intensive purposes

My new thing is to download the most recent This American Life onto my IPod and listen to it during my commutes to and from work. This new trend started because 1. I am sick of every single song I own and 2. It’s just a great show and the stories make my ride to work so very enjoyable.

So, last week’s show was titled “A Little Bit of Knowledge” and the theme was how people (everyone, at some point) will talk like experts about things they don’t know much, if anything about. The prologue covers several people’s stories of what and how they found out too late in life that they had false information about something they had been spouting about all of their lives.

  One woman, in her twenties, learns from a crowd at a party that unicorns aren’t real after wondering out loud whether they were endangered or extinct.

 Another woman had always thought that the X-ing signs were pronounced “Zing” and also learned the truth in an embarrassing manner way too late in life.

 One guy lived his life thinking that the Nielson ratings were only conducted by families with the last name Nielson. Again, lesson learned too late and out loud.  

Listening to this show this morning had me laughing hard enough to look like that crazy person on the bus and have mentioned it to several people since – who then offered up their own examples, which have been hilarious.

Mine you ask? Two have come to mind today:

1. When I was little my dad told me that the foam in the ocean was whale pee and it seemed more than believable at the time and so I never questioned this until my early twenties, while at the beach, running away from a very foamy wave, yelling to my friends ”AAAAH, WATCH OUT FOR THE WHALE PEE!”

2. Until two years ago I thought it was “for all intensive purposes” (rather than intents and purposes)

Two of the best I’ve heard so far today:

“Flash in the pants” (instead of pan, of course)

“Cufflings” (as in little baby cuffs, instead of cuff links)

Now it’s your turn.

fight and flight

I’m both, really. Ever since my cornered conversation with my grandma I’ve been reviewing my own personal relationship status with people/ friends/ family. That quick little back and forth last weekend really upset me and I feel like I need to do something, but none of my natural reactions feel right.

My usual response is to first fight a bit and then flee to whatever degree I deem necessary. Really, Violet is the first person in my life where the impulse to flee has diminished so greatly that sometimes it just takes stepping into the next room for a minute so that my rational brain can reattach to my body before my mouth opens again. But besides my relationship with Violet, if you corner me into feeling defensive I will usually bite back some and then get the hell out.

When I was 19 and found out my first love, my high school sweetheart, had cheated on me I booked a flight from Oregon to Vermont in the middle of January. It was a bold and cold (weather-wise) move bought and sold entirely by a first-time broken heart. I fled the scene in hopes of my aches staying behind, and that taking me away from her would hurt her. My plan was to go far, far away from the chaotic cloud of a break up and dance in the streets on a different coast, any street, free. And so I left. And what I thought would be a few months wandering aimlessly to pick up the pieces and come home ended up in my landing and living in Atlanta, Georgia for a few years (where my heart finally healed enough to get by and I ended up meeting my next great love. I never did move back to Oregon).

Another relationship’s end, in my mid-twenties, resulted in a one way ticket to Croatia, where I traveled most of Eastern Europe by myself for several months (Dubrovnik – go there!)

I think I must have learned this fight and flight technique from my dad, or at least that’s where it was introduced to me. When I was little, he and I got into it all of the time, over anything and sometimes everything. I’m have vague memories of spatting angry words back and forth over a two-by-four I loved, or something just as pointless, until eventually we’d both mutually retreat to somewhere away from the other, until later (the time frame that ‘later’ refers to varied depending on the individual level of injury due to insult).

When I would storm off, usually to my bedroom before he could tell me to go to my room, I would hide in the closet (yes, literally) and make and hang signs on my door that read things like, “Anyone can come in this room unless you have a mustache” or “All welcome, except for guys named William”. He thought this was cute, but it was my anger finding a way out. If I couldn’t leave I would keep him from coming in.

The first time I really upped my ability of flight was after a big blow out with dad. I can’t remember how old I was exactly, maybe 8. We were yelling aimlessly at each other and I remember it originated with a fight I was having with my brother and my dad taking his side. I stormed off yelling, “Fine. I don’t want to live here then! I’m running away!”

There was no response from dad, which was typical, meaning he was pissed, which was exactly what I was looking for. I packed a t-shirt, a pair of shorts, a yoyo, my rubik’s cube, a few marbles, a little notebook and a small pencil into a handkerchief, that I would later tie to the end of a stick, just like in the movies, and walked out of my room, nervous and prepared for more battle.

“Ok, I’m leaving now!” I yelled, kind of wondering why he wasn’t right outside of my door.

“Wait. Here.” Dad said, coming out of the kitchen holding two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cut diagonally, the way I liked.

And I left, right out the front door. I walked down several blocks in our subdivision until I got to a point where I would have to cross a pretty busy road. I stopped and stared. I was so torn. I wasn’t allowed to cross that road without an adult… but I needed to run away to prove a point… but I really didn’t want to break that rule and the road kind of scared me.

So, I stood there until finally I sat down there, at the edge of that busy road. I ate one of the sandwiches dad had made for me and then became really thirsty – too much peanut butter like always! I stared at that road and started to obsess over the idea of a cold glass of milk. Eventually, the milk won and I turned around to go home.

I walked back in the house, having been gone all of 45 minutes and went back to my room to unpack. Dad came inside from the garage and said with a surprised voice, “You’re back, huh?” which made it all feel worth it to me for some reason. (He told me years later that he had secretly followed me, just in case, and when I came back he acted like he was in the garage doing something).

Later that evening we were all watching TV, Scarecrow and Mrs. King to be exact, and I asked my dad if I could sit on his lap. He patted his legs and said, “Get up here,” and that was that.

There’s no point to this I guess, except that I am realizing that I need to learn how not to leave, or I need to pay more attention to my intentions for leaving. When I’m arguing with Violet I usually leave so that I don’t say things I don’t mean. The other night when my grandma cornered me I left with Dog for a walk and when that didn’t work I left by drinking my way out of the situation so that I wouldn’t have to accept what she said as something she really said.

But thus far, every conflict I’ve ever been in with someone I love has either worked its way out or it hasn’t – and that’s just the way things go and will go whether I’m there to see it through or not. So, my grandma is going to be here this weekend, and in every way I can figure out how to, I’m going to try to be too. We’ll see.

caught in bed with wood

As a kid, my animistic behavior and attitude towards everything was rather active. I invented a personality for everything and could empathize with anything: frustration for trees trying to grow through cement sidewalks, burning muscle aches for cars going faster than they wanted to, stomach aches listening to baby birds squawk and squawk because they didn’t know exactly where their mom was, and disdain for the doorway that bumped my funny bone.

As a kid, after seeing the movie, The Red Balloon, I made it my duty to rescue all less than fully inflated helium balloons from restaurants. When the server would ask me if I wanted a balloon I would say, of course, and then deny the big healthy one being offered and ask if I could have all of the sagging, drooping, or nearly dead ones, please. I would take them home and put them in our hall bathroom. The hall bathroom was the warmest room in the house and usually the sagging balloons would perk back up again for a day or two. This was enough for me to feel as though they were getting a fair second chance at life.

I had way too many stuffed animals as a kid. They all had names, of course, a family history and an awesome adventure story as to how they became a part of my life (I got busted for “lying” in Kindergarten over one of these stories… another post for a different day). At one point I had so many stuffed animals that I started sleeping on the floor so that they could all fit on the bed at night. Eventually my dad caught me, asked me what the hell I was doing sleeping on the floor and I explained. Our compromise was that either some of the animals had to go (not an option!) or that I had to find a way to make room for myself in my own bed. I worked out a pretty simple rotation for my animals and not one of them got any more time than any other. Teddy Ruxpin carried no priority over the Gremlin or that little Red Bear I got from my grandma on Valentine ’s Day. They were all loved and equally important to me, and this was obvious to them, I was sure.

And then there was the time I screamed bloody murder so loudly that the neighbors came running over and busted the door in to see if they should call the police when I caught my dad carving my 2 week old Halloween pumpkin.

I remember the night my dad finally drew the line with my affection towards everything. That night he came to tuck me in only to find a four foot tall two-by-four under the covers with his daughter. The wood’s name was Charlie and he was cool because he was just as tall as me. Charlie had 3 big knots: one was an eye (the other was closed so you couldn’t see it), one was a belly button, and one was a bruise on his knee. Dad found me in bed with Charlie only a few weeks after he had caught me sleeping on the floor next to a pile of teddy bears sleeping soundly all over my bed. He stayed pretty calm and simply asked, “Jesse, sweetie, why is there a large piece of lumber in your bed?”

I said, “Dad, it’s Charlie! He’s as tall as me! He’s fine, he fits. Pleeeease let me keep him. We all fit, see.”

The next morning I woke up and Charlie was gone, never to be seen again. I wasn’t terribly invested in Charlie and never really dwelled on his disappearance. Plus, with my new rock, Sylvester, weighing in at 16 pounds, covered in little petrified shells, I was all, Charlie who?

I mention all of this because I was thinking about it on Sunday while I was watching my fish swim around and around… and around, waiting for my raccoon to show up, and worrying about my avocado plant’s loss of leaves lately. I realized how much of that part of me I still carry around. With my head hanging over the pond, all of a sudden it dawned on me that Fraidy probably doesn’t even care about me. And this is most likely BECAUSE HE IS A FISH. And for a moment Fraidy became just a gold fish and that’s it. Chances are he doesn’t even have enough conscious ability to have feelings about anything, let alone me in particular. It didn’t really hurt to realize this, it was just a bummer. Like when you think you’ve made a new friend in a college class and then the class ends and you never hang out again. Well, no, it’s not really like that at all, but that sucks too. I guess the bummer is that I’m too old now to be able to re-convince myself that everything matters and that everything knows that everything matters, like I believed as a kid. Fraidy matters to me but besides the fish flakes I have to offer, it’s likely that I’m just another big object that blocks his sunlight every now and then.

Or maybe not. Maybe when he sees me his little fish heart flutters and his fish face smiles and his little fish brain thinks, “Jesse! Damn, it’s good to see you again.”