tainted love

I'm kind of feverish and tired, so this might not even be coherent but I just had to jot down the memory of this weird couple on the subway. The girl was maybe, fourteen. That is the exact estimate of her age that I would make. She was just, so incredibly fourteen. I can't even picture her any other age and I will not accept any other suggestions because I have never seen anyone more fourteen in my life. She was wearing pink lip gloss and mascara but no other make-up (rookie mistake: see "she's fourteen" above) and a bright blue toggle coat. She had her semi-oily hair pulled back halfway, and it was not only down to her ass but had those weird blond streaks that everyone experiments with when they're a young teenager and ultimately realizes that they look ridiculous. And she still had this chubby baby face and freckles. Freckles. Adorable baby freckles on her pinchable little baby cheeks.
Okay strap in cause here comes the weird part: the guy she was with was at least twenty-five. I'm trying to be as fair as I can, factoring in early blooming facial hair and maybe he was sick with a cold that accidentally gave his voice a mature masculine timbre when he usually sounds like Willow Smith or a young Japanese girl? But no. Those are dark, slim-fit jeans and a chic brown leather jacket, sir. That mountain-man stubble was earned through years of shaving and the hope of a young boy that his mother was right, it does grow in thicker when you clean yourself up a little for grandma's house. That rakish hair-cut is not the awkward bowl-shaped-- oh God, he's toying with the toggles on her little baby coat. Now he's grabbing her butt as she pretends to be scared of the noise on the train and hides her face in his shoulder and he kisses her forehead. Really, baby girl? You're scared of traffic noise? Maybe New York City isn't the place for your delicate lady-like ears. I wouldn't want them to wilt like your youth in front of all the creeped-out passengers on the downtown 2 train this evening.
While I'm on the subject, that is further proof that she is exactly fourteen years old: she has no idea how to behave herself. I just want to shout at her. YOU LOOK LIKE A FUCKING IDIOT. Additionally, she talks like a goddamn baby. But not in that Sarah Silverman I'm-clearly-a-grown-woman-speaking-like-a-toddler voice, which in itself is annoying enough--but at least it involves a modicum of self-awareness. This girl is telling a meandering story about how she's just like so too super mature for her school and teachers and family, but she's like the rockstar of all of her super cool friends who she is so comfortable and casual with, they're like family, and like, and like, and like, and like, oh my God (Pro tip: if you have to announce how mature you are, you're probably not.)--and she's telling it without a trace of parody, without posing, and without the subtle desperation of the lost women who generally "up-speak"to appear more attractive (even when they're quite physically beautiful already).
And I wasn't the only one on the subway who was so uncomfortable: all around me I saw passengers staring at this couple and doing mental arithmetic or searching in their phones for the number for child services. But honestly, is the math really all that important? Let's ponder for a moment the possibility that the girl is just an extremely young-looking, young-sounding, apparently young-thinking woman. Is it any better for this adult man, who by all indications had a sage and temperate personality (I realize I was just eavesdropping on one brief conversation in a subway), to be interested in a woman who hasn't matured enough to tell a decent story that didn't make me feel like I was listening to my baby cousin during his Pokemon phase? It read like an older brother listening to his baby sister talk about her big day at school.
BLAM-O. Infantilization of women, bitches. It's bad for everybody. Connect the dots yourself, I am fucking tired. Sara OUT.

So You'd Like to Donate $50 to the City of New York: A Guide

As some of you may know, my love Julien is filing for a green card very soon. After filing some paperwork, he met me at the diner and we took the railroad back to Penn station, where we saw that the next subway to my apartment wouldn't be coming for another twenty minutes. So we went to take some beers at Rose's, tipped a confused cashier because I refuse to leave without tipping someone who has given me alcohol, and headed back to the subway, drinks in paper bags. Julien joked that he'd better keep his drink hidden because all he needed was to be arrested just before he was to file for residency, the joke being that it would be incredible to be stopped when you are clearly neither drunk nor disorderly nor causing any disruption of any kind whatsoever.
But alas, some of you already see the problem lurking just beyond the horizon: the "open container" law of New York City, which until now I actually thought was a joke that Europeans made up to make fun of the prudishness of Americans. I literally had no idea that you could actually be stopped for something so stupid, as I will evidence right now.
We exit the subway at my stop and we see, about a block away, some guy getting arrested. "Look, that poor guy is getting arrested. I wonder what he did," I say out loud, perfectly exemplifying irony within the novel of my life.
As the two officers pass with arrestee in tow, one of them looks over to us and is like "Hey what're you drinking?"
And I'm like "Beer."
And he's like "Please step to the side of the street."
Then, true to form, the officer doesn't believe that Julien's ID is real because it is French and the French have not adopted a new style of paperwork since World War II aside from lamination. His license is a folded piece of pink paper, and his official government-issued ID looks like a pool pass. I'm surprised he could even buy the beers, which in this case wouldn't have been such a shame.
I don't have ID on me, of course, because why would I live my life like an adult? He tells me if he were a mean guy he could arrest me for that, which I'm not completely sure is true and sounds kind of gestapo-esque, but I do not mention this to the officer. He gives us some scribbles on a paper that's supposed to be a summons but I swear is just a drawing of us inside of a big middle finger and we now owe the city of New York fifty dollars for buying beer from a stand and leaving with it, which is clearly the point, and even more clearly a conspiracy for entrapment.
The worst part of the evening was when the officer made us put our own drinks into the trash, upside down, so we couldn't even wait until they were gone to pussyfoot back and retrieve them like the derelict we are.

Rococoroboman.

There was a man on the train this morning wearing a silver tie. It wasn't a statement piece and he wasn't flamboyant in the least; it was just a tragic decision that I will proceed to detail here for your and my amusement.
Let's begin with a full description of the tie. It wasn't straight silver, like, I couldn't check my make-up in it: that would indicate either that he bought it at American Apparel or that his office has a bowl of ecstasy in place of an espresso machine. But this guy was not eccentric, jet-setting, drug addled businessman; he was schlubby, middle-management, two kids at home businessman... so while the background of the tie was a field of dazzling, shimmering silver, there was also a busy paisley pattern on top, the sort that dads use when they've got a fancy client to meet after work and their fifteen year old daughter picked it out for Father's Day and said it was classy. The pattern was also in shades of silver and grey.
Also, the guy did that American-guy-trying-to-match thing where everything else on his body was in shades of the one color, in a sort of monochromatic color wheel. He had a grey shirt, a darker grey suit, darker grey socks, black shoes, and a glimmering beacon of joy where his tie should be.
He looked like a Rococo courtroom sketch of a robot charged with go-go dancing too brightly, and he just made my day. I love you, Rococoroboman, you grumpy, sparkling diamond.

This guy I hated in college: A character study

There was this guy in college that I just hated so much. He was a thirty-year-old creative writing major in my introductory Victorian literature class, and he was just, the WORST. For starters, context clues alone (his age and choice of major) allow us to decide that he was a shitty writer (who, incidentally, didn't know how to read context), who came crawling back to university for a degree after he couldn't hack it on talent alone--and he returned to a private institution on the upper east side of Manhattan, instead of the cost-effective city college a few blocks away. Apologies to my creative writing majors, but you do not go back to school, much less a private school, for a useless fruity non-major unless you're an old lady who wants to interrupt my art history classes with her inane opinions about the pretty colors and a meandering story about her granddaughter who saw a painting in Paris. Creative and academic majors are for dewey-eyed youngsters and old people with too much time to kill, not some oblivious bastard who believes he's not getting writing gigs because of "the system".
So this son of a bitch would come to class every day in what I would (and did, frequently) term his "freelance writer/journalist costume". It's what you would wear on Halloween if you're one of the killjoys who refuses to get into the holiday but still wants to come and drink at the party: F. Scott Fitzwriterman was always and forever unshaven, but in such a way that you know that he shaved immediately after class so it'd be the exact shade of "I'm just more concerned with my art than with your social construction of my facial hair" every day. Baby blue button-down shirt, unbuttoned at the cuffs and rolled halfway up his forearm because he's getting down to fucking business, okay? By writing. He would also leave the first few top buttons open, for the ladies. Or gay gentlemen; he doesn't judge, he's too progressive. A progressive writer. He also wore Levi's instead of expensive designer jeans, I can only assume to traverse the rough and rowdy terrain of Victorian literature, and loafers. Did you expect socks with those loafers? Fuck your expectations. Fuck socks, and your expectations. He is encumbered by neither. This is fucking Victorian Literature: an Introductory course, so allow me to introduce you to W. B. Writes. He does what he wants, which is writing.
I'll take a moment now to remind the few of you who were educated about art and literature under the Third Reich that the English Victorian Era is characterized by basically three things: sexual repression, sexual "repression", and corsets. Because you are of sound and normal mind, I don't need to tell you that all three of these topics are deeply entrenched in gender relations. The English Victorians are a people who stole ancient Egyptian fertility-god artifacts just to display them in museums without any dicks on them because what if ladies saw dicks??! They took fertility artifacts, whose focal points were their giant auto-erotic dicks, and they removed the dicks; the "focal points", if you will. Somewhere stashed in the British Museum there is a pile of ancient erect stone dicks and a very concerned intern who regrets her rambunctious curiosity.
So Ernest Writingway would sit sprawled out at his desk, surrounded by fawning hipster girls who just could not get enough of this red-hot modern philosopher, and throw this perfect storm of incoherent yet intelligent-sounding questions at our poor, haggard professor. Like, if you walked into the class knowing absolutely nothing about history or sociology or humans, you might think that this guy was some kind of avant-garde genius. But in reality he was just a privileged asshole who didn't care to understand the basic tenements of the world he lived in, and profited from.
For instance, in response to Charles Dickens' furious hate-drunken rant about an influential painter's representation of the Christ child as a red-head (representative in that time of Jewish people, sluts, the poor, and the disdainful Irish--which astute readers will note that Christ was at least two of), a letter which must only be read with a ShamWow close at hand, such is the frothiness of his rage, this casual-button-down-bedecked pioneer of academia suggested, reading from his scribbled notes in a Moleskin (I can't report for sure that it was an actual Moleskin but--it completely was a Moleskin), that perhaps we're all just reading far too into it all, and maybe when Dickens referred to the child as "a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy in a bed gown" he just thought the painting was ugly. I mean although it's generally not stupid or imperceptive at all to take fictional writers at their word without reading context clues or any kind of symbolism, and although Dickens had a storied history of hideous anti-Semitism in his work, particularly anti-Semitism characterized by greedy red-headed villains, we're probably just taking this whole 'gross caricature of a disenfranchised minority' thing too seriously.
But the one curveball question that really stuck to my ribs and filled the back of my eyes with such white-hot frustration that forever burned his image into my brain came late in the semester, when a harried T. S. Idiot sighed deeply and moaned to no one really in particular, "When can we just stop talking about gender already?" Our professor immediately zeroed in on his woeful, passive-aggressive whine and simply responded, roughly, that "there wouldn't be any Victorian era without gendered tensions. Perhaps as a straight white Christian male you feel that removing the lens of gender would serve the purpose of studying the era because it removes the conflict of people who aren't just like you, and maybe that's just what you're accustomed to hearing about: your story. In order to do that you can take just about any history course. But in my class, we study the entirety of the era, from every angle, and gender is everywhere... except when told solely by men. You're studying for a liberal arts degree, in a liberal arts class. Act like it."
And in that moment, I think we all felt like a confused intern at the British museum. Because in this life, you sometimes just find dicks in unexpected places.

I accidentally bought ten laptops.

The other morning, absurdly early, a strange number called my cell phone. Being the person that I am, living the life that I live, I absolutely never answer the phone when a strange number is calling. Absolutely never, that is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode in my face. Mainly, it could be one of the numerous seedy characters I encountered as a matter of course during the time that I convinced myself that commuting into Manhattan for a full-time class schedule while holding an internship and [a/the] [unsavory] job[s] that allowed me to afford that commute/food/shelter was an actual thing that could be done by anyone other than the quadruple amputee army veterans that speak at Democratic National Conventions. Perhaps my phantom phone caller was the quadriplegic army veteran who in fact did not speak at the Democratic National Convention, but offered me CA$$H MONY to clean his apartment topless. Worse yet, it could be a creditor.

My first course of action is to obsess over whether I recognize the number, or have ever seen that particular combination of numbers in a prophesy or recurring in my life at a suspicious rate lately. In this particular case, I definitely didn't recognize the number as a quick google search of the country code told me that this person was calling from India, and I do not know anyone in India. Nor do I care to, because I've heard there are very few public restrooms for women in that country, and I tend to base my judgements heavily on the availability of bathrooms in a country. Using this scale, I have discovered that Peru and Italy are awful places, and France should be the president of all the countries.

So this Indian person/Omen then proceeded to call me five additional times, leaving no messages, while I sat folded into a tight knot in the corner of my bed, pushing my phone away with my big toe and whimpering. Why? Who in India would want to speak to me about anything other than finances? Why can't it be the legless army vet? I will clean a hundred creepy nightmare apartments while being followed by a half-person on wheels! I will clean them WITH my breasts!

Finally, my phone stops singing and I am at peace enough to check my email, where I have sixteen unread messages from Amazon.com informing me that I have purchased ten shitty laptops. More specifically, that I have purchased ten shitty laptops and that the payment wouldn't go through for nine of them. My best guess was because I didn't purchase the nine shitty laptops or their shitty brother, but Amazon.com disagreed. 

After making a pointless phone call to Julien because I was sad that I had apparently bought ten mystery laptops, I pulled myself together to spend the good part of my morning crying on the phone to an Indian woman about the high cost of living in my particular part of the country, due in part to the wide availability of public restrooms for women, and the fact that one of these shitty laptops would equal about a month's rent for me, while she repeated banal corporate phrases into my ear using dulcet tones to calm my whiny, pathetic cry-y rage. We wondered together that this was in fact ten separate orders for the same laptop (instead of one order for ten laptops), and that they were all apparently being shipped to my family's address-- a house that no one currently lives in. 

A brief interlude: When I was younger, I was a hardcore sleepwalker. Mainly, I would just creep my mom out when she found me sitting upright in my closet, sleeping, or at the kitchen table with a random assortment of condiments before me, or when I'd get up and start talking with those spooky unseeing eyes that anyone familiar with sleepwalkers can attest is the thing nightmares are made of. In a similar vein, my brother used to sleep with his eyes open, and I only know this from when he would fall asleep in the car during long road trips and I felt the chill of the damned when his watery, unseeing eyes would roll towards me as I sat intently watching them to make sure they wouldn't begin to devour my very soul if I turned my back. 

The only reason that I was really able to sell the idea that I never purchased ten laptops and that the orders should be retroactively cancelled and Amazon.com should immediately send a representative to my place in Brooklyn with a hug and a moderately priced espresso machine to make up for this indignity was the fact that I hadn't noticed the ten Completed Order screens on my Kindle until I was toying with it while on hold, waiting for my representative to return with some good news about the cancelled shipment.

When she finally did return, breathless and relieved after having talked with several of her superiors, I sheepishly thanked her for her help and insisted that there was no need for a hug or an espresso machine, really. I was just glad that the mystery had been resolved, in one way or another.