Today I had Sunday brunch at the home of someone with whom I work at the aerosol cheese factory. We’ll call her Florence.
Florence lives in a lovely two bedroom apartment in Rogers Park. One bedroom for her, the other, I presume, for her colossal sense of contentment and order.
Nice apartment, I said. How the hell is she affording this on what we make, I thought.
It’s beautifully decorated, I said. I’ve been at the cheese factory more than twice as long as her! Is she making more than me, I thought.
Did she clean her baseboards just for today? Are they always this clean? Does she do that regularly? What’s wrong with me that I can’t even be bothered to make sure the Kleenex hits the trashcan, and here’s Florence, coming home every night to scrub her baseboards! I suck! But I didn’t say that. Instead I gulped down a tankard of champagne.
True, I was already tense, being out of my element. (My element: Nestling among porn junkies in the Harold Washington Library.) Brunch among clean people who have meaningful careers is different for me. I’m not used to having manners and talking in complete sentences. Brunch in general, is sort of a what-we-do-when-we’re-pretending-to-be-adults kind of activity. To wit: Our parents almost never went to brunch. At least not until we got old enough to force them to. That’s because they’re grown-ups and don’t have to prove it by eating ever more creative egg-based foods. But as for ensuing generations--how gladly we consume the quiches of ambivalence.
Florence has the cleanest, shiniest hardwood floors I can remember since my middle school gym. I reflexively reached for my doctor’s note to get me out of gymnastics the minute I walked in.
As the morning went on into midday and I huddled on her comfy sofa with nary a stain upon it, and I dined on bread pudding and resentment. And plans. Oh yes, I dined also on big plans for the renovation of my home so I can be contented and orderly like Florence. She’s not the only one who can hit the trashcan with the Kleenex!
Hah! Take that, wadded up tissues in that hard to reach space between the toilet and the bathroom vanity! Your days are numbered!
To get inspiration tonight, I watched the Extreme Home Makeover show. But it didn’t really help. Instead, it brought out buried resentments so self-involved, I felt for a minute what it must be like to be a rich white guy. If only I had a terminal disease. If only I were missing multiple appendages. If only I had adopted a whole boxful of handi-capable kids. Then maybe the Extreme Makeover people would come give me a new home with unstained furniture, cleverly placed throw rugs, decorative art objects, and a brand-spanking new 52 inch HDTV. Or they might at least clean my baseboards really good.
But what kind of pitiable disabilities do I have for leverage? Is a really Extreme student loan debt and a keen capacity for self-pity enough of a disability? I think so, but I fear network television does not.
Just as well. That show has a serious decorating problem. They’re a little too into the personalized theme thing in the bedrooms. You let those guys into your house and they’re immediately casing the place for clues to your unique style. They see a few scraps of evidence of some kind of personal interest lying next to the nightstand, and they run with that design element like fiends. And seven days later, I’m stuck with a bedroom with walls painted with dizzying, giant crossword puzzles and a bed shaped like an enormous box of Benedryl. No, thank you. And don’t tell me that the families on that show are all that thrilled about the theme rooms. The kids, sure, but the parents have to be faking their expressions of pleasure. They know that the resale value of an otherwise lovely house is now surely shot all to Extreme Pieces. They’re already trying to envision how the real estate agent is going to pitch the room made of Legos, the Fairy Princess Room, and the truly inexplicable Amphibians in the Bayou Room that exists solely because some kid said he might like to go fishing one day.
"You’ve seen the gourmet kitchen, and the master bath with the built in hot tub and steam room. Oh, and this bedroom over here has a built-in bed made entirely out of NASCAR helmets and half of a stock car protruding out of the wall. Of course, you can paint it pink."
So yeah. Having all my appendages intact, the Extreme Makeover people are probably not the way I’m getting a better apartment. Short of actually making an effort to pick up the Kleenex and scrub my baseboards, my options are sadly limited. The only way I’m spending time in the embrace of so much order and niceness is to brush up on my brunching skills.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Saturday, March 7, 2009
My Left Foot
This morning when I climbed out of bed and put my feet on the floor, I had to double check to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently left a boning knife balanced somehow on end, by happenstance in the spot where my left foot landed. From my position (curled up on the floor, writhing in pain) I was a little surprised to find no knife. Not even the anticipated pool of blood. Instead I discovered a tiny lump just where the arch of the foot meets the first joint of the second toe. A lump from which the stabbing pain emanated. Nay, rocketed.
Naturally, my first thought was that I am in the end stages of some rare variety of cancer. And it figures that of all the cancers that might kill me, I would get stupid foot cancer.
Of course I did what I always do when I want to confirm my worst fears about physical symptoms. I Googled it, searching out gory photos of eventual oozing and malformation accompanied by grim texts describing the hopelessness of the situation or the required arch transplants with a 13% success rate.
The good news is that Google says this lump is unlikely to be a plantars wart associated with HPV infection. So I’m not going to get a reputation as a foot-slut. At least not that way. For a few minutes there, I thought I was going to have to call up all the people with whom I’ve recently had foot sex and have that awkward conversation. (Lola would be pissed. Not because I might have transmitted the foot-slut disease to her, but because she would be sure I suspected that she was the foot-slut who gave it to me. She would have been right.)
More likely, my disabling pain is product of plantar fibrmatosis. Which, according to an assortment of Googled opinions and musings, is an aspect of the broader problem of C-T Band Syndrome. C for Calf. T for Toe. And the Syndrome is for the range of unpleasant things that can happen when the band that runs from your calf to your toe is subject to overstress. Like from being on your feet a lot without adequate stretching. Or, in my case, I suspect, from having the ill-chosen favorite exercise of calf raises. And doing like a hundred of them yesterday, just to see if I could.
(The even better name for this problem is Ledderhose Disease. Which sounds too similar to Lederhosen to be a coincidence, if you ask me. I cannot locate an explanation about how Lederhosen may cause foot pain. Perhaps Lederhosen can alleviate foot pain. Where can I get Lederhosen?)
Now I’m doing calf stretches, but it just doesn’t have the same thrill as calf raises. There’s no shivery burn when I stop, just a vague feeling of stretchiness.
According to Google, it could have been worse. I could have been traipsing along and suddenly snapped my Achilles tendon. I know a guy who had that happen once when he was playing tennis. He said the snap was so loud, he’d thought at first he’d been shot in the leg. Then he sat on the tennis court and actually watched his tendon recoil up his leg into a massive ball on his calf, like a some kind of serpent burrowing into his flesh. Cool, huh?
Of course, he passed out, so I wasn’t able to get more details. Plus no one was there to take pictures to post on the internet. From what I understand, his tennis partner called an ambulance and he went to a hospital. So in a way he was lucky. It never once occurred to him that he might have end-stage foot cancer. And he never even had to even imagine making that awkward series of calls to acknowledge that he was some kind of foot-slut. All he had was several months in a leg cast and unfathomable time and freedom to Google every minor symptom he could possibly imagine. How lucky is that?
Naturally, my first thought was that I am in the end stages of some rare variety of cancer. And it figures that of all the cancers that might kill me, I would get stupid foot cancer.
Of course I did what I always do when I want to confirm my worst fears about physical symptoms. I Googled it, searching out gory photos of eventual oozing and malformation accompanied by grim texts describing the hopelessness of the situation or the required arch transplants with a 13% success rate.
The good news is that Google says this lump is unlikely to be a plantars wart associated with HPV infection. So I’m not going to get a reputation as a foot-slut. At least not that way. For a few minutes there, I thought I was going to have to call up all the people with whom I’ve recently had foot sex and have that awkward conversation. (Lola would be pissed. Not because I might have transmitted the foot-slut disease to her, but because she would be sure I suspected that she was the foot-slut who gave it to me. She would have been right.)
More likely, my disabling pain is product of plantar fibrmatosis. Which, according to an assortment of Googled opinions and musings, is an aspect of the broader problem of C-T Band Syndrome. C for Calf. T for Toe. And the Syndrome is for the range of unpleasant things that can happen when the band that runs from your calf to your toe is subject to overstress. Like from being on your feet a lot without adequate stretching. Or, in my case, I suspect, from having the ill-chosen favorite exercise of calf raises. And doing like a hundred of them yesterday, just to see if I could.
(The even better name for this problem is Ledderhose Disease. Which sounds too similar to Lederhosen to be a coincidence, if you ask me. I cannot locate an explanation about how Lederhosen may cause foot pain. Perhaps Lederhosen can alleviate foot pain. Where can I get Lederhosen?)
Now I’m doing calf stretches, but it just doesn’t have the same thrill as calf raises. There’s no shivery burn when I stop, just a vague feeling of stretchiness.
According to Google, it could have been worse. I could have been traipsing along and suddenly snapped my Achilles tendon. I know a guy who had that happen once when he was playing tennis. He said the snap was so loud, he’d thought at first he’d been shot in the leg. Then he sat on the tennis court and actually watched his tendon recoil up his leg into a massive ball on his calf, like a some kind of serpent burrowing into his flesh. Cool, huh?
Of course, he passed out, so I wasn’t able to get more details. Plus no one was there to take pictures to post on the internet. From what I understand, his tennis partner called an ambulance and he went to a hospital. So in a way he was lucky. It never once occurred to him that he might have end-stage foot cancer. And he never even had to even imagine making that awkward series of calls to acknowledge that he was some kind of foot-slut. All he had was several months in a leg cast and unfathomable time and freedom to Google every minor symptom he could possibly imagine. How lucky is that?
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