Essay – Page 3 – Open (Open (Close)

How to Arrive at Your Destination

April 13, 2008 2 Comments

As is my custom when Leaving Home For An Extended Period Of Time, I began packing for Costa Rica a week before our flight’s scheduled departure. Bright flowery summer dresses draped off the ironing board, with corresponding undergarments and shoes nearby; tank tops made precise, cotton multicolored tiers on the rug, and piles of t-shirts, skirts, denim shorts, linen capri pants, sunglasses, and swimsuits overwhelmed the bed in a collage of potential perfection.

I love this ritual, and it stresses the hell out of me. It’s exactly the kind of thing I try to keep from a significant other for at least two years.

“Don’t . . . come in,” I told Jurvis. “I have . . . delved into summer storage.”

There were chargers, extra batteries, extra lenses, extra books, necklaces and earrings in appropriately-sized Ziplock bags. Two notebooks, an iPod, three purses, my favorite pen, eyeliner, travel-sized shampoo and conditioner — freshly labeled with pungent permanent marker. And when I had finally gathered and prepared everything in my possession I could possibly desire in Flamingo, I set about putting back ninety percent of it.

I like thinking of the suitcase as the harborer of a new life, where I am beautiful all of the time, in love with everything, and I never think to myself is this just weighing me down? Do I really want to carry it up five flights of stairs?

Leaving home for a time is — I hope — becoming a new person. The kind you see in catalogs.

Welcome to Miami. I went to the bathroom after deplaning in Miami, and when I came out the door, Jurvis informed me that our connecting flight had been canceled.

“Canceled?” I said. “But we have boarding passes.”

“Canceled,” he said

Since the next flight — on any airline at all, let alone ours — wasn’t until the next day at the same time, an airline agent gave us six airport meal vouchers and a night at the nearby hotel. But this was not entirely convenient: besides missing a full day in Costa Rica and spending a full freaking day in hideous airportville, Miami, we had no way of contacting my cellphone network-less parents, who we were scheduled to meet in Liberia in two hours. I envisioned their panicked faces, the checking and rechecking of watches as they stood in the midday heat in the middle of the world, uncertain, unmoving, purgatorial.

What if they mispronounced the Spanish word for “money” with the word for “testicles”? What if I mispronounced the Spanish word for “money” with the word for “testicles”?

Essay

I’ll Have . . . the Salad?

February 22, 2008 12 Comments

It occurred to me, about a month ago, that the only thing really preventing me from becoming a vegetarian was my fear of what other people would think. Namely, I worry about people thinking I have an eating disorder.

[Appendix A]

If we haven’t met, there are a few things I should probably clarify at this point:

1.) I am naturally skinny,

2.) There was a time in my much younger life when I was more than naturally skinny, and

3.) We’re all going to be enormous in twenty-five years.

A few years ago, I had a boyfriend’s mother pull him aside and tell him that she was concerned that my anorexic ways would rub off on him, influence his eating habits, and actually turn him anorexic (you know, like how homosexuality works). I was a quieter girl then, so instead of making an immediate bee-line to the computer to flip my shit in a cutting, well-worded email, I started stuffing my face any time I saw her.

See, I was saying, a strip of steak dangling from my bloody mouth, see: I fuckin’ eat.

Biking, Essay

Heroes

November 22, 2007 7 Comments

There isn’t much that I wouldn’t do for a bicycle.

They pass me every day on my walk to work: a whir and the click of switched gears, a breeze across my face and suddenly they are in front of me, churning pedals and disappearing over the hill. Sometimes they’re girls in skirts and leggings, frizzy curls and mint Burt’s Bees chapstick. Sometimes they’re middle-aged men, with sleek neon yellow helmets and black spandex. Sometimes they’re gangsters in over-sized jerseys and undersized bikes, their bodies swaying over the seat to make up for lost momentum. But usually, they’re ninjas.

The ninjas are the ones I envy. There is no way to discern the gender of a ninja: their clothing, while usually thin and tight, is layered like a fine tiramisu, beiges, whites and chocolates peeking above a tattered belt, which is itself beneath a backpack, which is itself covered in buttons and patches for various worthy causes (and the green grass grew all around and around, and the green grass grew all around). They bike effortlessly no matter the terrain, and their calves bulge.

“What the hell do you do for a living?” I want to ask them as they fly by in a swirl of autumn leaves. “How can I be like you? Also, is it true that you never sweat?”

But they’re gone before my mouth can even open, and I struggle to loosen my scarf in the wind, remove my coat which is always too warm after the first twenty minutes of walking, and wind up tangled in a mess of headphones and handbags at the bottom of the hill.

Essay, Self-Portrait

Family Reunion!

November 15, 2007 5 Comments

When I was little I would sit on the toilet and wonder if ghosts were watching me. Hovering near the mirror, standing in the tub, poking their heads out of the closets — my eyes would scan our black and white tiled bathroom, convinced I was not alone.

This isn’t to say I was terrified in the traditional scary ghosts sense: for some reason I assumed the dead were mostly benevolent, nonthreatening presences (and not scary like, say, witches, which roamed the shadows of my bedroom wall). What I took issue with was their potential invasion of my privacy. I had, after all, just become aware of nakedness and modesty, and it had only recently occurred to me to close the door when I used the bathroom. The thought of that being ignored appalled me. Grandpa could be in here, I thought to myself, and I wouldn’t even know.

Essay

Inexplicable Hauntings

September 9, 2007 No Comments

The first time I mistakenly thought I was seeing my junior high science teacher years and miles from when he’d actually taught me science, I was in the comic book store in Pike Place Market. It was my sophomore year in college, and I had recently acquired an affinity for the new Cat Woman series. I was bending at some awkward angle at the time, trying to view the latest collection with an air of insider’s knowledge, when suddenly, I froze — what was that in the corner of my eye? That plaid button-down t-shirt, that gut hanging over jeans, the jowls like stretched udders? “Christ!” I thought. “Mr. . . . Rangle?”

The second time . . . it’s difficult to say what officially constituted the second time. I have seen him across the street from my office. I have seen him in Italy. I have seen him in grocery stores, and on the subway, in San Francisco, and in Memphis. There have been second and third and fourth and twenty-sixth times. Always out of the corner of my eye.

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