Small Town Saturday Night

I had occasion to be out of the house (gasp) last Saturday evening (double gasp), so I hit up the bookstore (GA--oh wait, no, that’s totally something Elizabeth would do on a Saturday night. Never mind, nothing to see here, carry on.)

For the last several years, this particular bookstore has been the only large one in the area. We used to have a Borders--which went tits-up in 2011--and two Barnes & Nobles, both of which closed for lack of revenue. One I know was in a lousy spot and didn’t have much traffic. The second one, though, was bang in the middle of a bustling downtown area, so I don’t know what happened there. I do know of one small independent bookstore a few towns over which has been in existence for over 40 years. It’s a great store, but out of the way for me and as a result I visit it sparingly. What I’m getting at, here, is that we don’t have a lot of bookstores, I don’t go out a lot on Saturdays, and, having done those things in combination last Saturday night, I have Thoughts-with-a-capital-T.

The first thing to say is that the store was bustling. Not ‘one week ‘til Christmas’ bustling, but definitely busy. Even if the people were only in there while they waited to be paged for their table at the restaurant next door, they were there. In a bookstore. There were families and couples and old people and groups of school-aged kids and weirdo singles like me, and everyone was looking at books or book-related things. I heard the cutest conversation between a group of girls who were somewhere between 11 and 13:

“I need weird plots!”

“Like [book]?”

“No, weirder!”

“Like [book]?”

“No! Weirder!”

“What about [book]?”

“Weirder than that. The weirdest!”

I have no idea what her personal rubric for weirdness was, but I was all for whatever she thought was weird because apparently weird made her happy, and kids who are happy with their book choices are more inclined to read, and that is a Very Important Thing. Personally, I was looking for my own weird books and walked away with an $8 copy of Umberto Eco’s How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays.*

There is constant Internet shrieking these days about the death of small towns/businesses/downtown areas/”Whatever happened to community?!”/et-the Millennials-killed-it-cetera. To a point, yes, okay, there’s a certain level of truth to that.** I have experienced first-hand the death and attempted resurrection of a small town’s downtown. Well, the death portion, anyway. The resurrection I got second-hand from my mother while I was away at college who would explain to me in great detail how they were attempting to turn downtown Gilroy into Los Altos--and failing miserably. To be honest, I find it ironic that the screaming about how we’re losing touch with our communities because we’re so busy being on the Internet happens on the Internet. If you’re as worried about it as you say you are, get off the web and go to the local coffee shop instead--and I don’t mean Starbucks!

Let’s put these things together, shall we? Last Saturday night I simultaneously experienced two things that have been put on the ‘Endangered’ list by Internet pundits: an actual, physical bookshop that was full of people, and a busy, thriving downtown area. Two things that everyone is screaming to the high heavens are gone for good, will never come back, we’re doomed to a life of nothing but Amazon and we’ll never leave the house again...I dunno, I kinda feel like maybe, just maybe, things aren’t quite as dire as all that. Maybe. I mean, the world is still a garbage fire, horrible people are making things worse, and you can’t move for all the pointing fingers, but I saw a community last Saturday night. Maybe it was a unicorn, who knows? But maybe we should all be prying our eyes away from the shiny, hypnotic screens a little more and looking around, because apparently, things are still happening.



*Dammit, I should have looked for Bulgakov. If y’all haven’t read The Master and Margarita, you’re missing out. Come to think of it, that would have been a great recommendation for the little girl looking for weird plots...if she had been about ten years older.

**Except all that “What will the Millennials kill next?” hogwash. We just have different priorities, m’kay? And all y’all who are bitching at us need to take a step back and look long and hard at why our priorities are different. You might notice that it’s due, in large part, to what an unholy shitshow you’ve created for us to have to live with. Now go to your rooms and think about what you’ve done, and don’t come back out until you can be rational.

That’ll be $12,493.12 after your coupon from the Sunday paper

Hi there, welcome to ‘Build-A-Girlfriend’©®™! Have you used our services before? Oh wonderful, then you’ll be working from a clean slate. Come with me and I’ll walk you through the process.

We’ll start with a body. All of our Girlfriends™ are custom 3D printed to your specifications. We have three models to start from--slender, average, and A Little Bit More to Love™--and you can play around with measurements and so forth here on this tablet. Each slider button is labeled with the corresponding body part, so, for instance, if I slide this one labeled ‘left foot’, you’ll see that the corresponding foot on the image gets larger and smaller. You can scroll to the right to access all the buttons for all the body parts.

Hm? Oh, it turned red because you maxed out that setting for that body model. If you try to make the breasts any bigger, your Girlfriend™ will be unable to maintain posture. Basically, she’ll fall over forward all the time. Actually, if you look in the upper-right-hand corner--do you see that little flashing exclamation point? That’s telling you that if you want to keep the breasts that size you’ll need to balance them out at a lower point in the body. Yes, in this situation shoppers traditionally choose to enlarge the model’s posterior. Once you hit equilibrium the exclamation point will stop flashing.

Well, you chose the slender model. Those are the most extreme measurements that model can support. If you want them bigger you’ll need to go up a model size, unless you want to pull her around everywhere in a little red wagon.

Yes, you will have to sacrifice the waist measurement if you go up a model size.

There are ways she can be dressed to accentuate the parts of her body you perceive as most important. There’s a pamphlet in the literature we send home with you. So would you like to try the average model, or…?

Sticking with the slender, okay. If you’re done with the body we can move on. Click the icon that looks like an eye and you’ll find the page with facial features. You can choose from the different categories--eyes, lips, and so forth--and adjust the size the same way as you did with the body. You know, bigger eyes for that doe-eyed Disney effect, Angelina Jolie lips, that sort of thing.

No, we’ll get to color at the end. There’s a final step that lets you tweak anything you’re not happy with after coloration. We’ll do hair next. Here’s the list of length, styles, and textures--no, no, that page is for hair in places on the body other than the head.

I think you’d be surprised, actually.

My opinion? Well personally I prefer the mid-length wavy, but ultimately it’s up to you--after all, she’s going to be your girlfriend--however, we do have the capacity to change the style later if you change your mind.

All set? Good. At this point I’d like to draw your attention to the list of add-ons at the left side there. For a nominal fee you can add a smattering of freckles, a cowlick that makes her look extra endearing when she’s all ruffled up first thing in the morning, a custom-designed birthmark…

An excellent choice. The freckles are very popular at the moment. And of course you can always come back and change them if you get tired of them. I’ll leave you to select your colors now. You can meet me back at the desk when you’re done and we’ll choose personality traits.


…


Oh, she’s lovely! I’ll get the printer set up while you browse the list here of available personality traits. All of our Girlfriends™ come with a basic pre-programmed personality, but you’re able to pick three traits you would like to have enhanced.

Yes, just three. We’ve found that any more than that overloads the Girlfriend’s™ core processor. If it helps, our most popular traits for enhancement are “Sense of Humor”, “Hero Worship”, and, “Devil in the Sheets”.

I’m ready when you are. Just click “Finish” for me? Thank you. While she’s printing I’ll ring you up if you don’t mind. Let’s see here. One slender with extra large top and bottom, Keane eyes, Orange County Beach Babe™ color package, add freckles--that’s an extra $50, by the way. And you chose “Sense of Humor”, “Hero Worship”, and--oh. “Curious”. We don’t see that one shift a lot. They’re thinking of discontinuing it, actually. Could you insert your card, please? Right, and sign the screen...thank you very much. If you’d like to sit in the waiting room I’ll bring her out for you when she’s ready. Help yourself to the complimentary coffee!


***


I’m back on the internet dating circuit, can you tell? ::grumbles::

I didn’t even buy another lousy t-shirt.

But I did buy new sunglasses. I figured my old ones were due for retirement after ten years of service.

I was on vacation last week! With my parents. Because that’s how exciting my life is. We were in Hawai’i--the Big Island--and I now have a tan in January which feels oh-so-wrong and oh-so-right all at the same time. I mean, the tan came from me falling asleep on a chaise lounge and getting broiled while waiting for the Parental Units to show up, so I did accomplish at least one thing on the ‘white girl on vacation’ checklist. I was very crispy for a few days.

But you don’t want to hear about my sunburn, you want to hear about all the fascinating things I saw and did and ate and whatnot!

Firstly, I would like to say that I have a new saved search on Zillow for the north end of the island because it is gorgeous and if I get the chance I’m packing up and moving! The relaxed lifestyle is good for my blood pressure and the hiking and swimming are good for my...everything else. I’m pretty sure I can cancel out all the macaroni salad with excessive amounts of tropical fruits, right? Right?! In any case, this was my first visit to Hawai’i and I’m really pissed I hadn’t made it over there before. (My parents had been before without me. Rude.)

When you fly into the Kona/Kailua side of the island you sort of expect to be greeted by Marvin the Martian--you might as well be landing on the moon. All that volcanic rock is a surprise if you’re not prepared for it. Then again, I was prepared and it was still surprising, so what do I know? On the shuttle ride to the condo my dad had rented for us I learned that the island has herds of feral goats which were introduced in a similar fashion to the mongoose. Also, fun fact, the mongoose was introduced to eliminate the black rat, but the plan failed because no one took into account that with the rats being nocturnal and the mongoose (Mongooses? Mongeese? WTF is the plural of ‘mongoose’?!) being diurnal, their little rodent schedules didn’t align well for hunting purposes. I tried on several occasions to get a photo of a mongoose but failed miserably because they’re quick little boogers. I’m still disappointed about this.

I did make a fantastic discovery on this trip, however, which is that if I snorkel while floating on a boogie board (or similar contraption) I don’t panic! I love marine life--if you’ve ever seen me in the same place as a tide pool, you know just how much--but that whole complete loss of your auditory sense when you’re under the water gives me an instant anxiety attack. You can’t see behind you, but that’s normal enough. The fact that you can’t hear anything that might be approaching you from out of your line of sight just gives me the jibblies. No, thank you. Of course, it’s hard to see interesting aquatic critters if you don’t stick your head in the water, so it was always an internal argument--until now! The fish there are gorgeous and colorful and BIG, holy crap. We had been seeing Moorish Idols (think the angel fish from Finding Nemo) in close to the shore and they were the size you would expect, but it turns out that they can be as big as a dinner plate. That was a surprise for sure. Oh, and we did see a turtle quite close up, but not snorkeling. It was while we were wandering around on the lava rocks. The turtle just happened to be having a snack in the shallows.

I just consulted my notes on the trip to help me remember more things to tell you, but the way I wrote the notes made me giggle so I’m going to give you the original, leaving out the mundane bits.

~~~
Hawai’i 1/5-1/12/2019
1/5
Thoughts upon landing:

• “Welcome to the Moon!”
• Where’s Marvin? (The Martian)
• My nasal passages haven’t been this happy in weeks.
• This is the weirdest airport I’ve ever been to.
• This is also the coolest airport I’ve ever been to.
• People here are nice. And calm.
• OMG COOL PLANTS!
• Saffron finches are totes adorbs.
• I wonder what the real estate market is like?
• Arrived, shuttled, dropped cases, went to beach, did not feed eels, got sunburned.

1/6

• Petroglyphs are porn.
• This Nikon* is complicated.
• GUAVA MALASADAS ARE LIFE.

1/9

• Hilo is kinda grungy, but I kinda don’t care.
• Guava malasadas are still life.
• There is a malachite specimen at the Lyman Museum that looks like a giant green stone dildo.

1/10

• Met a very vocal black kitty on the way back from the hot tub.

1/12
Flight home:

I swear people don’t know how to unplug anymore The guy next to me has his phone and a tablet, and I can see several other devices of varying size and primary duty from where I’m sitting. The in-flight entertainment is all in an app which you can download or you can rent a tablet from them for $10 which is preloaded with movies etc.

People, it’s a four-and-a-half hour flight. Enjoy being off the grid for a while. Read a book. Take a nap. Write. Color. Do word puzzles. Talk to each other.

Good grief.
~~~

I’ll leave you with a weird little experience we shared as a family at a kitschy store on the last day while we were wasting time waiting for our flights. My dad loves Hawai’ian-style shirts and was flicking through a rack when he said, “Oh, holy--look at this!” and pulled out a shirt to show us. Now, back in nineteen-diggety-doo, my...great aunt and uncle(?), TV and Uncle Muck (For real, just go with me on the names, ok?) took a trip to Hawai’i. They brought back a bolt of royal blue fabric with a white Hawai’ian pattern to my grandmother, and she made shirts for my dad and his four younger siblings. The shirt my dad had pulled off the rack, though on closer inspection not a dead-ringer, was eerily similar. The shirt was duly documented for posterity, and someday, when I feel the urge, I’m going to go out to the shed and pull the original shirt out of its box to compare.

I had a nice week off.



*My maternal grandfather was a very decent photographer, and my mom held onto his Nikon after he passed, but she never got around to using it so now it’s mine. And it is, in fact, complicated.

Here We Go Again

Hello, 2019. Here you are. It’s time to start over, start fresh, start anew.

It’s time to make resolutions! To look at where we went wrong last year and learn from it! To do things differently this time around!

…

Pppppppfffffffftttttttt, HA! Oh, that’s so cute.

Some of you may remember from this time last year my particularly dismal view of the ever popular ‘New Year’s Resolution’. To give you a brief recap, I think they’re a ridiculous societal contrivance brought about to make people think they’re goal-setting or being proactively self-improving or whatever other arsingly pep-talkingly vomitworthy linguistic drivel today’s ‘influencers’ like to throw at the viewing masses.

Okay, I suppose that’s a bit harsh. It’s not the concept that annoys me so much as the emphasis that gets placed upon it. It’s just so contrived. “Hey, this arbitrary date we determined to mean something is happening, let’s all be sure to make promises to ourselves that after it we will do things differently--and this time we mean it! For real this year! Really really!” I can’t name a single person I’ve ever known who has made a New Year’s resolution and stuck to it. I’ve known plenty of people who have given it a solid try with the best of intentions, but even the most determined humans are exactly that--human. We try, and we don’t always succeed. In fact, I’d say we don’t succeed far more often than we do. And the real cop-out with New Year’s resolutions is the attitude that if (when) you fail, you can just shrug and say, “Oh well, I’ll do better next year.”

::bangs head repeatedly on desk::

I harped on this last year, too. You don’t have to wait. What’s the point in waiting? If you really wanted to succeed at whatever it is that you resolved to do or be on January first when it was the expected thing to do, you wouldn’t roll over and play dead mid-March. You would stand back and say, “Well, I have lapsed in my resolution, but I am human, and I forgive myself. I will return to this thing, but perhaps with adjusted goals or an adjusted timeline, and after I give myself a short break because doing this thing has obviously worn me out in some way and I need to reevaluate its effect on my life.”

Resolving to do things for yourself or for others should be a continuous thing. Between mid-October and January 1st there is a huge uptick in charitable donations because there is such an emphasis put on it by commercial outlets. You should take care of you and, as best you can, take care of others all the time. Please repeat after me:

“I do not have to wait until next year to do things. There is no law that says that I cannot do these things right now.”

Obviously there may be various reasons why ‘right now’ isn’t an ideal time to start something--perhaps you need to wait until your next paycheck comes so that you have the cash on hand, or until after your kiddo goes back to school so that you have the freedom to be someplace at 9am on Thursdays. These are perfectly practical reasons to wait to do something, and I applaud your forethought. Just don’t let your practical reasons evolve into some sort of hyperbolic practicality monster that lords over you and makes you wait until you have ::Dr. Evil voice:: one million dollars in the bank before you can put your money into things that have meaning to you, or tells you that you can’t possibly do anything extracurricular for yourself until your child is an adult because what if the school calls while you’re doing it?

Save your money, but don’t be afraid to splash out a little on yourself.

Do what you want in the time you’ve got. If the school is going to call, they’re going to call anyway, and there’s no point sitting around waiting for it to happen ‘just in case’. Go do the thing and deal with interruptions as they happen, not before.

I was attempting to find a really good Twitter thread from author Chuck Wendig to quote here, but I actually got nauseated from all the scrolling while searching for it so rather than yak on my phone screen I opted to give up on that angle and switched to the ol’ Googlemachine, which yielded this:

“OKAY SERIOUSLY FOLKS I’M CALLING THIS “MAKE STUFF MONDAY,” AND NOW I’M GOING TO GO MAKE STUFF

YOU GO MAKE STUFF TOO OKAY

DO THE THING

CARVE THE WORDS

DRAW THE PICTURE

SING THE SONG

WRITE THE POEM

MAKE STUFF”

If I remember correctly, this was a portion of the thread I was looking for to begin with. Thank you, Mr. Wendig, for your all-caps encouragement to “DO THE THING”. I now encourage all of you to go forth and “DO THE THING”. Do it now, but not because it’s January. Do it because you want to do it. Or because you need to do it. Make the plan and “DO THE THING”. If you want to do a different thing in July, DO THE DIFFERENT THING IN JULY.

Can you imagine all the things you could do if you just did them instead of waiting until the socially-approved timestamp?

“DO THE THING”!