The Cheshiregrrrl RantPage

I'm always suspicious when I don't have to wedge myself between two suited men. This morn, I was equally perturbed and exited upon landing my own window seat, but nevertheless reveled in the gloomy silence of the cloudy landscape about to whisk by me for the daily ride. My bubble soon burst when *Plop* *plop!* I looked up, then to a gentleman behind me with a knowing, expectedly disappointed sigh. Perhaps the Metro North was trying to provide an extra ambiatic feature to make up for its dirty tan walls, by providing rain INSIDE the train even though precipitation outside had ceased.

They had the nerve to collect money, while a dark stain of damp slowly creeps up my trousers from the puddle my feet are in. The actual wetness on my hair didn't bother me so much as the incessant projectile droplets ricocheting off the seat and into my temple.

Interior rain. Just add that to the list of addemities, with the urine-scented air, sporadic "hot-cars," and vibrating rides strong enough to give one whiplash.

What's more annoying than sloths that mosey down Fifth Avenue rather than walking at a regular pace? When they're swinging around thick spears with a protruding web of metal arms, shielded by taut vinyl octagons. Rain often sucks.

Grand Central Station:

"You are beautiful just the way you are."

right below:

"I wish I could say the same for you, but you're a bathroom stall in Grand Central Station."

eBay
craigslist
lonliness
avocados
remaining stationary
cereal


Right now, I'm resisting the urge to click on the link to buy Carmen Electra's 5-DVD striptease workout. "But," I rationalize to myself, "It's a graduation present to myself." Of course, it will be my fourth just-shy-of-$100 graduation presents to myself, plus, I'm the only øne thus far that's bought me a graduation gift (besides my Grandma, who slipped me a $20. Call me bourgeoise, but it's more insulting to get $20 than nothing). Furthermore, I'm not resisting the curiosity that moves me to reply to an ameature-porn classified. Where are my online friends to prevent me from doing so? Swig, click, raped.

I recall my junior high best friend's disgruntled single mother freaking out one day when a door in the house was locked. "You know how I feel about locked doors," she sneered at her daughter. Wasn't sure if she was just pissed off, or had some sort of traumatic association with being blocked from entrance.

I wondered today if I have a thing with locked doors. I am constantly locked out of my house, due to a combination of 1) my family being deaf 2) my family being disorganized and 3) me being ditzy and loosing keys/wallets regularly.

So I dug back into childhood, remembering how I used to lock myself in the closet and go nuts. But I think it's moreso an invisibility issue: the fear of being forgotten.

One day, when I was just a toddler, I disappeared. My faint memory is as such: no one is paying attention to me. I crawl all the way to the attic, then keep crawling until I reach a tiny corner where I wait and wait. Do I yell "Help!" ? Do I cry for my parents? All I recall is waiting to see if anyone noticed by absence.

My father recalls tearing apart the house looking for the daughter that was just under his feet. He calls and calls my name, to no avail. Finally, he finds me in the attic, on top of a huge ladder. He had no idea how I had gotten up there with my quaint size.

Further hiding included hiding under the bed and running away. That's what I use now if needed: I sneak down to a tiny wooded passage inbetween two streets on my block. Amidst the overgrown poison ivy and crushed beer cans, I prop myself on this pyramid of three jumbo concrete blocks and write.

Although with my father, it's easy to be invisible. Often when I call to check the locale of my sister, he's not even sure if she's in the house or not, despite being home all day. My mother, on the other hand, cannot be in the same forty feet of someone without yapping. The toll for entering the kitchen in the morning to get a cup of tea, if she's around, is listening to stories of my dog ("Riley heard something in the basement and went down there last night." silence.) or interviews.

I'm a stickler for social discretion. However, I am also a firm believer in cadidness. I do my darndest to greet each piece of confided information, no matter how gross, with an objective mind.

So on I go with why my day was uncomfortable.

I'll say it. Yesterday, I took my usual 3 tablets of herbal laxative to help move things along. However, after a huge crazy attack which resulted in a big bowl of cereal and handful of carob chips late at night, I proscribed myself a half a bottle of fiber tablets and several teaspoons of Expec mucus loosener. I decided laxatives were a lot easier on the system than forced reverse parastalsis, which I can never bring myself to succeed in.

Run to the john number one comes at six a.m. Too tired to think about it. 7:30 am, work time drawing nearer. I realize I have gas (I have stopped getting gas since I became addicted to water). I crawl into a yogic inverted fertile position to release.

Work. By this time, my gut has inflated with the pregnancy of a mushy mass of fecal matter and methane.

I know what you're thinking. It was my rational too. "Well cheshiregrrrl, it's a good thing you work in Rockefeller Center, where your public bathroom comrades are too dignified and busy to 1) care what anyone else is doing in the bathroom or 2) spend enough time in the bathroom to have a chance to draw judgments.

Reality. The sharp suited-women I honor in the halls are never in the bathrooms. There are four kinds of corporate women who accompany me:

1. Two Spanish-speaking women who lean and talk for minutes and minutes, occasionally doing dishes in the sinks. I wonder, are they not allowed to speak in the office? Do they not realize the rudeness in hovering around the stall yapping away about their hair color?

2. The bathroom-less. My reactionary joy at hearing the woman's handwashing, her cue to leave, dissolves when silence comes. Why anyone needs to do a full makeover in the afternoon beats me. I'd think she was homeless, except she has one of those brown fancy handbags with the gold letters and fleur-de-lis.

3. The ditzy girls. I thought it ended in junior high. Then high school. Then college. They're still going strong. How do they get jobs? Gabbers like the Spanish women. The difference: the ditzy girls are in and out, but they chat through the stalls.

4. The fashion-clueless reserved accountant. Loose sweaters and tapered pants. I don't mind them so much because I'm cooler no matter how much flatulence I echo through the tile bathroom.

My ultimate humility, for you, dear reader.

I suppose I had birthed all the waste possible. Nevertheless, that herbal laxative was still churnin' hard. The fart must have been over a minute long. Luckily, the sound of my urination may have covered it. I was too astounded to be embarrassed, though. It sounded like Donald Duck holding the long note in the Three Amigos theme song.

Oh but there's more. I knew it was time to cancel plans of my culturally enlightening music/film engagement that night when I let out a discreet toot, accompanied by a moist sensation.

Of course the instant I got home I was fine.

Two months ago, I would have taken this as a cleansing opportunity, a time to start anew with only wholesome foods in my system. But no. I ate my veggies, but enjoyed a real cookie too. Last night, that cookie would have sparked me to take a laxative. But this night.... I think I'll run instead.

Driving my Mom to work in the well-to-do town of Wilton. We cross a bridge from their sickeningly quaint "downtown" (two blocks long).

From the back, it looks like the khakied gentleman is riding a bike with his Golden Retriever trotting aside him. But as soon as he bumps over that misplaced sidewalk slab, it is clear that the apparatus flying from between his legs is in fact a unicycle.

I acknowledge the potential comedic factor, but don't initially react. My mom reports what she sees from the rear view mirror:

"Oh shit, poor guy. His balls must be in his front pockets now. He's pretending that spill was nothing, but now, oh yeah buddy, sit down on that curb. No, no one knows you're about to throw up and now infertile. Just tying your shoe, that's right."

Then, we can't resist. We crack up to no end.

"That's great, we're laughing, and that man's turning soprano," she sings out between laughs.

"You just don't see that everyday. I wish I could replay that to his colleagues."

The first words I heard today were : "Are you dead?"

Spoken to me by my mother.

l took my ear plugs out and she laughed in realization. I had put them in the night prior when one of those whiney gnats started swarming around the ophus of my ear. l had just succeeded in guiding a fly out of the room and had no patience to chauffeur out an invisible gnat as well. Still, that's never less than unassuring to hear from your own mother.

Apparently she had tried knocking 3 times, and panicked when she he heard no response. I'm usually an early riser, usually waking on a dime. My mother being a prodding woman, she was probably more curious than worried. My mother being not the best at logical phrasing, she asked the question with only one answer.

A well-versed friend of mine swapped favorite book titles with me. I suggested he read Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, and he assigned to me Frank Conroy's Stop-Time. Both of these books are memoirs of frivolous childhoods, with the protagonist narrators being quick-witted adventurous loners, not unlike Mr. Caufield.

Stop-Time brought me back to being a kid in the summertime. Riding bikes everywhere, chasing things until exhaustion, snacking on sandwiches, running away... the duties and recreations of childhood that have now, in my entering adulthood, devolved into exercise regimines, dieting, and therapy.

The history is told in a non-linear fashion, with memories popping up seemingly randomly. We jump back and forth through location and time, but the way Conroy structures it leads to deductive conclusions and adherence.

Like Catcher in the Rye, Frank describes social epiphanies with such candidness, including astute digestions of the ridiculousness of people: the kind of critiques many creative, brilliant minds reduce at some point. Unlike Caufield, Frank is more lighthearted, experimental, and confident in his findings. He meets these realizations at a much younger age as well. Caufield, on the other hand, if often very unsure of what to do with all the observations of injustice that he's acquired. Frank springs off of his desperate confusion, while Caufield gets stuck in it like a glue mouse trap. Or Goofy in Jello from Mickey and the Beanstalk.

Moments of awe from Stop-Time:

"The secretions of corrupted minds are the juices that nourish modern society, just as the blood of animals nourishes our bodies." -Frank's teacher, discussing the power of words

"Outside I regain my sense of direction and continue south. After a few steps the rhythm of walking takes hold of me again and it's as if I'd never stopped. For mile after mile my mind is empty. No, not empty exactly. Imagine a symphony orchestra responding to a suddenly paralyzed conductor by holding a single note on and on, forever, without change."
-I got into wandering when I lived in France last year. By myself. For hours. No agenda. Just walking. No productivity. Hoping to soak in everything? It did result in several key memories, (like stumbling into a chocolate seminar, chatting with a French couple that eventually wanted to take me back to their apartment, and being asked by a stranger if I could take off my shoes so he could photograph my feet) and an impeccable sense of Parisian navigation.

"On the street, out of nowhere, desire swept me away. I wanted to live. I wanted to see something beautiful. Or to die. Anything definite, anything clear, visible and tangible, like dying, or saving someone's life, or being kissed by Jean Simmons. Tears of frustration started in my eyes. Something strange started to happen. My body felt it first- warmth, a sense of something gathering, a feeling of being possessed by magical powers, as if I could make the parked cars rise in the air by simply willing it. Suddenly a tremendous force carried me away, some really immense, earth-shaking power igniting like the unexpected second stage of a rocket already in flight. I screamed in the street and started running, flat out, crossing the intersections without looking. At home, in the elevator, I bent over and ran my head into the wall again and again, stunning myself but feeling no pain, hearing the hollow boom echo down the shaft each time, hitting harder to increase the sound. At the fifth floor I go out and stood in the hall for a minute, trembling, my fists and jaw clenched, feeling the power race around inside me, burning out my nerves. I opened the door to the apartment. Jean and Mother were talking in the kitchen. I went to my room, closed the door, and sat down on the bed in darkness."

-I developed a heightened level of anxiety/insanity attacks post-France, prone to moments of unbearable self-destructive passion such as this. It's nice to see I'm not the only coocoo. Thanks, Paris.


"Sitting on the smooth board with my legs dangling down into the hole, I drummed my heels against the padded sides. The other alleys were dark, the catwalk deserted on a slow afternoon. I was lucky to be working. The long thunder started, gathered power, and exploded underneath me as I lifted my legs. Pins flew in all directions and the ball hit the rear padding with a heavy thump. I dropped into the hole, my hands and feet going into the light as if into a pool of water. I heaved the ball up onto the track and watched it roll down the slope to start the long journey back to the front. After clearing the gutter with my foot I jumped up on the board."

-Great ambiguous description! Such imagery! But guess what he's doing, and analyze the information given.


"French, which I'd failed three times in high school, was in fact a real language, spoken by real people. Europe existed."

-A familiar acknowledgement.

(Thanks for the literary trip, Corey)