Why I'm not Cut out for the Workforce, Part One

"I think I should, like, design tablescapes for a living," I told my mother as we perused the buckets of ten dollar floral arrangements at the supermarket, fawning over the textures of the corollas with the same "ooohs" and ahhhs," that would issue from our lips while thumbing through fashion magazines, their pages embossed with innumerable textiles and colors.

"Oh, God," my mother said, quickly steering me away from the flowers, which clearly nurtured my ever blossoming imagination. "What are we going to do with you?"

"What?" I asked, as though her words were true blasphemy, and I wasn't just a dreaming, doe-eyed little dolly. "It's the people who dream big that make it big. You have to have far reaching goals to ever really get anywhere in life."

"You're right," my mother said, drawing out the last word steady and even, like making a foot long line with a wooden ruler. "Help me find this cheese for my quiche," she said, pointing to a jotted down recipe with a French sounding dairy ingredient that neither of us was going to even attempt to pronounce. I scanned the shelves in the refrigerated aisle, looking for those pressed curds of milk, and the instant after I spotted the right type, uttered an "I gotta get outta here," shivering my way to the warmth a few paces away outside in the summer evening air. On the way out, I noticed the button down, Hawaiian shirt uniforms of the employees, and considered how they could look vintage esque with a forties style curl set and pin up red lips, and thought about how I wouldn't mind working there if it meant I could get discounts on those dark chocolate covered pretzels and organic yogurt I so loved. But that's the issue: I'm as flaky as that grated cheese my mother was headed to the check-out line to purchase, never able to make a decision, melting under a mere ounce of pressure. Two days on a summer retail job and I was braced to quit, convinced that I had been right all along: my best suited career path was clearly housewifery.

It's not that I don't possess the competency to wrangle in employment, and I've honed my panty arranging skills and less than thirty second bra fittings at a national lingerie boutique, that, let's face it, is well known enough to not be categorized as any sort of elusive little secret. I may fumble for a few moments while wrapping up those lace panties in tissue paper at the cash wrap, but I practically assist browsing customers in my sleep. Literally. This evening, my mother reported to me about her entrance into my room during the morning hours, which was speedily greeted with a not-so-groggy sounding and polite, "What are you looking for?" "My black flats," my mother told me. "You've come to the right place!" I said, enthusiastically, and my mom, who had been searching for a while, continued her hunt even though the shoes were in fact in the foyer downstairs, while I rolled over and fell right back asleep. I have absolutely no recollection of this little exchange, but I do know that it mimics the conversations I hold with customers on a daily basis: "What are you looking for today?" "A great push up bra." "Well, you've come to the right place..."

The point is, I learn quickly, so long as we're not talking about mathematics or quantum mechanics or genetic engineering or anything of a semi-scientific, methodical nature. But, the problem is, I don't want to do any sort of laborious task if it isn't somehow synced up with my vintage fantasy world, sex, swing dancing, reading memoirs, and being generally slovenly. Oh, or eating chocolate.

Now, I know there are a great number of people out in the world pursing their lips like dried up fruit, all crinkly and shriveled, writing me off with a tuh sound or an internal Join the club, sister, and for those of you who would genuinely like to give your two weeks' notice and retire at an age closer in years to adolescence than to granny-hood, I commend you and will hopefully someday soon see you in the, "I bought a recliner before I hit sixty" league. But for the remainder of you, who I like to imagine as that annoying little fraction that I always forgot to carry up at the end of a long division problem in grade school - those ones who whine about never having enough days off and the flat out ineffectual nature of their supervisors, but twiddle their thumbs and feel entirely unfulfilled lounging on the couch for a full afternoon, and gnaw at their nails if they work anything under forty hours a week - you my friends, will never understand my predicament. I know that my arguments entirely discount necessities like paying bills and generosities like donating yearly to reputable charities, but I like to think that these toilers would "keep up the good work," so to speak even if all their finances were perpetually in order and they had no need whatsoever to usher in that biweekly paycheck. These people, even if half of their vocabulary consists of the words "hate" and "job," nevertheless find themselves somehow continually fueled by working nine to five, always on the go and hardly ever needing to be rebooted, like eco-friendly cars with seriously great gas mileage. I on the other hand, truly, genuinely, and confidently can proclaim that I have about as much desire to become a permanent member of the workforce as I have to change my major in college to Biology.

Of course, all convictions aside, there are always aberrations, and if I could have a completely impractical, whimsical career that involved planning garden parties or working on essays at my leisure or maybe tasting wine five days of the week, I'd drop out of school now and book my oneway ticket for the Employment Express. But as fanciful and imaginative as I can be, I can at the very least acknowledge these daydreams are never going to be actualized, and rather than quitting my job on the spot, I let the menial labor workforce keep me on its line, alive but skewered, like a fish who, as they put it, fell hook, line, and sinker.

Single Speed

Yesterday, I told James that we should get married now so I could have one of his vintage bicycles. Actually, I didn't give him the luxury of selecting one to gift me, as I had a particular blue hued one in mind. To me, this was an obliging and undemanding request, not an imposition. "Well, yes, I'm going to marry you, but you can have the bike now," he said to me. It may as well have been the Gold Rush of 1849, because I had already packed my bags for California, my eyes glinting with the reflection of all that potential opulence. Exactly what I had wanted to hear. "No, I couldn't possibly," I said, feigning that I truly believed this idea was pure cockamamie. "I can see how protective you and your father are of them," and then pure instants later, when he demanded I have the fendered beauty of my desires, I practically squealed, "But I would ride it wearing play suits and have a wicker basket up front that would fit my miniature dog breed, and put a motor on it, maybe, possibly!" By "put a motor on it," I naturally meant that I would watch daddy purchase it and then attach it to the old fashioned two wheeler that I had longed for since about age fourteen.

Of course, James rode these bicycles before it was cool to shop vintage, before perhaps, they were even novelties - when people were selling them at yard sales for two whole dollars, and when they were too rusted out to be worth restoration. While I brought my off road bike to college which I attempted to give charm with a little bell and metal pannier, James was riding his timeless transporters around campus. Sometimes I wonder how we hadn't met sooner, why I hadn't enviously and longingly looked at his bicycles and paid a compliment to their owner, commenting on how I had always, always wanted to have one just like his! We may never have had such an encounter, but instead I have the memories of me riding tandem with him much later on the brick walkway, as though his frail little bike were instead a great steed, or soaring down mountainous hills, together learning to fly, or James pedaling across campus, worried, searching for me in every cranny and crack, and parking his bike only to forget later where it ran off to once he found me. And it is this that makes me think, yes, we should indeed, share a bicycle, pass old treasures off to one another.

Oh, and let's not forget: he'd better follow through with this underhanded endowment, because I've already been dreamily gazing at pictures of gals on vintage bicycles!

Always loved the bike riding Ginger in Carefree.

Pin curls, penny loafers, and a bicycle just like the one I want!

Appropriately enough, this is one of James' relatives.

Who doesn't love a bike riding pin up?

That's all for now.

♥ Vintage Betty

Becoming Our Parents

The details of the argument are never important after the fact, but there was a miscommunication about money, hundreds of dollars of it, and fragile under the stress, I turned red with anger and combusted like an exploding fire hydrant uninvitedly flooding the streets. And then I pointed at Him, jabbing some invisible elevator button that would hoist me to a more commanding level, and said, “This is on you. Get your mother to write the fucking check, or that’s it.” I paced around in the middle of the road in front of my house, avoiding his touch that begged for patience and acceptance like the Artful Dodger, mumbling fragmented phrases: “So. Irresponsible.” “Fucking insane.” “I can’t believe it.” “It’s bullshit. Bullshit.” It didn’t matter that James and I had just spent the last two days doing nothing, but nevertheless enjoying the privacy of a house to ourselves: we slept until late in the afternoon, perused a local nursery, cut up fruit for a salad, imagined ourselves down the line growing and making our own food, working as a complimentary team, and watched Rick Steves show us Italy while we planned our semester abroad, enveloping into one another on the couch. No, none of that mattered now, and I was notoriously a bitch anyway, or at least too honest, which meant that I was entitled to scream and threaten to end our relationship, or if not entitled, then expected to. And I was, after all, living in the moment like a very enlightened woman, because the utter loss of so much money at that point in time made me sure we could no longer exist as a couple. Need reinforcement about female fury stereotypes? I’m your gal.

Later, after I had sufficiently infused my dialogue with “fuck” an appropriate number of times and made more exaggerated hand gestures than all my Italian relatives combined, and when the finances were on the path to resolution, I went upstairs, rummaging in a hat box for an appropriately uplifting, religiously inspired card to make out to His mother for her birthday. James, being the pure gold, rust-resistant medal of a man that He is, instantaneously forgave my behaviors, insisting against my self-deprecating words that, No, I was not crazy! Why would I ever think such an irrational thing? I had every right to be angry!

“How about this one?” I’d ask James, thrusting a card in His direction, and He’d respond gut-impulse: “No. She hates glitter. She’ll say, ‘that’s nice, but I wish it didn’t have glitter.’” “Why does she hate glitter? ‘Cause it gets all over the place?” I’d answer for myself, trying to focus on our conversation while my parents were cussing and shouting at one another, bursts of thunder and lightning, a few rooms down. James had nodded, and I suddenly dropped the pastel colored Hallmark creation and looked up at him. “I’m sorry. Really. Do you see?” I said in earnest. “It’s learned behavior. That’s how they communicate, and it hardly phases me anymore.” His face, ever gentle, paraded his understanding, and he said, “Let’s go downstairs. I don’t like it when people yell.” “Why?” I blinked, apparently only partially aware that loud arguments were unhealthy. “Because it makes me sad,” He said plainly, and I knew that that abstract declaration was as best as He could explain the sensation He felt.

As we made our way down the staircase and onto the front porch to sit hand-in- hand on the rickety wooden swing overlooking the garden, I thought about how no matter how much we all love our parents, the idea of morphing into them without our own consent makes for that cliché heart-sinking-to-the-bottom-of-stomach feeling in all of us. Later, I cried to James hysterically about how very similar we are to my mother and father, and how I didn’t want to wind up twenty years down the road sleeping in separate bedrooms, eating and watching television in different rooms, seemingly only talking to one another to argue. And I pointed out how very much he was like his own dad, and said I didn’t see myself going on forty, living in an inherited house in disrepair with no flushing toilet – that no, I couldn’t do that. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I needed him to reassure me that that wasn’t where my life was headed, especially if I decided to spend it with him, that I could do better than that, even though I was rotting away in the jungle-like humidity of a Baltimore summer, alone, while my friends headed abroad to third-world countries to assist in some noble, Peace Corps worthy cause, or moved to L.A. to work for big-name production companies, or landed internships with nationally renowned doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital. James reminded me that we were composites of so many different people and ideas and places, not just our parents, and told me that the fears I was presenting were a commonality between us, and our awareness of them could help us to eliminate them, uproot our weeds with a garden hoe, and that together, we could create our own utopian-like Eden. His words, a mix of cooing and encouragement and urging allayed my trepidations better than any chamomile tea or hot bath or spontaneous shopping trip could have. True, I thought to myself, I may be a Fallen Eve, susceptible to imperfect ways – unrestraint anger, jealousy, vanity, and greed – but at least I have a companion who unrelentingly shows me that Paradise can always be regained.