All I ever wanted

I thought I had a beach house reserved, but it turns out that I don't. Having given up on the idea of Ireland once again (next year!) I decided that we should go to the beach this summer. Unfortunately for me, everyone else who had to cancel their other travel plans also decided to go to the beach, to the same beach town where I want to go, at the same time that I want to go. For the last almost three months, I've been searching for an available rental for the second week in August; and for the last three months, I found nothing. Until last Thursday, when I found just the right place in just the right location for just the right price. And I quickly reserved it, and I signed the lease, and I sent a check for the security deposit, service fee, and half of the rent per the agency’s requirements. And I thought, having signed paperwork and mailed checks and whatnot, that the thing was in the bag and that all I had to do was mail the other half of the rent in July, and show up in August with my bicycle and beach umbrella and cooler in tow. 

But no. Because today, the rental agent emailed me that she was terribly sorry, but she had to cancel my reservation, because the owner just called her and told her that the house shouldn’t have been available for the week that I rented it. This would seem, wouldn’t it, a classic YP not MP (your problem not my problem)? See previous paragraph’s discussion of signed leases and mailed checks. 

I emailed her again later, because the whole thing just bothered me. A full five days had elapsed since I had reserved the house and confirmed my reservation, and it seemed unlikely that it would take that long for the owner to notice that the house was listed in error. Something seemed off. And I was right, as it turns out. When questioned, the agent freely admitted that the owner decided that she wanted the house back for a family friend, and so they cancelled my perfectly legitimate reservation to indulge the owner’s whim. 

Yes, I understand private property. She owns the place, so she can do what she wants. EXCEPT that if you don’t want to rent your house out, then don’t list it as available for rent. You don’t get to have it both ways. You don’t get to capriciously cancel a valid reservation because you changed your mind. You can change your mind BEFORE the listing rents, but not after. 

I don’t at all understand why the agency is allowing her to do this. In their place, I would drop her as a client. I’d drop her like hot garbage. I saw her name on the lease (which I signed and mailed and which is now in their hands and could even be used against me if her friend damages the place during the week that I reserved it for), but I don’t remember it now. I DO remember the name of the real estate agency. They are the ones I blame for this. They are the ones that I will not do business with again. 

Do you know what’s the worst part of this whole thing? Even worse than the disappointment of losing the perfect house in the perfect location with no stairs so my mother could join us for the week? It’s having crossed a task off my list, brushing the dust of a completed chore off my hands with a flourish, and then finding that I have to start over again. I was done, and now I’m not. Checks were written, paperwork was signed, envelopes were dropped in the mailbox at the post office that I drove to myself, and all for jolly well naught. That is the worst part. 

No, it’s not really the worst part. The worst part is that I really wanted to go and now I’m sad that maybe we can’t. I know that this is a first-world problem. And that some people, maybe most people, don’t have the money or the time to take any vacation at all. And I feel bad about this. But right this minute, I feel worse about my own stupid situation. I’m petty that way. I’m petty, and I’m not letting it go, either. It’s just one more battle, one more City Hall to fight. And I’ll probably lose, but I do hope that I can make the real estate people remember that they were in a fight. 

Sugar, spice, whatever

I watched a few minutes of “Rocky” one night last week. I’ve seen “Rocky” many times, and although I haven’t seen it start to finish in many years, I will always watch it for a little while when I come across it. I picked it up right at the scene in which Rocky tries to instruct young Marie, the street-corner-hanging, tight-jeans-wearing, tough little South Philly kid, on how to be a “nice” girl. 

Rocky’s heart is in the right place. Even with everything I know and believe now, which includes the firm conviction that a random neighborhood dude has absolutely no right to tell a young girl who is not his daughter how to dress or speak or behave, I know that he’s honestly concerned about Marie. In 1970s Philadelphia, foul-mouthed, late-night-wandering, careless young girls end up with a bad reputation, at the very least. 

When Rocky tells young Marie to watch her mouth, to try to act less trampy and more ladylike, and to avoid being seen with the neighborhood hooligans, he’s trying to protect her. He knows that a bad reputation, once earned, is almost impossible for a young girl to shed. He knows that a girl who wants a nice boyfriend and eventually a nice husband cannot be the type of girl who puts out, or who is even thought to put out, or who is thought to even think about putting out. He knows these things because he’s a man and he knows how he himself treats women of the right sort and women of the wrong sort. 

So yes, I suppose that Rocky’s heart is in the right place, and I love him for walking Marie home and making sure she gets safely inside. But I love Marie even more for telling Rocky to go fuck himself, just as she shuts the door in his face. At that age, I didn’t know how to handle the many men and boys in my neighborhood who all felt that it was their duty and their right to tell every girl how much or how sincerely we should smile, or how much or little makeup we should wear, or how we should walk or speak or laugh so as to be attractive to men but not too-attractive-if-you-know-what-I-mean and we did, thank you very much. I wish I’d known then that a polite but firm “fuck off” or variation thereof was the only reasonable response to such unsolicited instruction. 

*****

Did you think that this post was going to be about a movie? No, it’s actually about a book; Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land, a collection of essays about mid-20th century American girlhood 

I first read Caitlin Flanagan in 2006 or so. One of her Atlantic essays went viral (which at that time meant that people emailed it around to all of their friends, who emailed it to other friends). I read the essay, and then immediately went and bought the hardcover edition of To Hell With All That, Flanagan’s collection of essays on women and housekeeping and motherhood. 

The essay, of course, was the infamous “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” which earned Caitlin Flanagan a shit-ton of grief from working women and feminists. I just re-read that essay and I have to believe that most of the people who blasted it as a mean-spirited polemic against women in the workforce didn’t actually read it. Instead, they read the most inflammatory out-of-context quotes that circulated on the internet until everyone was sure that Caitlin Flanagan was a woman-hating Phyllis Schlafly wannabe. 

Having actually read “Serfdom,” I know that it is not at all an attack against women who work. Rather, it’s a criticism of women who take advantage of other women who work, by paying them low hourly under-the-table wages to serve as nannies and housekeepers. This is still a problem. Housekeepers and nannies, sometimes undocumented, sometimes legal, but almost always poor, are often underpaid, deprived of paid time off and medical benefits, and hired and paid without the paperwork that would make them eligible for Social Security and other government benefits. If they are hurt on the job, they’re not eligible for Worker’s Compensation. They don’t get paid holidays or voting leave or jury duty leave. If they’re undocumented, then they don’t even have any recourse if their employers fail to pay them. Caitlin Flanagan wasn’t attacking women who work in highly paid professions; she was pleading for fairness and equity for the women who do the work that makes it possible for professional and executive women to succeed. Things have changed since 2006, and I suspect that readers today would react differently to this essay than they did 15 years ago. Caitlin Flanagan was right. 

*****

A few years after I read To Hell with All That, another old Flanagan essay also made its rounds on the internet. “Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica” examined an apparent panic about an apparent oral sex craze among very young adolescents. I say “apparent” because Flanagan begins the essay by admitting that she had initially scoffed at rumors about middle school blow job parties, and because I had young children at the time so I wasn’t tuned in to teen and tween culture. The online discussion of this essay in 2010 or so, when I first heard about it, suggested that Flanagan herself was part of an hysterical pearl-clutching mob of middle-aged suburban ladies, aghast at the behavior of these young trollops. 

I kept meaning to read the essay for myself, but I never got around to it until just last week, when I read Girl Land, which includes a chapter based on “Are You There God?” And what do you know? Just as with “Serfdom,” the online haters had completely misrepresented the essay, and Flanagan’s point. That’s what you get when you read about what an author has written, rather than reading the author’s actual words. 

*****

But didn’t I say that I was going to write about a book? I think I did. Girl Land is about girlhood of a very different sort than Rocky’s young friend Marie and I lived through in inner-city Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s. Caitlin Flanagan’s girls are nicely brought-up upper middle class American girls, girls who are “cosseted,” “cherished,” “treasured,” “protected,” “sheltered,” “tended,” and “watched over” by their families. Flanagan and I are rough contemporaries. A Google search tells me that she was born in 1961, so she’s four years older than I am. And I get all of her cultural references, from Judy Blume to Patty Hearst. But I grew up in a working-class family, and so my experience of girlhood was very different from Caitlin Flanagan's.  

Working-class girls in Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s were definitely protected and watched very closely, but we were not cosseted, treasured, cherished, or indulged in any way. Nor were we sheltered. We knew exactly what could happen to girls who stepped out of line. Everyone we came in contact with all day long, from our teachers to our parents to our aunts and uncles to the random dude on the street took special pains to tell us, frequently, what could happen to bad girls, and we were expected to listen patiently to their well-meaning advice. And we had to accept, without complaining, that boys--even our younger brothers--could do what they wanted, go where they wanted, without fear. 

For the boys in our blue-collar Catholic neighborhood, things were pretty straightforward (definitely not easy, but straightforward). Life was more complicated for the girls. We had to watch ourselves, to make sure that boys understood the limits. But we weren’t to come across as standoffish or snooty. We had to act like ladies, but not like stuck-up prigs, because what did we think this was, the Main Line? We had to dress in a way that was feminine, but not prissy, but also definitely not slutty. We had to smile, but in exactly the right way. Too broad and open a smile might be taken as an invitation, and you don’t want to look like you’re asking for it, do you? Too stiff and formal a smile, and you might come across as prudish or stuck-up, and who do you think you are, Grace Kelly? (I grew up two miles and a million light years from Grace Kelly’s childhood home.) There was only one way for us to dress, speak, and act that would meet with adult approval. 

Here’s the easiest way to explain it. Picture if you will a big Venn diagram. The slutty girls occupied the circle on the left; and the girls who acted like nuns (or librarians, or old ladies, or lesbians), belonged on the right. The very, very small intersection between the two circles was where you needed to be. It wasn’t that hard to get into that little intersection. It wasn’t hard at all, in fact. The hard part was staying there. And once you were out, there was no getting back in. 

But that’s neither here nor there. I don’t fault Caitlin Flanagan for focusing on her own segment of upper middle-class white American girlhood. That’s her world; or at least, it was. Writers are supposed to write about what they know. I couldn’t have written Girl Land just as Caitlin Flanagan wrote it, but I understood and related to every word. The transition from girlhood to womanhood is universal.

*****

In the essay “Dating,” Flanagan writes about her high school near-rape experience. I say “her” high school near-rape experience, not “a” high school near-rape experience, because everyone I know had at least one. 

A few days ago, I was in the grocery store shopping for my old lady, and I heard Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy.” I hadn’t heard that song in a long time. I wondered how many other women my age (Class of 1983) hear that song and think of it as I do, as music to be held down to while a boy gropes you against your will. I don’t have hard data or anything, but I feel confident in my assertion that just about every girl who graduated from high school in the 1980s had at least one near-rape experience, with or without a soundtrack. Some women have a hard time getting over these experiences. Maybe they suffer in silence for years until their attacker is nominated to the Supreme Court, and then they speak out, upending their lives in the process. But most of us are completely cavalier, even lighthearted, about what we euphemistically describe as “bad experiences.” “Oh yeah,” we say, “I had a bad experience, too. I was at the movies/in a car/at the prom/at an after-prom party/on a beach trip/at an amusement park/going bowling/going rollerskating with my boyfriend/friend/friend’s older brother/older brother’s friend and he tried to attack me. And then we watched the rest of the movie, and we went home.” We didn’t talk about these things at the time. No one would have believed us; or if they did, it would have been our fault. It was always the girl’s fault. 

And as Girl Land makes clear, it wasn’t only working class girls who had “bad experiences.” Cosseted and treasured upper middle class girls had bad experiences, too. After I read “Dating,”  I thought about how I don’t know a single woman of any social class who wouldn’t recognize Flanagan’s wide-eyed naivete, going off for an afternoon at a secluded beach with a sweet, handsome, funny teenage boy; and then her growing panic as she realized that this adorable boy was about to try to rape her. We’re all women, and we all know that none of us, not even well brought-up upper middle class girls, cosseted and treasured and cherished and protected, are immune. 

*****

Girl Land, as Flanagan writes, is a place that girls must pass through on their way to womanhood. The journey is fraught and often perilous, and none of us, no matter where we’re from or what our families are like, gets out unscathed. And in some ways, it’s even harder now. My childhood was nothing like Caitlin Flanagan’s, but we had something in common, a great blessing that made adolescence much easier than it is for today’s girls. 

I didn’t spend my afternoons dreaming and reading and diary-writing in a pink and white bedroom filled with floral comforters and stuffed animals and posters, but I could still escape from the world and be myself for a few minutes without worrying about what the popular girls thought about my clothes and hair or about what the opinionated men and boys of the neighborhood thought about my deportment and my proper place on the Venn diagram. Girls today, immersed in social media for 24 hours a day, have no such respite. Girl Land was never an easy place to be, but it’s a minefield now. It’s a fucking minefield.

I am the mother of boys, but reading Girl Land made me want to take care of girls; to tell them that everything will be OK one day. And to let them know that sometimes, you need to close the front door on the judgers and the haters and the well-meaning neighborhood prize fighters. Sometimes, you need to tell them all to just fuck off. 

Mother's Day

OMG, I’m almost finished with a piece of writing that has been dogging me--DOGGING me, I tell you--for weeks, and it’s quite a relief. Watch this space! Coming soon! Don’t miss it!

But every silver lining has a heavy gray cloud because just when I thought that we were close to a resolution to the impasse that I mentioned last week, it turns out that not only do we not have a resolution but that some people appear to have dug in more firmly. I’m looking across no-man’s-land right now and I see sandbags. I see barbed wire. I see gun turrets. 

*****

It’s Friday now. We appear once again to have achieved a peace settlement or at least a cease-fire, so I can go about my business without a flak jacket or whatever the fuck else. 

I’m still very close to finishing the essay I’ve been writing; so close, in fact, that I can sit around her writing about writing it rather than actually writing it. It’s all part of the process. 

What I’m writing is an essay about Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land. Flanagan just published an essay on The Atlantic, about “Nomadland” (the movie) and she picked up something that I missed entirely because she’s Caitlin Flanagan and I’m not. Or rather, I did pick it up, but I didn’t quite get what I was seeing. Frances McDormand’s Fern and Linda May (played by herself) are living a very particular part of every young girl’s dream life; the part where we play house and pretend that we are mistresses of all we survey. The makeshift nature of a little girl’s playhouse is part of its charm, a feature and not a bug. Fern and Linda get to run their tiny mobile households all for themselves, just as they like them, with no demands from husbands or children and no neighborhood standards to live up to. As they sit together in their lawn chairs, Flanagan observes, Fern and Linda May are no longer beaten-down, overworked elderly blue-collar women. They are girls; little girls with their whole lives ahead of them, mistresses of all they survey.  

*****

Do you see why it takes me so damn long to finish anything? Last night, I re-read what I have so far, and I found a few easy edits that will make it all flow so much better. But why not write about revising rather than actually revising? 

*****

Now it's Sunday. Yesterday, we went to a cookout. I don’t really know the couple who hosted the party; they’re acquaintances rather than friends. They have a magazine-perfect house and deck and yard that I just slightly envied. So much room, I thought, and such nice outdoor furniture. It was unseasonably cold yesterday, but propane heaters threw warmth in every direction, and colorful flowers bloomed from planters and flower beds.

I don’t generally envy other people’s material wealth and possessions. I have enough. And later as I read Lauren Hough’s Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, I remembered that I have enough, even if I’d forgotten it for five minutes while I basked in the propane-generated outdoor warmth. 

Later, I did go back and revise my essay, and I’m this close. This close, I tell you. It’s 9:45 on Sunday morning and I just ate some eggs and fruit salad that I didn’t have to make, and I’m sitting on the couch, half-watching a “Hunger Games” marathon while reading and writing. I don’t know how appropriate “The Hunger Games” is as Mother’s Day programming, but I happen to love the movies (and the books) so I’m quite content. I have a whole day ahead of me when I don’t have to work or cook or clean or fight the power or adhere to anyone’s timetable. That’s all I want for Mother’s Day. 

Open House

I’m getting close to finishing the essay that I’ve been working on, on and off, for several weeks. I keep visiting it, like it’s an open house. I look around for a while, and I move a piece of furniture a bit to the left or the right. I stopped in yesterday and hung a whole bunch of pictures on the wall, and I was pleased with my work. It really popped, I thought. Lots of color and texture; lots of different shapes and images. Today, though, the light changed quite a bit, and what looked charming and eclectic and artistic yesterday looks like an explosion today. Cluttered. Disorganized. No unifying theme. Maybe I should just empty out the whole place, slap a coat of neutral paint (Swiss Coffee! Parchment! Eggshell! Sand!) paint on the walls, and start the hell over. 

That doesn’t make any sense, does it? Because why would I redecorate a house that I don’t own? I don’t know why I bother trying to get fancy with the metaphors. It seldom works. 

*****

My annual spring anxiety and panic is back to its pre-pandemic intensity so at least something is returning to normal. Yesterday on Twitter, I found that a certain right wing white supremacist Trumpy internet dope who is quite popular among the Tucker Carlson-watching public was trending because he was opining on the subject of anxiety as a mental illness, which it isn’t, according to the Trumpy trolling internet dope. Slow news day, I suppose. This is a person who is well known for talking directly out of his ass, so after a quick visit to see why the topic of anxiety was trending along with the internet dope’s name, I muted the whole thing and moved on. How’s that for mental health? 

Anxiety and its place in the DSM-IV aside, I am really just stalling. I did make some progress on the thing that I was writing, enough that I now feel compelled to finish it but not enough that I can easily do so in one sitting. So why not write about something else, even if “something else” means imaginary real estate and online dumbasses? What with the state of the housing market, the former might be the only kind or real estate available for purchase right now; and the latter? Well, they’re everywhere, so that’s an of-the-moment topic if I ever heard of one. 

I have some renovations to do. Sigh. 

Two shakes

Did I mention that I got my second COVID shot yesterday? Let me tell you, if you haven’t already heard, that the second Moderna shot is no joke. The shot itself didn’t hurt at all, and an hour afterward, I felt just fine. I continued with my work, and I got things done, until right around 5:30 PM, when I felt as though I’d been injected with a powerful sleeping serum. I went to bed at 9 PM, right in the middle of the hockey game, and I must have slept right through the bus running over me. When I woke up, I could not get out of bed. Eventually, I did get out of bed, but the fever, fatigue, and body aches were bad enough that I actually had to lean on something when I tried to stand up. 

I showered, got dressed, and got to work but I felt worse and not better as the day continued. I tapped out at 2:30, made my way to the couch and stayed there for the rest of the afternoon and early evening, drifting in and out of sleep. When I finally managed to drag myself off the couch to go to bed, I wondered if I really needed to brush my teeth and change into pajamas. “My clothes are comfortable enough to sleep in,” I thought, “and would it really be that big a deal if I skipped tooth brushing for one night? Are my teeth going to fall out?” I did finally brush my teeth, but it was hard. The toothbrush weighed 25 pounds. 26 with the toothpaste. 

No joke, I’m telling you. No joke. 

It's Saturday now, and I feel 80 percent better thanks in part to almost 12 hours in bed. I'm outside watching a baseball game. The temperature is cool and the breeze makes it almost chilly but the sunshine is lovely and we're outside, so we don't have to wear masks. Yes, I know that CDC guidance is no masks outdoors for fully vaccinated people and I’m not technically fully vaccinated because I just had the second shot two days ago. But we were sitting at least 15 feet away from the nearest other spectators, and I’m pretty sure that my immune system did the work of two weeks in one day yesterday. 

I came home from the game, and the house was empty. My husband and son were running errands, and my older son was at work, and the house felt messy to me. The house always feels messy to me. I looked around at the random things sitting on tables and counters, and the floors that needed to be vacuumed (in my mind) and the dryer that was full of clothes and the groceries that needed to be put away, and I took Sue Ann Nivens’ advice. I thought of my house as a clock. I started at midnight and I worked my way clockwise through 12 hours until the whole place was back in order. No one who saw the place before and after would really have noticed the difference, but I did. I do. And I was done in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. 

You kids aren't the only ones who love Betty White.
Here she is as Sue Ann Nivens, The Happy Homemaker,
in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, S4, E1, "The Lars Affair."

****

Later, I went for a walk. It was May 1, May Day, Derby Day, and the kind of still and peaceful warm May afternoon when as soon as the lawnmowers quiet, you can hear a conversation from across the street. Not that I was listening. It’s Sunday now and I am back to normal. With a little effort, a house recovers from disorder and with a little rest, a human body recovers, too. It’s going to be another beautiful balmy May day. It’s time to get moving. 

Immune response

I’ve been working on an essay for several days. Usually, when I get stuck with a piece of writing, I walk away, and I write about other things and I think about other things, and then when I go back to whatever it was that I was writing, the fog lifts, or the pieces all fall into place. Choose your metaphor. 

Sometimes, though, that approach doesn’t work. Sometimes, I end up finishing the essay anyway, knowing that it’s not my best work, but that it’s the best I can do at that moment. At other times, less frequently, I just give up and abandon the piece altogether, and I throw its charred remains into my graveyard of unfinished writing. This one is looking like it’s going into the fire. But we’ll see. 

*****

Things are opening back up again. It’s good. Of course, we still have to wear masks (and about my hatred of masks, I could write an entire book) and we still have to observe some restrictions. And my son is back in school and spring sports are underway and I have committee meetings several times a week, and when it’s a bad day, like today, it’s easy to think that I have the worst of both worlds--all of the terrible parts of the COVID lockdown, with none of the fun parts. But don’t listen to me. I’m glad that life is coming back, and I’m glad I get to be part of it. 

*****

But let’s talk about the committee meetings and board positions. One of the boards on which I serve is debating a thorny question, and we are deadlocked. I’ve been a member of this board for 13 years, and this is the most heated and contentious atmosphere I’ve ever seen. It might be time for me to step back and let a new person take over. Some of the newer members are gathering factions and rounding up supporters, and I find that I don’t have the stomach for bare knuckles politicking of that sort. It’s too much. 

*****

It’s the next day now. We seem to have reached an understanding, my fellow board members and I, and now I won’t have to mobilize my own forces and get out the vote and organize from the grassroots or whatever the fuck else. I mean, I have friends too. But I’m glad we have a solution. We have peace in our time, and I’m all for it. 

I had my second Moderna shot today, and my arm hurts. And I don’t feel sick, but I do feel as though someone injected me with a powerful sleeping serum. Thankfully, I don’t have much to do tonight except to sit on this couch and write about nothing in particular. That’ll all change tomorrow. I have stuff to do this weekend, and stuff to do pretty much every day next week. Today, right now, I’m going to rest as my immune system responds to the vaccine. Tomorrow, I’ll be back in the trenches. Maybe I’ll even finish that essay. Anything is possible. 

We'll take the lungs, too, if you're not using them...

How a conversation can alternate between hilarious and horrifying, in less than a minute: 

“Wait, what?”

That was my younger son, asked by the nice lady at the Maryland Vehicle Administration if he’d like to become an organ donor. He and I were there to take care of business; met to renew my expired driver’s license and him to take the test for his Maryland learner’s permit. It’s always later than you think. 

“Wait, what?”

“Step right this way, young sir. We’ll have those kidneys on ice in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. You won’t feel a thing.” 

Hilarious. 

*****

My son is very bright, but I guess he didn’t know how organ donation worked, and I certainly hadn’t prepared him for that question. You never want to think about your child dying in a car crash, or any other way, so we hadn’t discussed the organ donor box on the driver’s license. He was taken aback. I explained it to him quickly. 

“Sure,” he said, shrugging. “I won’t need them, obviously.” He picked up the stylus, signed the signature pad, and stood against the wall to take his eye test.

“I won’t need them, obviously.” 

Horrifying. HORRIFYING. 

*****

He passed his test, so now he begins nine months of actually learning how to drive. And Maryland extended the valid period for driver’s licenses, from six years to eight. My sons will both be grown men, maybe with children of their own, the next time I have to renew my license. It is always later than you think. 

The true and correct verdict

I started writing an essay yesterday, and I was going to finish it today. But it’s 4:56 PM on Tuesday, April 20 and the Derek Chauvin verdict is in, and I find that I can’t really think about anything else until someone tells me if it’s a guilty or not guilty. I’m praying for the former. It won’t bring George Floyd back, but peace demands justice. 

I’m watching the coverage on MSNBC. It’s a beautiful spring day here in Maryland, sunny and warm and almost perfectly still. The Minneapolis crowds surrounding the Hennepin County Courthouse are dressed in down jackets and parkas so it’s obviously cold there. But it’s sunny and almost perfectly still, at least from my vantage point in front of my TV hundreds of miles away. A few people are holding signs, and a few are recording video on their phones, and a few appear to be chanting along with a man holding a bullhorn. But most of them are just standing still, just waiting, just like the rest of us. 

It’s 5:04 now. The judge is about to announce the verdict. He just tapped on his microphone, and gave the all-rise order as the jury enters the courtroom. 

Members of the jury, I understand that you have a verdict. 

State of Minnesota, Hennepin County vs. Derek Chauvin. 

Guilty, guilty, guilty. 

These are the true and correct verdicts.  

Exhale. 

Oh no they DIDN'T

Do you know where I am right now? I am in Section 107 of Nationals Park, one of 10,000 lucky fans here in person to watch the Nats face the Arizona Diamondbacks on a very chilly Friday night in April. I'm dressed appropriately for the cold, but I am missing one thing. Women are no longer allowed to bring handbags into Nats Park. And now the entire Washington Nationals organization are my sworn enemies. 

Have you been here before? If so, then you know how I feel about my handbag. I don't like to go anywhere without it. Now I have to carry my phone and my wallet and my keys and my extra mask and my kleenex in the tiny girl pockets of my jacket and pants. It's almost like the Washington Nationals don't want women here. 

You might be thinking that I should have checked the handbag rules before I showed up at the gate, but I've been coming to Nats Park for over a decade, and I have always had a handbag with me. I even changed handbags before I left the house, because I knew that my usual Longchamp Le Pliage bag was too large. This terrible rule is brand new. And as they say on the Internet, I'm not having it. I am not here for it. 

I didn’t put up much of a protest at the security gate. After all, the staff don’t make the stupid rules. I stepped out of the line, pulled all of the essentials out of my bag (it's ALL essential!), and handed it over to my husband, who took the bag back to the car. He met us on the concourse a few minutes later. "Do you want to go right to our seats," he asked, "or do you want to walk around first?" 

"I have to go to the ladies room first," I said. "But wait. Do they still have a ladies room?" 

"Oh boy," he said. 

"I'm just getting started," I said. 

"Yeah," he said. "I can tell." 

*****

I tweeted @Nationals when I got to my seat. They didn’t respond. I looked around at the other women in the stadium. Some of them carried tiny wallet-on-a-string crossbody bags that just met the size requirement, and some of them had diaper bags for their small children (also allowed), but most of them carried nothing; at least, nothing visible. They probably also had wallets and sunglasses and phones and keys stuffed into pockets. 

I thought for a minute that maybe I should just get over it, and let it go. I’m too attached to things. Maybe I should just go with the flow once in a while, roll with the punches, adjust to circumstances. But I also need things to make sense, and a 5x7 handbag rule doesn’t make any sense. If God forbid there’s ever a mass shooting in a stadium, I promise you that the middle-aged lady carrying the Coach file bag will not be the shooter. 

*****

I’m still torn about this. We had fun at the game, and the Nationals won with a ninth-inning walk-off homerun. I want to go to another game, but I don’t want to knuckle under to tyranny. I don’t want to live by the man’s rules. 

A handbag is just a thing. But it’s also more than a thing. Women need things that men don’t need. Women have children who need snacks and band-aids and toys. Women have bodies that require supplies. Women have husbands and teenagers who carry nothing, who ask their wives and mothers when they need a kleenex or a mint or a squirt of hand sanitizer. Women carry makeup and hair ties. And we wear clothes that have shallow little pockets that barely accommodate spare change, let alone tampons and Lego minifigures and Altoids and keys. We shouldn’t have to worry about how we’re supposed to stuff everything we might need into our pants pockets, assuming that the manufacturer of the pants we happen to be wearing has deemed it necessary to even put pockets into those pants. 

So I think I have some letters to write. I think I have to take this fight right to the Lerner family. And I bet that Mrs. Lerner isn’t giving up her handbag for anyone. Nor should she. Nor should any of us. 

Cat and Mouse

I dreamed about mice last night. Well, more accurately, I dreamed that I had a cat. To be specific, I dreamed that I had just adopted a cat, much to my husband’s dismay. It was an adolescent cat, not quite kitten but not quite full-grown cat. And in my dream, the teenage cat caught a mouse on his very first day living in our house. And just as I was gloating about the brilliant usefulness of this cat who would be both a delightful and hilariously entertaining companion and a merciless exterminator of unwanted rodents, a herd of mice came skittering out from under the refrigerator, running in terror from our new feline enforcer. And then I woke up, having died of horror (in the dream, of course). 

“Herd” isn’t the right word, is it? Well, it’ll have to suffice for our purposes, because I’m not looking up the correct word for a teeming, writhing mass of tiny rodents such as I encountered in my dream last night, and which has continued to disturb my waking thoughts for much of today. 

*****

I don’t really remember my dreams all that often. Sometimes, I wake from a dream, retaining a few of the details for just a few minutes before I fully emerge from sleep and get out of the bed, by which time I have usually forgotten the dream or even that I remembered it in the first place. I awaken screaming sometimes but seldom recall the details of the nightmare. Was I running from a man with a dripping knife? About to be mauled by a bear? Falling from a great height? Who knows? When I do remember a dream, really remember it, it’s of the creepy or weird variety, populated with hideous creatures, like mice. 

*****

I get migraines, but luckily for me, they don’t come very often. Maybe three times a year, I get a headache that’s bad enough that I wish I could just lie still in a room without light or sound. I had one of those headaches yesterday, and when it finally released me from its vise-like grip, I was drained but euphoric. It was as if someone had suddenly relieved me of a small load of cinder blocks that I’d been carrying on top of my head unawares. Everything felt lighter. I turned my head this way and that, marveling at the lack of pain. And then I went to bed and dreamed about herds of mice. I don’t know if these two things are connected. Maybe I’ll report back. For today, my head is unencumbered. For tonight, I hope my dreams will be unpopulated, or at least unremembered. 

I feel better already

It's Friday morning, and I'm sitting on the examining table at the doctor's office, waiting. The nurse just took my blood pressure and vital signs and then I laid down on the table wearing nothing but paper, while she attached electrodes to multiple points on my body, and silently read the results on a monitor. At least, I think she was reading results. She could have been watching Netflix for all I know. I didn't ask her what she was seeing. I knew that she'd tell me that I'd have to wait for the doctor. 

It's been a very long time since I had a full physical exam. I go to the OB-GYN more or less annually, and I see the dentist every six months, but I avoid the medical profession otherwise. But I have not been well recently and I decided to try something different from my usual health care approach, which is to ignore all symptoms until they go away. I've gotten away with this for a long time, but my luck can't last forever. So here I am. 

Fortunately, I was allowed to put my clothes back on after the electrode exam or whatever the hell it was. I'll look it up and see. Meanwhile, I wait in this tiny spotless clinical space that looks and smells like every other doctor's office everywhere. A chair for my stuff, a rolling stool for the doctor, who gets to have all the fun; the paper-covered table for the paper-clothed patient, posters and brochures offering helpful advice and handwashing instructions, cotton balls and tongue depressors in glass jars, a rack that holds a thermometer and a stethoscope and the little pulse oximeter thing that clips onto your index finger, and the monitor that displays the output from all of these devices. All of that in a shiny-floored brightly lit room no bigger than 8 by 10 feet. 

*****

I’m a person who knows what she knows. What I don’t know is considerable, and there’s no field of knowledge in which my ignorance is more abysmal than medicine. It turns out that the electrode thing was an EKG. Duh. I’m 55 years old and I’ve never had an EKG in my entire life. And thankfully, my heart is just fine, and everything else is fine, too. Even my high cholesterol isn’t high enough to worry about. I don’t really know why I have been feeling so bad, because apparently, I am in perfect health. A little part of me wanted some kind of bad news, just because I need things to make sense. I need some sort of physical cause for the pain and exhaustion. But overall, I’m very, very relieved that I don’t have a dread disease. 

*****

For the rest of the day on Friday, I felt absolutely marvelous. I worked with great focus and purpose, and I accomplished more than I expected to. I had to cut my walk a bit short thanks to a weird early April thunderstorm, so I prepped dinner and did more work and then the sun came out and I resumed my walk and I could have run the whole way. I didn’t run even a step because let’s not get carried away, but after months of malaise and fatigue, I felt like a bottomless pit of energy. Maybe it’s the warm weather and longer days. Or maybe I just needed a medical authority to tell me that there’s not a damn thing wrong with me. Maybe I’ve been wrong about the medical profession all along.

Freedom

I'm off from work for a few days, and it's nice. I have errands to run and appointments to keep and calls to make and things to do, but I'll have some down time, too.

This morning, I woke up at 7:30, a time that my teenage sons would consider hideously and cruelly early for a day off but that constitutes sleeping in for me. I made coffee and checked my messages and emails and social media feeds, and then got ready to take a shower.

There is the first hint of the point that I will eventually get to with this little post that is going to be a hot mess, so don't say that you weren't warned. What does it mean to "get ready" to take a shower? Why does readiness or preparation of any sort even enter into this little equation? Taking a shower is in itself a readiness operation, but not a thing for which you need to get ready, right? 

Well, you're not me, now are you? Because when you're me, you plan your day around your to-do list and your compulsive household routine, and you look at the clock and you think "OK, it's a minute after 8. I wonder if I can fold the laundry, chop the vegetables for dinner, and wipe down the refrigerator shelves before 8:30?" And of course, being you, you can do that on your head; and by the time you’re done, it's only 8:28. So then you think "Hmm. I could also start the next load of laundry, clean the hall bathroom, and pack up this package that I have to ship, and I bet I can do all of that by 8:45." And guess what? You totally can. I totally can. 

At 8:45, I thought about going one more round. “9:15,” I thought. “By 9:15, I bet I can…” and then I stopped, First of all, because there was literally nothing left to do, housekeeping-wise. The house was clean and the laundry was caught up and the evening meal was prepped and ready to cook. And secondly because for crying out loud. At some point, it’s time to stop getting ready to start my day, and to just start my day. I took a shower and had a second cup of coffee, and I took my son to his eye doctor’s appointment. I wrote the first few paragraphs of this on my phone as I sat in a socially distanced waiting room chair. My son’s eyesight is 20-20. We left the eye doctor and we got some lunch, and I went on my way rejoicing. 

*****

Things are always proliferating and multiplying and taking over. If it’s not tasks and chores, then it’s stuff. Case in point: my husband gave me a wallet for Christmas. It’s a really nice suburban middle-aged lady Coach wallet, the full-size kind that zips all the way around, in a very light color that I would never choose for myself. I would never have chosen this wallet style period. But oddly, I really like it. It’s very nicely made; it feels smooth and elegant and substantial in my hand, and it easily fits everything I need to carry in a wallet. But it’s also kind of big, and a little bit heavier than I like. 

I carry far too much stuff, as you might know. This is a frequent topic of this blog and of the thoughts in my head. Stuff multiplies and proliferates, and it’s all I can do to keep it under control. I don’t hoard things; in fact, I’m often too quick to purge things and then wish that I still had them. But right now, I’m not talking about stuff in general. I’m talking about the stuff that I haul around with me, literally, because I like to be prepared. My bag is too heavy, and I want to lighten it, flatten it out a little bit. I probably still need to carry hand sanitizer or hand wipes or alcohol prep pads. But all three? Maybe not. I like to have a rosary with me, but do I need to have two? (In my defense, I didn’t realize that I was carrying two.) No, I don’t. One will suffice. Same thing for pens. 

I don’t need to carry a notebook with me. I use my phone to write if an idea strikes me, and there’s always a random scrap of paper in the giant wallet if I truly need to write something. I don’t need to carry a little card case for business cards, because they too will fit in the wallet. And a flashlight? No. I do not need to carry a flashlight. The phone will fill in as a flashlight, too. 

So the bag contains fewer things now, and it feels lighter, but I still have pretty much everything that I’m likely to need. I still have safety pins and cash. I still have Rescue Remedy and hand lotion and band-aids. I still have a stupid stupid COVID mask. I’m ready for just about anything. 

*****

My handbag weighs less now, and it looks better, too. I don’t like the look of a thing that’s overstuffed, full to capacity. Now that the bag is manageable, I find that I want to lighten the rest of the load, too. The handbag is just a start. There’s a lot of other clutter that I need to get rid of, and it’s mostly in my brain. 

Here’s what I want to do. I want to get up in the morning and just go, rather than trying to figure out how many chores I can complete before I allow myself to leave the house. I want to throw on whatever clothes are handy and weather-appropriate, without planning for every single possible eventuality that could arise throughout the day. I want to extricate myself from captivity to routines and lists and tasks. I want to get ready, without getting ready to get ready. I want to be free. 

That’s a lot to fix, a lot of mental clutter to clear out of an overstuffed brain. Sometimes I think they wrote whole sections of the DSM-IV with me in mind. Sometimes I think I should see a counselor or something, but we all know that that’s not going to happen. I can barely get myself to see a physician when there’s something actually wrong with my body, so there’s very little chance that I’ll ask for professional help with my compulsions and neuroses. But I did clean out my handbag, and that’s a start. A person has to start somewhere. 

Chat

In a test of my multi-tasking skills, I’m going to write and chat at the same time. I’m trying to buy a new phone and I’m stuck at the checkout. It’s more than I want to explain here, and you don’t want to read about it anyway. Just suffice to say that I don’t want to pay twice. Push comes to shove, I don’t want to pay at all, but stuff costs money and there’s no such thing as a free lunch or a free phone, so I’ll pay what it costs. But I won’t pay twice what it costs. 

Online chat is helpful but extremely tedious. (Ding).  The friendly agent keeps telling me what I should see, and I keep sending her screenshots to demonstrate my claim that I don’t see what I’m supposed to see, and we’re at an impasse. I’m close to giving up and just buying the phone from Verizon, which is what I had hoped to avoid. (Ding). And I’m cranky and snappy and trying my hardest not to yell in print at the hapless chat agent because this is obviously not her fault but it’s not my fault either and I can’t yell at myself. (Ding). 

So much for thinking that Google would be easier to deal with than Verizon. I’m finally about to give up after literally one hour of back and forth. Either they’ll figure out a way to sell me a phone without making me want to kill myself, or I’ll just get a Samsung phone from stupid Verizon again. You can’t fight city hall and you definitely can’t fight big tech. (Ding). Sorry, chat lady, I’m out for today.