Irritating things this week
by V.E. on April 12th, 2008
filed under personal
I am in an easily-irritated mood. I don’t think the incidents below would usually happen… or, rather, I wouldn’t be nearly as ticked off by them in so short a period of time. I’m a patient person, something I can say with relative confidence. But even I have limits.
Man on the Subway
New York subway proselytizers have this annoying habit of waiting until the subway doors have closed before delivering “the Word of God” to the rest of the hapless passengers; with all the exits effectively sealed (at least until the next stop, which can be a while, depending on the circumstances) these people literally have a captive audience to whom they may preach. These subway preachers are invariably men; I’ve never seen a woman proselytizer on the subway, anyway.
Well, this guy was no different. As soon as the doors shut, he started in with “Hallelujah; praise the Lord Jesus Christ, creator of Heaven and Earth” blah blah blah. Normally, it doesn’t bother me, but I was already having a not-so-good day, so I just bit my lip to restrain myself from screaming. But after he’d spoken for a whole three or four stops, he said, “And ‘lo, most of God’s children do not want to hear God’s Word. Shame! For they are shameful and sinners in the eyes of the Lord and listen only to Lucifer, the Devil.”
And I said, “If you think we’re all going to hell because we’re not listening anyway, will you please just let us have this train ride in peace?” Apparently that doesn’t happen often (that is, someone actually responding to him) because he just stopped and looked at me like I was the nutty one. He sorta tried to continue after that, but I think he lost his stride/mojo/what-have-you. So, he got off at the next station to wait (I presume) for another train with fewer back talkers on it.
The Dog, Buddy
Buddy, Eddie’s sausage-shaped rat terrier, has no manners whatsoever. He’s housebroken, but that’s about as far as it goes. Eddie feeds him from his own dishes and then complains when he begs at the table. Everything Eddie eats, Buddy gets to eat some of, too, and that’s fine, I guess, except he (the dog) thinks he can eat my food also. Plus, Eddie has the nerve to complain that Buddy is fat (he is), even though cutting out all the “people food” in Buddy’s diet would pretty much rectify that problem—and Eddie knows it.
Couple of days ago, I was playing Oblivion and I had a drink next to the sofa on the floor. It was cranberry apple something, I think, but that doesn’t really matter. Usually, when Buddy comes near and Eddie or I says, “Buddy, no!” or something, he backs off and doesn’t eat/drink the thing he was eyeballing. Today, not so much. In fact, he wouldn’t stop drinking out of my cup, even after Eddie threatened to hit him (not something I condone, by the way). Buddy’s the kind of dog who understands when Eddie says something like that, but at that time it was all in vain. I just hope the cran-apple whatever was worth it.
Eddie’s Impatience, “Helping” and “Teasing”
I learned in high school that my father used to tease me when I was a kid. I don’t remember this, and my mom told me why. She said, “Well, he was worried that teasing you might negatively affect your development, so he stopped.” And I am so grateful to my dad for that. I think it would’ve hurt me, but he had the foresight to not tease and I grew up to be a less defensive and guarded, I think, because of it.
Well, Eddie, my roommate, isn’t the most patient or sensitive man on the planet. In many ways he reminds me of a friend I had in junior high, Emma. Emma turned me on to HTML and website creation, among other things, but that’s not really why I remember her. Alison, my best friend in late elementary school and junior high, was friends with her first. We all had the same PE class period together, so we all changed into our PE uniforms at the beginning of class (and out of them at the end of class) in the same area. One day, Emma came over to Alison and said, “You should really wash your hair. It looks kinda grimy right now.” She was just trying to be helpful, but Alison was so offended that she refused to be friendly (much less be friends) with Emma for the rest of the year. To be sure, Emma could’ve been more tactful in her delivery of information, but I honestly think that her heart was in the right place. She wasn’t trying to be mean; I think she just cared enough about Alison to try to help her out, tactful or not.
In a lot of ways, Eddie’s like that. He’s well-meaning for the most part, but his style is total crap. He’ll say, “You should vacuum your room”—as if I haven’t noticed that already—or, “When are you going to do your laundry?”—as if him asking me is going to make me go do it. Just because I’m young enough to be his daughter doesn’t mean I am his daughter. In fact, if I were his daughter, I’d much more vocal about all the crappy things he tends to do without realizing that not everyone is like him. But I’m not, so I don’t say anything. I would like the same courtesy.
Eddie is a nice guy in many ways. He’s taken me out to dinner numerous times, paid for a lot of the groceries which I’ve had the luxury to eat, and set up my room and the apartment so they’re actually good to live in. I pay my part of the rent, but I don’t pay utilities, I don’t do much (if any) housework, and I don’t have to tell him where I’m going or when I’ll be back when I go out. The problem is that he knows all that, too, and when he’s angry he’ll pour on the guilt and use that stuff to justify himself. I keep telling him he doesn’t have to do that stuff for me—I am just his roommate, after all—but that doesn’t seem to get through to him.
One of our main rubs is The Dishes. By that I mean: he hates dirty dishes left in the sink. He’s so psycho about it that he’ll clean the dishes before even eating the food he cooked in them. I’m the kind of person who will do the dishes when the sink is full and I can’t find a clean fork. That’s not acceptable for him, and I understand that. For the sake of cleanliness, I get it. So we made a deal that I would do the dishes once per day and he wouldn’t bug me about doing them. Unfortunately, he hasn’t lived up to his end of the bargain. If he gets home and their are dirty dishes in the sink, he’ll complain. He gets home at 2:30 PM… there’s plenty of day left for me to hold up my end of the bargain (which I would, if he just tolerated it and left the dirty dishes there for me to clean, which he never does). So, he’ll go into the kitchen and say, “Viannah, Viannah, Viannah” in a “I’m so tired of this” kind of way and then I’ll hear the water running and the next time I go in there, the dishes will be clean.
My thoughts on this are: Great; if he wants to do my dishes, then great. Less work for me. His thoughts seem to be: Why doesn’t she do the dishes after she’s finished using them? GAH! We agreed that I would do the dishes once per day. I will, if I ever get the chance to do them before he does. I’ve learned from experience that when you’re living with another person (or with other people), the person with the lowest “yuck tolerance” level will end up doing more of the dishes, more of the dusting, and more of the laundry. This isn’t because everyone else is out to get that person, or make him/her angry with them, or anything like that. It’s just because they can tolerate a dirtier house/living area for longer. One person’s “dirty” could be another person’s “seems just fine to me.” If Eddie was patient enough to wait for me to do the dishes, I would do them. Sheesh.
Plus, he calls me “Diana” even though he knows my name and how to pronounce my name correctly and even though he knows it annoys the crap out of me. I hate teasing, especially the kind that’s just meant to piss someone off. It’s one thing if someone says to me, “You’re so nerdy; you actually dress up in anime characters’ costumes??” because I agree with that statement… I am nerdy in a lot of ways. That kind of teasing doesn’t bother me so much because it doesn’t go against something I’ve specifically asked for and it doesn’t hit a tender/defensive spot in my mind. But calling me “Diana” or “Vee-anna” when you know what my name is and how to say it just makes me so mad. It’s not really funny. Really, it’s not.
06 Why I write poetry
by V.E. on April 12th, 2008
filed under writing
[This is the first draft of the sixth part of my Master's thesis/book, Confession.
Comments and questions are always appreciated.]
Bennett doesn’t believe in unrhymed, unstructured poetry. He says it’s just uppity prose. Someone who deigned to call herself a poet, he says, wrote a paragraph and decided to break it into random lines and call it a “poem” because she didn’t want to have to fill the page with prose of substance. Or worse: she couldn’t. Bennett doesn’t argue with winning, though, and he admits it.
I won an award in college for “Looking out the front window of 6A”. It’s not a poem with end rhyme (according to Encyclopedia Britannica Online, that is: “rhyme used at the end of a line to echo the end of another line”) or meter (the “beat” of the lines). But—and please excuse my tooting my own horn, here—it’s pretty good, nevertheless. When I mentioned it to Bennett, he said exactly that: “Well, I can’t argue with winning.” He smiled and kissed my forehead and went back to reading his usual menagerie of online comics and forum postings.
I’ve also struggled with what poetry is… Or rather, I have struggled with it; Bennett has not. Once, very near the end, he picked me up at Port Authority and went with me to a job interview. While I was interviewing in my uncomfortable business clothes, he waited in the lobby, writing. When I emerged, hopeful and anxious, he kissed me hard on the lips as if to reassure us both and said, “I’ve been writing.”
Glancing over his magazine, the white space in which he’d hen-scratched some lines, I asked, “Poetry?”
He nodded.
“That’s nice,” I said. I knew he wouldn’t show it to me; he never did.
He stuffed the magazine into his bag and we stepped into the June heat.
Later, after arriving at his parents’ place on the Upper West Side, he asked me how long I’d be staying. I knew he’d been having trouble with his family about his (lack of) work prospects. I said, “As long as you need me to stay.” He nodded, frowning.
I told his parents I was visiting for my birthday, which was partially true. At the end of the week, Bennett’s father pulled me aside and said, “Viannah, you’re always welcome here; you know that. But your birthday was five days ago. What else are you here for?”
“I think you should talk to your son about that,” I said. “I’m here for him.”
He nodded, frowning.
————
I was wearing a thrift shop steal when he finally told his parents he’d been lying to them about looking for work. In reality, and put simply, he hadn’t been looking. It’s funny what you remember, isn’t it? I was an impostor in the meeting, and I could feel it.
My steal was a flowing skirt that fell just below the knees. My best friend, Daylin, had taken me to this cute thrift shop on the Lower East Side and I’d bought it without even trying it on—always a gamble—for a non-refundable $20 and change. It gathered at the horizontal seams so that when I spun around, the skirt splayed out like a flower. I loved it. Made of Army camouflage-colored linen and embellished with gold sequins all across the hem, I felt like a Romanian gypsy when I wore it. The sequins, however, made it impossible to walk quietly. The skirt brushed the sequins together and twinkling sounds echoed every move I made.
I was painfully aware of this fact the night Bennett had this Talk with his parents. Every time I breathed, their eyes told me I wasn’t wanted. And my thrift shop skirt wasn’t helping. I sat on the floor next to Bennett’s chair—we were in the living room—trying to be as small and inconspicuous and unobtrusive as possible. His mother and father sat facing us on the sofa.
Bennett’s mother, Chris, is a blonde 5-foot tall firecracker who likes seltzer water with dinner and a couple of screwdrivers afterwards to unwind. Her father wanted a son and upon her birth named her Christopher accordingly. From what I’ve been told, the familial relationship went downhill from there.
Jeff, Bennett’s father, is a well-meaning and concerned advertising guru parent. He fascinates with tales of the psychology that goes into getting people to buy things—getting consumers to consume, as it were. If he hasn’t eaten in the last couple of hours, steer clear: his metabolism makes quick work of his usual congeniality and turns him into a headache-stricken grouch.
I don’t remember their temperaments that night; I just remember feeling like I was forced into a soap opera rerun. Bennett and his parents had had this conversation before exactly, and then I was a part of it, too. I don’t know what it was any of them were doing wrong that they had to have the “I’m sorry I lied I’m not actually looking for a job but that will change this time I promise” talk more than once, but it was apparent to me that communication was being missed and all the talking hadn’t included much listening or understanding.
Chris was practical about the revelation: “Well, what can we do tomorrow that will help? That’s the first step.”
Jeff was more heartbroken. “But, Bennett, why? It’s not a hard thing to do, is it? To look for work? Why aren’t you? I don’t understand.”
I held Bennett’s hand. I knew it was devastating for him to let down his father. Jeff expected and hoped so much for Ben, and least according to Ben, and his son seemed only to fail. Bennett had dropped out of college twice, dropped out of paramedic training halfway through, and still wasn’t looking for any kind of work at all.
Later that evening, Ben and I were spooned together on his twin bed with 600-count Egyptian cotton sheets. It was luxurious and warm. He was breathing easier than the night before, though not by much.
“That’s why I write poetry,” I said quietly. I half-expected him to already be asleep.
After a moment, he said, “I didn’t ask.”
“I know,” I replied, “but I know you want to know why.”
“Why? Why you write poetry?”
“Yes,” I nodded into the pillow, “because I’m afraid of disappointing the people who love me.”
Bennett turned over to face me. “That’s why you write poetry?”
I shrugged. “Because I have to. I can’t not write it. I’ve tried.” I paused, “Your dad just wants you to succeed, you know.”
“Yeah, everyone says that,” he sighed.
“Well,” I continued, “when you find something you have to do, like I have, the only way you can disappoint him is by not doing it.”
Bennett was silent.
“He’s anxious for you to find the thing you can’t live without—so you can be happy,” I said.
