Have wheels, will deliver meals

I pulled up outside Marra Food Services this morning at 9:30 a.m., anxious as hell. I was going on a training run with Joseph, who would show me my assigned route, should I decide to take on the work. Anxious because I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, anxious about what I might see today, anxious because I didn’t know who this Joseph was — other than what the volunteer coordinator told me over the phone. Would he be an axe murderer? Smelly? An asshole? A horrible teacher?

Anxiety is so stupid sometimes. Joseph was a lovely retired gentleman who couldn’t have been a better tutor. He stood waiting for me as I walked up to the building. He firmly shook my hand, saying good morning, and I was completely at ease.

We walked inside and he ushered me over to the enormous, food-stuffed coolers that we would soon carry out to his car – one with hot meals, the other with cold food (milk, juice, cookie, roll). He showed me how to check off the number of meals/dietary specifications of the people on his route versus the food in the coolers (1% milk vs. whole, special diet needs, only some people wanted juice, no milk, one man who needed his food cut up for him, etc.). Everything looked good and we headed off to his car, coolers in our arms.

As we drove to our first stop (of 20), he explained the detailed notes on the route sheet, next to each meal recipient’s name: some people would leave their own coolers filled with ice packs outside their front doors (because they were either unable to get to the door quickly or they didn’t want to interact with the volunteers), others would be waiting for us, eager to see perhaps the only person they would see all day…to get what might be their only meal of the day. And others had caretakers or adult children that would be waiting to take the food from us.

“For the cooler/ice pack people, they sometimes forget to leave ice packs in them, and if so, we can’t leave the food. It might spoil,” Joseph explained. “If that’s the case, I’ll knock on the door to try to rouse them, but if I can’t get them to the door or they’re not home, I’ll give the extra meal to the next person on the route.”

He then laughed, and said “There’s one guy, toward the end of the route, who leaves hundreds of ice cubes in his cooler. Sometimes all that’s there when I arrive is a pool of water…and then I can’t leave the food for him. I’ll knock and knock, but he never comes to the door.”

Our first few stops were what I called “cooler people,” who had dutifully left their ice-pack-filled coolers by the front door. We packed the meals into their coolers, Joseph would rap on the door, and we would head back to his car.

On our fifth stop, a woman was waiting for us to arrive. As we pulled up, Joseph explained that she had only been on the route for three weeks and that she had baked pound cake for every volunteer who delivered meals to her during the first week. She was thrilled to see us. Joseph introduced me and told her that I would be delivering her meals on Mondays.

An update to Happy Birthday to Me

You know it’s going to be a good day when you have to wrestle a used condom out of your dog’s mouth during the morning walk. It was on the lawn of a neighboring apartment building. Did they have sex on the lawn or in a car or did they fling it out of one the apartment windows? I’ll never know, nor do I really want to. I hope it was good, though.

Anyway, I’ve been rereading a couple of old posts from last Fall, and I’ve been laughing and sometimes crying. The one that stands out to me the most is my Crazy Cake inaugural post, Happy Birthday to Me. I wrote that post 21 days after the breakup; I’m already a different person than I was then. So in the spirit of realizing that things never turn out as expected, I’ve provided current updates to my original list.

***

#1 – October 2011: I can go three days without showering (but need to wash my hair only every four days). Not sure if all my friends and neighbors would agree…but I promise not to judge if they ever choose to curl up in a ball and eschew bathing.

June 2012: As evidenced by my recent post, I’ve whittled successive non-showering days down to two. Hair washing frequency has also improved. Progress!

***

#2 – October 2011: Vodka is NOT food group. Neither are Cheetoes. I don’t think I can look at a martini or powdery yellow salty snack EVER again. Tomorrow I start training for a 5K!

June 2012: What optimistic blather I typed above. Before cutting back my drinking to practically nothing and jumping on the yellow puffy snack wagon 2 months ago, I had stared down the barrel of the Gray Goose and Cheetoes gun many times. I have not trained for, nor run a 5K. But, I have started doing Pilates again. Again, progress.

***

#3 – October 2011: My friends rule the world. So does my family (even though they sometimes put the crazy in the icing on top of the crazy cake).

June 2012: Hahahaha. Sorry. Yes, my family is definitely still crazy and entertaining. I do love them despite all the emotional and guilt-laden shenanigans. As for friends, I’ve reconnected with old dear ones and even several people here in Providence with whom I had lost touch. I will never take for granted their kindness and unconditional love. Others have fallen away, sort of disappeared. I don’t know if they were afraid, disgusted, tired of my apathy toward life and my inability to be a good friend, and/or dealing with their own difficult stuff (like me). Like the condom’s origins, I will probably never know.

***

#4 – October 2011: Everyone should have a pet. The unconditional love attached to a warm nose and gentle eyes won’t immediately cure a broken heart, but it sure helps a helluva lot.

June 2012: No change on this. If you don’t have one, get thee to the local animal shelter today.

***

#5 – October 2011: Exercise is a natural anti-depressant.

June 2012: I still agree. And that’s why I’m still a little depressed.

***

#6 – October 2011: Unpacking after packing/reversing a move S U C K S. And anyone who causes that sort of pain is just not a nice person.

The Job Interview – Parts 2 and 3

Continued from Part 1.

***

Part 2

A balding man in a rumpled gray suit shows me into a large conference room. He has bags under his glassy, empty eyes, which are framed by a mono-brow. He seems ambivalent, bored, robotic.

He leans in close – too close for my one-foot personal boundary rule and not far enough way for me to avoid a whiff of halitosis – and says “I’m the HR Manager, Dick Dickensheets.”

Think bad horrible ugly catastrophic thoughts, like exploding nuclear bombs and dead kittens, I think to myself. Do not laugh. Do NOT laugh.

“We’ll get started just as soon as Sage Green, our Marketing Director, arrives. In the meantime, would you like something to drink?”

Shit. Dead kittens, dead kittens, dead kittens. No, not helping. Men who wear capri pants, men who wear capri pants, men who wear capri pants. Okay, I can breathe now.

I think about asking for vodka on the rocks, but ask opt for water instead. I want him to get out of the room quickly so I can release a roar of pent-up laughter.

He exits the room, leaving a lingering trail of bad breath, and after a 30-second fit of giggles, I sit at the conference room table, tapping my fingers against the glass top and anxiously wondering whether my face is visibly blue based on my Spanx-induced oxygen deprivation.

Two minutes later, Dick arrives with Sage. Alarm bells go off – “runrunrunaway” they shrilly chime in unison. At first glance, I realize that Sage could be a man or woman or in the middle of a sex-reassignment surgery; a foreboding sense of dread about this interview starts to wash over my body.

It is wearing a tight-fitting pantsuit and a skinny tie – both in tropical fruit colors – with a crisp white shirt to pull it all together. Its hair is short, but not too short, fashionably slicked back, as shiny as a freshly waxed beamer and framing a semi-feminine face. Waxed eyebrows? Maybe – could go either way (they do provide a stark contrast to Mr. Dickensheets unpruned mono-brow). There is no visible 5’oclock shadow, although a curious bit of fuzz adorning its upper lip looks like a burgeoning caterpillar. Oxfords with laces and a slight heel. No make-up, wait is that eyelin…

“Hi Beatrice,” it says, interrupting my thoughts. It shakes my hand and says “Great to meet you,” sounding like Lauren Bacall or Kathleen Turner after smoking a carton of cigarettes.

“Good morning, Misterissus Green,” I slur, hoping he is too distracted by my muffin top to notice my poor enunciation. “You can call me Bea.”

“Well Bea, let’s get started, shall we?” Sage says in its raspy voice.

***

Part 3

The jump from the third-floor bathroom window has left my knees bruised and my panty-hose in shreds, but otherwise my body seems to be in working order. I glance up at the mangled, dangling window screen and then look over at the crushed shrubbery I had landed in, realizing – as I survey the large, packed parking lot – that I don’t remember where I parked my car.

In degrees

I debated about taking a shower this morning. It was a long debate. A senseless debate, really. If you haven’t taken a shower in two days, it’s probably an opportune time to take one. Remember my muscle memory post? Shouldn’t showering be a muscle reflex (if anything, a reflex from your nose when it smells your armpit)?

Well, apparently it isn’t, at least not for the jobless, the depressed, the shut-ins, those who don’t have an office to go to or a client to meet. And I know several of them right now, including myself. And for some reason, the showering really trips us up. We share in  a community: the community of a lack of purpose and (sometimes) poor personal hygiene. And really, who gives a shit about soaping up your armpits when you lack big-picture meaning – a job, a vocation, a career – in your life?

As I’ve posted previously, I will soon be unemployed. The spaghetti I’m throwing at the walls – through research, writing, online job searching, networking and agreeing to whore myself out for anything that pays at least $20 an hour – is not sticking. So recently, my this-feels-fruitless-job-hunt-I will-be-living-in-a-cardboard-box-very-soon anxiety has grown into an enormous green-scaled, red-eyed monster, who hovers in my shadow during the day and hides under my bed at night. He has really sharp fingernails (talons?) and it hurts when he pokes me in the shoulder to let me know he’s still there. I’ve offered to pay for a manicure, but he’s ignored my offer. I’ve named him Puff the Magic Dragon; it makes him seem harmless…even though some days he is quite the opposite of nice.

The Job Interview – Part 1

After months of unemployment, isolated from all the living except for a cat, dog, goldfish and orchid, I had taken to wearing sweatpants every day and eating copious amounts of Cheetos. So while it was surprising when I finally got a job interview, it was not surprising that none of my business-appropriate attire fit. Well, my clothes “fit” – after squeezing into three pairs of Spanx and deciding that muffin top was not only acceptable, it was the new sexy.

On the humid, rainy morning of the interview it takes me 27 minutes and 32 seconds to dress myself in 14 layers of spandex and an interview suit. I check my hair and make-up in the hall mirror (hair looks like an already-bad 80’s perm gone horribly awry and makeup is melting), pop half a benzo and head out to my soon-to-be-repossessed car

Driving the 20 miles to the interview, my mind is humming while my makeup continues to slide off my face and onto my neck. This company manufactures the rubber stoppers that are put on chair legs to prevent floor damage. I will be interviewing for the Senior Copywriter position; if selected, I would oversee production of the quarterly rubber-chair-stopper (RCS) catalog, including writing all the copy. Did you know that RCSs come in 325 different colors, and 75 different sizes? And more recently, they had become available in eco-friendly, sustainable materials, like recycled plastic, bamboo, cork, soybeans and bio-combustible cornstarch? (Don’t ask, I don’t know what the hell the cornstarch stuff is either, which given Murphy’s stupid Law, I will be asked about in the interview.) Six materials X 325 colors X 75 different sizes = a lot of scintillating copy to write.

I had applied for this job in a fit of Resume Drunk Dialing.

Muscle memory

My land-line business phone rang at 1:28 a.m. early Thursday morning. (Do not mock my land-line; I have a very nice iPhone for personal use.)

I awoke from a deep, Klonipin-induced sleep with the thoughts “Who died, who died, whodied??” racing through my head as I tucked into the fetal position between my comforter and a fluffy pillow. By the time I reached the phone – located in the other room – the caller had gone to voice mail/hung up. I looked at the caller ID, expecting to see my parents’ phone number or a call from one of my sisters. Or maybe my brother, telling me the Bulgarian Princess had absconded overseas with my nephew. Instead, I was shocked; the illuminated number had not been on my quickly assembled mental list of potential callers.

It was NEB (now ex-boyfriend), whom I haven’t talked to since last October. Why? And why – after he left no message – did I call him back? Because, stupid me, I still fucking care for some masochistic reason. Did his mom die? Was he sick or had he been in an accident? Was he drunk and finally ready to offer an apology for his douchy douche-bag behavior last year? Did he butt-dial me? Did his new girlfriend, trolling through his phone while he slept, stumble upon my number? I had to know. It’s my nature. For me, ignorance does not equal bliss.

I dialed without any thought, the muscle memory in my fingers typing the number without the need to hit redial. It rang and rang. I got his voice mail. I hung up, leaving no message. Alas, I would get no answer to my “Whys” that night and, most likely, ever.

The Bulgarian Princess – Part 3

This is the third and final installment of this story. Read Parts 1 and 2 if you haven’t done so already and want this to make sense. Or maybe you don’t want to read those parts, and that’s fine. OR, maybe you want to read them out-of-order, which is also great. Enjoy!

***

After more than eight years of marriage, I thought we, including my brother, would have grown to like her. Wishful thinking is a dangerous thing, kind of like chain-smoking Marlboro Reds for 40 years and expecting that the CT scan will reveal the unsullied lungs of a newborn. Their marriage was a mess due to my brother’s recent job loss, a house in foreclosure, and her refusal to seek legitimate employment in lieu of her current money-making hobbies: performing body painting at nudist resorts, chauffeuring my seven-year-old niece to local beauty pageants, and black market trafficking Levis jeans in Eastern Europe. The Bank of My Dad kept them out of a cardboard box and her in designer duds and platinum-blonde hair extensions.

As Fall fell upon us that year, I started to dread the looming holidays. I concluded that I would rather shove a meat thermometer into my eyeball than spend another family gathering drowning in the palpable tension created by two married people who hate each other. (No, I’m not talking about my parents, they might actually like each other, on most days.)

On Turkey Day, they arrived at my parents’ house, the location of the Dad ATM machine. This year, the machine screen displayed “Out of Order.” Perhaps my dad’s spine reappeared because the turkey still had 30 minutes to go and he was two-thirds of the way through a bottle of Bordeaux – or maybe he valued his retirement savings far more than her pedicures and Coach bags.

News of the ATM malfunction did not go over well. Panicked and shocked, they locked themselves in one of the spare bedrooms.

The Bulgarian Princess – Part 2

Continued from Part 1:

After the fake-marriage divorce was final six months later, my brother proposed. My father’s only comment was “Your brother in store for a lifetime of misery.” That would make a great greeting card, I thought. I must remember to pitch this to the Hallmark people. She asked my dad for $5,000 as an engagement gift. As we would find out during the next several years, gifts for anniversaries, birthdays, Christian and Jewish holidays, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, Festivus, Mother’s Day, and even Arbor Day, involved cash, flashy jewelry or designer handbags per Bulgarian customs dating back thousands of years. Does she think we’re that stupid? said my dad, as he sat hunched over his desk writing another check.

On their wedding day, my mother fainted when the Bulgarian Princess marched down the aisle in a corseted dress with a skirt (and price tag) larger than the Louisiana Purchase. My mom came to with the aid of smelling salts just as my older sister showed up halfway through the homily, teetering down the aisle in stilettos, which hit the marble tiles with a clack clack clack that echoed as far back as the vestibule. She plopped herself down beside me in the pew and whispered, “I guess I got the time wrong,” her breath reeking of bourbon.

As far as we could tell, the Princess had not worked since she arrived in the states; she had met my brother while loitering outside the pharmaceutical lab where he worked. She was attracted to men in white coats like a lion to an innocent, unsuspecting gazelle that had stopped to take a sip from the watering hole. She once told me, “I am not a alone job girl like you, or how you say, career? My most greatest dream is to be mudder and marry American, how do you say, doocter?” Mudder I soon figured out was not a quaint term for a horse-stall mucker or archeologist; she became pregnant two months after the wedding and six days after my brother started medical school. Mudderhood was on the horizon, whether any of us liked it or not.

To be continued…

Hurricane names I’d like to see

Yippeee. It’s Memorial Day. I’m feeling MUCH better than yesterday, due in large part to a friend’s generosity of spirit and the healing power of movement. More about that later this week, as I re-embark on a Pilates regiment, something that worked for me before and that I hope will be one of the next pieces in the puzzle of getting back on track.

So it’s Memorial Day, and you know what that means? Hurricane season is right around the corner – the official start is June 1, but we’ve already seen two named storms: Alberto and now Beryl (which in all honesty sounds like a god-awful ventriloquist act).

LIVE FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY! 6pm at the Knotty Pine Lodge!! Alberto and Beryl play with puppets!!! No COVER CHARGE!!!!!

Sigh. Can we please come up with some better monikers? Names that do justice (or lend irony) to these powerful forces of nature? Growing up in Florida and suffering through more hurricanes than I can count, I know they are killers, destroyers — and if we’re lucky — just minor annoyances. I respect them, we have no control over where they go or their strength. So, if anything, let’s have a little fun with their names, shall we?

To prove my point, here’s a sampling of the crap we have to work with this year, following good ol’ Al and Beryl:

• Debby: All I can think of is that she does (and hits) Dallas. Nuff said.
• Florence: As in Henderson. No self-respecting hurricane should remind me of Carol Brady.
• Kirk: William Shatner, go back to the U.S.S Enterprise, please. Or those creepy Priceline commercials — and stay out of the Caribbean.
• Patty: Seriously? I have a goldfish named Patty.
• Tony: Mafia boss or pizzeria name. Inappropriate for any storm with sustained winds of over 39 mph.
• Valerie: My sister’s name is off limits.

Soooo…drum roll please…here are my suggestions for some hurricane names, in lieu of the lame ones obviously being pulling from TV show credits and/or The Most Popular Baby Names of 1954 book:

Weddings and divorces and long holiday weekends, oh my

I am way out of sorts today. On the verge of tears, in fact, as I sit in a very public East Side place — surrounded by the ladies who lunch dripping in gold chains and adorned with frosted foot-ball-sized hair — typing this. I hate these long holiday weekends, especially when they back into a four-day work-week where I don’t really have a job anymore. I feel lost. I feel lonely. I feel useless. I feel (stir) crazy. Hopefully the fancy ladies won’t notice the fat girl in the corner sniffling over her bowl of fruit, which she really wishes was a big chocolate cookie.

I know what my problem is but  I don’t know how to fix it. At least not right this moment. So I’m just going to write about it.

Back when lack of a paycheck and job and the imminent doom of government cheese weren’t concerns, I intended to fly out to Northern California this weekend and see a good friend get married. Although I know my decision to not go was a wise, mature one (so unlike me!), I’m sad that I’m not there to see her on one of the most important days of her life. I watched her work her butt off to become a doctor and suffer through her mother’s long illness and subsequent death, and it was about time to see her on a very happy day. Have a blessed, beautiful wedding day, dear Jess. My much happier spirit is there with you. I promise.

As a juxtaposition to that, I found out yesterday — via my sister-in-law’s Facebook status update — that my brother asked her for a divorce on Friday afternoon.