| smells like flowers |
[Apr. 17th, 2007|07:52 pm] |
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After a nice long 9.5 + hour day at school suffering from intense note-taking-induced hand cramps I came home to find Ian had planted us a new garden. Sometimes my boyfriend can be pretty sweet. |
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| Doctor’s Office, Santa Monica, CA |
[Feb. 26th, 2007|05:47 pm] |
Waiting rooms. The act of waiting. One of the secretaries is wearing a neon green shirt with assorted buttons sewn along the collar. I didn’t know they make clothes in colors like that for anyone but crossing guards, and I’m not sure what ever prompts a person to decide that neon is a good idea. It casts a sallow glow onto her skin, already washed out by her dyed red hair. It is a week past Valentine’s Day, and decorations are still up on the walls, signs with exclamation points in bold red. Lace doilies, and hanging from the ceiling accordion hearts shot through with gold arrows. I am glad there are no Cupids, but just in case the mood should strike, there’s a toothpick wrapped in plastic on the floor. For emergency first dates that lead to a night in bed and a pregnancy scare in the morning. There are two doors out of the waiting room: one for pregnant women, and one for everyone else. The floor is cleanish in the center of the room, dirty near the walls as if whoever swept up didn’t bother to move the chairs. The dust is obvious, black grime accumulated. It looks sooty. I am wearing flip flops and chipped pink toenail polish. I keep my feet off the floor.
Across from me hangs a framed print titled “Guardians.” Four figures guard a bird, a fish, and tree, and a baby. No one guards my time. I sit, looking at the sad magazines; Family Fun has the cover torn in half. A man flips idly through it, and I want to tell him to put it down, the thing is crawling with germs. A nurse comes, calls to the man, and he stands up with three coughing children. Before the dirty yellow door swings shut to their examining room, I hear the nurse say, “Okay, who was sick first?” It’s dirty and I don’t want to touch anything so I sit and write, remembering I am a writer. This is what I do. Maybe I need more doctor visits in rooms with embossed wallpaper and sick children with unlaced shoes.
There is a sign announcing I am not allowed a cell phone. Prohibited, it tells me. No way out, no hope, no cry for help. The girl at the front desk, the one not wearing green, didn’t write down my name; I wonder if I will ever be called. Across from me sits a girl in all black; black hair, shirt, pants, shoes, and I wonder if she wonders what I’m writing. I would. Her name is Sonya. She looks like she could be anyone.
Someone walks out of the pregnancy door. She’s fat, her boyfriend is fat, both have flushed cheeks. She’s pregnant, but you probably wouldn’t know if you didn’t overhear. She will have strong arms to hold her child. I wonder what color skin it will have, what they will call it. It’s just an it right now. The woman’s name is Amber, her ultrasound is at ten a.m. tomorrow. Her boyfriend kisses her on the top of the head. Maybe they’re married. Maybe there’s a wedding band I don’t see.
While Amber confirms her appointment, another pregnant woman walks through the front door. She’s wearing a gray cotton dress and those leggings that are trendy and I can’t fathom it, can’t understand how you would ever want to be pregnant and wear something that clings to your thighs. They tell her to go pee and weigh herself. She goes.
“Eat,” the receptionist tells Amber, “so tomorrow morning the baby is awake.”
I shift my weight, uncross, cross my legs. I call Ian, tell him to feed the cat. I won’t have time to come home. I have been here thirty minutes, a page, and then five people walk in the front door. I wonder if I should count pregnant women as one and a half? Two? I will have to get dinner at school, a snack, but maybe I can get by on the emergency peanuts stashed in my purse. The only thing the airlines ever give you anymore. A woman sits next to me, baby in lap. She has too much blush on and I wonder if her child will remember the powdery, feathery smell when she grows up, leaves home. Right now the daughter has a fleece bib with pale violet flowers, and almond eyes. Her ears are already pierced. I hear conversation at a distance. The green-faced woman pinches her lips together and says, “Well, everybody’s on break.” Another thirty minutes go by. I track the time by people in, people waiting, people gone. At last my name comes at a distance. I am called. I go. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 10th, 2007|09:43 am] |
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So I really think the kid sitting next to me in class yesterday had crabs or something. He kept shadily reaching under the table and itching his crotch while I scooted farther and farther away. Alas, the kid on the other side of me smelled. Seriously people. I did not come back to school for this. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 8th, 2006|07:11 pm] |
today was the first day ever, i think, that a straight man complemented me on my shoes. "What are they?" the stranger asked as I walked by. I laughed. "They're Payless."
Sometimes life is hilarious and ironic and we shared a grin and I walked away. |
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| schoolio |
[Aug. 21st, 2006|05:57 pm] |
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So finally UCLA decides that yes, they'll let me defer to the winter so that I can be an in-state student and go for mucho cheapo and not have to pay off school for the next twenty years. I can't say how excited I am. I'm a little bummed I won't be going in the fall because it's my favorite time of year, but this will give me some time to save up. I'm thinking I'm going to take off for December and get a chance to go home and catch up with people there and also really focus on finishing my book. So there's my deadline: manuscript finished by Christmas so Ian can buy me the publishing book he's always promised. Also, we're thinking of Paris over Christmas and New Year's. I'm exciiiited. It's good to finally know. Knowing something, good or bad is always better than being blind. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 12th, 2006|06:08 pm] |
Okay ya'll, I just got done reading Tristan's entry (yea, I'm a little behind) so here's the update. I just moved from Glendale to Playa Del Rey, hence I've been without internet for a few weeks. Ian and I are in this sweet little apartment with brand new everything (floors, microwave, stove, fridge, marble bathroom, granite countertop kitchen etc.) which is less than a mile from the beach. It's nice to be out of the Valley and down by the water, so we've been trying to hit the beach and the bike path as much as possible. Somehow it's never sunny down here though- not sure if it's the season or just the ocean. Regardless, it's been a nice change and it's our excuse to get out, get excercise, and get in better shape. Working 45 + hours a week at a stressful job doesn't help, but I got into UCLA (cross your fingers that everything transfers) so hopefully it'll get smoother come fall.
I'm really looking forward to getting back into the academic swing of things, since I've caught myself sounding like a Valley girl far too often. I miss learning and assigned readings and meeting people my age and frankly it's the one time in my life that I can go back without too much trouble. So let's hope. I'll also have more time for writing, which has been neglected lately. I think I need to give myself deadlines, but I'm also trying not to overload myself.
And that is pretty much it. I miss the Broomall gang and driving down dark roads with the windows open, playing music you can dance to. It is rarely dark here, and I miss staying up late to watch the moon. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 7th, 2006|06:17 pm] |
He had long fingers
and the sort of jittery nervousness
that sparked waitresses into action
bringing him another pot of black, saying
maybe he should lay off the coffee,
maybe he should have another cup.
They never called him hon.
Even strangers sensed there was something
implicitly wrong in the way
he tapped his cigarette pack against the edge
of the table
and the way he looked at women too hard,
sharp and jittery and hard
with eyes like moths lighting against your skin
in the middle of the night,
unexpected, unwelcome.
I know now they took pity in my mother
the roadside waitresses,
on purpose forgot
to charge her for toast,
adding an extra scoop of ice cream to my sundaes,
a soda on the house.
When we piled back in the car
she would always smell like the thinnest smoke
and I imagine her in a bathroom stall
curled over a cigarette on loan from the hostess
breathing in,
her briefest escape.
Later, tucked driver side in the back seat
I would watch her flutter beside him.
With streetlights marring their faces
they took on the mottled pattern of birds.
I knew from the way her lips were pinched
he drove too fast,
but she harbored fear silently and
only once, when he nearly sideswiped
another car did she flinch.
Her hands flew to her chest then,
a betrayal of instincts and I knew for the first time
this is how she went along-
braced for impact, steeled for crash. |
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| san jose airport |
[Nov. 28th, 2005|05:09 pm] |
I am two bites into my banana when the voice comes at me, just inches behind my right ear, writhing with suppressed panic. “Excuse me?” It is a question, it is an apology, and it is uttered in less than perfect English. I turn around and the woman is ever so slightly too close to my shoulder but her brows are knitted with worry. I stifle my involuntary response to startle, tell myself that the airport is a large, public place, I will be okay talking to strangers, and ask her what’s wrong. “The machine it…I put in money…Can you help?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have any cash on me,” I say and start to turn, thinking she is asking for money. I’m on my first official business trip and I wonder, briefly, if giving change to strangers can be listed on my expense report.
“No,” she says, “I put in. I’m sorry, I don’t speak English, can you help?” She is trying so hard to form the words that I want to breathe them out of her lips for her. I can’t imagine feeling hopeless in a foreign country, lost in a sea of adverbs, nouns, and prepositional phrases. Everyone’s first instinct is to cry in his native language. How horrifying to have to translate your fears.
“Can you--?” she says, and shakes her head in frustration. She motions toward a small machine against the wall. “Please?”
She looks like she might cry so I get up, slinging my tote bag over my shoulder. Shiny and black, I bought it new to hold my files. I follow her to the machine. $20 buys you an international calling card, the face of the metal box tells me. $20 bought the woman next to me grief but no calling card. The card has become wedged, the thin plastic a white tongue you can make out through the black mouth of the dispenser. Close enough to see but not touch. “Can you please?” she says.
I pull a mechanical pencil out of my bag and push the lead through the mouth, trying to loosen the card. It wedges further. “It’s pretty stuck,” I say, the stupid American. The banana peel dangles wetly against my wrist. “Let me see if I can find someone to help.”
I look around the airport, at the buzzing crowd around me. There are no employees at the terminal desks, and all of the passengers are sitting in the plastic seats, absorbed in their own lives. I walk a few feet down the hallway, spotting a man pushing what looks like a dumpster on wheels down the hallway. No regular person would be carting around something the color and size of a baby elephant so I approach him.
“Excuse me, do you work here?” I ask.
He rolls past the phone card machine and says, over his shoulder, “I work in the airport but not for the airport.”
Great.
The man wheels on and I turn back to the woman, whose nondescript face is paling.
“Can you please?” she says.
I am frustrated myself and want to snap, “Yes, I can, I’m trying.” Instead I press my lips into a smile.
Through some invisible transaction, her burden is now my burden, her grief my grief. Though I am a stranger to her, though she will never see me again, I am powerless to walk away. It would be like moving to a new town and leaving a pet behind. She wouldn’t understand.
Anyway, you don’t leave someone in need. I pace down the hallway and finally give up trying to find someone who works for the airport and make my way to the closest store. At the register a woman counts change and when she looks up I am startled to find she looks exactly like Mimi from the Drew Carey show. Bold blue eye shadow and eyebrows drawn in thin brown pencil frame her brown eyes and her lips are pursed into the shape of a heart. “Hi,” I say, resting my hands on the counter, “do you have the phone number for any airport offices? There’s a woman who doesn’t speak English and she paid money for a calling card that is stuck. I’m trying to get someone to open the machine.”
“Oh, that’s what was happening,” comes a male voice. Out from behind Mimi steps the man who was pushing the dumpster on wheels.
“Yeah. Is there any way you can help?”
He follows me into the hall where the woman I am helping in pushing her fingers against the mouth of the machine. “Okay,” he says, after taking a look at the machine, “The airport office won’t be able to do anything. There’s only one company that can open this machine. Let me see if I can find the phone number and you can call.” He gestures to a phone on the wall, and says, “that one’s free for airport use.”
I smile at him and turn to the lady.
“He is going to help us,” I say. “I’ll call and get the company to come open the machine.” I doubt she understands what I am saying to her and I cross my fingers that it will be that easy.
It isn’t.
When the man returns with a phone number I dial and come up with a harsh buzz in my ears. I grit my teeth and dial again to the same result. “Nothing,” I say to him.
“Maybe it’s disconnected,” he shrugs, and walks back into the store.
I decide to call the airport office. As the phone rings in my ear I signal to the woman that she should do as I do. I grab the machine and tilt it at a forty five degree angle and whack the metal back with the base of my palm. The woman does the same and the effort of it loosens the machine’s grip slightly, the plastic calling card sliding closer, but still just out of reach.
“You trying to jimmy the machine?” asks a man who has appeared for desk duty at the gate.
My cheeks blush crimson and I say, “Nope, just trying to get our money’s worth.” Where the hell was he when I needed him?
“Hello?” The other end of the line finally crackles to life and a man’s warm voice sends a shock of calm through my body.
“Hi. I’m trying to contact the company that sells International Phone cards. We have a machine here that’s stuck and I’m trying to help a woman get her card out.”
“Sure thing,” he says. “Let me put you on hold and transfer your call.”
“Thanks.” The line goes quiet and then starts doing the same buzz as before. I hang up the phone and dial the office again.
“Hi,” I say. “I’m the girl who just called. My transfer didn’t go through.”
“Let me try again.”
“Thanks.” Nothing.
The third time I call him back he says, “Hm, must be disconnected.” Duh.
The woman stands at the machine, still whacking away, every minute or so getting on her knees to try a different angle of attack. I turn away from her.
“Is there a store or restaurant or something right across the hallway from the calling card company? Maybe I can call there and someone can run across the hall and ask.”
“I’ll check.” The line goes quiet again and I give the woman my hopeful smile.
“Ma’am? Just another minute.” I hate it when people call me ma’am. I want to tell him, Tanya. I’m Tanya but he’s gone again so I turn back around.
The woman is growing tired in her efforts. I help her bang the machine again, but nothing comes and after all that, after twenty minutes and me still on hold, she says, “Thank you. Arragato.” She bows to me, this woman who looks Russian but has just spoken Japanese, and starts to walk away.
“Wait,” I call after her, “We’re almost there.” But her white t-shirt floats down the hallway and gets lost in the crowd. I wait on the line, not wanting to hang up on the kind man who is helping us.
His voice comes back a few minutes later. “Ma’am, I’m still trying to connect to someone.”
“She left,” I say, and I’m the one who feels abandoned now. She gave up. We were so close. “Thank you for your help,” I say, and hang up the phone.
Devoid of purpose now, I walk back to the store and offer my thanks to the man who tried to help. “No, thank you,” he says. “I hate it when people come to this country and get bad service. It’s bad for customer relations and global relations.” I’m not sure if it is really a global problem but I nod in agreement. “Anyway, I got her number and name, so if we ever do get the card or money back, I can send it to her.”
“Thanks again,” I say, and walk out of the store. I look at the desk and realize that my gate has changed. Quite possibly my flight was never supposed to go out of that terminal and I didn’t notice. I adjust my briefcase on my shoulder and walk down the long hallway to my next destination, pausing briefly at the machine to wonder why out of everyone’s faces the woman in white found faith in the back of my head. |
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| Letters to strangers |
[Nov. 1st, 2005|06:39 pm] |
Dear UCLA,
Please let me come to your school.
Love,
Tanya
Dear Old Man who ran over me in the supermarket in one of those motorized shopping carts,
I forgive you. Those things do look tricky to drive.
Regards to you and your dentures,
Tanya
PS. There was no one else in the store with you, so how did you get there in the first place?
Dear Trick-Or-Treaters,
I am glad you liked the Sour Skittles. I was worried at first that no one would eat them, because I am a chocolate fan at heart. Thanks for being cute. I also carved you jack-o-lanterns, but they got moldy. Next year I'll get the fake kind, okay? Sorry we ran out of candy. Don't eat everything in one night.
Yours,
Tanya |
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| doctor's office, van nuys |
[Oct. 11th, 2005|07:08 pm] |
I never know how to react when people tell me I remind them of someone they know. Do you shrug and say thanks? Politely raise an eyebrow and feign interest? What if the person they’ve projected onto you is just awful? Do you frown? How do you know?
This time it is a male nurse. My arm is held hostage by the blood pressure cuff and he’s got his stethoscope tucked under the fabric in an impossibly tight fit against my skin. He can’t find my pulse so he gropes the crease of my elbow, stretching fabric, rearranging Velcro, ripping it open, closed, until finally smile and “low.”
“Is that good?” I say and he doesn’t answer but puts a thermometer against my forehead, some new kind I’ve never seen before. He frowns slightly as he writes my numbers into a chart. I’m not sure if it’s a concentration face or that I’m just low again.
“That’s pretty cool I say. A lot better than the old fashioned way, especially for kids.”
“Oh completely.” He smiles now, enthused. “You know they used to do rectals for infants and the doctors would unknowingly tear their skin.”
Oh. Goody. I grimace, because really who wouldn’t. “That’s awful,” I say and he says, “It’s time to check your height.” I stand up and kick off my flip flops, curling my toes so he won’t notice the polish peeling off in red strips, because he is, after all, cute.
“It should be four eleven,” I tell him and he takes a measurement and shakes his head and says, “I have bad news for you.”
“No,” I put on an indignant smile, bat lashes. “Don’t tell me I’m shorter.”
“Four ten and a half,” he offers.
“Low,” I say.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“No.”
“Yep.”
“I would have said eighteen or nineteen. Damn.” Young.
“I’ll be glad one day. I’ll be carded till I’m forty.”
He smiles. “When I was, you know, like, sixteen, I would go into this store to buy beers. It was known all over cause they wouldn’t card. They always got in trouble too. Man, that store was closed more than it was open. But I was okay. Now I’m twenty nine and I shaved off the stuff on my face and I get carded all the time.”
I cluck sympathetically.
“Well,” he says, and leads me to a room with a pink door. “Wait here.”
He leaves and I smile, sit, jiggle foot, wait. On the wall there are posters in Spanish. Are you allergic to pollen, dust, indoor pets? Try Claritin. The paper is laminated, shiny with promises of good health.
Down the hallway I hear the female nurses say, “Hey Vincent,” and hear his voice. He mumbles something back and sticks his head in my room.
“Hi,” he says.
I smile, uncross and cross my legs, tilting my feet out of his view thinking, I need to paint my nails.
“You know,” he says, “you remind me of my ex girlfriend.”
“Do I?” I ask.
Sometimes people get this mysterious little smile on their faces and just say yes. You can tell they’re lost in thought and they’re seeing Not You. They’re thinking of adventures lived with Not You and they’re remembering all the idiosyncrasies and secrets of Not You. It’s unnerving. But Vincent leans against the doorway in his teal scrubs and says, “Yeah. I met her here, you know. She was in getting a pregnancy test and she was all cryin’ and upset and I sat there and calmed her down. It turns out she was. Pregnant I mean. She was freaking out ‘cause her ex-boyfriend had gone back to Mexico and he was the father and her mom just hated him. Couldn’t stand him. So my girl’s freaking out and I told her, ‘hey, just tell your momma it’s mine.’ That calmed her down a little. So then she and I started seeing each other. And she lost the baby so it worked out okay for her, I guess. But then her ex-boyfriend came back and they got back together. I told her it was okay. It was like, me and her had only been together for what, three months, and she had been with him on and off for three years. So I said don’t worry and she went back to him.”
What part of her does he see in me? Maybe it’s her smile.
Vincent looks at me, expectant. “Yeah, I guess those on-and-off relationships can be really hard. You get into cycles with people that are hard to break, even if they’re not healthy.”
I don’t think this is really what he wants to hear, or rather where he wants to build his conversation from because he says, “Yeah. But I mean damn, what is it with girls? You know, you got some guy saying he’ll be with you forever. Bullshit. They’re just saying it to get in your pants. Everybody knows it. Guys know it. Girls know it too. It’s just to get in bed with you.” At this point Vincent looks at the little examining table. Oh god, I bet they’ve had sex on the tables. I imagine the protective paper crinkling under the weight of bodies, a non-discreet yet unwilling third partner in the mess. I want to laugh but I try to look serious and say, “It’s not really satisfying.”
“Well,” he says, eyeing the table again, “it is. In the moment, I’m sure.”
“Yea, well I mean emotionally.”
“Yea, yea,” he says and all of the sudden he looks sad, looks down the hallway. “I still call her every now and then, to see how she’s doing. She’s okay. I guess as long as she’s happy…” His voice trails off and then he raps his fist against the door frame, once, resolutely. “Okay, well, the doctor will be with you soon.”
And he leaves, disappearing down the hallway to help translate for some Mexican patient. Vincent doesn’t come back. I sit, jiggle, and wait some more, alone now, having been measured against his past and, pound for pound, having somewhere come up short. |
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| Death Road Trip '05 |
[Jul. 7th, 2005|05:02 pm] |
Adventures of the past week:
On Friday I went to Ian's 4th of July work party at his boss's house on the beach. Literally. You walk out their back door and there's the ocean. It was nice to be there, even though I got really lost driving there (cough cough, Ian) hehe. I got to meet some of the people Ian works with and we had some really funny conversations about what we should do on the roadtrip we planned for the weekend. The winning suggestion: take pictures at the sign for Weed, California. Unfortunately in the next three days, 1600 miles, and countless hours in a brand new rental car, we didn't quite make it there. However, the weekend was awesome. To condense, I'll do bullet form:
Day One: Odds of death 79%
~ took the 101 north for 15 hours and no one killed each other. amazing
~ sightings: 1 midget (for good luck), 1 pirate, 1 hick who put weights on his dogs legs to make them bigger, 3 country fairs that we kept getting told to go to ("it's warm there" one crazy cashier advised me. of course it's warm, it's freaking California in July.)
~ saw the Golden Gate bridge and almost got blown off a cliff because of crazy winds
~ San Fransisco made me think of Valencia, the book about crazy vegan lesbians. All of the street names were familiar, but I'd never been, which was a weird feeling. It also made me think about Yelena, a Russian lesbian from Wisconsin who was fabulous because she lived without apologies. We should all be so brave. San Fran was also wonderfully fruity, complete with a rainbow tunnel as you left.
~ drove through redwood forests to arrive at our hostel
~ Liv Tyler's hippie twin ran the front desk and sold us chickpeas and rice, which Big Nick cooked up for dinner. Ian got the $.25 ramen. :)
~ Went to a supermarket, which was really crowded for the middle of the night, and bought booze to complete our meal
Day Two: Odds of death 86%
~ went to the beach across from the hostel after breakfast. took pictures of the black sand beach.
~ left and passed the Trees of Mystery, which featured a giant talking Paul Bunyon and his blue-balled ox
~ took the scenic drive through a part of the Redwoods National Park, hugged a few trees and took some pictures.
~ the scenic drive kicked up enough dust to cover the back windshield of our car, allowing us to write Death Road Trip '05 and draw some rabid animals and a skull and cross bones.
~ we start to notice the many bugs who have died on our front windshield.
~ we head to Lassen Volcanic Park, which is really freaking cool
~ stops in the park: Chaos Jumble, full of rocks from an avalanche, mountain peak (elevation 8,000 ft)- snow in July!, a rock left over from glaciers, beautiful blue lakes which probably contain something bad for you because they bubbled, sulphur springs that reeeeked.
~ coming down the mountain I tried not to have a heart attack
~ more hours of driving, made it to the Super 8 in Red Bluff. went to some weird diner for dinner and ate my second meal of waffles for the day.
~ more drinking and passing out to the South Park movie
Day Three (Fourth of July): Odds of death- skull and crossbones
~ drove home on the 5 (so much faster than the 101)
~ avoided angry drunk drivers, mini tornadoes, extreme heat which overheated cars around us, and made it home for dinner
Whew.
Today I also got my driver's license after a looong process. Wooo! It's official. Okay, too much writing. the end. |
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