Thursday, October 6, 2005

out front. that day the leaves seemed more green on that tree out front we discussed what shade of green that might be celadon? no, you said too pale. emerald! that's darker -- apple? no -- more blue jade? maybe jade! like your mother's necklace -- the one from chinatown on the silk cord a rose carved out of smooth, cool stone. is it still in that box with her rings and your grandmother's pearls? in the drawer at the end of the dresser? we blinked at the sun through the branches. so that's what colour that is? jade? I don't know, you said. there are so many damn shades of green. 11:19:19 PM    well, yes, but...  [] Four Random Rants. 1. It is a profound wonder to me that more people aren't in car accidents every day. I mean, yes, we have long-established rules of the road enforced by armed police, and cars that are increasingly designed for effective handling and comprehensive safety, but have you SEEN some of the people that are toodling about (yes, I meant to use that word -- it fits profoundly well)? People who look as though they've turned either 12 or 103 in the last ten minutes; people who look like their Ritalin-Valium-Viagra cocktail might not be giving them that 'emotional uberbalance' they were hoping for; people who have wires coming out of every orifice on their faces, enabling them to communicate with home, office and Uranus (cheap humour, but isn't that the best kind...); and last but not least, people who have fourteen children stuffed in a five-passenger car, each holding an ice-cream cone and a toy that launches projectiles. How do these people concentrate? I won't even get started on the rearview mirror museums that they are cultivating, complete with wooden shoes, tiny plaques reading 'Aloha!' , mortarboard tassels, "Vanille Francais" deodorizers, and tiny crystal squirrels. I won't even broach the stereo systems blasting Barry Manilow, Tool, or P.Diddy ft. Josh Groban. I won't mention the onboard VCRs, the radar detectors, the under-chassis lights in festive blue and pink, or the tiny Japanese dashboard ornaments that say "Fun Time GOOOO!" every time you stop or start the vehicle. And last but not least, we'll try and ignore the lonely men flirting with the OnStar girl when they didn't need directions or a rescued key at all. The point is, in terms of mental focus and positive vehicular environment, the vast majority of the population is sorely lacking. Yet most of them trundle through life daily without incident, driving between the solid and dotted lines, and using their signals correctly, even when some poor souls look as though they hadn't used soap since the Carter Administration. I've been in my share of accidents, as have my friends and family, but it should be so much more perilous than it is now. Just take a look around next time you are out and about. The line between order and chaos is by its very nature thin, but most of us are only really a thread away from an MVA with a guy in a camper van with wall-to-wall shag and a teardrop feature window. 2. I really, really don't care if coffee is good for me or bad for me anymore. Let me state this unequivocally, so that the world can sit back and marvel at my show of brazen confidence. I have kicked the habit for a month at a time, only to dive back in wholesale with an eight-shot nonfat latte. I have tried doing one cup a day, just for kicks, to see if my desire for it would wane, only to finish off the pot I made "for everyone else" (while neglecting to tell them it was there, hidden underneath the sink, in a room no one uses). I have tried doing decaf, but found this to be roughly the equivalent of kissing without lips. If the caffeine is going to take me out, it's going to take me out. If the caffeine is going to help me, it's going to help me. If there is some secret chemical in there future-curing cancers I may one day have, well... .cool. If there is some secret chemical in there that is going to result in me growing a third ear, well, all the better to rock out to my iPod delights. Coffee rocks. And the hotter the better, just like pool boys. 3. I really get tired of cute bumper stickers, pithy little quotes on mugs and t-shirts, and wall plaques proclaiming tidbits of conventional wisdom. I don't want to "Bless This Mess", tell the world I am a raging sufferer of PMS (via a limerick rhyming the word 'cramp' with 'champ'), or advertise my freakish need to consume chocolate. Messing up the English language in order to simulate drunken rambling is a tired device (I'm not as think as you totally lame I am!), and anything with a heart has GOT to go, whether it be a declaration of love for Bush-Cheney, Minneapolis, Nerds, Rottweilers, Obscure Martial Arts, or Todd Fields. Some of them are witty, but for the vast majority that aren't, I would consider a comprehensive ban. Everyone I know has something along these lines, so this is destined to get me some snarky feedback. But if I see another preteen girl rocking out a baby-t with "My Boyfriend is Out Of Town", I might pop... evidently your parents' brains and eyes are off on vacation, too. 4. Corners. I don't like corners. They are excessively problematic, from my vantage point. Drug deals happen on them, they reach out from coffee tables to dent my shins, they rip off of money, they get tattered on books, they dry out on sandwiches, and they house the table in your local cafe where you can't really see the jazz trio unless you crane your neck and risk spilling the house red down your shirt. They are where the spider lurks, where the fridge does not fit, where you are sent for being bad, and where houses crack like fortune cookies under an overfull carton of Mah Gu Gai Pah. Personally, I don't really embody the corner aesthetic with my natural born curves, and since shoulder pads were put on my personal no-fly zone, my clothes don't either. Let's make everything circular, and save my legs from another bruise. 9:21:58 PM    well, yes, but...  [] whole lotta shakin' goin' on. If you partake regularly in the magic of public transit, you will hold these truths to be self-evident: You cannot choose your driver. You cannot choose your fellow passengers. You cannot, oftentimes, even choose your seat. As much as you may choose to travel at a certain time or by a certain route, there are always intangible elements that prevent you from defining the nature of your experience to any real degree. From these variables come both blessing and curse... ease and discomfort... laughter and strife. One day, you might step into the warm embrace of a forward-thinking and pleasantly ambulatory community. The next day, you will find yourself wondering why PETA hasn't come to rescue you from your cage. Today began with the vibe of the former, to be sure. It was a typical Vancouver fall day -- giant droplets of warmish rain fell onto leaf-slicked pavement, mist hung in the air like faint clouds ringing Nepalese peaks, and the glow of headlights seemed almost festive in their brightness amidst the gloom. When I left my house -- ear buds crooning a bit of Erik Satie's Gymnopedie, toes exposed in joyful flip-floppery to the downpour, dangly earrings brushing against my cheek with the breeze -- I was running unusually late, but feeling good nonetheless. I had just enough time to board a coach and get to work with only seconds to spare. My usual cornucopia of passengers (Isabelle and Mama, Cheerio Guy and his baby girl, the Loud Driver and his Loud Wife) wouldn't be sharing the journey with me today, but I was curious to see who I would come across at this new and unfamiliar time. When I got on, the bus driver was a notably grandfatherly sort, round of belly and kind of eye. We exchanged 'good mornings', and I walked to the back of the bus to stand, since the seats were all full. This isn't unusual by any means for any bus that leaves here; apparently, many of us have to leave our neighbourhood for work and school. So I hooked my iPod on my green leather bag, click-wheeled to some Whiskeytown, and got some solid footing next to a rather attractive bald guy in a lovely duffel coat. We smiled shyly, noted one anothers' white-grey ear accessories with approval, and stared out the foggy windows as the wet world went by. It was nearly idyllic. This was a docile bus, full of people who aappeared to have coordinated their wardrobes in advance with phone calls and emails: earth tones and autumnal shades were the norm. We had a bit of a glow about us -- a universal sort of positive disposition. And then everything changed with an abrupt switch of drivers and the arrival of a new passenger about ten stops from my home. I'll call this man 'Sensory Assault Guy', mostly because any other terms I might apply to him would involve swearing, and well... my mom reads this blog. First, the new driver: a short, squat, Newman-esque guy who grunted up the stairs and sighed deeply as he took his seat at the front. He didn't adjust any mirrors or the height of his seat, which seemed odd to me, given that the last operator had been about six inches taller than he. He just lurched away from the stop. But not before SAG boarded. His coat was the colour of a Watermelon Jolly Rancher -- a strange acidic orange-pink that ruined the entire visual scheme of the passenger population. I couldn't look at him without blinking; he glowed like a construction beacon on a dark and stormy night: CAUTION! DANGER AHEAD! He also wore a pair of acid-wash jeans, Converse sneakers with mysterious autographs over every inch of his foot, and a baseball cap that sat so high on his forehead that he looked John Deere-ready. His music -- through old foamy headphones that were sitting just above his ear canals -- was turned up so loudly that I could easily make out the Def Leppard he was rocking that a.m. As a final touch, he greeted the driver at such an extraordinary volume that we all jumped a little where we sat or stood. He seemed irked that there was no seat waiting for him, but he eventually sidled down to stand next to me, nearly impaling or beheading people with his large backpack (I think I saw the handle of a tennis racquet and a head of celery sticking out of its confines) all along the way. Cute bald guy and I exchanged a look, but what can you do? It's the bus. Besides, Willie Nelson was now singing to me, and I could just look out the window and disappear into my thoughts once more. Or not. Some bus drivers like to make their stops and gos smooth and painless; they seem to understand how hard it is to stay upright for a half-hour journey unless the motion of the coach is somewhat regulated. Other bus drivers -- whether from lack of skill or a passive-aggressive (mostly aggressive) desire to punish us, their rider/oppressors -- hit their brake and gas pedals like they're trying to conquer the Whack-a-Mole at the County Fair. Within moments, all the standing passengers on this bus were like flakes in a giant snow globe of horror, bouncing off our fellow riders and bobbing and weaving like Ali at his finest. And guess who I got to bounce into? No, not the solid and inspiring frame of Cute Bald Guy, but the neon madness of SAG. And every time I would touch him in the slightest -- and I DID NOT CHOOSE TO, IT WAS A FATE I COULD NOT ESCAPE -- he would squeal "PARDON ME" like a stuck pig. Not that stuck pigs generally squeal pleasantries, but this wasn't really a pleasantry either. It was a reprimand -- an accusation! I think he thought I was trying to harm him, and no matter how still I tried to hold myself by clinging to every strap and bar in sight, I could not completely avoid contact. The driver's legs were cycling the pedals like a tantruming toddler kicking at a parent's arms from a Wal Mart floor in Purgatory, GA. Suddenly, my golden little patch of human experience was a Def Leppard-hissing, people-jostling, eye-popping nightmare, and I considered getting off this ride altogether. But we were hurtling forward at such a rate that I feared I would project directly through the windshield of the bus if I pulled the bell for a stop. And then it happened. As we rounded a particularily perilous corner near my stop, something startled the driver (a leaf, a passing car, thoughts of homicide) so deeply that he braked just as abruptly as I feared. We moved forward, we standees, as a unit of flesh, gasping, groaning -- completely unable to cease our trajectory. It was in this moment that SAG's hand landed on my bosom. As my friend Dan -- who plays soccer in a co-ed league -- has always told me, when you touch a ta-ta, even in the midst of a skirmish or tackle in a completely non-sexual environment, you know that's what you've touched. It's embarassing, and it is not to be mentioned. SAG didn't get the memo. "Oh, SORRY. Was that your BOOB?" I wished I was a boy for the first time in my 31 years in that moment. I was not going to reply to his question, no way, no how. Cute Bald Guy -- not looking as envious as I might have hoped -- grimaced at the awkwardness of it all, and the entire bus fell into a reverent and sympathetic silence for my comprimised virtue. But he did not press the issue further -- in any way. When I gratefully tumbled off the bus at my stop, breathing deep the outside air, and click-wheeling to Aretha's Respect, I heard SAG start to laugh right before the doors closed. "Heh! That's the breast thing that's happened to me all day!" Sigh. I wonder how long it would take me to walk to work, anyhow? 7:06:09 PM    well, yes, but...  [] class action. I was never one for the group projects. Well, I should qualify that: in elementary school I certainly was, but then again, I viewed all of life as one big group project at that point; I liked anything that allowed us to talk in class and goof off under the guise of work. Things got a little different once I got to university. For one thing, we never got to actually work on group projects in class; anything we did involved scheduling meetings around 3-5 different school and work schedules -- not to mention personalities ("I hate mornings! Nothing before ten!" or "Oh, I go to bed at 8 pm so I can get up for my early block of Sociology.") Yeah, right -- like you ever actually went to that class, honey. Once you got to the meetings, people would slip into their natural roles of recession of leadership. Someone was always falling asleep, someone was always the impossible visionary, and everyone else had to figure out how to motivate the slacker and bring the dreamer down from the clouds -- before they doubled our workload with a papier mache model of the French Revolution. After a while, when our projects were underway and things were assigned, you'd start to realize that some of the people in your group weren't going to hold up their end of the bargain at all. You'd only really comprehend how bad it was at your final meeting -- the "wrap up" -- when half your project would be revealed to be still in the embryonic stage. Somehow, they always got pulled together, but it usually involved an all-nighter by a couple of the group members -- and one of them was always me. Granted, I have some pretty funny memories of hanging out with people I barely knew trying to create flash cards about medieval literature, but still. There was always the awkwardness of forming your group, too. It was easy if you liked the people that sat around you -- you could just link arms and project off into the sunset! But if you didn't? Challenges. Memorable ones, though. John was by far the most shy partner I ever had for a project; we did two assignments together during the course of a six-credit Middle English class. The first one was a bit of a default situation for both of us. He'd been too terrified to approach anyone to form a partnership on the day the project was announced, and I was sick at home in bed that period. When I came back the next class, the teacher told us to "make it work". John was catatonic. I tried to put him at ease with jokes, but his eyes would fill with tears. I tried to suggest fun angles we could take with our project, but John would shake his head and sigh deeply. The only light I ever saw come on in his eyes was when I made some comment about how the assignment was so childish that we should do our presentation with Lego. And then a light went on in my eyes, too. We made Lego models of our text from his extensive collection, and acted out the dialogue like a puppet show behind the professor's podium. John could not believe I was on board with the Lego thing, and I couldn't believe how hysterically funny he became when no one could see his face. During the next project (he beelined for me, his safety zone), when we were supposed to be "fleshing out the text" of an old, old work, John burst into a song from Cats in the middle of our presentation. To this day, I cannot hear 'Memory' without thinking of him. I couldn't stop giggling, valiantly holding my Lego horse aloft and humming along, and eventually, we had to stop the dramatization in favour of rolling around on the floor. The teacher, irritated by this point, told us we could only redeem our presentation if we took questions from the class. And they tried to stump us, those hyenas. But we held fast, John answered with uncommon boldness, and we proved we knew our stuff even as we wiped happy laughter tears from our eyes. Tracy was probably the worst project group member I ever encountered in five years of university. She had the flu during the course of our project planning, so she would usually beg off all her tasks because she felt too ill to follow through with them. She carried a box of tissues with her to every classe, and would sit sipping chamomile tea at the few group prep meetings she managed to attend. Usually, she'd begin rubbing her eyes and coughing idly about ten minutes in, and leave about ten minutes later. I was full of sympathy for her ailment -- who would ever hassle or begrudge a sick person! -- right up until the day I bumped into her at a concert, drunk out of her mind, sans tissues, and unsure of who I was. She showed up to the project meeting the next day in sweatpants, swigging Nyquil from the bottle and claiming near-death once again. Just as she was going to leave, I leaned over and told her I'd really liked her green shirt. She looked confused, and I replied, 'The one you wore last night. But I think you'd spilled some beer on it." It was the only meeting she ever stayed all the way through, and the one in which we managed to saddle her with a 20-page summary. In my English 101 class -- that I was supposed to be able to skip upon my completion of the AP exam, but wasn't able to at my university of choice (damn you, U of A!) -- I was placed in what my beginner, MA-candidate prof called an "evaluatory body". What this actually meant was that I was stuck in a group with three other students who were mandated to read all my papers and offer criticism and constructive advice -- and gauge 10% of my course mark in the process. Or at least that was the goal. What they actually did was sit and complain that I should "lose the ten dollar words" and "be a more humourous writer" (about the death of Dylan Thomas?) and "stop being so Englishy". To my defense, I was the only English major in the entire class, and the "ten dollar word" was 'fluctuate'. I spent the whole year making quad copies of everything I wrote to deliver to these people, gritting my teeth and waiting for them to call me 'Miss Thesaurus'. I finally realized sometime in November that they would give me no complaints if I brought in muffins to our "evaluatory periods". So, instead of becoming a better writer, I became a better baker. At the end of the year, when the prof recommended me for the Honours program, he wrote on my letter of reference that my group seemed "well fed" by my work. Smartass. I have always been a team player and a lover of people, but I am also an obsessive perfectionist -- I hated having my academic performance connected to anyone else's efforts. Sports? Sure. Games? Sure. Support? Sure. Grades? Hell no. I'd take on a whole project alone, rather than risk failure. So it's ironic, then, that my first job post-university involved leading a team comprised of a bunch of small groups. It's even more ironic that I would work now in such a collaborative environment, given the challenges that cooperative bodies have presented me with in the past. Maybe I've just been broken in! No, no -- the truth is that, as I grow older, that the groups I am blessed enough to work in now are not ones in which I have to struggle to pull up the group average, but the ones that allow everyone in the group to be their most above average selves. I knew everything would be okay at my current job when someone forwarded me a web site about Biblical Lego on my first day. It reminded me of my best and most silly collaborative university moment. A moment where two people abandoned their personal comforts in favour of true inspiration. That was the kind of environment I'd been searching for. And I knew John would be proud. 12:10:01 AM    well, yes, but...  []

© Copyright 2006 Meg Fowler. Last update: 3/4/06; 2:28:51 PM.