More About My Neighbors

I know everyone on my block.  Well, almost everyone.  I don’t know most of the neighbors and those I do know, I do not like.  There’s Thing 1 and Thing 2, the Horrible Dog Owner, and the Bread Thrower.  The Horrible Dog Owner used to live in the apartment now occupied by Thing 1 and Thing 2.  We thought that would be the last we’d see of Horrible Dog Owner, but no, she moved to an apartment building three doors down.  Our terraces are within eyeing distance of each other.  Stink-eyeing distance.  She has a beautiful friendly dog that she leaves on her terrace in the worst weather conditions.  Mr. Dingo and I never have to check the weather report.  During the winter, if we can see the dog, we know that it’s freezing with a 100% chance of hail.  In the summer, if we can see his thick, fluffy fur, we know that there’s a heat advisory and we’d best stay indoors eating Popsicles and making sure we have enough ice cubes for our Long Island Iced Teas. 

I’ve never seen The Bread Thrower.  I’ve only seen the aftermath.  Occasionally, Mr. Dingo and I will be sitting on our couch watching TV and enjoying our Long Island Iced Teas when we hear a series of thumps on our terrace.  Upon investigation, we’ll find partially eaten bagels, crusts of bread, and saltine shards.  I have no idea who’s throwing bread out their window.  I know it’s not Thing 1 and Thing 2 because I don’t think they’ve eaten a carb since the first Bush administration.  Sometimes I’ll hear a window open and I’ll dash to the terrace — but too late.  I arrive just in time to be showered in bread and walk back into the apartment pissed off and looking like a chicken cutlet. 

The neighbors I like the best don’t actually live in my neighborhood; they either own or work in the shops on my block.  There’s the deli where I buy my bagels, the deli where I buy sandwiches (Yes, two delis on one block.  This is NYC), the dry cleaners, flower shop, nail salon, and pizza place.  I’m on a first name basis with most of them.  I know who’s working their way through school and who’s getting married.  They know my class schedule and the results of Dingo Girl’s last vet visit.  And we all hate the nail salon people.  The salon people have an attitude that makes them a pox upon this block.  The rest of us are sunshine on Sesame Street and they’re more like a sleep-inducing moonless night on Elm Street. 

My favorite neighbor, however, is Michael.  Michael works in one of the non-descript buildings on my block. I don’t know exactly what he does but I think it has something to do with the arts/entertainment industry.  He’s very cryptic about his line of work but he often has backstage passes for many of the cultural events around the city.  This weekend he gave me a ticket to an international photography exhibit way uptown where the ladies who lunch live and work and shop.  The exhibit was incredible.  It featured everything from mid-nineteenth century daguerreotypes to freaky experimental stuff that I pretended to like because everyone around me was viewing it with slack-jawed awe.  Okay, I didn’t pretend to like it, but I did have a slack-jawed look on my face.  The price tag on one particularly garish piece was a mere $250,000.  See!  Your jaws just went slack, didn’t they?!  $250,000!  One woman was elated that the recession had made the price of art so affordable these days.  You see, she was looking for artwork to complement the new Italian marble in the Grande Foyer and the completely renovated Petit Foyer (and yes, she pronounced it “pet-tee foy-yay”).  The Petit Foyer was completed last Summer and she’s just positively mortified that it’s Spring yet the Petit Foyer remains barren.  I wanted to tell Lady Foy-yay that I just ordered a venti foy-yay and then ask whether her pet-tee foy-yay was for the pets because I would never be caught dead with anything less than a tall foy-yay, and then it would need to be made with whole milk and an extra shot of espresso.  I didn’t say any of that, though.  I just shrugged and vomited a little when I did.

I left the mewling masses to explore other parts of the exhibit and was completely in awe of photos by Jill Freedman, Minor White, and Ansel Adams.  Poking around the nooks and crannies of the exhibit I couldn’t help but think that Ken Gilbert’s photography belonged there. His work is by turns shocking, soothing, introspective, and in your face but it’s all from a very talented eye.  If you haven’t checked out his photoblog you are missing out.  As I was standing on one side of an L-shaped wall looking at a tiny landscape and trying to convert 1900£ into U.S. currency — unlike Lady Foy-yay, I had forgotten to bring an accountant along — I heard a sound that could only be described as someone trying to play a kazoo filled with Jello.  And then came the “ahhhhhh!” And then, the smell.  Apparently someone chose to go to an out-of-the-way spot to relieve some gastrointestinal distress. 

Imagine a rotten egg wrapped in moldy feta cheese stuck between two layers of decomposing meat.  Now imagine baking that in a crock pot for a few hours before just now opening the lid.  It came drifting around the corner and wrapped my head in its stink molecules like a tight facial compression wrap.  My eyes watered and my throat immediately seized up.  The room started spinning and everything began to fade to black.  I knew I couldn’t pass out because the olfactory offender would be sure to tell the arriving paramedics that I was the one who forgot my Beano.  I don’t know why I was the one who felt embarrassed, but I did.  I thought about leaving before the sense assaulter came around the corner.  My mama raised me well.  Courtesy is about making the other person feel comfortable. But I don’t listen to the mama on my shoulder.  I just held my breath and waited for the noxious noisemaker to appear.  And appear she did. 

Apparently, Lady Foy-yay was also an accomplished player of the ass-trumpet.  The butt-ugly piece of art she just bought?  $250,000.  The look on her face when she saw me standing in her fog of stench?  Priceless.

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How ’Bout ’Dem Apples!

Sometimes I think I can change the world.  Sometimes I think that I can do something that makes a difference.  I usually feel this way when I’m listening to the Broadway soundtrack to Hair. I get pumped.  I look up volunteer positions, I make sure I’m getting Rachel Maddow’s tweets and then…and then, I just get deflated.  It’s overwhelming. Bailout.  Homelessness. Domestic Violence. Illiteracy.  Animal Abuse.  Natural Disaster Relief. Fashion Policing and Passing Judgment on Tourists.  There’s so much to be done and I can’t even remember to change Not a Dingo’s litter box with any regularity.  And then sometimes I feel that the best thing I can do is to bolster the economy by ordering another Venti Earl Grey and slice of pound cake from the grumpy Starbucks barista.  And no, I’m not putting a tip in the tip jar. 

Really, who does that?  You know when I put a tip in the Starbucks tip jar?  When the whole bean coffee Mr. Dingo drinks isn’t on the shelf and someone runs to the back to get some for me.  Not when someone puts a tea bag in a cup of hot water.  Excuse me, isn’t that your job?  You want me to tip you for doing your job?  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I am definitely in the overtipper category.  Waiters, hairdressers, delivery people, and cab drivers love me. These are all people who tend to go above their job description to make my interaction with them the best it can be.  Refills before I ask, squeezing me into an appointment at the last minute, delivering my pizza so that it’s hot and right side up keeping the cheese on the pizza and not sticking to the cardboard box, seeing me waving frantically in the pouring rain and pulling over to haul me and a soaking Dingo Girl to a vet appointment uptown — those things get tips.  Big tips.  But, no, grumpy barista, you are not getting a tip from me for simply turning from the cash register to the hot water spout and dropping in a tea bag. 

But lately, I have had to change my grumpy barista tipping policy.  You see, I’ve become one of those people.  You know the people I mean, the people you see sitting in Starbucks for hours at a time typing away on laptops or scribbling furiously in a wire-ringed notebook.  I always asked myself, “Don’t they have an office or at least a dining room table to work from!  Who comes to Starbucks to work?” People like me, that’s who.  People who can’t see their desk for all the crap piled on top of it.  People like me who cannot shut out the catcalls and running commentary on my poor housekeeping skills from the dishes in the kitchen and laundry on the floor.  And the mold in the bathtub shooting dice with the soap scum?  They taunt me.  Oh, how they taunt me. 

You know who else works at Starbucks?  People who can’t type a complete sentence without Not a Dingo walking all over the keyboard on her way to the mouse.  The mouse she then chooses to sleep on only to wake up when I try to slide my hand under her dingleberried butt to do a cut and paste.  And waking her up means that I must want to pet her, right?  So she makes sure she stays within arms reach by sitting in front of the monitor. 9999999999999999999999999999 (okay, that was from Not a Dingo walking on the 8888888888888 keyboard and I’m too lazy to delete it).

And then there’s Dingo Girl.  Dingo Girl who loves her mama so much that she must sit and whine at her mama’s feet for attention.  If whining doesn’t work, she’s sure that pawing at my arm will.  Or maybe licking my feet.  Put shoes on and she licks my leg.  Put on jeans studded with cactus tines and she stands on her hind feet to lick my face.  There’s so much love at Casa Dingo.  Love is killing me.  Hey!  I think that’s a great title for a new Lifetime Movie. 

*announcer voice*

One woman.  Two fur-kids.  She’s slowly losing her mind.  Is the descent into madness a sadistic plan by the four-legged critters or is this woman simply unable to love?
Starring Melissa Gilbert, Garfield, and that dog from the Taco Bell commercials.

*end announcer voice*

Really, go set your Tivos.  I’m sure that my screenplay is going to be picked up by Jane Campion or Sofia Coppola any day now.

I could go into the office to work but I share an office with about a gabillion other adjuncts.  It’s less of an office and more like detention from The Breakfast Club.  No one really goes there to work.  It’s a place to go to commiserate about The Man and hand out leftover homemade cupcakes.  Here’s how my attempt to work in the office went late last week,

Me:  (going to my desk and taking out a six inch pile of papers and notebooks)
Co-Irker #1:  Talktalktalktalktalktalktalktalktalk…My daughter had her dance recital.  Talktalktalktalktalk…living room…talktalktalktalktalk…Peru…talktalktalk..ha!ha!ha!...cupcakes!
Co-Irker#2:  Slurp! Chomp! Chomp!  Slurp!  Click! Click! Click! Slurp!

Apparently Co-Irker#2 needs to get his dentures fixed.  He brought in an apple and proceeded to grind it to applesauce with ill-fitting dentures.  He couldn’t bite the apple like a normal person.  Instead, he would slurp the apple creating a suction of saliva and spittle that softened the peel allowing him to chomp into the crunchy flesh.  Of course the saliva made the apple a little slippery. His mouth would lose suction and he’d have to do the slurping thing again.  Then, his dentures would shift and protrude from his mouth like the creature from Aliens.  They’d chatter together with a clicking sound as he masticated the poor fruit and then the cycle would start all over again.

So, I’ve ended up at Starbucks.  And the past two weeks have been more productive than any day I’ve had in the past two years.  I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner!  The only down side is not having internet access.  I mean, they have it but I’m not about to pay ten bucks for it.  Hmmm, could the lack of internet access have something to do with my productivity.  Nah, that’s just too silly to believe.  And oh, Innernetz, the people who come to Starbucks are a strange lot.  I have some stories for you.  But those are for another day.

What I want to tell you is that I tip at Starbucks now.  I tip a lot.  Hell, it’s more like I’m paying rent.  I’m not tipping for my hot water and tea bag.  I’m tipping for a place to work, a place to think, and a place to people-watch and be highly entertained.  I love you Virginia Woolf, but you didn’t need a room of your own.  You needed a Starbucks.

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Red Read Well

First of all, I have to thank everyone for their advice and suggestions for how to deal with my back pain.  Second, Innernetz, y’all are a bunch of broke down bitches.  Herniated discs, IT band injuries, sprained ankles, sciatica, RA, damn, y’all!  Can you imagine our blogger get together?  With all the wheelchairs, canes, and walkers I’m sure we’d be mistaken for an AARP convention.  I’ll be the one on the Hoveround.  Or the riding mower.  Not only do I think I’d look good on a John Deere, but I’m rather impatient.  If any of you take too long perusing the prime rib at the buffet table, I will mow your decrepit asses down.  Don’t try me.

Anyway, my back is feeling much better.  I think some of the pain stemmed from hours and hours hunched over my desk grading the first papers of this semester.  I’m also sure that some of the pain stemmed from the full body seizures said papers induced. How does one get to be a second semester college freshman without even the most basic knowledge of subject-verb agreement?  And paragraphs, people!  Blog posts without paragraphs are annoying enough.  Five page papers without paragraphs?  I don’t have the words.  Wait!  Yes, I do.  Fucked. Up.  Five page papers without paragraphs is just fucked up.

In spite of the trauma of grading sixty, five-page papers in one week, I must say that my classes this semester are amazing.  The students are fun, enthusiastic and, for the most part, really want to learn.  I don’t have any bad kids, you know, the kind of kids that make you wish that you could just send them to the principal’s office or one of those juvenile delinquent boot camps?  Or run over them with a riding mower?

While I am there to teach them about literature and critical reading, I often use the texts as a springboard for discussions about current events, racism, classism, sexism, and about any other –ism you can name.  I try to make literature relevant, even if it means that I sometimes stand on desks and flail my arms as I face the imaginary tanks of the Chinese army.  I’ve taught Shakespeare in the dark, had them pick teams on the first day of class in order to discuss first impressions and biases, read articles to them about the genocide in the Sudan, and discussed the media circus and social implications of our fascination with Britney Spears, Branjelina, and Little J.  I take great pride in squeezing social relevance from Stephen King, William March, and Angela Carter.

The only thing that we are not allowed to discuss in my class is the train wreck that is Twilight.  Yes, I am practicing censorship.  My class is not a democracy.  It is a dictatorship.  So, no Twilight.  End of discussion.  Oh, and Twilight lovers? Don’t even think of defending it in the comments.  If you do, you should keep an ear and eye open for a John Deere bearing down on you in a haze of diesel fumes.  Don’t try me.  It’s bad for your health and the environment.

I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind overnight or even in a semester.  What I do expect is to open their minds.  I want to challenge their normal way of thinking about things.  Sometimes I think I succeed.  Sometimes, I think I fail miserably.  This failure is never more disappointing than when some of my best and brightest students write things like,

Little Red Riding Hood should have known better than going into the woods alone.  She got what she deserved.

*sigh*

Then, there’s this,

All women like to wear make-up and look beautiful.  If she doesn’t look beautiful she is not normal.  She is ugly.  Ugly people are not normal.  Women should wear make-up.

Do I even need to rant about the many ways in which that is just so wrong? 

But, in all honesty, I’m not one of those people who thinks everyone is beautiful in their own way.  Cheesy 70s song aside, I have seen some ugly people.  Not you, of course, Innernetz, you are all beautiful.  In your own way.  But, back to the non-Innernetz ugly people.  I live in NYC.  I see ugly people every day.  I don’t judge them.  I just walk on the other side of the street in case the ugly is contagious.  I kid!  I kid!  I don’t really judge people on their looks.  I’m too busy judging them on their shoes. My point is — and yes, this post does have a point — my point is that Spring Break is still almost a month away and I can hardly wait.

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The Health Department Is Even Afraid Of This Place

I have back problems.  These back problems may stem from before I was teaching when I got thrown from horses for a living or, before that, from when I was a flight attendant and spent my days standing during turbulence while insulting little people.  Maybe the back problems are more recent in origin, and stem from the burden of carrying the future generations of this nation on my shoulders so that my students can thank me in emails with such stunning testimonials as, “Thanks for the bad grade and wasting my time.” Or maybe it’s all in my head. 

But, the pain!  Oh, the humanity!  Sometimes I feel as if someone is dripping battery acid on my spinal cord.  Other times, when my back doesn’t hurt quite so much, it’s like sandpaper being rubbed across exposed nerve endings. Alas, those are the good days.

Standing hurts, walking hurts, lying down hurts, sitting hurts, and cartwheels hurt.  I have found that levitation eases the pain somewhat, but that doesn’t solve the cartwheel problem, now does it?  I have tried ibuprofen, a heating pad, and Jim Beam, but nothing alleviates the pain or loosens the Gordian Knot binding the right side of my spine.  And I don’t really want to get used to anything stronger than those things.  Jim Beam is strong enough, thank you.  And what’s the step up from a heating pad?  Dousing my back with gasoline and then leaning into a candle?  That sounds fine but I’m afraid of getting addicted.

Once or twice a year I get a massage at a really nice salon, and that has helped.  I have a favorite salon that offers wine and petit fours with soothing music, plush robes, fuzzy slippers, and silky, scented oils — but that was then and this is The Recession.  Oh, sure, when I was getting mega-bonuses and flying Dingo Girl around the world in a company-owned private jet to hobnob with Branjelina and eat sushi and pufferfish with Kanye, a massage and a facial at a fancy salon didn’t seem like much of a luxury. It was a necessity. But now, on my adjunct salary, I’d be tempted to eat the cucumber facial and roll a rice cake in the Regenerative Seaweed Body Wrap.  Also, Dingo Girl is unemployed and her résumé looks like crap.  Really.  Crap.  And sleeping and eating and that’s about it.

So yesterday, I levitated over to a salon that offers cheap massages.  The way their services were advertised, I expected to see the vice squad surrounding the place as I crab walked my way to the rear door.  There was no vice, but judging by the stained carpets, empty food containers, and pedicure basins covered with marine life not yet discovered by National Geographic, I thought I was in the middle of a Primetime Live Investigative Report: When Toddlers Own Businesses.  I should’ve turned around but the pain in my back limited quick evasive action. Before I knew it, I was ushered into a dimly lit hovel at the rear of the salon.

My masseuse, Mariana, looked disgruntled that I had interrupted her evening meal.  At this point, however, I would have gladly settled for anyone, even Bobo the Monkey, if it would alleviate my pain.  Mariana gestured to a small wooden table and instructed me to lie down.  Yes, I said wooden table.  It looked like a piece of unfinished plywood balanced precariously on table legs someone left at the curb.  I wasn’t sure if she’d just led me to the outhouse or if this was actually supposed to be a massage table because instead of a nice, cushioned O-shaped pillow in which to rest my head, the salon had cut a rough circle into the plywood.  Mariana noticed my hesitation and offered to get a cushion from the moldy, tattered couch I had spied on the way in that was held together entirely by bodily fluids.  I passed on her generous offer.

As my teeth began to chatter I asked Mariana if it would be possible to make her dank, dark cell a little warmer.  She responded with a deep sigh and rummaged around in a box at the foot of the table until she found a small space heater.  She lined the wooden table with towels and instructed me to climb on.  The table wobbled but, using all the poise learned from my years spent serving high-altitude drinks to belligerent businessmen, I climbed aboard the shaky plywood express and stuck my face through the hole.  I half expected that I was being punked.  I was pretty sure that on the underside of the table they had painted a woman in a Super Girl costume that the hole was her face. But no flashbulbs went off.  No television personalities came laughing into the room.  Nope.  All that happened was that I had my face sticking through a roughly-cut hole in an unfinished sheet of plywood suspended on wobbly legs.

I tried to make the best of it.  I closed my eyes and tried to relax.  I took a deep breath and… wax.  I smelled wax and some other pungent odor.  I opened my eyes and, well, you don’t want to know.  Let’s just say that there was a bucket stored under the hole and, apparently, the salon did waxes, too.  Maybe they recycled the wax and stored the used wax under the table in between de-hairings.  And maybe, just maybe, every now and then someone getting a massage on the wobbly plywood table suddenly had to puke due to the constant movement and balancing, and they kept a bucket right under the hole in the table just in case.  And then they recycled the wax. 

That was the straw that broke this Dingo’s already aching back.  I started to get up but Mariana uttered incoherent apologies while pressing her fingers in the middle of my back.  Aaaaagh!  I couldn’t move.  It was some Spetsnaz immobilization trick.  I could only lay there and weep quietly while she whisked the offending recycling away.

When she came back — I don’t think she had washed her hands after handling the recycled hairy wax and puke bin — she began the massage.  It was not the best massage I’ve ever had.  Actually, it was not even a good massage.  I was cold, the balancing act I was performing so as to not tip over the plywood table made my stomach muscles hurt and, yes, I felt a twinge of motion sickness.  But a half hour later I was actually able to get up and put my shoes on — I’d been wearing slip-ons all week because I couldn’t bend over to tie my shoes.  I left the salon feeling much better than when I’d first entered! 

But I also felt a little itchy.  Okay, a lot itchy. Of course I came home and asked Dr. Google about my symptoms and, apparently, I caught some skin disease at the dirty salon that’s going to cause all my skin to fall off.  It’s true!  Dr. Google said so and he’s never wrong!

But at least my back feels much better.  I can actually sit at my desk without crying — until I start to read my students’ papers.  I will never go back to that salon, although they did give me nice souvenirs from my visit. In addition to the skin-falling-off disease, I have a four-inch bruise along the front of my forehead where my delicate flesh was in contact with the jagged plywood hole.  I look like I was halfway through brain surgery but, as soon as the surgeons changed my mind, I just got up and left.  Or it looks like someone gave me a paper-cut lobotomy. 

I hope that if my back ever feels that bad again, it’s after this recession when it will again be okay to go to salons that offer chocolate transfusions and where the employees have their hands surgically replaced with cashmere mittens.  If these back problems recur before the recession is over, I will just lie down in traffic and let tire treads work their magic.  The smell would be better and I would definitely get a happier ending out of it. 

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