Nonsense Verse

Adjusted for daylight saving time

The cell phone alarm goes off. (Do. Do! Do-do-dee-do! Do. Do! Do-do-dee-do!) I’m lying on my stomach, face mashed into the pillow. It feels as if I've already been half-awake for hours. I reach out to silence the thing: 8:30, it says. And then, too cheerfully: “Adjusted for Daylight Saving Time!” “I know,” I think. “I adjusted you yesterday. Yesterday, when you didn’t bother to adjust yourself, you useless thing. But thanks for the confirmation.” I wonder, for a moment, if this could mean that — but no, my cell phone wouldn’t be that cruel.

The light in the room is strange, too young, but it is, after all, technically earlier than usual. I roll over in bed. No reason to linger here. And so I haul myself out, head to the bathroom, and get ready to face the day. I’m supposed to be to work by 10.

I do all those morning things one does, and at 9:08, by my phone, I step outside. Birds are chirping, and I am bleary. The air feels early — crisper than usual. Everyone headed to the subway is bundled up tight against the cold, half-awake, heads down. I descend to the subway. There’s a smattering of people. Either I just missed a train, or they’re running so regularly that the commuters haven’t had time to accumulate. Excellent. But the Q pulls up, and it’s packed. Strange. Did the people deeper in Brooklyn all oversleep? It’s too early to care.

I step onto the train. It’s shoulder to shoulder all the way to Midtown. I try to peer at people’s watches. They all say different things. At Times Square, a flood of people get off the train. So many people, so many of them running late.

I walk to the coffee cart. “So early!” the lady tells me. “I know,” I say. “It does seem too early. Daylight saving time.” I shrug my shoulders and raise my hands because it seems the thing to do.

I usually get a small coffee, but I decide I need a medium.

I enter the building. A man in a suit precedes me through the security turnstile. And that is all. Odd. There are usually more people here. More people, more casually dressed. The man gets into an elevator — all his own — before I even have time to push a button. I push the button (E, it says). The doors of E bank open immediately, and I step inside. I have the elevator to myself. It goes straight to my floor. I step out and turn the corner. The lights over the first set of cubicles are off, and every desk is empty. I walk past, and the lights, sensing motion, go on overhead.

By now, of course, I already know what has happened. I look at the clock on the first wall: 8:48. I knew, I think, as soon as I woke up. I look at the clock on the next wall: 8:48. I knew, and yet — “Why stay here?” I thought. And so I got to work at 8:48, and sat down at my desk, and began to write.

“Adjusted for daylight saving time.” Twice.

8 things

At the prompting of my friend Paul I shall now take part in a meme, and only because it's Paul, and he's adorable and charming and British, and looks just about the same now as he did when he was 10 years old. (And here is where I ought to note that I'd love to reveal my 10-year-old self for all the Internets to see, if only my photographs and scanner weren't being held hostage in a climate-controlled storage facility in the Bronx. But I will say for the record that I look nothing like my 10-year-old self, which is probably unfortunate. I was damn cute back then.)

I shall also crib (partly, not entirely) from Paul's list of topics, because Paul's random choices are good enough for me. And no one said it was against the rules. But to make up for it, I'll go into a little more detail:

1. If my father hadn't decreed that my name was to be Jennifer, I would now probably answer to Megan or Emily, my mother's top choices.

2. The longest train journey I ever took was 24 hours from San Francisco to Seattle, in the summer of 1991. That was two or three hours longer than the ride was supposed to take. For some reason it was very slow going in the forested region between northern Oregon and southern Washington; we stopped and started in the middle of nowhere, sometimes in the darkness of a mountain tunnel. (To amuse myself I played that game where you try to hold your breath all the way through the tunnel — a potentially dodgy game, as it turned out.) I took the trip with my mother, who was along to help settle me in for a summer of dancing at the Pacific Northwest Ballet school. To kill time on the train, we played lots and lots of cards: posoy dos (Filipino poker), crazy eights, go fish, blackjack.

3. In terms of ice cream, I prefer cones to cups, and waffle cones to any other kind of cone (crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and for goodness' sake, they hold so much ice cream!). I am equally enamored of the tartest limone gelato and the sinfully salty-sweet Chubby Hubby. I could eat a whole pint in one sitting, but then I'd hate myself for days and most likely refuse to go out in public.

4. I have arachnophobia, entomophobia and an irrational fear of driving (which is apparently a form of agoraphobia). I'm also mildly acrophobic, which is extremely annoying because I love hiking, and while I'm unstoppable in the "up" direction, this hang-up makes me not so great on the "down" side. (If only someone could retrieve me from a summit by helicopter, I'd be scaling mountains all the time.)

5. I can speak snippets of Spanish and French. I can count in German. I know how to say "cheers" in half a dozen languages; "delicious," "kiss" and "bottom" (as in buttocks, tush, booty) in Portuguese; and only one word of Tagalog: "salamat," which means thank you. I'm most often mistaken for a Spanish speaker, usually at restaurants or salsa clubs, and it is those times when I most rue the fact that (a) I didn't retain more from the Spanish I and II classes I took at community college, and (b) I didn't have the wherewithal to stay for extended periods in Puerto Vallarta or Mérida or Costa Rica or Tarragona when I happened to be passing through. C'est la vie.

6. For a few weeks in 1989 I had 14 very stubborn blisters on my feet — seven on the left, seven on the right — because of an ill-fitting pair of Schachtner pointe shoes. And yet I danced on, through many nights of pointe class and variations class and pas de deux. Then I switched to Blochs with a three-quarter sole (right), and my tootsies were saved.

7. I'm really tired of people asking me, upon first acquaintance, what I do for a living. I know it's a standard line of inquiry, but honestly, wouldn't you rather know something else? My favorite place to run away for a weekend, say? Or my favorite cocktail? And then, perhaps after that cocktail, my favorite author/composer/dessert/sexual position?* Wouldn't that be way more interesting?

8. I always thought I'd live in New York, at least for a little while. Now that I'm here, I am enjoying it — and yet, though I may be here for quite some time, I know it won't be forever. There are too many other enchanting places in the world.

So there! And now, I gather that it's my turn to tag someone. How about ... Aimee and John.

* I exaggerate here, but you get the gist.

On the L

After swing dancing I'm sweaty and disgusting and don't want anyone to look at me, and so on the L train across town, I'm focused intently on my reading. It's an essay by Chinua Achebe, for class, and on this night, I'm cheating. I'm not supposed to be reading it yet, but this packet of photocopied literature is the only thing I've got in my bag, and I have to keep my eyes focused on something, lest eye contact be made and an unwanted Interaction With Strange Someone commenced. At Sixth Avenue a bunch of bodies file on. One presses up against the armrest to my right. Out of my peripheral vision I see it's a slender body with tight jeans. I keep reading, but it's hard to concentrate. I feel a hovering presence. I raise my eyes from the page for a quick second, then turn them back down, when the woman attached to the leg speaks.

"You don't mind if I read, do you?" I look up. She's pretty and blonde and drunk and Irish, unless she only sounds Irish because she's very drunk.

"Sure, go ahead," I say, thinking, Well, if you put it that way, I don't have much of an out, do I.

I read the next half of the page without really knowing what I've read. Union Square. Third Avenue. I hit the bottom of the page and want to turn it, to let my eyes skim over new words. But I don't know if the girl is ready. Just flipping it would be rude, right? Or would it be weirder to ask her, since after all, we've only just met, and after all, she's pretty much butt her head into my business without any thought to me. Mustn't grumble. One more stop and I'll be rid of her.

We approach First Avenue and I look up. "This is my stop."

"Is that for school?" she asks.

"Yeah."

"Well good luck with that," she says, and as I rise she adds, "Just don't believe everything you read!"

What a thing to say. The piece of text she would have read was not overtly political, nothing to be believed or disbelieved. ("I have always been fond of stories and intrigued by language — first Igbo, spoken with such eloquence by the old men of the village, and later English, which I began to learn at about the age of eight.") I look at her perplexedly. "I know." But I wonder: What would make her think I didn't? And this is the question that consumes me as I walk the final ten minutes home, and as I shower and change and sit and type and continue, now, to wonder. Whereas Irish, I'm sure, forgot me and Chinua Achebe as soon as I was out of her sight. "Don't believe everything you read." I guess in the end it need only be taken at face value — the sage if fuzzy advice of a nosy, drunken Irishwoman bound for Williamsburg.

I do hand it to the mightly caterpillar. I do.

Those friends who've been following the never-ending saga of my New York condo non-closing (to recap: why of course the building will be done in March — just kidding!; closing will happen by end of May — just kidding!; closing is scheduled for June 29 — just kidding!; we're postponing it a few days to July 2 — just kidding!; we've confirmed a closing date of July 27 — just kidding!; we're looking now at August 20 — just kidding!), and who have heard all about my provisional living arrangements (which were supposed to be for three months, tops, but have stretched to six+ months, and yes, my hosts are the Saintliest of Saints), may be amused by my Vanity Fair horoscope this month:

You've got to hand it to the mighty caterpillar. Now that your ruling planet has completed its passage through your solar 8th house, you should be feeling empathy for any creature that has to remain encased in a coffin-like shell it has already outgrown while waiting patiently for a sign that it is time to break out. Claustrophobia and a screaming case of death anxiety aside, you've got to be pretty damned happy that you can finally spread your wings and fly away.

Of course I don't really believe in such things, but applied to the Condo Non-Closing Hell, which has indeed resulted in claustrophobia and a screaming sense of anxiety of various kinds, this makes oh so much sense.

Meanwhile, in another case of the stars aligning strangely yet happily, I must give a shout-out to the Canadian artist Marc Bell, whose "Shrimpy and Paul and Friends" provided the inspiration for a blog-post title some months back ("The Goose Is Greedy"), and who I'm tickled to say wrote me a very brief but utterly delightful e-mail recently, in an Internet-style reach-out-and-touch-you moment. Hi, Marc! Verily this pitiful blog shall be forever and eternally grateful to thee and thine. Yay.

Stupid

The other day I gave money to a guy on the street. It was quite a lot of money, in the usual context of those things. At most, you tend to jangle around in your pocket for change, right? Maybe, just maybe, you reach for a dollar bill. More often, perhaps, you don’t reach for anything at all. But this time I was stuck. I fell pray to a Grand Ploy, to a masterful salesman’s pitch, to a sense of pity and guilt and humanity and gullibility and fear and, perhaps my greatest flaw at that moment, selfishness.

“Miss! Miss, could I just talk to you for a second, please,” the man said. He was standing on the corner of 12th Street and 6th Avenue, clinging to the handle of a rolling suitcase, extending one hand in a desperate plea. I had just gotten out of my last class of the night and was rushing to make it to a dance. Had I crossed the street upon leaving the school building, had I seen the minefield ahead and cut a wide circle around it, I might have escaped the impending mindfuck. “Please, don’t worry, I’m not gonna attack you or anything. I’m just a stupid ol’ fag in trouble. Could you just hear me out for a second?”

I should have counted to one and fled. I should have pleaded lateness, invented a missed deadline. These very thoughts ran through my head as I stood there, unmoving. Why wasn’t I moving? Something about this poor soul. He seemed despondent but not crazy, at the end of some rope, but more in an anguished everyday-stress sort of way than a twitchy, strung-out, Must Keep at Arm’s Length sort of way, as if one form of distress were more deserving of people’s time than the other, as if it were legitimate for only a certain kind of overture to be answered by the willfully oblivious.

“O.K.,” I said. “Go ahead.”

I’d challenged him to a story, and boy, was it a good one. Something about being a minder of costumes for The Drowsy Chaperone. “Do you know The Drowsy Chaperone? You do?! Oh, good! None of these other idiots running around have ever heard of it. Wow. So…” Something about getting locked out of his apartment down here and needing to get the keys up there and urgently needing to get at the costumes, which were locked inside the apartment, and the fate of something or another riding on his ability to get into the damned apartment, and oh, god, how he hated having to ask this but he really was in dire straits. All this accompanied by gesticulating and deep sighs and frantic glances up and down the street, and he wasn’t getting to the point and I really did need to go, and so finally I said, “O.K., all right, so what is it that you need?

“What do I need? Oh. I just need cab fare. I need to get up to 81st street and back down here.”

My wallet was out. Why was it out? I looked inside. All I had were bills larger than I would ever, under rational circumstances, think to give to a stranger on the street. But I was caught up in it now, entranced by this man’s impressively specific tale of woe. I was so busy imagining Broadway dancers with no clothes and the ensuing uproar and this poor “fag in trouble” losing his job and then really being in trouble that my usual common-sense mechanisms had gone into lockdown. “Cab fare, eh?”

“Yes! Cab fare. I promise, you can hold my iPod if you want to. I can give you something to take as collateral. I just need the cash because I need to get to these things before I’m totally screwed.”

If I walked away and his story was true (not that I’d ever know), I would be the villain-bitch punch line at his next cocktail-party performance. If I walked away and his story was untrue (not that I’d ever know), I might feel vindicated and yet at a morally relativistic loss. If his story was true and I gave him the money, my karma points would shoot through the roof, and only happiness and light and subway trains waiting in the station for me, and only me, would be guaranteed for at least the next, oh, month. “Here. Just take it. It’s enough to get you up there, if not all the way back down. That’s all I can give you” (all I can bear to give you, all I am physically capable of giving you, all this lockdown mode will abide).

“Oh, thank you!” He reached for the money. I noticed for the first time that his hands were rough and coated in grime. Not quite costume-handling hands. “Thank you, thank, you, thank you. Seriously, what can I do -- do you want to see the show? If I could get you tickets, would you go? Can I reach you somehow, to pay you back?”

I wanted it to be over. At the moment the money left my possession and became his, the reality had socked me in the stomach. I didn’t want him to be able to reach me. I wanted him to go away. And yet he was insistent.

Then, another train of thought: My denying him the ability to prove himself would be yet another form of cruelty, a judgment on his dubious character. It would mean that in the end, even though I had given him the money, and even though I had in so doing ratified the ostensible truthfulness of his story, I did not believe him. And in denying him access to me, I would have passed a final, callous sentence.

I took out a business card. “Here. You can call me at this number. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Oh, great! Great. Who should I ask for? I mean, I don’t want to bother you. I don’t want to get you in trouble. Is there a secretary, or--”

“What? I don’t know what you’re getting at. Just call me. Or leave a message. That is my number. If you call it, you’ll reach me, and only me.”

“Oh. O.K., I just didn’t … O.K.”

“Listen, I have to go. I really am trying to get somewhere.” I was already backing away, turning to leave.

“O.K.! Thank you so much! Really, this is such a huge help!”

I descended to the subway and swiped my card. I stood there waiting -- no train waiting for me. I realized that if he really needed to get uptown and back, I could have insisted he come with me. I could have bought him a Metrocard. I could have forced him to prove the veracity of his claims and watched him get on a train. But I had not. I’d handed him enough money for a good meal or maybe enough to put him well on his way to a good fix. I’d been the perfect mark. The perfect chump. All in the name of good karma. And where was my freaking train.

The world as they know it

On the subway ride home, a young woman toting a brown cardboard box boarded at the opposite end of the train and launched into a saleswoman's pitch:

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is -------- and I just turned 17 years old two weeks ago. These are my younger sisters, and we're enrolled in an after-school program to keep us out of trouble. We have here some delicious candies. It would really help us out if you would buy some of these candies, or, if you'd like, make a donation…"

It was something we'd all heard before. Suddenly conversations with neighbors became more absorbing, heads burrowed deeper into books, iPod earbuds got twisted into ears, and glances were thrown askance. I was sitting alone and had only one stop to go, and even if I had wanted to buy a candy bar, I had not a dollar on me. And so I adopted the ostrich line of defense, looking into my lap, as if not seeing them would mean they couldn't see me.

The young woman flipped on a boom box, and the familiar opening trumpet and swinging timpani of "Take the A Train" sang through the car. Involuntarily, I tapped my foot. And then events took an unexpected turn.

The two younger girls, one about 8, the other about 4, both in polo shirts dotted with blotches of brown and gray, began dancing through the train to their older sister's calls.

"That's right! Now go dance. Swing!"

The older child skipped to my end of the train and twirled around one of the shiny floor-to-roof poles. She took hold of a seat and laid out in a deep back bend, one foot on the ground, the other extended as far as it would reach into the air before her. The tinier girl came scurrying up next, grabbing the pole directly in front of me to kick and twirl and giggle.

"Now switch!" their sister cried, and they danced and pranced in a do-si-do.

A click and a clack, and the music jumped from "A Train" to the plaintive violins of "The Godfather." The girls adjusted accordingly, elongating their movements and tempering their bouncing into soft chasses.

They were loving it, smiling all the way. To them, this was playtime -- an innocent frolic on the downtown Q. I could imagine their sister selling them on the idea back home:

"We're going to dance and give out some candy! Doesn’t that sound fun?"

"Yeah!"

But I couldn't help but wonder, How long until the thrill is gone. How many years will it be until awareness creeps in to steal away the fantasy. How long until this blithe subway ballet gives way to the reality of necessity. And then my mind wandered to the book review I'd read just an hour before, an assessment by Janet Maslin of Robert Goolrick's family memoir "The End of the World as We Know It." In it, she had written:

After opening the book with glimpses of how dire these lives will become, he moves backward in time to observe his family from the vantage point of a bedazzled, seemingly innocent child. Only gradually and coyly do the hints of his later experience creep in.

I had caught these girls in their "bedazzled" childhood moment, the time of their lives in which subway hawking could still be called a game, in which they might even go to school the next day to boast of their subterranean adventures. I found myself hoping that for the sake of their future sanity, this memory might remain pure -- that this subway gambol might become something to look back on fondly, instead of fodder for a tale of life going, as Maslin writes, "very, very sour."

Last night: A play in 9 lines

Him: You never slouch.

Her: Yes i do!

Him: No you don't. I never see you slouching.

Her: But I do! I slouch. Just like other people. I slouch, I poop, my feet stink, everything. But when I catch myself slouching I simply tell myself to stop.

Him: See? That's the difference. Why you're unlike the rest of us. You're a stealth sloucher.

Her: OK, yes. Stealth sloucher. Slouching tiger.

Him: Like that movie!

Her: Right. Slouching Tiger, Hidden Back Pain.

Him: Nice.

At least it wasn’t Coke

This day was going so perfectly. I got up at 10, despite having set the alarm for 9. And despite having had only five hours of craptastic sleep, I felt surprisingly awake. I worked out, and that felt good. I showered and groomed myself, and that felt good. I had a delicious panino sandwich for lunch, and a couple of the most perfect café au laits I’ve ever had in this city. Then I went to the Amish market, one of the most perfect little grocery stores, and bought all sorts of fun food items, like preserves and prosciutto and grainy bread and ingredients for making cupcakes.

PERFECT, I tell you.

Then, I got home and sat down at my computer, and started listening to Andrew Bird, one of the perfectest musicians ever. And I began making a couple of CDs for my friends, full of the most perfectest music ever. And I’m sipping some tasty sparkling water, and my kitty cat decides to jump up in my lap and get all cuddly. And I think, Could this day be any more perfect? I may burst for its perfection.

And so there I was, sitting, listening to music, nuzzling with my cute little kitty, and the kitty was purr purr purring, so happy to be sitting in my lap and sharing in my most perfect of days, when all of a sudden, CLONK! SPSHHHHH.

Kitty’s happy tail bumped into my bottle of sparkling water. And sent sparkling water spilling ALL OVER my shiny little 12-inch Powerbook. Which at that moment was right in the middle of burning songs onto a CD. And the water spread so quickly, and seeped so efficiently into the gaps between all the keys, and into the tiny cracks around my touchpad mouse action, and all I could do was look at it and gasp and go, “OH, $@#!”

And then I had a heart attack and died.

What to write

For some reason I get all paralyzed when I read things like this:

Write about a book or film that has provided you with a new way of thinking. Describe how this work has influenced the way you see yourself, others or society.

Guidelines as broad as this inspire a serious case of option paralysis. It's like going to Shopsin's (PDF) and looking at all the combinations of yummy goodness, hundreds and hundreds of possibilities, and just as you've scanned them all and think you've finally narrowed it down to half a dozen things, you flip the menu over and find...LUNCH!

In this case the films would probably be breakfast, and the books, lunch. I can't explain why. For some reason I associate watching movies with moles in the hole and fluffernutter french toast and raspberry mac-n-cheese pancakes with a side of andouille sausage. Books are much more bacon burger deluxe, more reuben on rye, more Waldorf salad. WWYD? (What Would You Do?)

And the juice was (almost) jaunty

I was contemplating my box of OJ this morning because I'd already done my work and didn't have anything better to do. (O.K, well, yes, I could have read the newspaper or started rereading the style manual or wiped the dust off my Hula-Fabulous Betty Boop Bobble Head, but honestly, it was way too early for that.)

This was a mini box -- a 6-ouncer. A carton that in its mini-ness brought me back to the elementary-school days of Capri Sun and juiceboxes and tiny plastic straws with an aluminum-piercing pointy end. I tried opening the box from one side, pulling back the flaps where it said "open." But it did that annoying thing where only part of the cardboard paper comes up, which meant that to get any further would have required much plying with fingernails and most likely much spillage of sticky orange substance all over keyboard as well.

Thankfully, on these boxes there's also the delightful Straw Hole! That's the box's enthusiasm. The people who manufacture the box obviously know how dang hard it is to open these boxes the intuitive peely way, and so they minimize the sidesaddle "open" with faint italic type and a tiny white arrow and instead play up the Straw Hole! in bright red type with a giant swooshing arrow that points to said hole. I only lament that the juice doesn't also come with a straw like the one drawn on the box to demonstrate the proper straw insertion point, a straw that is the height of jauntiness with its red-and-white candy cane stripes.

Jaunty juice. Now that's the sort of thing to make a gal pleased (or at least less perturbed) about going to work way too early.