk away. But now that I enjoy living in a new culture, I am aware of a cultural expectation I was previously blind to: I expect to enjoy silence as I make my yogurt selection. Here, I will dawdle in every other section of the grocery store, delaying my advance into the dairy section as long as possible. Then I summon courage and plunge into a cacophony of sounds as at least ten over-amplified hawkers simultaneously push their products in a space the size of a minivan. Even worse are the days that one tries to be helpful and offers suggestions to me standing six inches from my face while still talking into the microphone. I have no proof to back this claim, but I think most of the country is suffering from hearing loss and that is why all the hawkers’ microphone dials are set to eleven.
But as much fun as the grocery store is, I have been pondering our quaint American ideas on what makes a good doctor. Upon entering the country, I had my immigration physical. I knew it was coming. But it wasn’t until I entered the immigration building that I realized too late that I should have asked questions first. I felt like I was on a weird scavenger hunt. Armed with a beginner translator and a checklist, we (my first-time translator, about fifty unrelated immigrants, and me) wandered the unlit halls of the immigration building, taking tests and getting stickers (okay, fine, signatures) along the way. Perhaps the low point in this bizarre scavenger hunt should have been the urine sample (unlit, sewery smelling bathroom with teeny, tiny test-tubes for the samples, oh, and no soap). But I was still mentally off-balance from my ultrasound. When I found the ultrasound room (and scored a point in my imaginary scavenger hunt), the lab tech grabbed my checklist and pointed to the bed. I lay down. With no greeting or even looking at me, she pointed to my shirt and said, “Off.” When I started to take my shirt off, she said, “No, off.” She meant “up.” She squirted the gel stuff on my and did her test. Then, she dismissed me by throwing one tissue on my stomach and saying, “Go.” I know that the lab tech knew how to do her job, but a huge American part of me felt like she didn’t just because she never looked at me. That’s when I started to wonder why I think my doctor’s care is better if she chats with me first. Her doctoring skill does not change based on her ability to engage in small talk. And then, to compound these thoughts, I started watching House, a tv show predicated on the idea that a complete jerk can be skilled doctor. Between House, my immigration physical, and two different traditional doctors here (one who spoke no English and one with limited English), I’m starting to wonder if interaction is necessary at all in a doctor’s visit. For my first traditional doctor’s visit, I practiced all the words for my symptoms; I was ready. But he didn’t ask me any questions. He told my translator what my symptoms were just by looking at me and checking my pulse. And he was right. So, what I’ve learned about doctor’s visits: looking at the patient is optional, listening to the patient is even more optional, and being polite to the patient really is a waste of time. I love the in-between. Don’t mistake me: I hate transition. Irregular, unexpected Change is persona non grata in my book. But I love the in-between seasons. When I look at my nature poems (most of which were involuntarily written for writing exercises), they are about autumn or spring. Occasionally, a poem about early winter, arguably still a part of the in-between, works its way into my writing. But those are really praising Snow and not the wonders of the season itself.
One of my favorite fictional characters, A Separate Peace’s Finny, believed that if you love someone then they love you back. To him, it was the only logical, natural conclusion. I have a little of Finny’s logic when it comes to seasons. Fall mornings and evenings should have a nip in the wind, a bite that makes hot cocoa and pumpkin stew the most logical conclusion to the day. And, naturally, those cooler temperatures require fall clothes—sweaters should be deep orange and red; it’s their most natural state. Sweaters are most sweater-like when they are autumnal. Spring mornings and evenings, however, should have a playful breeze that swishes through our hair, making it wave back at the bobbing daffodils. And who would have soup in spring when the cool, fresh strawberries are available? And just as naturally, spring dresses should be bright, breezy, and floral. This week, I tried to get my spring clothes out. After all, Easter has long since passed, and Easter is in my ideal world the epitome of spring (in the same logical way that my birthday is the pinnacle of fall). But after a short jaunt to the corner store, I returned to my room to switch out my airy blue blouse for an autumnal orange turtleneck. That change of clothes shook my paradigm for seasons. It reminded me that last fall most of what I wore was my light-weight “spring” dresses, and most of what I wore this spring has been my warm “fall” clothes. After that epiphany, I looked back over the years. Usually, I roasted on my birthday because I wanted to wear my fallish clothes, and usually I froze on Easter because my springy Easter dress was several layers too thin. Although each year, I noted that my outfit wasn’t right for the weather, the next year I somehow expect it to be different. I will assume part of the responsibility for my disappointment, but I think that clothes manufacturers need a few mea culpas, too. After all, if they made light-weight dresses in fall colors and warm sweaters in spring colors, I might have something to wear that is actually seasonal instead of an idealized notion of seasonal. As is it, at some point today I will have to brave getting out of my fortress of blankets with my toes curled under the radiator for an additional boost of warmth, and instead of accessorizing with my new pale green bamboo patterned scarf, I will wrap up in my somber winter scarf. Not that it matters what I wear. No one has seen my fall or spring clothes in five months since it’s too cold to take my coat off. Hmm, I should have bought a cuter coat. I enjoy thinking, theorizing, postulating, speculating—call it what you will, I enjoy it. I know, I know, as a pastime, it’s not really one that a lot of people talk about. When your friend asks, “Hey, whatcha doing tonight?” you can’t say, “Oh, I’m gonna think.” And, certainly, it doesn’t make for interesting scrapbooks. “Here’s a picture of me thinking. Here’s another picture of me thinking.” (On a related note, it does apparently make for a good sculpture pose.)
Fortunately for me, I have friends who equally enjoy a good thought puzzle, so we can share our thoughts and call it “hanging out,” a far more socially acceptable pastime. Over a cup of coffee (or a coffee-like substance), a friend recently shared one his theories about love: if there is a short, eligible girl, a tall guy will swoop in and woo her before any of the short guys have a chance. (Perhaps, this is because the tall guy can see her over the crowd while the short guys have to fight through the crowd before they even realize she’s there.) We thought through our tall acquaintances, and with few exceptions, our tall guy friends have married significantly shorter girls. But our tall girl friends are generally with guys of equal height. Another friend in the conversation added more data that supported this theory (though this data is all self-reported, so it’s hardly the most valid, but then again, this theorizing is just for a pastime, not for a federal report). She herself is rather short, barely passing five feet, which is the height she recorded on her on-line dating profile. We scrolled through her potential matches (guys who had expressed interest in her). Only two were shorter than 5’ 9”. Most were over 6’. Some even stated on their profile pages that they were looking for a short girl. My friend who proposed this theory is, in case you haven’t guessed, short. With the weight of our data making this look more like a tall guy conspiracy, he admitted that when he sees couples like these, he wishes he could run up and kick the guy in the shins and demand to know why he couldn’t pick someone in his own height range. On my part, I’m wondering about the dating websites. Do they have an algorithm set to match the tall guys with the short girls? (Yes, I also enjoy people-watching.) A student recently asked me whether I were a coffee snob or not, and I heartily affirmed that I am. An experienced barista, I can smell and taste the difference between good and bad coffee. Most importantly, I enjoy coffee for only the flavor, unaffected by caffeine that drives many to drink coffee-like substances just for the kick of caffeine. When I moved abroad, I brought with me two bags of coffee, a treasure hoard that I guarded as carefully as any self-respecting dragon. Because my love language since college has been to make others coffee, this stinginess hurt. But I rationalized that most of my new friends don’t like coffee and those who do have been drinking ersatz coffee for so long that they wouldn’t notice the difference. My brother sent me another two bags of coffee for my birthday, so my hoard lasted until the end of December. In my rationing of coffee in those early weeks, I learned some sobering truths about coffee here. Yes, there is Starbucks. (After all, if we ever colonize another planet, the first business to open will probably be Starbucks, which, while not serving a great cup of coffee, at least serves consistent coffee.) Knowing that eventually I would deplete my coffee hoard, I scoped out the local Starbucks menu. The holiday flavors should have been listed, but alas, I didn’t recognize any of the flavors. But the worst truth is this: there is no regular coffee in this country. When I order a regular cup of coffee at any coffee shop in town, I get an Americano. Sorry, but watered-down espresso is not a cup of coffee. Worse than being a coffee snob in a country of non-coffee drinker, I am a creamer snob in a non-dairy country. Good cream is even more elusive than good coffee. Yes, I splurge and buy cream instead of milk, what the other coffee drinkers here use. Admittedly, I’m not sure what it really is, but it claims to be cream. Cream should mix with the coffee and change its color. The white stuff I’m putting in my coffee feathers and stays in a mass floating on the top of the coffee. It barely even changes the flavor. It might as well be plastic for all the good it does my coffee. (And it coats my mug with an impenetrable film.) Out of desperation, I have been experimenting with creamer substitutes. After searching the web for some options, I started with coconut oil, which is easier to find than cream. After I got passed the feeling that I were putting Crisco in my coffee and after admiring the mesmerizing multi-layered oil bubbles, I tried a sip. Once I get back to the States, I will immediately switch back to International Delight creamer, preferably Cinnabon. Last week, a student took me a new market and proudly showed me the imported coffee section. I perked up (oh, sorry, unintentional pun). But every single bag of coffee in there was espresso. To add insult to injury, the only brand of flavor syrups they carried was Monin—my least favorite flavor syrup. Sometimes I worry if my coffee taste buds will stop working out of self-defense. Yet each time I make another cup of coffee, I am reassured that it still tastes as un-coffee as the last cup. One of my favorite movies from my childhood is His Girl Friday, a fast-paced “jabberwocky” movie according to my mother. It’s a completely frivolous comedy, but one serious idea in it has gotten stuck in my mind this week. The patsy character in it shares about a soapbox speech he heard about production for use.
As I’ve been watching commercials—I mean, tv this week, I was struck with a glaring omission in soap commercials. These various products promise to energize our senses, beautify our skin, nourish, revive, rejuvenate, firm, comfort, and moisturize. Do you notice what these products don’t claim to do? Clean. The focus of the advertisements is so much on the add-ons, the extra features of the product, that the main purpose is completely overlooked. Is our purpose in buying soap to revive ourselves or to clean ourselves? I had the same problem when I started car shopping. A car is produced for a specific use—to get from point A to point B. And the salesman kept highlighting the extra features—a built-in vacuum, a built-in cooler, and heated/cooled seats—as though those features were going to help me get from point A to point B any faster. Those are just a basic features; there were even more features that seemed like the salesman thought that I would be living in the car more than in my apartment. (If it isn’t obvious that I’m an old soul, yes, I have the same argument with cell phone salesmen. I’m buying a phone to talk to people, not a pocket-sized computer.) Normal people get songs stuck in their heads.
And I certainly do get songs stuck in my head (but I really don’t claim to be normal. Not that I try to be abnormal or that I am offended by normalcy, it’s just something that’s not on my radar). Some of my friends can be rather annoying about throwing out lines from songs because they know that I will have the song stuck in my head forever. Even today, just wearing a retro-ish dress that reminded me of the recent movie La-La Land was enough to make me sway to the mental music while my coffee percolated. But, while I know that earworms are a common malady (see, they even have a word for it!), I don’t just get songs stuck in my head. I get words stuck in my head. All week, I have had random foreign phrases dancing around in my head. They are not even profound phrases. And sometimes they spill out. I cannot tell you how awkward it can be to be passing a customer in the store and accidentally audibly mutter “on the chair, in the car, under the bed” in a foreign phrase. It’s probably more awkward for me since I know what the unintelligible words are supposed to mean. Then yesterday, the word dumafache popped into my head. It’s a word I don’t even use! My go-to “I don’t know what that item is called but I need to refer to it” word is whatchamacallit. For a full eight-hour shift, I kept mentally referring to things as dumafaches. And I just found out when I googled its spelling that I got the wrong word stuck in my head. It isn’t even dumafache—it’s dumafLache. (Heads up, dumaflache users, you might want to enunciate a bit more for those of us that prefer whatchamacallit.) The cure for getting a song out of one’s is, of course, to sing it or listen to it. I know of no cure for getting words out of one’s head. So my hope, a desperate one, has been that using my nonword earworm a ridiculous number of times in one blog post will be the needed cure. If this doesn’t work, I declare my obscure word for next week to be smarm. Please excuse me while I smarm my hair. Recently, I started doing Crossfit. Actually, I’m not sure how to word that; whenever I learn about a new activity, I’m hesitant on what the verb form looks like. And, I’m such a beginner that my “doing” Crossfit looks a little more like watching other people lift large weights over their heads, contemplating my own miniscule weights, and trying to replicate their movements.
I felt the same way when I started yoga last year. I heard the instructor call the next pose: “Warrior 2.” Everyone else was already in position while I was still placing my feet. Even worse (or better, if you’re sadistic) was when the instructor would stop by my mat to guide me into a pose that left the rest of the class hanging, sometimes literally, in a challenging pose until she finished with me. Sorry, guys. Whenever I see what’s on the docket in Crossfit or what our challenge pose is at the end of a yoga series, I think, “Ha! I can’t do that” even though both of my instructors are wonderfully positive and encourage us to push ourselves (while maintaining safety, of course). And, here’s the amazing thing: most of the time, they are right! I might not lift more than the bar, but I can do unassisted barbell squats. I can do more pull-ups than I or my P. E. teacher ever thought possible. (Honestly, even one pull-up would have shocked either of us.) And I can get into a prep pose for birds-of-paradise—all of those things that I never thought that I, the bookish, uncoordinated weakly, could ever do. As I was leaving Crossfit last week, my arms were angry at me for bringing such a large water bottle, and my legs revolted at my suggestion to walk to the car. But I felt great, and awful, and great, and awful. How is it that something that makes me feel so weak (and glaringly reveals my weakness) also makes me feel so strong? At the time, my brain told me that there was a profound thought waiting to surface, but my brain muscles were too focused on remembering how to get into a car to give the thought my full attention. After a week of pondering, I’m still not done teasing out this idea. Perhaps this idea, the interrelationship of power and weakness, is why the apostle Paul used so many athletic metaphors in his epistles. The very things that reveal our weaknesses—the unassisted pull-up, side cross pose, the command to love our neighbors/enemies—are the things that build our strength. And the practice, the habit, of working on these skills—Crossfit, yoga, obeying the Word—does two things. One, the more I practice, the more I see how much I still have learn. Two, the more I practice, the more strength I have to learn more. . . . “Out of weakness were made strong.” Wouldn’t it be convenient if we could rehearse each day before it happened? People could get a feel for possible ways to deliver their lines; they would know when to best time their entrances and exits and pick up on cues that they otherwise would miss. It might take some of the spontaneity out of life, but it could also clear up a lot of misunderstandings.
Or, for those who like spontaneity, what if we could hear the soundtrack music for our days? It wouldn’t give away specifics, but it would help us know how we are supposed to respond. Scenario: Guy and Girl are walking down the street at night. A light staccato on the piano lets them know that this is a light-hearted scene and it would be okay if they wanted to dance in the rain. Or a swelling of the orchestra lets them know that this is a romantic climax in their relationship. Or long, menacing tones from the string bass warns the girl to scream and run away. (The other day in class, we were enjoying a discussion during which I periodically soapboxed for a few minutes before releasing the discussion back to the students. Each of my soapboxes was serendipitously accompanied by the music from the neighboring classroom’s movie, the mood of the music perfectly underscoring each my points.) Perhaps, some of you think that even having the soundtrack gives away too much. How about if we at least knew which genre we were in? My friend and I were driving back from a party one night and noticed a side road that neither of us had seen before. Curiosity made us want to turn down the lane, but we didn’t know what genre our evening was in. If it were a horror movie, this was the part of the story that the audience is yelling at us to stay on the main road because they know that an escaped killer is hiding out down this side road and would chase us around the woods (because, naturally, our car would break down and our cell phones would die). But if this were a romantic comedy, our car would still, naturally break down, but it would be right in front of a cottage in which Mr. Right and his best friend lived (even though at first we would inexplicably hate them both). Or, an even better option, if this were fantasy, this side road existed only on this one night and it was a portal to a magical realm in which, of course, one of us was the Chosen One to face the scary bad guys and lead the people into a golden age. So many choices. But, alas, we were not able to rehearse the scene before, heard no soundtrack music, and did not know which genre our evening was, so we continued on our humdrum way home, skipping all possible adventure and misfortune. “Watch for fallen rocks,” the sign read as we turned onto the mountain highway. My friend and I waited to see these advertised rocks. Perhaps they had stage fright; we saw none. Instead we saw fallen trees (the rocks’ understudies?) and wondered why the sign hadn’t warned us to look for them too. More disconcerting was that the sign warned only of fallen rocks. Perhaps the sign makers presumed that warning us of falling rocks would unduly frighten us.
Many people read books, listen to music, and, now, even watch tv and movies to while away the hours of a road trip, but I prefer to find my entertainment through the car’s windows. Had I been buried in a book or a movie, I would have missed the confusing gem of a road sign warning me of the fallen rocks. (I would have also been car sick.) The sign itself sparked conversation for miles as, with each hairpin turn, we expected to see these famous fallen rocks and contemplated whether the sign makers had not warned us of falling rocks because our chances of surviving the barrage were that slim. A later sign advertising “Alison free farming and homemade ice cream” was another gift of conversation as neither of us knew what that type of farming was. Our conjecture was that Alison was the redheaded stepchild of that farming family and they were advertising that they had not included her in any of the family business. Unlikely, but entertaining. The signs also provide insight into the local culture, like the convenience store that we passed that proudly displayed this in the front window: “No shoes, no shirt, no problem!” Between the signs and the old toilet lawn ornaments, we could tell that we wanted to wait a few more miles before stopping for coffee and fuel. |
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