The Pink Snake

Something is lying in that grass.
(Photo courtesy of me)

This morning I jumped out of my sleep screaming.  I was having another snake dream.  Lately I’ve been having recurrent dreams about snakes, and roads and bridges.  In the dream I find myself, for whatever reason, walking along a road, the way I walk along a local road every day to compulsively burn calories and also to expel my ever-present, overwhelming energy—my existential disgust, that is.  And then I get to a point where I need to cross a bridge, or an overpass across a highway or something.  It’s a typical suburban overpass overgrown with weeds and thickets, etc.  And it also is crawling with snakes overhanging from branches and wrapped around poles and power lines and vines, and curled up on the pavement.  It’s grotesque, and when I get to the middle of the bridge I encounter one particular, brightly colored virulent snake.  The others are only black garden snakes that are merely disgusting, but this one is disgusting and also poisonous.  This one in the middle of the bridge is a pinkish, organge-y earth tone with some design on it, and it’s slimy, and it’s curled up like a pretzel, waiting for me in the middle of the bridge.  In this particular dream, I started to cross . . . and then I sprung up out of my sleep in a hysterical scream, waking myself up (kind of) as I approached the pink snake.

When I screamed myself awake, I started checking my blankets and bedding around me, convinced there was a snake crawling around my room or bed, still delirious with slumber.  It was around 8:15am.  Then I fell back into a zombie stone-like sleep spell until around 11:30 or 12, when I was no longer delirious, and I resumed my usual daily routine of staying under my blankets awake and dumfounded and hiding from life until I finally somehow managed to force myself up and desperately drink coffee.   

Life Skills

I had thought that cooking dry beans and rice over the stove was the most economical way to subsist on scarce resources without developing anemia or beriberi or pellagra or kwashiorkor or something . . .

I had wondered what this thing in the back yard was for so many months ever since I moved in.

. . . Until I found the bill from the propane company stuck to my front door when I came home this afternoon.

Dear LinkedIn:

I’m getting really sick of those goddamn emails you regularly dump in my inbox telling me about “Jobs I May Be Interested In.”  I once really did apply for one of those jobs.  Three days later I drove 110 miles to find myself at some too-hip-for-you consulting firm run by some too-cool-to-comb-his-hair megalomaniac sociologist who apparently thinks that surprise group interviews allotting 10 minutes to each candidate are a responsible way to hire people.  They sent the rejection email before I even finished swerving my way back the 110 miles under the influence of my job interview-strength dose of tranquilizers.  I don’t find your juicy-looking fraudulent job ads that you spam out to me to be very credible anymore.

And why don’t you stop flashing a bunch of “People I May Know” in my face every time I sign into my account.  Yes, I do in fact know all those people.  But you know what?  I really don’t want to know that the flakey classmate who never even showed up to two seminars in a row now manages the grants at Big Fat Important Foundation That [supposedly] Saves the World.  I don’t want to know that the pompous classmate who sat in the back of the room and snickered the time I flounderingly taught a class to the undergrads is now a policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.  I really, really, REALLY don’t want to see blinking back at me the profile of the former internship supervisor who had the gracious generosity to tell a reference checker that I’m “on the introverted side.”    

The Contents of Your Kitchen Cabinet Can Speak Volumes About You

…As I’ve learned over the years of sharing living quarters with others.

My current roommate’s eating habits are almost as peculiar as mine, something I couldn’t help but notice since I’ve moved in this past fall.  Now that she’s left town for three weeks, I set out to confirm my suspicions and took the liberty of swinging open the doors to her side of the kitchen cabinets, above the counter where she keeps her Zumba tapes.  The findings are quite telling about a 31-year-old compulsive-dieting product of our present day health-nut consumerism.  Of the pseudo-food that I found include:    

Phone Calls With Mom, and Ensuing Contemplations of My Life At 29

I got off the phone with Mom a while ago after making her sit and wait patiently while I dumped my weekly baggage on her for an hour.  In between my monologues, she took the opportunity to mention, again—as if my life isn’t already complicated enough—“You KNOW, you’ll be turning 29 soon!  Oh my goodness!” Blah Blah.  And once again she reminded me how my eggs—you know, my eggs—will only still be fresh for about another year.

“It’s just a fact,” she harped.  “I was talking to my-friend-the-OBGYN about it.  So many women make the mistake of thinking ‘they can wait’ and that everything will be perfectly fine and then they end up in trouble!”

So then I suggested that for my 29^th birthday she and Dad pay to have a few of my eggs frozen.  You know, a long-term security deposit, like buying a CD or a mutual fund or something.

“Ummm . . . sure.  Daddy and I would pay for that,” she stammered.  “We’d do anything for you.”

Let’s say this is me.

This would be me if I had lived in Europe in the 1930s.

This would certainly be me if I had lived in the US in the 1880s.

This is most likely what would have ultimately become of me if I had lived in early modern Europe.

. . . Or maybe this, if I had lived in the English colonies.

This is definitely not me, but I really prefer the more romantic portrayals of aberrant women . . .

And this short story by Idra Novey makes me think of what I’d be like if I had lived in Latin America in the 1970s.

*Images are all from Wiki Commons, and I sure hope they’re on the public domain.  Click the image to go to the source.

My Library Days

Today was another day without a call from the staffing agency.  So, at around 4 pm I decided to force myself to change out of my pajamas and head over to the local library to return the near-due batch of books I had taken out.  And go browsing for more.  The library is one of the few places in which I feel truly comfortable and unthreatened.  It is the only public establishment that I can think of where I’m off the hook as an agoraphobe.  For me, it’s a temple to the soul.  In a library, I am protected by compulsory peacefulness and privacy:  You’re not allowed to talk to anyone.  You get to conceal yourself within a silent forest of towering folios, rows upon vacant rows of comfortingly shadowy foliage.  And, what’s more for my deprived soul, is that you are free to pluck voraciously from the shelves with impunity.  Anything and everything marked with a call number is up for grabs, no fees, no calories, no obligations, no strings attached.  And picking and sampling is both condoned and encouraged.  Likewise, it is perfectly acceptable to loiter around aimlessly perusing for hours.  The library is beyond the realm of the mythicized candy store: it’s the Garden of the Hesperides, on steroids. 

Questions I Would Like to Ask the Married Guy Who Asked Me Out

I have pondered and pondered and Googled, yet I remain stupefied by the most irksome Question of the Ages:  Why, Mr. Really, Really Nice Guy, do you decide to reach out to me and spill your guts to me and commiserate about life with me and give me your number and email back and forth with me and say such nice things to me and suggest that “we get together sometime,” and yet, you don’t mention that you’re married?

?

Hmm?

So, in an attempt to organize my confusion, I composed the following list of questions.

Dear Roommate,

Please don’t play your guitar and sing your nasal Latin serenades while I am writing an article on a deadline.

Yours Truly,

The AA

My Sanity Walks (Introduction to an ongoing series. . . Possibly)

I’ve been walking to keep somewhat sane my entire life, but it only occurred to me to formalize these walks when things began to feel very distinctly insane.  We all need some structure, right?  About a year into my post-graduate underemployment spell—which is now my established status quo—I decided it might be worth the tradeoff in grocery money to splurge on gas once a month and treat myself to a day out.  Given that underemployment and languor are now officially part of my life, I concluded that a monthly day off from brooding in my rented room about my existential dilemma is necessary for sanity maintenance and in turn survival.  That is, I began to realize that if I were to continue to maintain an uninterrupted lifestyle of a nocturnal recluse for much longer, I would soon sink into an irreversible depressive coma, my brain would completely atrophy, and I would become a zombie catatonic idgit before my thirtieth birthday.  Or, at least, I’d go from being only half crazy to being totally crazy; of this I am certain.  

Reasons Why I Am a Shitty Blogger

You might have noticed—and you didn’t, because no one reads this blog—but I had a crisis of the blogging spirit and went AWOL for the last few weeks.  I had a pseudo-destructive impulse and took my blog offline (To be fair, if it were a truly destructive impulse, I would have completely deleted the blog).  It was the result of an ongoing case of Blogger’s Block, and of the disturbing fact that after writing and posting three shitty blog entries, I still derive absolutely no pleasure or inspiration from writing for every Googler and WordPress-er to see.  And, this fact is in turn derived from my tendency to constantly remember the reasons why I make a Really Shitty Blogger, whenever I consider writing a blog entry.  The reasons are qualities about me and particularly my writing style that affront every sacramental principle of the present-day blogosphere.  In particular,