Everything Happened | vol. 226
What I did on my work vacation
Nothing beats a little break, some built-in downtime between Big Things. I am more excited for the downtime than I am for the Big Thing usually. The summer between college and grad school was one of the more romantic and debaucherous phases of my life. I knew it was all about to end. It was the summer of wearing my bikini under my work uniform so that after I closed the restaurant, I could break into apartment complex pools with my friends and drink tumblers full of wine that had gotten too stale to serve. The next day, I’d find my uniform shirt still damp from pool water and I’d frantically point my big pink Conair at it, heating up the lingering smears of hummus in the process. I was already late for another shift.
That summer was like throwing a rager after receiving an eviction notice, but it was three months long. It was like shooting my shot because it was the last day of camp.
It’s not that I hadn’t been a dirtbag before that summer, it’s that it always was tightly braided with shame. I was supposed to be doing other things when I was finding the bottom of every pint glass, when I was doing my best Daryl Hall at karaoke bars. There were always papers to write, assignments to complete. Shouldn’t I be figuring out my “next step”? How do you get an internship? How do you get in shape? How do you keep on top of laundry? Those voices were quieted that summer, because I had a spot in a graduate program for the fall which was going to solve everything!! I could rest. I was done.
I was prevented from doing it by bad policy, but I always wanted to start my maternity leaves around 36 weeks. Not to build the crib and Dreft the baby socks, but because I wanted a second to stare at the wall before whatever it was that was going to happen to me. I wanted a moment at the top of the high dive, you know?
Speaking of maternity leaves, I’d taken two of them during my time at my most recent employer. My experience was that although everyone had ample notice that I’d be fucking off for a few months, people still decided to spend my final weeks, when I was at my most bulbous and irritable, crawling up my ass with dumb requests.
So because I’d “quit” (had a baby) twice already, I expected the same scenario. Instead, I put in my notice and it was like I died. I was dropped from meetings, emails dried up, I felt myself fading from the photo like in “Back to the Future.”
Do not misunderstand me, this was great. It gave me more time to plan my break! The ten days I’d have to myself before starting a new job. Because I’m middle-aged now, this did not mean substances or trespassing. My gauzy dream sequence visions involved house projects and trips to plant stores. You never expect spending $300 on gravel (with delivery!) to make you horny but that’s living the mystery, baby.
One day I took an entire carload of stuff to the landfill. Every place I’ve ever lived has required a byzantine process to arrange large item waste pickup. In the city, you could just leave shit on the curb and wait for someone to snatch it (tho your neighbors might hate you.) On multiple occasions, I tried to use the city’s web form to arrange a bulk pick-up which resulted in 0% success rate. When we moved out of our apartment in Victorian Village, we still somehow had a thousand-pound CRT television that even the e-recycling places didn’t want. It festered by the dumpster forever, until someone, probably a circus strongman?? claimed it at last.
Anyway, here in the recent past (rural America) you get rid of large items by hauling them to the landfill run by the county. You buy a book of paper “dump tickets” at the grocery store and you spend a ticket each time your vehicle passes through the gates. I had one ticket left when I tipped (among other things) the bucket car seat with click-in base over the wall and into the sea of moldy furniture. I thought I would need a moment, the tiny car seat that protected all of my babies is WASTE?!!, but then I forgot that it was poignant until I was already halfway home.
Because you can’t usually get a tattoo on short notice, and I already have bangs, I decided to do some science on my face. When I asked the esthetician to shoot beams of light at me to erase the past five years, she broke it to me that this would make my melasma even darker. Would I like to try a peel instead? Janine, you can peel off everything. You can peel me into 1986 and stop me being conceived. Peel me into an abalone shell: luminous, mute, eight miles off the coast of New Zealand.
The peel turned my skin orange for a few hours and I still had errands to run in the “city” (literally the Christiana Mall in America’s biggest whoops, the state of Delaware.) Like many women my age, with weight fluctuations and in my case, using titty as a piping bag for months and months at a time, I do not know what is happening with my boobs. Whatever breast tissue remains is being stored in an envelope of overproofed pizza dough, the saddest calzone. During my reproductive years, I wore stretchy bralettes and ill-fitting underwires that I never bothered to upgrade because all of this was temporary, wasn’t it? Except that even if you will someday die, it’s nice to have your boobs hoiked up to a reasonable latitude.
The Nordstrom was a ghost town. It had been so long since I shopped in a real department store that I kept having deranged thoughts, like admiring the SKIMS display and thinking how convenient it was to “see it all grouped together visually.” ???
What I really wanted was for a gruff older woman on staff to measure me with dressmaker’s tape she had on her person. The last time I experienced this was at a Victoria’s Secret in high school with my sister, memorable because despite being flat-chested, the math somehow worked out to me being a C cup. C was beyond my wildest dreams. C stood for Cexy.
That was a lifetime ago, literally it happened before some of my coworkers were born. I was nervous that the norms had shifted so much that asking a store employee to size me for a bra would be like asking the massage therapist to wipe my ass while she’s down there. Eventually, I spotted someone who was older than me and thus might remember these quaint times of titty-sizing on demand. Her name was obviously Tina and she didn’t flinch.
I went home, face still the color of southern dirt, with an armful of bras that made sense of my torso again. I also bought a pair of Citizens of Humanity jeans that cost roughly a car payment and that Nick later called “worse than JNCOs.” You have to be careful when analog shopping because you might accidentally try on jeans you can’t afford but that are like a well-fitting bra but for your ass!! (Btw Nick’s candor is permitted because 85% of the time he has Tex Avery eyes for me.)
And of course, I watched my television. There were big plans to read books (heard of ‘em?) at the beach or by the pool but guess what? It rained all fucking week. We finished Barry, caught up on Yellowjackets. We watched Bringing Up Baby, which reminded me of how it felt the first time I saw Annie Hall, before its enjoyment was tainted for me forever. We saw the new and I think final? season of Never Have I Ever. I did the thing I always do which is wondering aloud who is watching this anymore??? about Queer Eye before, well, watching the entire New Orleans season. Antoni explaining meal prep to a mother of 7? I could have missed out on that!!
Nick and I saw Polite Society (Peacock), which felt like Scott Pilgrim action and Fleabagian sibling torment by the creator of We Are Lady Parts. A teenage girl from a Pakistani family in London longs to be a professional stuntwoman and leverages her skills in a desperate mission to prevent her sister from getting married and leaving her behind. I’m pretty sure we clapped for the credit sequence, which rolled in daylight in our living room on a weekday. I think all of you should watch it, probably tonight.
Finally, I watched Deadloch (Prime), a comedy crime noir set in small town Tasmania. It usually takes me a while to warm up to a new series, but from the opening scene in episode 1, I was like…..wow I’m having so much fun. Yes, I suppose technically copaganda!! but mother loves a whodunit and mother is a longtime Australophile. I was hooked from the first episode in which a detective refers to autoerotic asphyxiation as “a bit of a tug job gone wrong, yeah?” and a crunchy community choir is shown rehearsing for a self-serious performance of “I Touch Myself.” I used to think depictions of semi-backwards small towns, where sophisticated big city cops are always being sent as punishment, were a bit exaggerated. And then I moved to a small town.
Then I started my new job, which I expected to feel like dying but it’s actually so interesting and normal and sane and I like it😭😭😭
yr mate,
Evie
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Love the jnco butt bra jeans for you 👏
ps how legendary was that NOLA frat house episode