Fashion Plates and Say What You Will

Little that J might say could surprise me. When he says something like "Did I tell you about the time I hung out with panhandlers?", as he said yesterday, I don't think "What?!" or "Really?!"

Instead, I think, Yes, that sounds about right.

Little that I say actually insults people. This is a good thing, because I don't sensor well.

The hockey game we were going to was set up to be a group event, but only J and I went. As we were training in, I chided him on his shiny shoes and long wool coat, saying I didn't realize that hockey had become a bis-cadge event. He said, " I actually bought these shoes because you were ripping on my old ones. Remember? You said it was time to put them down and I said something along the lines of piss off? Well, then I got these ones."

I didn't remember saying that. I supposed I was drunk at the time. But I said, now, completely sober: "I was thinking today that I say very personal comments to you kids. And it occurred to me that if I were a guy, you'd all consider me to be a jackass. But because I'm a girl, I can get away with it."

"Yeah. Well, you know, when you're living on your own and you don't have your mom to tell you things like, hey, buy some new shoes, you just don't think of it."

I wasn't pleased with being likened to the team mom--mostly because I think I'm pretty funky. But it's better than being a jackass, I guess...

"Do you recognize this sweater?" he asked.

"No," I said honestly.

"You found it in my closet once and said you never seen me wear it. So I thought, I'll wear it today."

"Well," I said, "that sounds like something I'd say." And I immediately decided to not tell him about the slight hole in the back neckline.

::sigh:: I'm a snob :(
Today I'm wearing a longer and bigger necklace than usual. My mom got it for me when she went to Hawaii, and it's a little more BAM! than the things I might normally wear. But there's nothing wrong with expanding your fashion tastes. This particular one, however, has made drinking from a watr fountain very difficult. And I imagine it will be the last of the long necklaces for me.

Barrel's Bottom Rents Last

The clawfooted tub on the 2600 block of Marshfield did not inspire the same romance, nor did it invoke a mediocre appreciation, as other, vintage clawfooted bathtubs might. In magazines and on cable tv, the four feet of such a tub would rise majestically from a highly polished marble floor. It would stand opposite a pedestal sink and an open organizational system for towels and toiletries.

But this tub on the 2600 block of Marshfield rose from an old laminate floor. The color of said floor was the yellow-tan tone you'd expect to see a newpaper turn following 15, 20 years of neglect. And the tub did not face a pedestal sink. There was no sink in the bathroom in the Marshfield apartment. There was no organizational storage system, open nor otherwise. Only a small toilet and a clawfooted tub, whose fourth foot was poised atop a general biology textbook.

In statues or paintings, when the subject has one foot poised atop a box, pillar, animal, or severed human head, many words come to mind, though they all have that serenely powerful connotation: triumphant, proud, conqueror. It's easy to gaze awestuck at such a figure, who cleary held mastery over something.

I sincerely doubt the tub had mastered general biology, and I say this forgetting that tubs do not invest in science. I say this with an air of pompousness: How could a tub, living in these conditions, ever improve itself to learn general biology?
Thankfully, one would not notice the textbook upon entering the bathroom. This was precisely because the textbook was from 1970--at least-- and the corner of it that was nearest the door was worn or chewed away, revealing pages that blended in perfectly with the laminate floor.

Aside from the bathroom, the rest of the apartment was in poor shape. So bad, in fact, that the bathroom seemed the highlight--which is why we started there.

The walls had holes. The wood floors collected dust balls so large, they must be considered dust rabbits, not bunnies. The dry wall rippled around the windows where water had come in and stayed. Then there was the second entryway.

The second entry was framed by an old wood trim--except, of course, where it was completely lack. Eight inched above and below the deadbolt were exposed. Where the trim began again, it was splintered and disrupted. The owner had replaced the absent accent by hammering a four-inch-long block of unfinished wood over the place where it seemed the deadbolt had plowed from its space within the frame to the inside of the apartment.

As an added sales aid, the owner took the sole lightbulb out of the main room. This gave potential renters a modified version of the "look around". It seemed that the owner believed, to view this place in its best light, required absolutely no light at all.

I hated bringing clients there. But everyone wanted to see it. It was the only apartment under $600 in all of Lakeview, and each renter wanted to believe this would be their gem--the perfect place that only they had been lucky enough to find.

Marshfield was in the database for months before I started apartment leasing in the summer of 2006. And soon I realized its usefulness. If clients had just seen an apartment they really liked, show the Marshfield apartment to make them understand just how bad the other options were. This isn't as manipulative as it sounds. It's actually doing the clients a huge service. The dumps remained available for months. But the gems--hardwood floors, eat-in-kitches, closets in the bedroom, and heat included--would stick around for a couple of hours or a day at most. As agents, we knew if a place would rent in less than a week. And if we showed a gem to clients who seemed keen on it, they'd surely be disappointed if they came back later in the afternoon and discovered it was gone.

But Marshfield was going nowhere fast.

Clients would ask me, "Would you live here?" and I would say something like, "I'd rather move back home with my nagging, coddling, nosey, controlling parents. But you don't really have any better option." I would walk into Marshfield and immediately start appologizing for the 40-year-old refrigerator and the moldy general biology textbook. I would point out the absence of the sink in the bathroom, but quickly announce that the kitchen sink is just a short trot away.

I knew I had no chance of renting it when I was showing places to a couple of college-student sisters. They were nice as can be. Fresh off the boat from Nigeria, I believe. They were used to living sparsely. They told me that they were not accustomed to air conditioning, and they were accustomed to sleeping in the same bed. We looked at the few places that were in their price range, of which Marshfield was the gem. In the end, they decided to stay another semester in the dorms.

I had only been in the leasing business for three months, long enough for my temporary license to expire. And during that time, only Marshfield was available from the start to the finish of my short career. It wasn't until Christmas time that I had gotten a call from a former coworker, inviting me out to celebrate that, in an apartment shortage, someone had finally rented the old Marshfield place.




LENT UPDATE
Four days of Lent and one Sunday: two margaritas (both on Sunday)! And I was in attendance for this weekend's mass...
Sha-Blam!

Forty Days Dry

For Lent, I decided to give up booze. Forty days on the wagon doesn't seem like a challenge to me. I've only been drinking for the past couple of years. It's just something I do to socialize.

Why are you doing this to yourself?
Here are three reasons I'm giving up the sauce:

1. If I stay out late on Saturday night, I can't motivate myself to go to church. And during Lent, I'm going to make the good effort to go every week.
2. I'm getting ready for summer, and all of those calories seem to be making my daily workouts less effective than they should be.
3. I would like to spend less money. The second I leave the door and head out into the city, it's $40. A $20 cab ride out to where ever I'm going, and a $20 cab ride home--nevermind the food and booze!!

What the Friends Had to Say...
So I went to play a soccer game on Wednesday, and I told my cohort about my new leaf. Here are some of the responses I got:

W said:

• "Are you kidding me? I took off work tomorrow so we could go drinking after the game!"
• "Do you really think you'll make it 40 days?"

M said:

• "You can't be serious? What are you going to do if you don't go out drinking?"
• "Are you studying for a test or something? Why would you do this?"
• "Why don't you give up something else? Like sex?"

J said, "What about the hockey game on Sunday?"

I told him that Sundays are not included in the Lent season. (If you don't believe me, start on Ash Wednesday and count days until Easter. You'll only get 40 if you don't include Sundays. A special thanks to Vatican 2!)

"Oh," J said, "so you can just come out and meet us up at midnight on Saturdays, then."

"Yeah!" agreed M, "That makes sense!"

I tried to explain that that would ruin the whole idea. Besides, I said, I'm bothered that you guys don't think I can get by without drinking! "The point is that if I get drunk on Saturday night, I won't be able to get myself up in time for church."

"Well, why don't you just not drink on Saturdays, but still come out with us on Fridays?" asked M.

It was an uphill battle against these nonCatholics. They just don't get that Lent is supposed to be a quite, calm, and reflective time.

Jeez! Even the heathen I'm boinkin' gets that!


LENT UPDATE
Two days without any desire to drink... take THAT doubting Thomases!

When It Looks and Tastes Like Food: It's Done!

Most things are not as difficult as people make them out to be.

I applied for a part-time job as a barista at a coffee shop near my house. I could, potentially, hop off the train after my day job, make cappicinos for college students, and with my revenue, get $80 more drunk each week. When I go in to apply, the manager, a hippie guy who forgot to eat everyday for the past 3 years, says, "Do you have experience as a barista?"

"I have 24 years of practical experience holding cups and pouring drinks for myself," I say.

I didn't get the job...


Cooking. Another perfect example. A group of friends and I were out for dinner. A pair of them are recently married. The wife says they have appliances they do not know how to use.

"What do you do with a mixer?"

If four of us could have stacked the notes in our voices, we would have made an excellent barbershop quartet when we responded: "Mix things."

Then came the cateloging of reasonable items that require mixing. For example, any dough that is preceded by an adjective: cookie dough, bread dough... Our one friend offered the idea of mashed potatoes.

"Mashed? Potatoes?"
The girl who brought it up proceded cautiously. Was our married chum joking? This launched into a whole orated treatise on how to make mashed potatoes. First, you boil the potatoes. Ah, but how do you know when they're done? Why, you stick a fork in them. A fork! Genius! Then you put them in the mixer... Yes, yes! Go on!

I have few qualms with being a snob, so I'll just go ahead and say it: Are you kidding? Mashed potatoes is the only food where the ingredients and the preparation process are in the name!

And cooking, in general! I'm a fair cook, and the trick to cooking anything is to keep looking at it and when it looks and tastes like food, it's done. If you're cooking fish, and it doesn't look like the food you got last weekend when you ordered it from a restaurant, it's not cooked completely.

When it looks and tastes like food, it's done!