Indecisive Peach

No real post due to training my cat to hunt cockroaches. He now has a taste for blood. Rar! This is Sparta!

When I went to S’s confirmation on Easter of this year, GS and I stopped at a gas station between Albuquerque and Amarillo. It wasn’t Clines Corners, a semi-famous ueber large rest stop full of random trinkets, but a bleak, small, and empty gas station before or after the commercial monstrosity. For the size of the the place, it contained something that made it large with beauty.

Posted in the women's bathroom

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I heard him grab the orange out of the bowl on the dining room table. He plopped down next to me and started slurping away. I first glanced over, then quickly turned to face him. “What…what the hell are you doing to that orange?”

A few weeks earlier we had bought some kiwis during our weekly shopping trip. After we had settled our food into the fridge and the pantry, I grabbed a kiwi from where I left it on the kitchen counter. I proceeded to take a knife, cut the kiwi in half, and then plucked a spoon from the drawer. I heard a “Whaaa…?” and saw him staring at me intently from the dining room.

“What are you doing with the kiwi?”
“I had planned to eat it…”
“But why cut it in half?”

I tilted my head quizzically. Saying nothing, I carved out a piece of kiwi with the spoon and popped it in my mouth. His eyes widened. I suggested he take the other half. I told him this somewhat explained his fancy kiwi peeling process I had seen at breakfast a while earlier. I thought it was quite fancy.

I watched, similarly awed, as he slurped at his orange, cut in half with the rind still attached. He pulled the meat of the orange out with a bite and replied in mid-chew, “I’m eating an orange?”

These are the small things that I enjoy when I notice our differences and how we learn from each other. And while I have not tried this methodology yet, I aim to with some flair that I was told about later.

“We actually put chili powder on top.”
“Of COURSE you do.”

It was going to be Dairy Queen, but then was moved to Vani. Haven’t heard of? Neither had I, but then I got involved with a southern wind. More and more I’m understanding the winds, but among people my age, with the slang, you sit between understanding and assuming. For me, it’s led to fading in and out of the conversation.

“Are you following it?” GS asks and his brother throws me a half smile. I hadn’t. A lot of introspection happens in the silences created when I weary of straining to pull a conversation apart. I had been enjoying the silence which has been rapidly filling with another language. And I’ll start missing the days I could opt out and sit happily listening to the meanings I hear inside myself.

The building I now work in is structured so that women from various offices can use their lunch hours to put on their tennis shoes, tight stretch athletic pants and throw on the old “1994 Gardening To Live” shirt to power-walk in the circles. Coming out of a meeting that left me questioning whether or not the power-coffee for the morning was a good idea, both myself and a coworker power walked to get quickly to the same destination on the other side of the building.

“You too?” I asked with a laugh.
“Oh my, I was about to burst,” she said leaning against the bathroom door. “I was about to stand up and walk out because I couldn’t hold it anymore.”
I laughed and we walked in separate stalls.

Suddenly, I heard retching in the stall next to me and small, painful gasps. I see a black skater shoe with purples laces brace against the tile adjoining our two stalls. The first thought was simple – freshman, day two of first-time-alone campus life… Those Jäger bombs can really be a killer going back the other direction.

I finished and was washing my hands as the girl trudged out of the bathroom. She had short-blonde disheveled hair, dyed green a few spots, an oversize black sweater, black glasses, and a lip-piercing. She bent over to wash out her mouth and stood back up with a bit of a sway. She reminded me of me when I was 19 and I somehow felt a nostalgia.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She blinked in surprise. “I had a kidney stone that passed last week and it’s really painful right now still.”

I did a bit of a motherly breath inhale, “Oh man, maybe you should go to the Health Center.”

She grimaced, “I’m on a whole bunch of medicines right now but it’s not helping.”

We move to the door and she says, “I’m even on an anti-nausea medicine, but I don’t think it’s helping.” She rubs her stomach slowly.

“Damn, irony is not fun,” I murmur.

I go left and she goes right. “Take care,” I added.

She calls out and I turn, “Hey…thanks for the concern.” Taken aback, I say, “…Of course.”

I briefly wonder then why this just isn’t common place and why you have to be thanked for it… but I still know exactly that it isn’t.

This is when the audience goes to get more popcorn.

Being an adult is fun when you’re allowed to make the decisions that let you eat your dessert first. Unfortunately in the same vein, you have to make those decisions that balance out the fun, such as, if I do not do laundry tonight, I will have no pants. I had to make the unfun choice and shall be enjoying fresh pants. This left to focus for writing.

I resolve to have pizza for breakfast tomorrow in order to restore the balance.

Strangely, I have also made the connection today that I gain likability points by wearing a Grandma sweater at work. All the secretaries dig it.

The first time I was actually published as a journalist, my article went to the front page. I think my name was below the fold, but my by-line went with the main headline and photograph.

I had gotten this gig, as three-week reporter at my home town paper, after my first semester as journalism major in my second year of college. [The first year I fancied myself a lot more of tech sort until I realized, oh snap, I am decidedly liberal arts.] The home town, a term used loosely as it was only home during my high school years and where my parents stayed after my Dad retired, had a population of about 30,000.

The stint was achieved with networking. One of the advisers for the program was a man who fed to every incoming journalism student that they needed, no NEEDED, an internship in order to earmark future success. He lobbied all across our fine state to make the university’s journalism program something of a mill for producing newbie reporters, photographers, and people who would fetch coffee for these reporters and journalists – because there were people who ultimately ended up in journalism because they didn’t feel that they were artsy enough for a proper English degree.

[Oh no silly, that wasn’t me!]

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When I walked into my polling station this morning, by day a mild-mannered elementary school and by election day a place with more poll workers than voters, I was at first stared at blandly.
“Yes?”
“I, um, would like to vote.”

I heard a mechanical voice announcing to “Try. Again.” It was a typical 1980s robot voice, a halting midi sound, and I found it interesting that the polling machines now spoke. Turns out it was an elderly poll worker who had a voice box. “You. Have. To. Wiggle. It,” his voice rasped as he touched his throat as I finished the ballot.

I felt immense pride by the action, but immensely less by the state of the country as it stands and how lackluster the turnout tends to be. Women have died to vote and men and women die still to give us the chance to activate our freedom tangibly. An hour after the poll opened, I was only #16 to vote.

Today just slipped through my hands. I’ve been noticing that my rationalizations lately start with a mental tagging the lack of time to being active in “life things”. I’m not sure if that’s correct. Sometimes, the hardest things to break are the mental mantras that one fixes up in their mind. I have a lot of those and I do think that I’m in dire need of a little focus with writing.