Daily Double (11.11.11)

I know I'm not the only person who leads a double life.

Given the vastness of the planet, of the universe, of history, of literature, of culture, what hubris it would be to pretend I am unique. This fear of the mundane stops me from writing more than any other of my many anxieties. The cold fingers of cliché wrap tightly around my stomach as I stare at the blinking cursor. My brain lies stagnant in an endless pool of tired images, plucking one after another out of the mucky water: a budding rose, a cat stretching in the sun, a boy becoming a man on the battlefield as he learns to shoot a gun. Each day is another pitter-patter rainstorm of middle class clichés, starting with the smell of coffee and ending between cool sheets in the wee hours of the morning.

Yet I am still moved by the miracle of sentient life and the beauty of shared human existence. How's that for a truism?

So when I say I lead a double life, I don't mean to suggest that you don't. In fact, I'm sure you do.

I don't hide my age when I teach, exactly. I suggest, via a series of half-told truths, that I am older: I speak of starting college in 2003. I mention my Master's degree, students I had two years ago, and voting in the 2008 election (the first time I could vote, of course, but I don't mention that). I dress deliberately in "professional" clothing that was trendy a decade ago, and I wear slightly heavier makeup than I need to suggest that I'm covering signs of aging that aren't there. I avoid bringing up specific ages and instead speak of generations, of "middle-aged" authors and "young people." I rarely speak about myself and my experiences anyway, so my exact age is almost never relevant. I know, though, that with only a Google search, any student could figure it out. It's on my website. If anyone asks, I've told myself, I will not lie. I am ready at all times to have a frank discussion of my youth and educational history. I've rehearsed the encounter in my head repeatedly, staring at the popcorn ceiling in the semi-darkness as I try to fall asleep, listening to the dishwasher gurgling downstairs.

In my first year teaching, I waited apprehensively for the question to be asked. "I'm 19," I planned I'd say, matter-of-factly, with a single, serious nod of my head. I imagined the surprised murmur of the class, the incredulous looks on my students' faces, and the awkward laughter of the few who would realize they were older than me. "Yeah, I started college when I was really young," I'd explain. But no matter how many times I ran through the scenario in my head, I couldn't imagine what would happen after that. Would they revolt? Would they ask me questions? Would they be content to leave it at that and move back into class material immediately? Would I be able to maintain my authority in the classroom--would they still respect me? When I finished my first year without anyone asking my age, mostly I was relieved. I passed! I did it! They didn't realize! One small part of me, however, was disappointed: never again will teaching college freshmen be so special.

Now, at 21, I am as tired of pretending as I am unsure how to stop. I want to be candid and honest with my students. Why shouldn't they know that I go home, put on shorts and a t-shirt, and play Mario Galaxy in a room filled with lava lamps? Why shouldn't I dye my hair bright colors and go to my office hours in a sundress and dance unselfconsciously at bars downtown? What is the purpose of professionalism and propriety, when I will only be in this job for four more weeks, and I'm not sure how much good my acting does my students anyway? Don't older educators work hard to cultivate an aura of friendly relatability and pop culture relevancy? Mightn't I make more of an impact on them if I was my "true" young and casual self? But this late in the game, how do I do that?

A student who came into my office yesterday wanted to know the difference between an A, a B, and a C. Before I explained the basics of my mental rubric, I went for candid and honest: "I recognize that there's a lot of subjectivity in grading in English. I know that it's hard to understand sometimes, as a student, why a paper you didn't work very hard on gets an A and another that you slaved over for weeks barely passes. I don't pretend to be beyond all subjectivity."

After a few minutes of explaining how I grade (a C paper meets the most basic requirements, but does so without being terribly interesting, engaging, well organized, or rhetorically powerful; an A paper is a pleasure to read), I asked if he understood and if my explanation helped at all. He furrowed his eyebrows and, glancing down at the grey linoleum, said, "Kind of." He was hoping for an easy answer, he said, or for a trick or formula or rule that he could follow to be sure to get an A on every paper.

Success just isn't that simple. Life isn't either.

Thus I return again to the same clichés. And sitting here on my mundane couch, I take another sip of my mundane coffee.

What a Year: A Photo Adventure!

Darling,

We have had so many fantastic adventures this year. My new job has been stressful in many ways, of course, particularly in the wake of the Wikileaks disaster, but we have taken full advantage of the traveling I have been forced to do. A year ago, could you have imagined what this year would hold? I certainly never imagined myself working for international corporations, let alone in espionage, but with you by my side anything seems possible. And as the vacation pictures I will share with you below demonstrate, you have been quite literally by my side for so much of the past year. You are a trooper, a hero, a king among men.

Remember when we went to Niagara Falls last spring?



Remember how just after that photo was taken, the wind picked up? The mist was so heavy that we would have been drenched, had we not been wearing our jumpsuits.



You won that adorable sock monkey in the claw machine when we went to Denny's for lunch. As you know, we lost him to the falls that afternoon.

No matter. By the time we reached New York at the end of April, I was hardly crying about Mr. Juggles at all anymore. Better to have loved and lost, etc. etc.



Being a tourist with you has been a supreme joy, and what better place to be a tourist than New York? Though we hit all the important spots (the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the museums), my favorite part of the trip had to be standing with you in picturesque places wearing our signature jumpsuits, holding our thumbs up to the world. (Four upvotes for you, New York.)



If nothing else, though, we'll always have Paris: swimming naked in the Seine, stealing that corgi we found tied up outside a market, spitting off the top of the Eiffel Tower.

And as the trip went on, we even began to make friends. Remember the Extreme Spaghetti-Making class in Tuscany? I hadn't heard of extreme pasta-related sports before, but Marco and Carmina showed us how just how much fun it can be to cut spaghetti on the edge of a mountain after having shared several bottles of wine.



Carmina lost a finger in the pasta-cutting machine not too long after this photo was taken, but since it was only her pinky, she should be okay.

In Nepal, we had that entire group with us! This photo was taken on my birthday, I think. Some hill, huh?



From left to right: Sarah, Michael, Joanne, Robert, Enzo, Pierre, Jake, Fernando, Chris, Robert, Alonso, you, and me. I'm laughing now just thinking about Enzo and some of the crazy things he said--remember his Arnold Schwarzenegger impression? Shame about his sister, really.

Of course, we were sent back to the US after not too long.

We met Jason and Krista in Yellowstone. They were a little nonplussed by the geysers, but you were as enthusiastic as ever. How could I be anything otherwise? Hot water is awesome! It's science!



In Arizona, we spent a good hour making jokes with the Poopoulos kids, who we met on the trail.



In general, they were pretty good sports. Unfortunately, though, you just couldn't stop making poop jokes. Good thing we were in our skydiving outfits, still--when little Joey Poopoulos (that's him on the left) got fed up with us, he pushed us off. If we hadn't had our parachutes on, our trip might have ended at the bottom of the Grand Canyon! As it was, we were able to get back up the canyon, find our car, and make our way back to San Luis Obispo.

It's been quite a year and quite a trip. And now that we're back home safe, I can say without a doubt: I've seen the world, and you're my favorite thing in it.

Happy Valentine's Day, Sterling.

Love,
Elizabeth

Amazon's Hierarchy of Needs

What do we want? What drives us? Why do we do what we do? As a self-proclaimed intellectual and sometime poet, I like those sorts of questions. Or I tell myself I should like them, which is basically the same thing.

I encountered Maslov's hierarchy of needs in a psychology class when I was fourteen: Food. Shelter. Love. Respect. Self-actualization. The pyramid wraps things up rather nicely. There is some irony, of course, in a schematic that identifies "eliminating prejudice" as an ultimate goal explicitly privileging those who are able to eliminate prejudice. Thus, by being less prejudiced, I am better than everyone else who… uh. Hm.

Anyway, recently, I've discovered an undeniably more fitting schematic. It's democratic; it's primal; it's beautiful. Better yet, it's unabashedly capitalistic. It is not at all shy about privileging those of us who have the internet, have credit cards, have some disposable income.

Amazon's bestsellers: the ever-changing consumer bible. I'm particularly fond of reading the Home and Garden section--while not everyone wants a Kindle or a new digital camera, most internet users have at least some interest in small appliances and soap. So I figure that the Home and Garden section is a unique window into the fluctuating popular hunger. The wants of Everyman.

So what do we want?

As of 9 p.m. tonight, we want the Aroma Cordless Water Kettle, which Nietzsche (Eduardo, that is, not Friedrich) calls "visually attractive AND functionally satisfying." Even more, we want the Black & Decker 4-slice Toast-R-Oven, about which Tanya R. Golding raves, "Wow to get what you want and not have to pay a high price! Woohoo!!"

But most of all, we want a small, t-shaped, handheld bit of plastic We want an ergonomic handle and a stainless steel edge. We want an "innovative grooming tool for long- and short-haired dogs and cats." We want the large FURminator deShedding Tool--only $11.65, with free shipping from Amazon Prime.

With 2,700 5-star reviews, how could I not be convinced? I've just got to have a FURminator. The cat can come later.

The Soccer Emails

Since May, I've been getting these emails that are meant to go to parents of some girls' soccer team at a high school called MHS. The first email arrived as I was slammed with end-of-the-year studying and grading, so I ignored it, thinking perhaps it was spam (the list of recipients was long). But the emails kept coming, one every couple of weeks.

And now it's uncomfortable, like when you don't quite catch someone's name when you first meet them at a dinner party, then sit through dinner, dessert, and an hour of charades hoping that someone else will call her by name. But if anyone did, you missed it. So now you're leaving and want to say, "Nice to meet you…" Jennifer? Jessica? Joanna? It would be weird to not call her by name, but even weirder to ask for it.

Or, at least, that's what I'm telling myself. I'm telling myself that "Dina" with the Hotmail address (Do people still have those? I guess people still have those. God…) will think I'm strange and creepy and voyeuristic if I tell her now after three months and half a dozen emails that I am not the person she thinks I am. High schools are really protective, aren't they? Didn't I just read that article the other day about the 25-year-old woman who got denied a teaching degree for posting a picture of herself on MySpace, drinking a cup of beer? I know it's not really the same thing, but it's kind of the same thing, isn't it? Couldn't they bring sanctions against me for knowing too much? For not alerting the sender that her private message about underage girls was going to some stranger?

Probably not. Probably not. But maybe that's my worry because I am a little voyeuristic about it. Because I like imagining that I'm going to spend my foggy July mornings on a freshly mowed soccer field in New Mexico. That I'm starting off my days at 8 a.m. with dirt and cleats and shin guards and ponytails.

It's occurred to me that part of it might even be the fact that this fictional, pristine high school existence I'm fabricating for myself is at a place called MHS--initials identical, coincidentally, to those of the high school that would've been mine. I wanted to play soccer as a kid, but my cash-strapped parents told me that they could only support one extracurricular, and I wasn't willing to give up my music lessons. So by not responding to these emails, I can keep living this vicarious, alternate life. One in which I'm significantly more "normal."

On the other hand, though, whatever typo got me on the email list has meant that the parent-of-the-similar-email-address isn't getting these emails. So maybe I'll let "Dina" know.

Maybe not.

The Chair

T-minus 7.5 hours and we'll have the keys to our new place. It feels like Christmas Eve or something. The night before a trip to Disneyland, maybe. I've been boxing up stuff for weeks, planning, signing paperwork, hoping.

I actually really like moving. As a kid, I always imagined it meant being able to start over new. We moved a lot--not as much as, say, a military family. But by my 10th birthday, I'd lived in 5 different places, which is a pretty significant number of moves. At least, it's enough moves that by that age I had come to see moving as a part of life.

A new house meant a new school, new friends. Maybe there'd be some neighbor kid my age who'd become my best friend. Maybe the new place would have a swing set, or a park nearby, or a pool. Maybe I'd be less shy. Maybe they'd like me. Maybe.

This time, it's a little different. There's a little less possibility, I guess. I know that I'm still going to be me, and that a new apartment isn't going to make me less awkward or more capable of striking up conversations with strangers. I know that, within a few months, I'll fall back into habits and patterns and so on, and it'll stop feeling quite so new and exciting.

For now, though, it's still pretty exciting. I like the idea of being able to rearrange all our stuff and make our life work in a different place. I like the idea of being out of the frathouse.

So, anyway, in preparation for moving, we've been looking for a little bit of new furniture. Sterling's parents gave us this glider that evidently Kathy rocked Sterling in when he was a baby: it was once white, but now has stains that all my scrubbing with Comet and the rough side of a sponge can't seem to do anything about. We've enjoyed it for two years, but the wood in the glider mechanism eventually gave out, and it now sits next to our couch like a lame old mare, limping noisily and resignedly through its duties.

We decided that we'd wait until we moved to buy a new chair, so that we wouldn't be constrained by the space limits of our current apartment. My hope was that we could buy a whole new couch and chair set (matching furniture!), but as I think about our finances, I don't know if that's really prudent right now given other moving costs and whatnot. Thus, I've also been reading Craigslist furniture ads for relevant items for the past few weeks. Today on Craigslist, there was an ad for a glider that looked relatively similar to the chair we have--Sterling likes gliders, and wanted something that at least rocks.

I called the number in the ad to go take a look at the chair and a man picked up, his voice friendly but quivering slightly in the way that older voices do. "We'll be here tonight," he said. I suggested 8:20 and he agreed, then gave me directions. "I'm Jim, and my wife is Joanne." Cute, I thought. 'J' names.

The house was in Shell Beach, which is out along the coast, between Pismo and Avila (if you know the area at all). The 'J' couple lived in this big, expensive-looking house with a gorgeous view of the ocean. We arrived right at sunset, and I stopped the car at the crest of the hill for a second. I love that, even after two years, this area can take my breath away with its beauty.

Anyway, we looked at the chair, liked it, agreed on a price. Jim suggested we measure it before we take it out the car, to see if it would fit. We did, and Sterling and I were pretty confident that it would make it--just barely, but we thought it would (hear the foreshadowing there? My touch is not light, admittedly).

Long story short (shush, you), we struggled for several minutes to get the chair in (Jim helped; he didn't have to, but he did, which was nice) a variety of different ways: front first, back first, sideways, the other sideways. No cigars; not even a cigarette.

I was about ready to stick the chair in the trunk, hanging out, and bungee-cord it to the car. I noticed that, in our struggles to get it into the car, we'd nicked the arm of the chair just a little. We hadn't handed money off to Jim yet, but I was afraid that, if we weren't able to take the chair away we'd have to offer him some money anyway for damaging it…

As I was thinking this, Sterling was on his knees by the car door, poking at something with his Leatherman. He explained that the door looked to be held in just by a pin, and if he could get it out, maybe he could get the door off entirely. When the pin came out, the door opened slightly further (didn't come off, but that was okay), and, with the window rolled down, we were able to get the chair in the car. I paid Jim, and we finally left.

The chair is currently lying on its back like a pregnant woman in the backseat of our car. Alone. In the carport. We will take it out tomorrow, when we arrive at the new condo in the morning, and it will be the first piece of furniture in our new place.

If we don't break the car trying to get it out, that is.

"Smooth Body Slimmer" v. "Insta-Slim Shirt"

I received an ad in the mail today (along with my usual pack of junk mail) for a "smooth body slimmer" from DreamProductsCatalog.com. The ad caught my eye for a few reasons:

1. The woman's sexualized stance. Sure, the idea is that this'll make you look "sexier," but since I've started reading Sociological Images I can't help but notice any instance of an unnecessarily "feminine" stance in advertising.
2. The ad is simultaneously fat normalizing and fat shaming: it speaks of "female 'fat zones,'" as if there are areas of the body where women are just fat in general, but then of course it tells you that those zones aren't okay, and you should be trying to look 20 pounds thinner.
3. The idea of owning one of these things kind of made me giggle. I tried to imagine bringing a guy home from a date, getting into the bedroom, him pulling my dress over my head to find... this thing? "Ooh, baby, I love your, uh, smooth body slimmer?" I don't think so.

Out of curiosity, I went to the website, and was surprised to see a somewhat similar male garment prominently featured. The contrast is interesting. The male ad admits that this kind of thing for men is uncommon--the copy reads, "Finally...a slimming garment for men!"

Yet the ad reproduces the women-diet-to-look-good-while-men-can-only-be-interested-in-health-because-they're-active dichotomy. While the women are evidently worried about "look[ing] up to 20 pounds thinner," the men should be "feel[ing] and look[ing] years younger." The male garment provides a behavioral and emotional boost (there's a big difference between "feeling" different and just "looking" different)... but more importantly, the desired state for women is "thinner," while the desired state for men is "younger." The former is purely cosmetic, while the latter suggests improved virility and vigor. This difference is emphasized in the little bullet points that tell you what the products do. The female garment "lifts your bust & butt," "flattens your stomach," and "slims your hips and thighs" (so that you can stand there and look pretty, of course!), whereas the male garment "promotes perfect posture," "trims and tightens," and offers "back support" (so that you can go out there and be an active, trim, tight, weight-lifting man's man).

Of course, the idea that your body isn't good enough is universal.

Ladybugs

I've been battling whiteflies now for a couple of months. They're these little, white, soft-bodied pests that suck the lifeblood out of your plants like a hundred tiny replicating vampires. While school was in session, I didn't have much time to think about my whitefly invasion. Compared to exams and papers and presentations and grading and teaching, whitefly control didn't seem very important.

But now that my life consists of biking, gardening, cooking, and studying for the M.A. exam next Fall, I spend a lot more time worrying about my whiteflies. Sterling accuses me of being like Rabbit of Winnie the Pooh, fretting over my garden, pulling at my ears, de-bouncing Tiggers, etc. I really have tried all kinds of solutions: I made some insecticidal soap from water, vegetable oil, and dish soap. It did practically nothing. I then bought some commercial insecticidal soap. It decreased the number of flies somewhat for a while, but though I continued spraying my plants occasionally over the course of a few weeks, the whiteflies began to grow in number again.

I then made some yellow sticky traps, of various kinds. I stuck pieces of yellow cardboard on chopsticks and covered them with tape, sticky side-out. I cut pieces of clear plastic, colored them with yellow Sharpie, and coated them in petroleum jelly. No luck. The whiteflies were still more interested in my tomatoes.

I bought a marigold plant, which supposedly repels whiteflies. The whiteflies took up residence under its leaves.


So finally I broke down and bought 1500 ladybugs from the Internet. They arrived about a week ago (I'd forgotten what I'd ordered and freaked out when I opened the package to find a bunch of insects) and I released them onto my plants. I've been a little disappointed, though. They've mostly just hung out in huge groups between the leaves of my gardenia. Whiteflies will land millimeters away from the cluster of beetles, who will continue to sit there, totally uninterested.

I'm hoping that they're crawling around and eating whitefly eggs when I'm not looking, but the number of whiteflies that flutter off my plants in a disappointing cloud seems to keep growing and growing.

The other possibility: my ladybugs are simply more interested in chillin', maxin', and relaxin' all cool than in scarfing down my flies. An artist's representation: