Friday, April 11, 2003

As an experiment, I would like to share my yesterday morning with you.  I suspect that very few people’s toilettes evince so spectacularly an essentially ad hoc mode of existence. I awake, with my husband, at four-thirty in the morning.  Eric leaps into the shower while I step in front of the bathroom mirror.  “Did you buy any deodorant?” I call to him.  I say this before actually looking for the deodorant, because I know that we have run out of the Powder Fresh Mennon for Women that we both use.  After a bit of shouting back and forth, he understands my question.  “It’s in my suitcase,” he cries. I finish putting in my contacts – being careful to wash off the accumulated cat hair first. “By the way,” he yells, “I’m taking the razor.” “Sure – oh.”  Uh-oh. More on the razor situation in a moment. I retire to the study to write.  On my way, I stop by Eric’s suitcase and filch some deodorant, since once he leaves there of course will be none to filch.  He has beaten me to the punch and bought himself some manly black Gillette deodorant.  Now I smell like   an Arctic Peak.  While I’m writing, I clean my face with some Clinique astringent I’ve kept under my sink for about seven years, but have pulled out now because I’m starting a new regimen.  My regimen is that I wipe my face with astringent-soaked cotton balls while I write.  I place the dirty cotton balls on top of the pile on the desk left over from yesterday. By the time I’m done with the writing, Eric’s left.  It’s my day to shave my legs, which of course is difficult today because Eric has taken the Mach III razor we share with him.  My usual method is this.  I go into the bathroom and take Eric’s Mach three razor.  I take the blade off – Eric is very particular about his razor blades, and has pretty much forbidden me to touch them – and leave by the side of the sink.  I take the razor handle, and also Eric’s lather brush.  I do not, however, use his shaving soap, some fancy-ass stuff from Kiehl’s that costs like twenty buck.  Instead I use the shaving soap he was using before I bought him the Kiehl’s stuff for Christmas, which costs a dollar ninety-nine at the Duane Reade.  I’ve been using this round of soap ever since he switched over to the Kiehl’s – it lasts a really long time, and besides I find I do not shave my legs all that often.  The shaving soap sits in a ceramic ramekin, which is why I make my Petits Pots de Crème in pyrex mise en place bowls.  I have two Mach III razors reserved on the lip of the tub, and I use one of them, remembering to take it off and return Eric’s razor to its proper place when I am done. So Eric’s taking the Mach III is an obstacle, but not a completely insurmountable one.  For I have the crappy plastic pink razors I bought one day, that suck and that I only use when I have to.  I refuse to use the pink razors on my more intimate areas though, because you just don’t want the damage these things can inflict up there.  Doesn’t matter – Eric’s out of town, and I don’t plan to go traipsing about in a bikini this weekend. I also don’t shave my armpits, but that’s just because I’ve already used the Gillette Arctic Peak, no longer on the premises, and if I shave, the precious deodorant powers will be grossly diminished.  This is a board meeting day, after all, and there’s a high potentiality for a common motherfucker like me to pit out. Then I get to work on my ulcer for twenty minutes waiting for the train, which is not really part of this story because it’s not my fault, except for the fact that I continue to allow myself to work at a crappy nine-to-five job and live in an outerborough apartment.  Someone has said – surely someone has said this – that we create our own hells.  My life is pretty much a living example of that. Yesterday was the strangest day of my life.  I rode the subway three times – the first time I was gabbling and cursing like a maniac, the second I was just sobbing, the third I kept making these high-pitched squealing noises and giggling.  Not all of this was due to mental instability.  There were circumstances involved.  It was one of those days where, in the midst of events moving faster than one not-too-skilled, extremely stressed secretarial worker can keep up with, said secretary can nevertheless not help but notice the social interactions of people as if they were the interactions of apes or bonobos.  There was an extreme awareness of body position, gesture and eye contact, and conversation as a set of lures and traps.  It was one of those days when you realize anew, like being punched in the stomach, what a strange, amazing and scary bunch we humans are. You have days like that, don’t you? Obviously, I didn’t cook.  Hell, I didn’t even remember to take out the garbage.  Instead I ate leftover eggplant and chicken and noodles, heated to an not entirely appetizing crisp in the oven, sitting in the kitchen all by myself, giggling occasionally.   7:31:47 AM    comment []