heels Over the past two weekends in a row, a parent of a friend has passed away. I’ve spent the last two Tuesdays in a row at funerals. I hate to be superstitious because I always think of swarthy women with hairy moles, wearing burlap scarves and giving people the evil eye, and I can appreciate science and all that it has done for us (iPods are a great invention, after all, as is laser hair removal) but man, I admit that I’m approaching the upcoming weekend with a little trepidation.
This week’s funeral was for a truly incredible man who was heavily involved in local activism. I think I’ve remarked before that I feel like I really get my friend CC because she and I had very similar hippy childhoods, and so at her father’s funeral, I kept seeing glimmers of the aged faces of my own adolescence, one filled with hemp and Greenpeace and peace rallies. I was eight when I got my first sliver from a picket sign. They were always made from the shittiest wood around, usually stolen from construction sites and road markers. That particular sign protested violence against women. If you don’t think that marks a kid, you’re wrong.
I sometimes wonder if Generation X isn’t too jaded to get involved, to support a cause we know is impossible. I wonder if our hippy parents had any idea of what they were creating when they sent us off to school with sprouted hummus sandwiches and carob chip guerrilla cookies. Except that we figured the cookies were named for large apes, not men wearing bandannas and Che Guevara t-shirts.
Afterward, I was talking to another activist that I had known when I worked for the homeless shelter. She asked what I was doing now and I explained that I worked in the private sector rather than for a charity. She told me about how much everything has changed at the homeless shelter since I left and then she said ‘You should go back! It hasn’t been the same since you left.’
It was like looking into the headlight of an oncoming car. I think I actually gulped as though I were in a comic strip, with a little word bubble hanging above my head. While it was a great job for the resume and for the soul, the pay was laughable (according to my Social Security report, I made $9K in 1996, working 20 hours a week as well as weekends as a weekend retreat coordinator at a summer camp) and the only benefit was a free tuberculosis test and first pick at the unusable donations (which is where I got my first edition copy of Catcher in the Rye). I did my four years for the good of mankind. Let a fresh-faced college sophomore coast on their job title while they worry about being stalked in the parking lot by their community service assignees. And maybe I am jaded. Or maybe I just have no desire to witness another person crapping their pants.
Lest you think I’m overreacting on that point, it happened multiple times.
After five years of wearing headphones to listen to music while on the computer, I once again have speakers. Esteban wouldn’t let me hook up the speakers while my pc was in his office, since it was supposed to be temporary, and then he forgot that they were for my pc and sold them to someone. When I asked about them, he said that he had a set of speakers but I wouldn’t want them because they were white (my desk accoutrements are black), so he offered to get me new ones. Esteban lives to shop for electronics, I suspect. That and cars. He embraces both with the same strange vigor I hold for planning travel itineraries. And he found an awesome set of surround sound speakers, all sleek and mod and, of course, black. He didn’t tell me, just led me into the office yesterday and showed me the coolness. Four speakers and one that attaches to the bottom of the monitor. And a subwoofer. I have a subwoofer!
It’s so weird to be able to listen to music from iTunes while I’m not chained to a cord or alienating all other sounds in the house (my headphones are noise-canceling studio cans). I feel like I’m thirteen and just got my own stereo. I now have iTunes playing constantly. It’s a whole new world. A world in which I just realized that The Doors’ ‘Backdoor Man’ is, you know, not what I thought it was about. Not at all.
When I moved into a different pod at work, I lost my awesome semi-private cubicle suite and exchanged it for one that sits directly in the center of the department. I am now on display. And, more importantly, my wardrobe choices are as well. And, as women tend to do, when people walk by, they apprise what I’m wearing. A very sweet and delightful coworker started complimenting me on my shoes. And then started noting that I had a lot of cute shoes. And then that I had a lot of shoes in general. Yesterday, a few coworkers posited that if I went through my shoe collection, wearing a different pair every day, I would probably make it to the end of summer with no repeats. Now, frankly, that’s not likely, because of one simple fact: I have one half of a four foot wide closet. That’s it. And every season, I have to swap out all of my clothing, refold everything and stashing it under my bed, in a cedar chest and in a few Rubbermaid containers in the linen closet. During that process, I fill a bag of stuff that needs to go to Goodwill, including shoes. While yes, I do buy a lot of shoes, I also give away a lot of shoes too. I work with pack rats who own shoes that are fifteen years old, kept in case they buy a dress that happens to match it. Granted, I have a few blindspots of my own: for instance, I’d never give away my vintage beaded sweater, even though it has a rust stain that the cleaners can’t get off. And I’ll probably never give away my mother’s vintage sable, even after Tilly’s done using it as a very luxurious kitty bed. But shoes you don’t love but keep because they might be good at some point? Shoes that only went with a skirt you can’t fit into or a business suit of metallic hot pink with linebacker shoulder pads? Why bother?
I explained this, but they wouldn’t believe it, because I do rotate my shoes through my wardrobe and while I do wear my old floppy Birks and Doc Martens more frequently than the rest, I probably cycle through most of my shoes in the stretch of a month. So I threw the challenge right back at them. And they accepted.
We did make rules, of course. If you had to be out of the office, your shoes on that day would not be counted, and weekends and holidays are not recorded. Also, speciality shoes were off the table, as amusing as it would have been to see people tromping around the workspace in soccer cleats and fishing waders. I included a caveat that the shoes needed to fit within our office’s dress code, but since it’s a very casual office and people wear flip flops every day of the week, that’s not saying much. I can’t really imagine what would be inappropriate, honestly, unless it’s maybe stripper shoes.
My Norwegian coworker is playing along too, although he claims to only have four pairs of shoes. This seems incomprehensible to me, but then again, Esteban would be on the sidelines after a week too. And there’s at least one lady on the team who claims that she too only has four pairs of shoes. Maybe I’m the weird one.
Ok, it’s a bit like spirit days in high school, where everyone had to wear a certain color or come to school with their clothes on inside-out, but I am sort of curious to see how creative this is going to get. I mean, I have work shoes, and then I have’ non-work shoes. Like the 4.0 shoes. Do you pair such delights with a button down and black trousers and look vaguely misguided, or do you just throw caution to the wind and wear it with jeans and a black t-shirt and not give a damn? It’s perplexing, to say the least.
I told Esteban about the competition and he replied, ‘My god, you actually have voluntarily become a Dilbert cartoon.’ I tried to explain that it wasn’t about that, it was about their perception that I have somehow got more shoes than they do. It’s about who has the most toys, in a weird reverse way. He misunderstood, thinking that I wanted to win.
I don’t want to win. I want to come in second.
And I do have the bizarre need to catalogue this endeavor on the internet.
It’s very difficult to take a picture of shoes while you’re in them. How does one find the most flattering angle for one’s own feet and still adequately display the footwear? Impossible. The best solution seemed to be to hold the camera out and blindly shoot. Well, not really an answer, but it worked.
So, yeah, this is probably a sickness. I’m just glad that they didn’t want to do purses or nail polish, because then the true depths of my depravity would be out there for everyone. I hope this doesn’t mean that I’m starting to go through menopause or something because this behavior makes no sense even to me. At least it makes good internet. The ongoing saga will be on my Flickr page, if you want to play along at home.
This week’s ‘3 Fast, 3 Furious’ podcast might be the funniest yet. The theme is Pet Peeves and it’s available on both iTunes and is also available here. I’m glad that La Wade mentioned the cigarette butt issue, because that actually bugs me much more than insufficient personal support. I’d take on an army of flapping drooping boobies if we could just stop idiots from flicking their cigarette butts out of the car windows as though it’s somehow OK. I live in constant fear that one of those lane hogs will flick a cigarette butt out their window, because my head might explode. Literally.
The comments want to know what your pet peeve is.
