You Are Not a Winner

One Sunday, a classified ad caught my eye. A community edition of the Ann Arbor News needed a page designer/copy editor. That’s what I do.

Like many employers nowadays, they wanted a lot (degree, two years of experience, proficiency in three different software applications, a high level of language ability, proven proofreading skills, perfect attendance, chipper attitude, great standardized test scores, type O blood) for not much in return (part-time, no benefits, “flexible schedule” - read “on call on our terms,” but hey - we might let you work four days a week!). Still, I reviewed my resume, composed a decent cover letter, and prepared to send it off. The ad listed an e-mail address. I weighed the pros and cons of attachments vs. plain text and opted for the cover letter as text and the resume as an attachment. I figured it would show them I know how to make a pdf.

I clicked “send” and the e-mail went off with the little swooshing noise the program makes. Within a few minutes, the e-mail program whistled that I had new mail. My cover letter and resume were returned to me as undeliverable.

In college I had a pencil that had “I are a English major” printed on the side. I held the newspaper clipping up to the screen and went over the address letter by letter. I had entered it correctly. I Googled the community newspaper and clicked on “contact us.” They had spelled the address wrong in the ad.

I suppose they really do need someone with proofing skills. Tempted though I was to point it out in my cover letter, I did not. I resent the e-mail to the correct address.

Yesterday I got my rejection notice. Naturally, it’s not my first, so I know how these things usually go. “We will keep your resume on file, blah blah blah.” Not this one. This is just about the bluntest letter I’ve ever received. It is three sentences long:

Sentence one is basically a thank you.
Sentence two: “As we narrow the field of applications, you will not be among our finalists.”
Sentence three pretty much says, “Good luck, loser.”

I’m not a finalist? :’-(

Well, that’s okay. I don’t want to work for you anyway. ‘Cuz not only do you not know your own e-mail address, but you also got my street address wrong on both the envelope and the letter.

Thank you for deigning to reply to my mail. Unfortunately, your performance does not meet my requirements at this time. Best of luck in your continued search.

Ooo Ooo That Smell

Life literally stinks at my place.

This week at work we received one of those periodic e-mails that C. is going to shoulder the loathsome task of cleaning the communal refrigerator, and we need to remove by end of the day Friday anything we don’t want thrown away. I pushed around ancient yogurt cups, T.’s cans of Fresca, and A.’s leftover Arby’s sandwiches, and found in the back a Rubbermaid container of mine, full of forgotten three-week-old broccoli. I put it in my big, patterned Nine West bag and threw it in the trunk of the car.

After work, I went to a nearby park with a coworker. As we pulled into the muddy parking lot, a foul, gaseous odor assaulted my nose. I assumed it was the mud, since my coworker seems like the kind who would be decent enough to fart after we got into the woods. We took our walk, and after I dropped her off, the car still smelled stinky.

When I arrived home, I opened the boot of the car - and was hit with an eye-watering stench. Rubbermaid had erupted, leaving nauseating green broccoli pee in my bag. I haven’t smelled anything that bad since the turkey vulture and the fox were in the same room at the wildlife rehabilitation center.

I dumped the offensive vegetable remains in the outside trash can. Rubbermaid came inside with me, followed by the stench. I shot a big squirt of Joy into the container and ran the water as hot as it would get. The odor lingered like a visiting in-law. I grabbed the Lysol from the bathroom and sprayed it into the air in every room in the apartment. I wiped out the Nine West bag with a Lysol wipey-sheet-thing. “Crisp Linen” seemed to quell the demon smell.

With the reeking container contained, I turned my attention to kitty, gave her a good scratch, and spooned out some canned Friskies into her bowl. Then I walked into the bedroom to discover two piles of cat yack. With a sigh, I got paper towels and the carpet cleaner and cleaned up the barf.

Within fifteen minutes the cat was yowling under the bed. “Sylvie,” I called. Hopefully I sounded inviting and not pissed off.

“Come here, kitty cat.”
“Yeow-ow-ow.”
“Kitty! Come here, boo-boo.”
“Yee-owwww!”
“Come here, kitty.”
“Hack-a-hack-a-hack-a...blargh-gh-gh-gh-gh.”

I sighed again and went back for more paper towels. I returned to the bedroom. There was Sylvie, sitting in the middle of the floor, looking at me with imploring green eyes. “You never barf in the same place twice, do you?” I asked her.

Under the bed is storage. (Yes, I know it’s bad feng shui and impedes the flow of chi.) I pulled all the boxes and bags out from the under the bed to find the puke pile - thankfully it was not the whole way in the far corner. Pacific Salmon in Sauce is already pretty soft, and after 10 minutes in the cat, it was warm and even more pungent. I practically had to mop it out of the carpet.

As I dumped handfuls of partially digested cat food into the trash I sniffed. The broccoli remained. I re-Lysoled, including the Rubbermaid container this time. I went to my desk and started working. Minutes later, I couldn’t concentrate. I could smell rotten broccoli again. The reek wouldn’t die. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep or do anything. I snapped the lid on the Rubbermaid container, tied a plastic Meijer bag around it, and marched it out of the house. I went back inside. Ah, much better.

Anyone walking into the apartment that night would have expected a séance, judging by the number of Yankee candles burning.

I awoke this morning, patted Sylvie’s silver fur, stretched, and took a deep breath.

Is that a soupçon of Pacific Salmon in Sauce?

I've Got a Secret...Not

Since discovering PostSecret a few weeks back, I’ve wanted to climb on the bandwagon. I’ve been trying to think of a secret of my own to send in.

I can’t think of anything.

The site states that your secret has to be something you’ve never told anyone before. Being a Good Student Who Follows Instructions, I feel bound by this. The problem: I’ve told everything to somebody. Obviously different people are privy to different secrets. If P. knew things about me that D. knows, she’d flip her gourd.

What secrets do I have? That I eat butter out of the dish? My dad knows that. That I helped a friend’s sister try to run away with her boyfriend when we were teenagers? Half my family and half of hers knows that. That I only pretend to understand Noam Chomsky? That I think Professor Snape is sexy?

Does a lack of secrets mean I’m uninteresting? Does it mean I'm unusually honest? Does it mean I’m not bad enough, or that I’m a blabbermouth? Does it mean anything at all?

There has to be something...

Sign Outside Chiropractor's Office

Pain is inevitable.
Misery is optional.

For the first time in nearly ten years

I have a student ID card.

Really, I just got it for the prestige and the movie discounts.

Usually I Just Erase Their Mouths

From PostSecret

Men and Other Reptiles

“We had a yard sale,” my mother told me on the phone last week.
“Don’t be sellin’ my stuff!” I replied.

I get attached to stuff, even stuff I haven’t physically seen for years. When I was in elementary school, I had this pair of black winter boots that I wore for years. My family teased me about them, and said they looked like Cossack boots, and tried to get me to wear other, newer boots. I refused. I liked the boots. I loved the boots. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t just let me alone about them.

I sure would like to have boots like that again.

My family has no heirlooms. We get rid of everything. My great-grandmother’s player piano and all the rolls for it, the carnival glass, the Fiestaware - all gone. Practically nothing remains to be handed down from generation to generation. I have my grandfather’s goldstone cuff links and a few books, including an old copy of “Black Beauty” that a teacher inscribed as a gift to my great-grandfather in 1909. If I didn’t have it, it probably would have been in the yard sale stack.

“We found something of yours in with your sister’s books,” mom continued.
“Don’t sell my stuff!” I hyperventilated.
“I’m sending it to you.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Something one your friends gave you,” she said. “You’ll see.”

I scritched my head over that. Something a friend gave me? Surely it wasn’t the red wax bust of Lenin, with a candle wick in the center of his bald head, that N. brought back from Russia for me. I’m pretty sure that’s one thing I did throw away. I’m pretty sure I’m still peeved that everyone else got cool Red Army flasks and slender Egyptian perfume bottles, and I got a Lenin candle. (“You’re not girly enough for the perfume bottles,” she said. “And I thought this looked more like you.” Bite my ass, N. Even after all these years, bite a little communist star into it.)

The package from mom arrived yesterday. I tore open the padded envelope and there was “Men and Other Reptiles,” a small volume of quips and quotes that “runs the gamut from subtle teasing to bitingly on-target barbs.” There's lots of Mae West, Dorothy Parker, and Zsa Zsa Gabor: “I want a man who’s kind and understanding. Is that too much to ask of a millionaire?” sort of stuff. There are a few more amusing entries: “Show me a young man who actively embraces Republicanism and I’ll show you the world’s most boring date.”

But my favorite part is on the end leaf, an inscription to me (mammal) from D.

Hiroshima Paint

I was out last week with a friend in Ann Arbor, who was telling me about the Hiroshima stencils on the sidewalks. Walking to Sabor Latino, we looked at the shadows and counted how many stencils the artists had used.

After dinner, we walked to Wurster Park, played on the swings, and patted Henry (a shepherd mix whose tag reads, “The Greeter of Wurster Park”). We got ice cream at Washtenaw Dairy and headed back to the car.

We returned to the parking lot from a different direction than we left it. At this entrance, there was a dashed line. The line curved sinuously over the asphalt. We laughed when the line led us back to its source in one quadrant of a parking space: a huge splatter of white that looked suspiciously like Hiroshima silhouette paint.

Rites of August

It’s August. Time for corn on the cob.

I come from a long line of prodigious corn-eaters. At one time, my small family, then consisting of me, my sister, mom and dad, Uncle M, and my grandparents, could easily put away two dozen ears at dinner. In recent years, as the family and times have changed, we’ve slowed down a bit.

Almost every late summer lunch or dinner included corn on the cob. With so many small farms in our region of western Pennsylvania, fresh corn was readily available at roadside stands or right off the back of a truck parked at the edge of the field. Brown paper bags originally filled with ears were soon filled with husks and silk of the palest green. We kids used to marvel at how fast my father could shuck an ear of corn, taking all the silk off in one tear. With our small hands, it took us a while to clean an ear, almost the same time as it took him to do six. We would “Ewww” over the worms and dad would cut them out with his pocketknife.

While we stacked the corn on a platter, hamburgers and hotdogs sizzled on the grill. The corn would be served as the last course. Apart from cucumbers, which my grandmother usually smothered in sour cream and pepper, there was never anything green or remotely like a salad.

The uncontested patriarch of corn on the cob was my grandfather. Pappap loved his corn, and his early August birthday coincided with the first fresh harvest. He would lean forward from his chair at the head of the table in my grandparents’ humid kitchen, grab the topmost ear from a steaming golden pyramid, and get to work. At least three sticks of butter and two salt shakers sat in strategic locations on the table. Pappap usually had his own. His preferred method of butter transference was to roll the corn right on top of the stick.

We all ate our corn the same way, like a typewriter. Left to right, carriage return, roll the top away to get to the next row. No one ever cut the corn off the cob. That would be sacrilege.

Conversation at the table centered on varieties of corn. My mother and I preferred “Silver Queen,” white, small kerneled, sugary sweet. But “Silver Queen” usually matures later, so in early August we were more likely to have what is called “Butter and Salt” or “Butter and Sugar,” for its yellow and white pattern. Sometimes I think we ate regular old field corn, waxy and with huge gold kernels that stuck to our teeth like caramel. My grandmother and father liked this best, joking that they would be happy eating with the cows. If Pappap had a preference, it never showed.

When the feasting was over, Pappap would heap his denuded cobs and destroyed napkins on his plate, exhale heavily, and wipe the butter from his glasses with the edge of his corn-splattered white t-shirt. Sometimes part of a kernel would hang from a strand of his silver hair. Picking his teeth, he’d push away from the table and say, “I need to take a shower.”

Tonight I truly felt his granddaughter, as I turned away from the table, two empty cobs on my plate, fingernail between my teeth.

Bomb Shelter Potatoes

Earlier this evening, something cracked. I’ve been feeling low for a while, but I’ve been putting on my brave face and trying not to let life suck ass through a straw quite so much. After all, life could be chewing my ass, and that would definitely be worse than a little sucking. Still, like I said, after work I broke, and I curled up in the middle of my bed and cried in a chest-heaving, nose-running way that I haven’t cried for a long time.

After I stopped, I lay there sighing and stroking the silver fur of my good and patient kitty, who was waiting for her canned food. I got up and walked to the kitchen with her wrapped around my left ankle. I spooned some gloopy, and evidently delicious, chicken-and-tuna stuff into her bowl and washed my face. I wasn’t sure if I was hungry myself or slightly sick to my stomach.

Comfort food is what I needed - something warm and filling and non-diet. Someone told me that when it comes to stressed-out eating, women tend to go more for fatty and sweet (chocolate, cheesecake) and men more for fatty and salty (French fries, pizza). Here once again, despite my obvious female features and mouth-foaming heterosexuality, I sift out on the same side as the boys. Fried chicken. Mozzarella cheese sticks. Macaroni and cheese.

Mac and cheese sounded particularly good. I opened the cupboard, replaced the blue plastic margarita glass that toppled out, and pushed aside the tea and sugar to see if I had any mac and cheese in stock. I didn’t. But I did find, scrunched way in the back, a package of instant mashed potatoes.

In the absence of macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, complete with a dammed-up lake of butter, started to sound pretty good. But were they okay? The potatoes came from my grandmother, who sends me home with bags and coolers full of food every time I visit. The last time I visited was Christmas, so the potatoes were at least eight months old - maybe older. She might have given them to me at Thanksgiving, or even Easter. It’s a bit mysterious why she gave them to me at all, since I have never prepared instant mashed potatoes for myself and have never (knowingly) eaten them at her house either.

I smoothed the rumpled bag, looking for an expiry date. There wasn’t one. I suppose they don’t expire. I suppose that’s why you can store them in your emergency kit, right next to the duct tape and plastic wrap. “With sour cream, chives, and imitation bacon,” the package read. Yummy. I boiled the water and dumped ‘em in.

While the potatoes rehydrated themselves, I sliced a cucumber from the garden and rinsed the last of the arugula that I bought at the farmer’s market on Saturday. On one side of the plate I had fresh, tasty, organic produce; on the other side, highly processed Frankenfood that openly admitted the artificiality of its bacon bits. I laid a knife between them so the potatoes wouldn’t eat the arugula before I did.

I created a satisfactory pool of butter and sampled my first forkful. They weren’t too bad, though they certainly were not my grandmother’s homemade mashed potatoes. They were rather bland and sticky, and the bacon bits didn’t do much for me. Nevertheless, I ate half the pot, pretending all the while I was savoring the finest macaroni and cheese, properly baked with bread crumbs on top.

As I sit here simultaneously working and writing this, the potatoes are resting in a cold lump in my tummy. Perhaps the bomb shelter potatoes will put me out of my misery. Perhaps I will explode like a sea gull full of Alka-Seltzer. Or perhaps it’s nothing a little vodka and tonic wouldn’t fix.