wisdom from my twenties

After not seeing or talking to my friend Marc in 5 years, he came to Austin the long way from New York and arrived on Tuesday. He reminded me of things I hadn't thought about or laughed about in years and of things I'd completely forgotten. He left early Saturday morning on his motorcycle headed for California the long way.

Marc 

     By the pool at Hotel St. Cecilia 

I woke up early to say good-bye, then spent the next several hours reading old journals from St. John where I met Marc in 2003. Among the wreckage of memories I discovered a few scraps of hotel paper on which I once scratched this sage advice, apparently to my future self, in pencil, sometime in my late twenties. I hope I look back on my thirties and surprise myself with wisdom I didn't know I had.

• The future is uncertain; you can't count on it, go with the flow.
• Trust yourself more than you trust anyone else.
• Getting lost just means finding something new.
• Don't freak out about money. Take care of your finances but don't worry about money; you can't take it with you when you go.
• Be proud of your accomplishments, even really small ones.
• Don't be scared of anything. You are strong and brave.
• Don't worry about what other people think. Never change yourself for anyone. Stand tall and proud.
• So what if you're awkward or dorky or shy.
• If someone doesn't like you the way you are, Fuck them! You don't need them in your life.
• Don't misinterpret emotions.
• There is no room for embarrassment, shame, guilt or worry.
• Stop judging people; you don't know them.
• Avoid gossip.
• Laugh for all you're worth, whenever you can. Laugh & laugh & laugh. It will keep you alive and heal your heart and soul.
• Don't be afraid to cry. Let it out. Keeping sadness inside will make you sick.
• Do things in nature, it makes you feel better.
• Exercise, Breath, Learn...

naked.

Last summer, on the 4th of July I went on a joyride in a banged up old Jeep that deposited me at a party where no sooner had I strolled in than I discovered that my ride had just abandoned me for a twenty year old, fat-bottomed, Brazilian tart. Not knowing where I was and not having enough money for a cab I suddenly felt panicked and I accepted a ride with a bunch of jovial Latinos. I was one of six human sardines and a mountain bike being shoe-horned into a Rav4 for a chance at getting a few miles closer to where I'd left my car. As we uncrumpled ourselves at our destination, I discovered that we were at a Tango studio and realizing I was still no closer to getting home than when I started my clown car shenanigans, I decided to drink.  I introduced myself to the owner of the studio, an Argentinean woman and a prolific winker. As I helped myself to her wine, I learned that she had been a Tango instructor on Nudist Cruises to Alaska! The combination made me shudder and shiver. I do a lot of things naked. I sleep naked, cook naked, eat naked. If you've ever talked to me on the phone, I was probably naked on the other end. I'm not a nudist. I don't want to share my nudity with you and you would never catch me on a cruise ship learning to dance the Tango naked off the coast of Alaska! As I sweet talked a lanky Venezuelan into a ride to my car I chuckled to myself. "Absurd!" I thought. "Outrageous! Naked tango dancing...Well! I never!" This afternoon I found myself naked in my empty bathtub with a razor blade, rethinking my swift judgement.



Sometimes I clean naked and nothing prompts cleaning your house or finally finishing some mundane or pesky household chore like an impending visit from a guest. And nothing prompts a serious examination of ones bathroom cleanliness than a soon to arrive guest who, whether he remembers it or not, had to wear flip flops in your shower last time he stayed with you because you may or may not have contracted Athlete's Foot from your boyfriend's wife's boyfriend. With my guest arriving in a few days and having just taken a shower I happened to be naked when it suddenly occurred to me that this was the time to re-caulk the bathtub.



Years ago I had a fiance who before becoming a chef, had been an HVAC guy, an Orkin man and a Maytag Repair Man. Every time we moved into a new rental place, my loving handy man would take it upon himself to make some repairs and adjustments. One of the things he always did was re-caulk the bathtubs. He made it look so easy. I figured I could do it too. I immediately discovered that removing old mildewy caulk is a lot harder than it seems. As I scraped at it with a razor blade I decided I needed to actually be inside the tub and not leaning over the side to really get at it. And since my knees feel like those of a 70 year old mogul skier's when I squat down, my best bet was to just sit directly on the floor of the tub.



I might be a bit more morbid than the average bloke so it's not unusual that as I sat there naked on the floor of my tub, razor blade in hand that I imagined how this would look in the event that I should meet an untimely death. What if I slipped and hit my head and bled to death while unconscious? This is the sort of thing I think about everyday and it brings up some big questions. Who would finally find me? How long would I have been decomposing before I was discovered? No one has a key to my apartment except my landlord. If I stopped showing up for work because I was dead, my boss and coworkers would think I just quit without notice and no one would look for me. Almost no one knows where I live. I wouldn't be returning any phone calls if I was dead but no one would really think that was cause for alarm for several weeks at the least. It would be the neighbors complaining of the stench that would finally get my carcass discovered which means it would probably be the landlord who would find me, dead, naked and rotting in a pool of congealed blood in my half caulked bathtub with a razor blade. My deposit would never be returned. And, what would they tell my father?

Then I wonder who would go through my stuff? I'd like to think it would be my sister. If anyone is going to discover my less than savory, sordid past and present, I hope it would be my sister. But I don't think it'd be her. She rarely travels and isn't likely to have the funds to fly the 2,000 miles to Austin, Texas to rummage through and dispense all of my personal belongings. I don't think Dad would do it either. My youngest brother died 4 years ago and still his belongings sit barely touched in a bedroom at the end of the hallway in my father's house. But someone would have to clean out my stuff, I live in a rental. One of my friends? But my family wouldn't know who to call. They don't know any of my friends. My ex-boyfriend once promised that if I died before he did, he'd find all my journals and destroy them (without reading them) before my family found them. I'm pretty sure that promise expired when our love did. My best guess is that my brothers would come to the rescue. So it would be my brothers then, who would discover my dirty little secrets, the lascivious contents of my nightstand drawer, my volumes of revealing journals, the inexplicable contents of the trunk in my closet, my shocking debt, my passwords, my questionable google history, my unmade bed, my mountain of laundry and my sink full of dishes. But I think they'd be proud that I caulked my own bath tub and they'd be cool enough not to tell the rest of the family that I did it naked.

what my nose knows

People who suffer from something called "migraine with aura" often experience a perceptual disturbance and auditory and olfactory hallucinations among many other things just before the onset of a migraine.

I am one of those people.

The visual effects can sometimes be quite stunning, terrifying or crippling. I've experienced blurred, tunnel, peppered, kaleidoscope, double and monocular vision. Thankfully not all at once.

Most of the auditory hallucinations in my case just give me the sense that all background noise is equivalent to a roomful of hungry, tired and soggy diapered toddlers jacked up soda pop and candy or the sound of radio static blasting through a megaphone.

The olfactory hallucinations can be a lot more fun, although I'm sometimes sure I smell the hot, dry aluminum of a cafeteria steam table that has evaporated all of its water, I often smell vanilla pudding, brownies or jasmine.

Even when I'm not about to experience a migraine, I have a constantly hyper-alert olfactory sense, fantastic when I'm in the vicinity of a bakery and nauseating when I'm near a urine soaked dumpster alley. Of course that would be gross for you, too, but it appears that my schnoz is even more sensitive to it than the average sniffer. I once cooked in a restaurant where I got to know the regulars by smell and from my perch in the kitchen I could start cooking their dinner even before the hostess had seated them.

Much of the time throughout my days can be marked by smell as much as by activity. Daily arrival at work for me smells like this: hot dumpster, cigarette smoke, full grease trap, stale beer, mildewy mops, slimy grey disintegrating dish pit floor mat, old fish. That's before I even clock in.
So it's no surprise that much of my ADD is also triggered by smell. No doubt I'm still distracted by chipmunks, lizards and shiny objects, but I'll be going about my day when a smell like fake apricot or wet mittens will wriggle its way into my nostrils and suddenly I'm 6 years old and I can't remember for the life of me what table 8 just ordered.

Apricot & Strawberry

Tonight I got a whiff of my childhood.

From an unknown source, I could smell Apricot.
Not the fruit, but the tiny rubber figurine of Strawberry Shortcake's friend, Apricot, who was one in a series of the little dolls who smelled like their name.

Apricot is holding hands with a bunny, to the right of Lemon Meringue and to the left of Apple Dumplin' on her pet turtle.

As much as I was dying to collect them all, Apricot was the only one I ever owned and had I not gotten rid of her, (during my all-grown-up teen angst years,) I would take her out right now and give her a sniff. Strawberry Shortcake was popular (the first time around) with many little American girls born in the 1970s who almost all share the middle name Lynn. But, she was even more special to me because she was the only popular kid icon that my strict and pious Mennonite-wanna-be mother approved of.

I was absolutely head over heels for Miss Shortcake. The year I discovered her, my favorite color changed from purple to red.

I had the Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag;

I had the lunch box.

I clearly remember getting the three pack of "Weekend" underwear with Strawberry posed on pink, yellow and peach for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I immediately put a pair on in the car, in the parking lot of the department store even though it wasn't the weekend.

For my 7th birthday I got a cake with her sweetly smiling icing face and I also received a personally autographed plastic image of her with her cat "Custard" that said, "To my berry special friend, Tracey." I still have it. And it was berry special to me because my name was properly spelled with an "E" which was a rare find on the monogrammed items that were all the rage in the 1980s. And I still have a pot holder shaped like a strawberry house with her looking out the window, tending her strawberry window boxes. And I still to this day keep all my hair elastics and barrettes in a canister on which she is depicted gleefully lounging in a juicy pile of bright red berries. One little whiff and a landslide of memories.

Thanks, Strawberry, for your optimism and cheer, you got me through some pretty tough childhood times.

Alvina

I just got in from stringing up Christmas lights.Anyone who knows me will immediately recognize the absurdity of that statement. But it's true. I hung them for Alvina, my 85 year old neighbor.

photo by Sonia Rangel

Alvina and I met about a year and a half ago when I moved into our 4-plex on a tiny street in South Austin. Alvina in no way resembles the beautiful, young, Swedish woman she once was, except for her eyes. Her eyes are bluer than the giant exercise ball abandoned in the corner of my living room, bluer than the interior indicator lights of my Volkswagen. The rest of her is sags, wrinkles, bruises and veins. Crooked toes jutting from holey knee-highs worn on concrete without shoes. Wild white hair almost always absentmindedly tucked into 47 bobby pins. Pendulous breasts that flop from side to side like out of sync metronomes, only seeing the inside of a brassiere on special occasions, like trips to the HEB and Furr's Cafeteria. She hasn't had her own teeth since the age of 25.

A day or two after I moved in I noticed small scoops of dirt missing from my potted Aloe plant by the front door. Not long after that I noticed a small trail of dirt leading from my Aloe pot to the newly potted Aloe by ol' Alvina's front door. This continued throughout the summer until her Aloe was out-thriving mine. Sometime later that fall Alvina offered me a potted mint plant as a gift because, "I been takin' your Aloe all summer," she chuckled. What started with a few pinched Aloe sprouts, since her heart attack last fall, has blossomed into what I believe to be full blown horticulture therapy for her. She has about 11 plants now, presumably all swiped from other folks in the neighborhood. She's 85, she can do what ever the hell she wants.

Sometimes the old woman drives me nuts with her shrill, squawky voice and her incessant repetition. Almost everything she repeats to me she has repeated to me repeatedly. A year and a half of heading out the door for a waitressing job and she still asks: "yew a waitress?" just so she can tell me: "I yewsed ta be a waitress over at Scarber's." Three semesters of heading off to class and I'm still greeted with "Goin' to skeewl? I never went ta skeewl. My mama said I dint hafta go ta skeewl." And that brings me to another things that just drives me crazy about ol' Alvina. She's so damn simple minded and as much as I can relate to that it's still hard to maintain interest in what she's saying. Except for sometimes. Sometimes she surprises me. Makes me see things I think about constantly, like my impending death, in an entirely different way. And makes me feel like a dick for saying things about her plant thieving and shockingly windsockesque breasts.
Last week Alvina knocked on my door at the disturbingly early hour of 8am. Luckily I had already been woken up by a dull and endless rumbling noise. Our tiny street had just gotten our fancy blue single stream recycling carts and the whole neighborhood plunged into chaos and confusion. Our street is less than 1/10 of a mile long and is completely lined with ramshackle 4-plexes. By adding the recycling carts to the already existing rolling garbage cans, alongside eviscerated couches, shattered televisions, and other ghetto apartment jetsam my street now proudly displays 144 cans!

Alvina was knocking on my door to make this suggestion: we could share her cart so I wouldn't have to block my whole window with one. She followed up her brilliant idea with, "I'm just glad we're neighbors, I just love you to death." With little comments like that, my crusty old grinch heart grows just enough to not only offer to hang lights for her today but also go as far as to suggest she show me those new pants suits she bought at Beall's that she's been chompin' at the bit to show me all week.
So I get everything hung and she can't find an extension cord so I run next door and grab one of mine and as everything illuminates Rockefeller Center style I say, "when I take this stuff down
in March, I'll need this cord back" and Alvina says, "well if I'm not here, just tell 'em it's your cord." And I'm wondering why the hell I would be taking down her Christmas decorations if she wasn't home and just as I ask her this I realize she said "if I'm not here," not "if I'm not home."

She's so sweet that even if she dies before this wretched holiday is over, she wants to make sure I get my extension cord back. Truth be told, Alvina is the best darn neighbor I've ever had.

laundry.

Monday I had a Mexican Day. Mexican Day is what my immigrant Mexican kitchen laborer friends call Monday. Their one day off, their descanso. The one day when they sleep as late as possible to make up for all the sleep they didn't get because they were working six doubles in a row. The day they wash all their clothes at the laundromat, buy and cook all their food for the week and Western Union much of their hard earned dinero back home. I don't work six doubles a week; I trade my extra sleep for a titillating Algebra class. And I skip the Western Union and just go to the Wells Fargo and cry.

My friend Daniel is from Guanajuato and has a really odd opinion of my life as an American woman. He thinks that because I'm white I go to a lavish, secret, spa-like laundromat where only rich, white people like me go.

The laundromat I've been going to for a year and a half is on William Cannon. It occupies space in yet another Feng Shui nightmare, nearly defunct strip mall with a super ghetto-looking beauty school, a rent-to-own furniture store, a nail salon and a CVS Pharmacy where I once bought condoms and the cashier actually said: "Looks like some one's going to have fun tonight!"

I chose my laundromat for two reasons: 1. its proximity to a bar and 2. the absence of children. When it rains, the drop-ceiling panels leak murky liquid the color of expectorated bronchitis phlegm and then fall in chunks onto the floor. Today when I arrived and with frantic grace began sorting and cramming my clothes into the machines, the old guy who runs the place asked: "Where ya been?" I eloquently responded, "Huh?" Then he said, "I haven't seen you in a while, did you go out of town or somethin'?" And I start thinking, this guy is wack. I schlep my filthy, restaurant-stinkin' laundry in here every friggin' week. He must have me confused with the other white girl who washes her clothes here and then I remember: HOUSE SITTING! Yes! For three joyful weeks I washed my clothes in one of those magical machines, a quarterless clothes cleaning device in a house with a solid roof. Spa-like indeed! "Yeah," I finally answered, "I did go out of town." and he responded, "Well next time, don't stay away so long!"

Sometimes it's nice to be noticed.

lucky.

A friend recently read a passage for me from one of his favorite books and reminded me of how lucky I am. Here are some of a million things that I'm feeling particularly lucky for at this moment:

• my health.

• water. it flows out of my faucet hot or cold when ever I want and I can drink it! as much as I want whenever I want.

• my hearing. I cannot imagine life without ever hearing laughter, music or ocean waves.

• my sight. for every beautiful and ugly thing I see every second of every day.

• my freedom & autonomy as an American woman. I can live alone, chose to get married or not, have kids or not. I can work and vote and drive. I can eat what I want, wear what I want, read and watch what I want. Screw who I want. I can drink; I can curse. I am woman; hear me roar.

• humor. I most definitely would have died a long time ago with out it.

the technological advances in my lifetime. I don't know how any of this shit works and I don't know how I ever lived without it.

•  tampons. seriously!