College the First Time

It lasted all of a year, and then I dropped out.  At the time I told myself I was just taking a little time off - and, in fact, five years later when I finally went back and loved school, this was actualized. But for a long while in between college round one and college round two, "dropout" would have been the more appropriate term.

I hardly ever think about college round one, but it comes up often enough, mostly when people I meet in an academic context get super confused about how I am in my 30s but only earned my BA five years ago. Earlier this week I was really put through the ringer about the whole ordeal, and so it's been on my mind. I'm trying to piece together what I was up to then, and how to account for how different things were for me when I was 17 than they are now.

College the First Time was a small (I mean really, really small) liberal arts school in New England. My assigned roommate and I were the very best of friends until suddenly we were worst enemies; looking back, I should have known from the start that she was kind of nuts and just kept my distance. She played the guitar, which I had no interest in doing (although took up in my 20s), and was an artist, which I suddenly had every interest in becoming. I arrived with an arsenal of bad poetry and short stories and was determined to churn out many more, not realizing until much later the the medium in which I would eventually find the most creative expression would be non-fiction. During College the First Time I added to my repertoire of creative endeavours drawing, set design, pottery, and photography. I was truly convinced that I had something to say, but I had absolutely no idea what that thing was, and only through photography did I come even remotely close to figuring that thing out. But even there I failed.

Under the guidance of my new roommate and in a gesture of feminist solidarity I hacked off most of my hair the first week of school. There was much pomp and ceremony involved, and needless to say it really confused many of the people I'd just met. I went through this awkward total butchy moment that I look back on as pretty sincere and endearing but also as kind of the worst choice ever. I was up to my ears in mid-1990s nonsense like overalls and combat boots and thrift store t-shirts that said things like "I love everybody and you're next." When my hair grew back I dyed it fire engine red. The cassette player was always blasting this or this or this or this or this, and it was never not blasting. I spent a lot of time in diners, writing more bad poems.

I'm almost certain I went to class sometimes. In the more traditionally academic courses, I remember a lot of things seeming like they could be super interesting, but paradoxically I wasn't that interested in them (or anything else). I found many poets taxing, was intrigued by Emma Goldman, adored Chaucer, and adored Charles Dickens even more. But that was really about it. Art history - which became my love and my career much later - was not taught because the faculty didn't want the past to taint our creative processes. The one professor who wouldn't stand for this was the man who taught photography, and so as a photo student I was required to take a zero-credit three-hour lecture on the history of photography once a week. The history of photography has become my field, and I would love to say that these lectures way back when informed this decision in some way. But I can't. I hardly remember them. I wish I did, because it would make me feel loads better about still paying off my College the First Time student loans.

By the middle of my second semester I knew I wasn't going to return the following year. And by the time I went back to school - this time, armed with a goal and firm ideas about what I wanted out of the experience - I knew I would transfer to another very different institution. At a rough-and-tumble large urban state school I fell in love with academics. Thank you, College the First Time, for showing me so early what I didn't want.

Get your pets spayed and neutered, people (redux)

I know I've blogged somewhere down there about The Price is Right, but here I am doing it again. Just bear with me. And if you're one of my co-workers, and you think this blog post is going to be about the time last week in Arizona when I had to go swimming with my boss in a pool owned by someone named Bob Barker (not the actual game show host) -- think again. I would never.

Nope. This blog post is about last Monday, when I took my first ever for realz sick day from work.

I know what you're thinking - you're thinking, but A.B., you've been working for a million years at so many jobs -- how can this be? But it's really true. All the jobs I had between undergrad round 1 and underground round 2 that afforded me sick days made it truly impossible to actually take them. They were the sorts of employment situations in which very few people could replace you, especially last-minute, and you were absolutely integral to things not falling to bits. It was Really Frowned Upon to call out, and generally so doing would mean begging a coworker to cover for you and then owing them tenfold in shifts later on. These were the sorts of jobs that on paper were forty hours per week but really ended up being sixty, and so time off was sacred. Calling in sick meant disrupting someone else's sacred time. It was a real problem.

And then when I was putting myself through college, I had two hourly jobs. Calling in sick would disrupt the very delicate balance of barely being out of debt and being in debt. It was all very complicated, and so I always went to work even when I felt like total ass.

Now, however, I have a real(ish) job with a lovely boss at which I am not expected to show up if I don't feel well unless something really and truly dire is going on. I had no idea what to make of this, and so Monday when I woke up after my Sunday evening "I'm in denial about my scratchy throat" South Philly water ice [look it up, non-Philly people] crawl and felt even worse, I definitely lay in bed for about an hour willing myself to get up and get in the shower and drag myself to my desk. I had the same debate an hour before about bagging on my morning run, but I felt certain that I would make it to my job. But at some point I surrendered, and left an all-too-long and over-explain-y voice mail for my boss, and then a worse one for the department administrator, about how awful I felt. And then I went back to sleep.

It was amazing.

Around 11 I woke up and really needed to watch an episode of The Price  is Right, like the good old days of middle school mornings spent home sick. I was hoping to turn up some 1980s episodes with Bob Barker, but the internet did not provide. Instead I watched a recent one on CBS with Drew Carey as host. I was pleased to find that he threw out the same Barker tagline at the end about spaying and neurering your pets, though it didn't have the same je-ne-sais-quoi that Bob's got. It's also worth pointing out that the Price is Right mystique that I recall from childhood - aka "How the hell do they know how much this shit is worth?!" was not solved by my graceful entry into legitimate adulthood. Put a six egg boiler or a steam shower or a speedboat or a vacation to Hawai'i or some Fiestaware in front of me, and I still can't tell you if it costs $5 or $5,000. They need some sort of secondhand store version of this show. At that I'd be a champion.

FWIW, I'm on the mend now. And that sick day sure helped. Thanks, my job.

A Random Assortment of Philadelphia Occurrences, May the 28th, 2011

1.
Overheard snippit of a conversation between a heavily-tattooed guy in his late 20s and his girlfriend:
Guy: Yeah, so, the thing about this tattoo (points to cobweb tattoo on left elbow) is that all these bitches keep getting them even when they haven't been in the slammer. Like the other day I saw this girl with one and I was like "Yo, where were you locked up?" and she says, "Huh?" And I say, "What prison were you at?" and I point to her tattoo. And she's like "Ummm, I wasn't in prison."  Let me tell you, that bitch is lucky nobody's walked right up to her after that answer and cut that tattoo right off her fucking arm.
[pause]
Oh hey, you want to go into H&M?

2.
Overheard conversation between two guys on the street near City Hall:
Guy 1: You know what? It's fucking beautiful outside today.
Guy 2: Yeah. But you know you've said that maybe a dozen times today already.
Guy 1: Well fuck you cuz I'm gonna say it at least 100 more times today. Because it's fucking GOOOORGEOUS out and I FUCKING LOVE PHILADELPHIA!!! WHO'S WITH ME HERE PEOPLE??

3.
Noticed, better late than never:
When you stand in the middle of the Parkway, you can see all the way from City Hall (Broad / 14th Street) clear to the Art Museum.

4.
Observed at Market and 9th (thereabouts):
A Ramones cover band set up - amps and all - and got through two great and extremely loud songs before some cops figured out they didn't have permits and shut their shit down.

5.
Observed at my house:
Two squirrels trying in vain to enter my neighbor's apartment through their cat door.

6.
I love this city.

Pea Shoots

Oh hi, blog. Sorry about that. I've been ... busy.

Right now if you looked in my window you would see me shoveling salad into my face as fast as possible. Stupid ruffage requires so much chewing, but it's a labor of love because it's springtime and all sorts of produce is suddenly in season and everything tastes fresh and crunchy and flavorful and delicious.

One of the things on my salad is pea shoots  by far my favorite of the sprout-type things. Nonetheless their taste is always so confusing to me because I'm pretty sure some wires got crossed in the sensory department when I was a small child. Pea shoots taste like, well, pea shoots, but they also taste like cigars.

Let me explain.

I grew up in the suburbs, except not really, because there wasn't an "urb" for miles and miles and miles. But I say "suburb" because it definitely wasn't the country. I could tell you where it was, but I'm not going to do that because the internet is full of weirdos and I'm not too down with blabbing my shit all over the place. But know that it was a place full of towns that were supposed to be quaint but that I found sort of horrifying, and also old people. Tons of fucking old people.

Our neighbors were not old people, but I counted them as such because they didn't have any kids. They also weren't very friendly, and I always interpreted that as a sign of old age curmudgeony. What they did have going for them was a sweet vegetable garden with which I was mildly obsessed from about age 3 to age 6. There was no fence between our houses, but I was definitely not allowed to go investigate what the curmudgeony neighbors were doing over there. So often I just sat and watched them garden from afar, hoping that my very sincere interest would be rewarded with some sort of response. This was one of two periods of my life in which I was acutely interested in Science, and I was really determined to figure out plants.* We didn't have much going on in our yard, so the next-door neighbors were my best bet.

The husband curmudgeon did most or all of the gardening. He was always out there milling about, pulling weeds, picking vegetables, plotting against squirrels. Also, he was smoking cigars pretty much nonstop. And so forever after I have truly mixed up those two smells: when I smell cigars, I think I am smelling green beans and peas; when I smell peas, I think I am smelling cigars.

The only time I got to go hang out in the garden was the week their extended family came to visit. One of the kids was roughly my age and we got along okay. Her name was Sally, and she would have me over to eat fresh sugar snap peas right off the plant. More important but totally unrelated to peas and cigars, she had this amazing t-shirt I coveted but was never allowed to get myself - a blue ringer tee with Blueberries for Sal on the front. I don't even remember what that book was about, but I know I loved it.

OK blog. I can't promise I'll post again soon. But I can promise that I'll eat more pea shoots all summer.

*My interest in science is also the reason I once got grounded for hoarding apple seeds and then during some unstructured free time planting them all over the yard. Obviously none grew, but there were trenches in the yard forever after where grass wouldn't grow. My plan really backfired.

Pen Fifteen

Two thoughts on childhood, triggered by recent trips to NYC:

1. A friend and I were discussing pranks and jokes that kids play on each other.  Or, more precisely, we resurrected our absolute favorite: Club Pen Fifteen.  In case you don't remember or in case this somehow passed you by in third grade:

A: Do you want to join my club?
B: What is it?
A: It's called the Pen Fifteen Club.  It's awesome.
B: How do I join?
A: It's easy. All the members just have the club name written on their arm. I'll do it right now for you.
B: OK, I'm in.

Person B then spends the rest of the day with PEN15 fancifully written on his or her arm, then finds another unaware and uninitiated youth, and advances to the role of Person A.

Genius. Comic genius. Perhaps the only joke from elementary school that still makes me laugh.

2. I am forever delighted when I hear a song I used to sing along to as a kid, and realize that there are a number of metaphors that really passed me by. Monday in the car I heard this song and realized it was not about driving but actually about coke. That blew my mind:



This in turn reminded me about something else great: misunderstanding song lyrics as a child.  Like how I thought a second Eagles song was about hiding lion eyes.  And how I thought this one went "Every time I poop I lose":



That one still really cracks me up, by the way.  It gets stuck in my head all the time, unprompted.  And it takes a whole lot of self-restraint to not belt out all of "Every time I poop I lose" when this happens.  I am laughing right now just thinking about it.

I argue, I posit, I demonstrate, I contend ...

I am deep in the trenches of dissertation grant applications right now, which means that I really want to do anything but.  This includes tending to my neglected blog and its three readers.  Sorry, guys.

I wanted to blog about two things today, one being this: why the hell I wake up at 6:13 am every single morning.  This has happened every morning for the last two weeks, and it's starting to make me feel slightly nuts.  My alarm does not ring until 6:45 on weekdays and 7:30 on weekends, so what on earth is rousing me from much-needed sleep every morning at the exact same minute is really beyond me.  Ideas welcome.

The other subject I'm mulling over is my lifelong obsession with cities, which would make for a much more interesting and thoughtful post.  But it will have to wait until this application is done.

In the meantime, please enjoy this adorable music video about cuckoo clocks (I think?) of which I understand about every fourth word:

Gearing up for the weekend

<drum roll>

Question

Has looking at a Lewis Hine photograph ever made you weep?

I was asked this yesterday by a scholar (in certain ways, THE scholar) who knows Hine's work well.  It was in the middle of a conversation that was more or less academically-oriented - the usual questions about Hine's practice of image-making.  It caught me off-guard, not because it's an irrelevant question to ask about those images but because I've never heard an academic ask somebody that.

Truly, Hine's pictures are hard to look at.  All the images I'm writing about are hard to look at, which is maybe why scholars don't often seem to look at them very carefully.  I think one of the most difficult things about these (and other early social documentary) photographs is that there was so much invested in their making, that the photographers really believed that pictures would move their audiences more than they actually did.  But no, I haven't cried.  The question is really sticking with me, though.

More Saturday!

Let it be known that somebody at the Library of Congress also appreciates the roller skate:
Crazy Sk8

Saturday