Little Sorrows, Wrought by Disinclination to Move

The theme of my March has been inertia: the inability to rouse from bed, to get up from the chair, to leave the apartment. The quality of being loath to move from where I have settled. Uncharacteristically for adult-me, I've put the bare minimum into my schoolwork (and done more on the fun bits than otherwise), and have allowed general responsibilities to slide in a way that only makes life less convenient for me and doesn't really grant benefits in return. Other than the dubious benefit of not having to move.

Sculpture (underwater, in Mexico) by Jason deCaires Taylor. More here.

The hummingbirds on the balcony have built a nest on one of my strings of lights. How this delighted me when I discovered it in February! But for weeks I didn't refill their feeder, because I didn't feel like cooking up the simple syrup that goes in it. Now, post-refill, even though they've returned to hanging out on my balcony and perching on my lights, the nest has remained empty.

That's a sorrow. That's the kind of thing I've lost in March because of inertia. Little happinesses that in the scheme of things don't matter much - the birds certainly found other places to hang out, and they may return to using the nest once I diligently refill the feeder a few times in a row - but that do subtract from life in small increments.

I hope April moves me. I've never been a do-bee personality, but a month is an unusually long stretch of unproductive stillness. Good things are coming next month, and I want to stand the hell up and meet them.

The Quality of Not-Knowing

At the beginning of the year, the band Foster the People put up a mural in downtown Los Angeles. People apparently liked it. According to ABC7, its location is in an "area with beige-colored warehouses and office buildings," so "local residents welcomed a spot of brightness." However, on July 11, it emerged that the city had told the band to remove the mural. The image they put up as a mural is exactly the same as the cover of their most recent album, Supermodel. Evidently there are city regulations about advertisements vs. murals that meant their permits were not appropriate, because the image could have been construed as an advertisement.

Pretty colors, to be sure

I don't really care about Foster the People, but this story caught my interest. The band claimed that they were just trying to add art to the daily routine of ordinary citizens, but I wonder. If that was their only purpose, couldn't they have chosen another image? Surely it occurred to somebody along the line that this was a good way to get jumbo-sized advertising without paying jumbo prices. If not, if that's a cynical way to look at this incident, let's go the other way: is it fair for the city not to take into account that the band was just trying to make art? Should they give the band the benefit of the doubt, and let the mural stay up? Well, but even if the whole thing was an innocent mistake and this was just an image that the band believed in enough to plaster it on everything, letting it stay might create a foot in the door for genuine advertisements that are cynically masquerading as murals.

I find both possibilities valid, the cynical one and the innocent one. And I love news stories that demonstrate the existence of this split in life, that an incident could easily be one way or the other and there's no way to know from reportage what the truth of the matter is. That middle ground is exactly where I want to write, what I want to explore through fiction: when all sides of the story are equally plausible, and only the participants really know what their motivations were, and no one external to those participants' skulls will ever know.

One of the longest (and best, IMHO) stories I've written in the past year is about this - "Carlotta Made Flesh," a.k.a. the journalist story, which I wrote after reading many articles about catfishing, but specifically this one. The wikibook also has this split at its heart, although I'm not any closer to writing that blasted thing, so I guess I should stop bringing it up here, because I need to just put my money where my mouth is. The point is, this often comes to mind when I sit down to the notebook, this we'll-never-really-know thing, and it always gives me a little jolt of inspiration when I see it in real life. Some of the news stories that bring me food for thought about this issue are very unpleasant, but here, it's only a mural, and the stakes and harm are nice and low.

Incidentally, here, citizens petitioned in favor of the mural and Mayor Garcetti made an exception. The mural stays. And - maybe - some PR guy across town just put his feet on his desk and gave a satisfied sigh. Or maybe not.

Reblog: Unsightly

Today, my work appeared on Role/Reboot for a second time (yay!) in the form of an essay defending pubic hair. In the interest of riding that wave, here is a blog post about body hair that I wrote and posted here in December of 2011. Some aspects of it are no longer accurate, as I don't teach yoga anymore and I do actually leave my pits unshaven for months at a time, a practice I've grown to love. But that's a whole other post. Enjoy! 

It's Catalog Season in our mailbox, and the other day we received a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog - we probably purchased a single gift from them three years ago or something and are now on their holiday list ad eternium. As is the Schlemmer way, they had a lot of cool stuff in there, but something that particularly caught my eye was a home electrolysis...thing, a little machine about the size of a lady's electric razor that did permanent hair removal after numerous repetitions of swiping the thing over your unsightly body hair.

At first glance, I thought, YES, this is like a zillion times cheaper than salon electrolysis would be, and yes I'd probably have to swipe for several months in a row, but NO MORE SHAVING MY UNDERARMS, thank God, sign me up.

Then I thought about it some more. I thought about the idea of actually having no hair under my armpits. Ever. Again. Or on the tops of my toes; the little golden hairs that have grown there since I was in middle school are deeply humiliating to me (which is why I'm telling the whole internet about them). Or...well, no, those are the only two places that have hair I'd like to be permanently rid of. I'm kind of conservative that way.

The more I thought about it, the more I was bothered by the idea of forever removing that hair. I never let my underarm hair grow out for more than a day or two, in part because I don't like to show hairy pits to my students when I'm teaching yoga and I teach a few times a week. But the idea of it gone forever was very disconcerting.

I think it's because I've never quite reached comfort about the amount of hair removal women are societally requested/required to do, and which I go on and do in order not to be frowned upon in femininity. Every time I see a woman with publicly fuzzy pits, I give her a little mental fist-bump: way to not conform, grrl. I wish I had your fuck-'em-all attitude. But I don't. It's not a step I feel comfortable taking, and that kind of bothers me, that I'm not gutsy enough to let my armpits be what they are and to hell with anyone who'll disdain me for it.

There's always the "I want to be as awesome as Patti Smith" defense.
Which, you know, is a thing.

I can't think of any occasion in the future where I'd want my armpit hair to grow, nor can I think of any kind of life situation I am likely to experience in my remaining years on this planet where I won't regularly "need" [want? have?] to remove it. But that hair is a part of me, the real me who sweats during exertion and gets crud under her toenails and relieves herself via urination and defecation. These are human things, and the way that our society paints over them with obsessive hygiene and creams and powders and soaps and unguents of every possible configuration, consistency, and aroma, is something that I'm often grateful for (on subways, etc.) but I'm also often kind of dubious about. It smacks of a lack of acceptance of our essential humanness, and it leaves us all with a shade of illusion over the bits we most genuinely have in common, for better or worse.

So although there's a big part of me that can only think of how awesome it would be not to have to scrape my armpits raw every day or every couple of days, there's another part that's warning me no. Don't ditch that unsightly hair. Our unsightly parts are the parts that keep us grounded and whole, the parts that prove that under the most expensive perfume and the most perfectly coiffed hairdo, we are still beautiful animals with feet of clay.

Or, as the kids say, everybody poops.

How to Read the Same Thing Twice

Three weeks ago I read a 1963 book called The Story of the Misfits by James Goode. (The Misfits in this case being the 1961 film starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift.

Not the punk band, 

nor the rival band

of Jem and the Holograms.) The book was more or less a production diary of the overlong, over-budget shoot that resulted in one of the oddest letdowns of that period in cinema. I don't know what I was hoping for from this book; more dirt and gossip, maybe, or a clearer window into the potent personalities involved in the film (John Huston directed and Arthur Miller wrote the screenplay) and how they bounced off one another. Whatever I wanted, I didn't get it.

Throughout the parts of the book that involved Marilyn, I kept having the feeling that this wasn't like I remembered it. No, I wasn't there - my mom turned two that year - but I was recalling the stories of these events from my main source for Marilyn inspiration and knowledge: Donald Spoto's exhaustive biography of her. It presents a whole woman, flaws and all, and offers carefully sourced versions of events in her life that aren't in many other books about her.* After finishing Goode's book, I reread the sections of the Spoto book involving The Misfits, and I was amazed at how different a picture was painted.

For example, Goode's book mentioned from time to time that John Huston was doing a lot of gambling throughout the picture's lengthy location shoot in Reno. If you asked me what Goode intended to convey by talking about this, it would be that Huston had a man's habits and a fool's luck at the gambling table, but boys will be boys. Something Goode failed to mention but Spoto pointed out was that Huston was gambling with the production money. Tens of thousands of (1960) dollars of it. Which he had to call around to Hollywood friends to try and replace before the shoot ended. I don't think that Goode's book tried to pin all the production problems on Marilyn instead, but it lovingly described her huge entourage of assistants and groomers and repeatedly brought up how her lateness made things more difficult and expensive.**

The Spoto biography also put into perspective that Arthur Miller continued to alter Marilyn's role in The Misfits as their marriage situation got worse and worse, twisting Roslyn into a character with less integrity and more flooziness, more of a soft female foil to Clark Gable's incontrovertible masculinity, as the shoot wore on and on. Goode did record that scenes were being rewritten all the time, but didn't mention any character shifts (not that he had access to such subtleties; if he even saw that Marilyn and Arthur's marriage was failing, he didn't say anything). He also spent a lot of time quoting Miller, who sounded to me like a pompous, conceited sourpuss, but I can see how you would mistake that for intellectual giantism if that's what you expect.

Spoto takes every opportunity to sympathize and empathize with Marilyn, to show the reader the events from her point of view. I appreciated this enormously when I first read the biography, because I felt like I'd sat and talked to Marilyn herself for the length of the book, rather than reading about her at a remove. However, next to Goode's reportage, the style seemed downright simpering, as if Spoto was overly interested in making her sympathetic rather than serving the facts. I always felt that his biography was pretty neutral, not fawning, as he doesn't hesitate to talk about her mistakes and how her character failed her. But I no longer had that sense when reading about the same events from a different point of view.

All this is to say: I am astonished at how wildly disparate the same events - sometimes the same actual quotes coming out of the same person's mouth! - seem in different hands, in different contexts, with different attitudes. This long but fascinating article, which is about this very issue applied to a John Belushi biography authored by Bob Woodward, demonstrates this particularly well.

It's also the very thing I plan to get at in the wikibook. (I think I'm too ambitious about theme in this project, because I also want to get at how life on the internet works on people.) The central purpose is to write about how the real version of events, when the participants aren't talking or can't be trusted or all tell different stories, can never truly be known. How our perception of events determines what we consider the actual nature of those events when we are reading about them; how the unbiased reporter can (unwittingly?) become the biased storyteller. Rashomon, sort of, but with more petty arguments between Wikipedia editors.

So not that different at all, really

I'm trying to write a little on it every day, in no hurry at all. I expect this book will take me in the years rather than in the months. It's a much more meticulous, cerebral project than any of the book-length work I've done before. Last week went okay with it, but all spring I've been much more adept at avoiding it than writing on it.

In case you're interested, I was inspired by the death of Jean Harlow's second husband, Paul Bern. He probably killed himself, but we'll never really know.

---
*She never slept with Robert Kennedy. She probably slept with JFK once. She died due to gross negligence over drug dosages/combinations on the part of her doctor, Ralph Greenson, not because she overdosed on purpose or the Mafia killed her or whatever. Stuff like that. I tend to believe Spoto's versions of these disputed events, because he clearly spent more time on Marilyn than most of her other biographers did. 

**For those of you who don't know much about Marilyn Monroe, she was pretty much always late for casting calls in the last years of her career, sometimes by a matter of several hours. I.e. if shooting was supposed to start at 10 AM, she might not show up until 1 PM, with no explanation. Spoto indicates that she was insecure and suffered from atrocious stage fright, and her lateness resulted from not being emotionally ready to perform. She also had serious sleep problems throughout her whole life, which meant that in the morning she sometimes had trouble shaking off the sleeping pills she took. 

The $128,000 Answer

Following up on the last post: I watched Dark Victory, and Bette Davis was plenty clipped. I win. Depressing (but redemptive, I think) movie, very melodramatic, and the usual gang of Warner Bros.' DVD film experts gathered on a featurette to talk about why Dark Victory stands next to the rest of 1939's (stunning, never-equaled) crop of movies. They were wrong, but it was a valiant effort.

Following up on the prior post: I remembered an interesting secondhand story the other day that ties in to my point. A friend of mine - much older - told me about this time in the 1970s when he was in film class, and his professor asked him what his favorite movie was. He answered Wild Strawberries, an Ingmar Bergman film. Perfectly respectable answer for someone getting an advanced film degree. The professor proceeded to ask my friend the name of the last movie he'd seen in the theater. Star Wars, of course, was the answer. The professor noted that there was a small theater around the corner doing a Bergman retrospective, and that as the professor recalled, Wild Strawberries was part of the bill. Had my friend gone to see Wild Strawberries during this special event? No, he'd seen Star Wars again, instead, probably for the fourth or fifth time. Why did he choose to see Star Wars instead of his nominal favorite movie, the challenging and beautiful Wild Strawberries? Well, that, my friends, is the $64,000 question.

It's the same thing, why I've been watching MST3K on Matt's iPad over the last couple of days rather than writing or watching movies that are more worth my while. I love MST3K. It fills my heart up. It's not as respectable as Bergman, and it's perhaps not as stimulating. But I love it and it makes me happy.

All week I've been nosing through my notes book looking for my next project. There's at least one short story I think I'm ready to write, a literary one, but I'm not sure it's going to come out right. That's no reason not to write it anyway, but it's surely a reason to mentally whine and bang my self-pity drum.

Yeah, well, what legitimate reason did YOU ever have
to feel sorry for yourself, Keller? 

Money-work is nearly as dry as a desert, so the thing to do is write. I even have ideas for essays. There's no reason not to begin, and yet off I go to do laundry instead.

The Closer I Am

My KUFC manuscript is currently the length of a short story. [waves small flag with WOO! written on it, glum expression on face] I think I'm doing good things. I think it's going to be something I can be proud of. I think. It's just going so goddamn slow, and hard. I desperately want to share pieces of it with others, but I know that's a very stupid thing to do until I have a full MS. Which could take forever, at this pace.

But today I want to talk about something else.

There's been a slow dawning in me over the past, uh, mumble (because it just takes embarrassingly long for me to get a clue), brought finally to a head by this article and this article. This slo-mo epiphany has finally peaked at the point where I have convictions about my lifestyle that I can support and defend.

The first article is a thoroughly pleasant and fun read, and posits a philosophy that I couldn't believe in more strongly if it was a religion.

On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. 

[snip] 

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets.

The second article is a little more difficult to read. It's Harper's all the way - kinda over-intellectual and snooty and unenticing, and written so that reading it in Bette Davis's voice would enhance it. But I urge you to read it, read the whole thing. There are wonderful thoughts within.

Sometimes, I want to say, money costs too much. And at the beginning of the millennium, in this country, the cost of money is well on the way to bankrupting us. We’re impoverishing ourselves, our families, our communities – and yet we can’t stop our­selves. Worse, we don’t want to.

[snip]

It is this willingness to hand over our lives [to work] that fascinates and appalls me. There’s such a lovely perversity to it; it’s so wonderfully counterintuitive, so very Christian: You must empty your pockets, turn them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you hardly knew, and the days you sim­ply missed altogether watching the sunlight fade on the bricks across the way. You must hand over the rainy afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of simply being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach your children to do the same, and then – because even this is not enough – you must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both natural and good. But even so, your soul will not be saved.

Toward the end of his essay, the author turns to reflect upon George W. Bush in a way that strikes me, eight years after its publication, as...immature? Inconsiderate? Overly ranty? I'm not really sure, but even though I didn't much disagree with his points about Bush, it soured the piece. So, fair warning. So much intense yesyesyes comes before that whole Bush section that I still recommend the piece wholeheartedly.

Anyhow. I realized the other day that the worst thing that could happen if I worked a little less, and took a little more time for reading and movies and sitting outside on my patio to watch the hummingbirds, was that I wouldn't pay off my credit card debt particularly fast. That's it. That's the catastrophe. We are living pretty well within our means at this point, so although more money would be nice, I've discovered -

I am not trading money for time anymore.

Time is more precious. A lot of people would agree with that automatically without thinking about what it may mean in their lives. There are lots of people who can't afford to make the choice between the two, of course - minimum wagers, single mothers, etc etc. But there's a big ol' swath of the population who probably have the means to choose: who could work one less day a week, or drop back to half hours, or even get a different job. But they don't. Money matters more. Partly because they've been convinced by this culture, on a daily basis, that it does.

I'm not going to get all evangelical about this and claim that everyone must agree the life of a loafer is a superior life, that it should be our ultimate goal as a society. There are all sorts of people who are suited to all sorts of lives. The thing I'm trying to say is that the sort of life which I prefer, and the sort of life to which I'm suited, is a slower-paced and less work-focused life. Not a life you can live in America without askance judgement and the pervasive feeling that You're Doing It Wrong.

But I'm doing it right. I'm doing it right for me. It is so hard to come to this conclusion! It's been serious effort, through inadequacy and despair and all manner of therapy-needing emotions, to figure out that a life with enough space for idleness is not only a choice that it's possible to make, but that I can be healthier and happier than I could ever have imagined if I have the guts to go on and live that way. Guts which I've finally accessed.

Hence, I'm not gunning for a better job (except as a novelist). I'm not longing for more security. I'm even content with our smallish apartment in an unglamorous neighborhood. Because around 2:00, I'm finished with my work for the day. For the rest of the hours before dinner, I write paragraph after paragraph of fiction that I love and believe in. Or I take a walk and feel the sun. Or I just fiddle on the internet, or watch Mary Tyler Moore. Doing some of those things every day is more important to me than virtually anything else except the people I love. And I'm not going to hide from that anymore. I'm not going to be ashamed, or consider myself freakish or disappointing.

It is okay to choose not to be busy. It's okay to walk away from the money church. I swear, nothing horrible will happen, no one will spit on you or eat your brains. Such a life may not be for you - that's something you have to learn for yourself, knowing who you are - but it's a legitimate, possible potential choice, much as it may not seem to be.

Disclaimer: If this post sounded too self-satisfied, or too WOW THIS OBVIOUS THING IS TOTALLY AMAZING, I apologize, but there are no refunds. See you in the park, or at the movies.

A Suspiciously Fragile Camel

Today's blog day, and I've been racking my brain all day long for something to write about here. Nothing coherent is coming to mind, so I'll do bits and pieces instead.

I've consumed a lot of great media lately, but it's been, like, YouTube videos of artists I know I love, or movies that everybody else in the dang world has also seen and loved, or whatever. Nothing new to say there.

A lot of stupid homeowner crap is going on. I'm trying to get the house clean for guests I'm having on Sunday and I am so miserable at cleaning. I have a fancy new washing machine, and that's good, but it cost a lot and I suspect it contains potassium benzoate, and that's bad.

I ran just over 2.5 miles yesterday and it about killed me. Completely square one compared to the 3 miles I ran last week. The Warrior Dash, which has been the whole point of these stupid shin splints and sore arms and hassle and whatnot, is in a week and a half so it's hardly relevant for much longer, but lesson learned: do NOT wait a week between runnings unless I want to lose serious ground. 3 days, max.

I'm twiddling my thumbs over the sci-fi story until it's time to tear through it for the open-door revision, which will happen around Monday. Can't wait. I'm thinking about starting something else, but I'm so stressed and spun up about personal shit that I think writing on a new project would be adding a big bale of hay to the back of a grumpy-ass and suspiciously fragile camel.

I taught my last class this morning at a location where I've been teaching since January, and I am enormously relieved. It might have been a bad move strategically to stop teaching there, but MAN it feels good to be free of that place.

Facebook has become sort of a problem for me lately. I've been keeping it open all day long and watching it like a hawk for interesting or respondable stuff, and it's, uh...really not good for me to do this. In the last couple of days I've gotten involved in some interesting conversations on Facebook with film people, which has really redeemed the whole enterprise in my mind, but I know I need to stop. I need to put it down and back away. And not care what's happening on Facebook every damn minute of the day.

I developed this theory about why we're so obsessed with our devices. I think it's because these devices promise intimacy and human connection, and then they don't quite deliver the way we hope they will, and so we click them off disappointedly and then come back 15 seconds later hoping that this time there will be more to the interaction.

That's part of the draw Facebook has for me - that and all the downright interesting stuff that flows through my feed. Neat links and funny pictures and just clever minds at work. But I need to click it off and concentrate on my own stuff. Easily said, hard to do. Especially because Facebook has made it so that it's very difficult to be sure and certain that you haven't missed anything. Which is kind of a thing for me.

I've been reading this writer's chapter-by-chapter smackdown critique of 50 Shades of Grey, and I am SO glad she's relieving me of the burden of reading this book. Omigoodness. She's extremely funny, which doesn't hurt, but she's also clearheaded and smart, which is by far the best part. Here's chapter one and you can go from there, if you so choose. Right now she's running a contest to name the, in romance parlance, member of a main character, and the entries made me snort and nearly fall out of my chair.

That's all for now, sports fans. Although, if you are sports fans, I don't know why you're here; I don't like sports.

Peace

Very obviously, I do not possess the copyright to this image. 

On Friday I walked to the mailbox, and discovered that it was a stunning, cloudless day. I decided I'd take a walk after lunch, just a short one for some fresh air. There's a passage in Bridget Jones's Diary that I've never forgotten, where Bridget muses that perhaps there are only so many beautiful clear spring days ever apportioned to one lifetime, and sitting inside on one (or many) of them is wasting a valuable gift. This is probably far more dire a problem in England, and living in California would bring me more than my share of such days, but the spirit and the point of the passage remain, and bothered me during every single beautiful day I ever spent behind a desk in an office.

So I took my walk, looking up at the sky, walking over to the trees and smelling their blossoms, feeling and hearing the breeze. I was filled with wonder at how perfect the temperature was, how fresh the air. I walked up the hill to the strange little wisteria-enveloped not-exactly-a-gazebo thing a couple of blocks away, and then walked back. On the way home I noticed a field that I had somehow never noticed particularly, a rough circle of land that had recently been mown and was set away from the road behind some low bushes. I walked into it, found a flat spot with good grass cover, and sat down. Then I lay down. Then I closed my eyes.

I felt the sun on my skin. I felt the breeze play over my shirt. I heard the trees rustle, heard some kids practicing layups on the community basketball court a few hundred feet away. Occasionally a car passed.

I could have stayed there all day.

This Is How Wars Get Started

Yesterday I was scheduled to teach at 8:30, and when I arrived, there was a parking place open in the smaller parking lot to the side of the facility, where thus far I have never parked. As I pulled in, I saw a car behind me with a bumper sticker reading "Who is John Galt?". I rolled my eyes and went on in and taught a really pretty not-so-bad class, if you ask me, and when I came back out, the car with the Shruggy bumper sticker was still there. So I thought I might take a picture of it and post it on Facebook with a snarky comment about what exactly this bumper sticker announces to me about you if I see you tooling down the road with it attached to your car.

But then, after I put my stuff in Matt's car (which I happened to be driving yesterday rather than my own), I saw that there was a simply colossal, very new, white Suburban idling at the entrance to the small lot, obviously waiting for my space. I grabbed my phone and made a hasty attempt to get a picture of the sticker, but technology was not cooperating. I was annoyed about feeling rushed by the stalker Suburban, so I thought I'd pull out of the space and let this person park and then take a moment of my own idling in the parking lot so I could get my picture.

I backed out, and because the lot is kind of narrow, I got rather close to the line of cars on the other side, many of which were parked nose-out. When I was clear enough of the space that the Suburban could get in, I put my own car in park and opened my door. I didn't realize until I opened the door that I was quite close to a dark-colored Acura sedan, and the edge of my door tapped the Acura's license plate lightly. I pulled the door in a little and started to get out.

A horn honked. Matt's car's horn is kind of sensitive and I have accidentally honked it on more than one occasion, so I looked around a bit to see if it was mine, and I saw that behind the wheel of the Acura was a woman holding a cell phone up to her ear. She was screaming. Balls-out, utterly bereft of human control, shrieking. At me.

I can only presume that she heard my door tap her license plate (I am not misusing the word "tap" here, I wish to emphasize) and thought that I must have actually hit her bumper, or scratched the paint, or something, when in fact it was just the license plate. Yet still - she seemed to have gone from zero to 180 mph in about half a second, because of what couldn't have amounted in the worst case to a mild scratch on her bumper.

I couldn't understand what words she was shouting at me, although I could clearly hear her voice through the protective barrier of her car. I lifted my eyebrows a little and got back into my own car, and then backed up a few yards (as far as I could without hitting a dumpster), ready to flee as soon as the Suburban was done parking.

Which it wasn't. The woman in the Suburban had decided to back her ridiculous Cunard White Star vehicle into this space, and I honestly don't think I've ever seen a parking maneuver that was proceeding more slowly. I sat there, waiting for her to get the fuck out of the way so I could just leave. The comedy of the situation was not escaping me, and I knew that a) no harm was done and b) the woman in the Acura was waaaaay overreacting, so I wasn't feeling guilty or upset or anything. But I really wanted to get out of there in case she perchance had a license to carry a handgun.

On the way home, I reviewed these events, kind of incredulous at the way it had all unfolded, and so quickly. All because I wanted to get a picture of a bumper sticker. The various chess pieces and their parts to play; the conjunction of time and space. One person with a hair-trigger temper, and another one who was late for her Pilates class, and a third who meant well but was driving a car she wasn't accustomed to. As I told Matt later, this is how wars get started.

Unsightly

It's Catalog Season in our mailbox, and the other day we received a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog - we probably purchased a single gift from them three years ago or something and are now on their holiday list ad eternium. As is the Schlemmer way, they had a lot of cool stuff in there, but something that particularly caught my eye was a home electrolysis...thing, a little machine about the size of a lady's electric razor that did permanent hair removal after numerous repetitions of swiping the thing over your unsightly body hair.

At first glance, I thought, YES, this is like a zillion times cheaper than salon electrolysis would be, and yes I'd probably have to swipe for several months in a row, but NO MORE SHAVING MY UNDERARMS, thank God, sign me up.

Then I thought about it some more. I thought about the idea of actually having no hair under my armpits. Ever. Again. Or on the tops of my toes; the little golden hairs that have grown there since I was in middle school are deeply humiliating to me (which is why I'm telling the whole internet about them). Or...well, no, those are the only two places that have hair I'd like to be permanently rid of. I'm kind of conservative that way.

The more I thought about it, the more I was bothered by the idea of forever removing that hair. I never let my underarm hair grow out for more than a day or two, in part because I don't like to show hairy pits to my students when I'm teaching and I teach a few times a week. But the idea of it gone forever was very disconcerting.

I think it's because I've never quite reached comfort about the amount of hair removal women are societally requested/required to do, and which I go on and do in order not to be frowned upon in femininity. Every time I see a woman with publicly fuzzy pits, I give her a little mental fist-bump: way to not conform, grrl. I wish I had your fuck-'em-all attitude. But I don't. It's not a step I feel comfortable taking, and that kind of bothers me, that I'm not gutsy enough to let my armpits be what they are and to hell with anyone who'll disdain me for it.

There's always the "I want to be as awesome as Patti Smith" defense.
Which, you know, is a thing.

I can't think of any occasion in the future where I'd want my armpit hair to grow, nor can I think of any kind of life situation I am likely to experience in my remaining years on this planet where I won't regularly "need" [want? have?] to remove it. But that hair is a part of me, the real me who sweats during exertion and gets crud under her toenails and relieves herself via urination and defecation. These are human things, and the way that our society paints over them with obsessive hygiene and creams and powders and soaps and unguents of every possible configuration, consistency, and aroma, is something that I'm often grateful for (on subways, etc.) but I'm also often kind of dubious about. It smacks of a lack of acceptance of our essential humanness, and it leaves us all with a shade of illusion over the bits we most genuinely have in common, for better or worse.

So although there's a big part of me that can only think of how awesome it would be not to have to scrape my armpits raw every day or every couple of days, there's another part that's warning me no. Don't ditch that unsightly hair. Our unsightly parts are the parts that keep us grounded and whole, the parts that prove that under the most expensive perfume and the most perfectly coiffed hairdo, we are still beautiful animals with feet of clay.

Or, as the kids say, everybody poops.