One Hunnert Things

You, all right? I learned it by watching you!

It's a tribute. Homage of sorts. A gesture of thanks and celebration, my emulation, for curing me of candida frustration. Let me tell you, gal pals, Jilbur's advice re: vinegar and boric acid was RIGHT ON. Even if you maintain you'd "never put acid in [your] whoopie." (N.b. The preceding was lifted from an IM session with Mollie, and while I likes to give credit where credit is due, I didn't want to simply link "whoopie" to her blog, see, without some explanation. Because that's just weird, like opening up your office's shared drive this afternoon and discovering thirty-seven files with names like "porn--boobs--oral--analcool! awesome!!!" and "XXX cumshots3" where there were no such files an hour ago.)

Furthermore, I'm right lazy. And somebody gave me a beer.

So let's get this party started.

1. Damn, where do I start?
2. Okay:
3. I'm lazy.
4. But it's because I'm a discouraged perfectionist!
5. I read it in a book about birth order, in the eighties.
6. I was at an impressionable age (12)
7. and immediately adopted this crackpot diagnosis as an important part of my psyche
8. thereby ensuring a future of breathtaking sloppiness.
9. To wit:
10. presently I am thawing a chunk of frozen spaghetti sauce by boiling it in a pot
11. rather than slowly thawing it like a reasonable person capable of creating and executing a plan.
12. Plans. Ha.
13. They are for suckers, plans. Suckers and the reliably fertile.
14. I planned my parenthood some time ago.
15. It did not arrive on schedule, and there I was, forced to reckon with humankind's inherent powerlessness
16. which after many years of struggle has come to be quite a relief.
17. Cosmically speaking, hey, it ain't my job.
18. And yet I am extremely resentful of poor service in restaurants.
19. I waitressed at Shoney's in college.
20. A career track I do not recommend
21. unless you can score the coveted breakfast shift
22. because the customers, they will shovel in the powdered eggs and leathery sausage as fast as they can, and all you have to do is clear.
23. You can bring in two hundred bucks in tips on a good morning.
24. As a novice I was relegated to the evening shift
25. during which, one brilliant post-hurricane afternoon, a man wandered in and crapped, via the leg of his pants, onto the carpet in the foyer.
26. The pay for waitstaff at this point was $2.17 per hour.
27. So no one would clean it up.
28. While we waited for the manager, we watched customer after customer trudge through that foyer, looking with growing horror upon the unmistakable TURD on the FLOOR
29. but NOT A ONE OF THEM turned back.
30. I feel this was both a formative and an enviable experience, the whole Shoney's thing.
31. I'm not really lazy.
32. But I do tend to get sloppy.
33. I make art. Or I used to; I haven't in a while.
34. I have mad printmaking skills.
35. I'm good at nitpicky obsessive things like copper drypoint
36. but only as long as they're one-off.
37. Your more complex multi-step processes like acid etchings, I tend to get bored with and fuck up.
38. If my professors could see the way I framed my work, they'd gouge out their own eyes with a stylus.
39. However, we illustratively-inclined types get zero respect in the art department I worked in
40. so none of my art professors cared much about me.
41. People who actually went to art school make me insanely jealous.
42. Therefore I scoff at art school, gnawing at my knuckles all the while.
43. I am, in general, a textbook case.
44. For example: one might expect the child of talented. successful, driven, equally perfectionistic parents to have issues of perfectionism and approval hunger.
45. On that count I will not disappoint.
46. Tell me I'm smart.
47. Also tell me I'm pretty.
48. And a good writer.
49. But don't tell me now, because then you'd just be saying it because you're my mom and you have to say these things.
50. I think I will be a good mother, in a lot of ways.
51. I also have enough sense to know I will fuck up spectacularly in ways unforeseen.
52. Hey, it ain't my job. To foresee.
53. I am not psychic. As much as I would love to be.
54. Sometimes I am very intuitive, and keyed in to other people, to the point of knowing who's calling before I answer the phone.
55. And yet I often find myself ignorant of the most overt clues that someone is hurting, someone needs to talk, something bad has happened.
56. I don't know why that is, but it makes me feel like an asshole.
57. I am happy, most of the time.
58. Really happy. Idiot happy. I-love-you-guysh drunk person happy.
59. Not that I don't have my issues.
60. I love my job
61. but it's very stressful because I'm learning, and therefore I frequently screw up.
62. Ow.
63. Thankfully my boss is gentle and gives constructive criticism.
64. But still: ow.
65. I hate not being good at things
66. Therefore I tend not to do things I am not already good at.
67. You can see how this would be limiting.
68. See #4.
69. I never found 69 to be a satisfying position, if you catch my drift.
70. I am distractable and selfish. You can imagine how that plays out.
71. I am writing a book.
72. Don't tell my mom.
73. She is a well-known writer. And good. Oh, and she used to read my diary.
74. I would die a million deaths if she saw anything I wrote unless it was in published form with flattering New York Times book reviews tucked into the foreword.
75. You can see how this would be paralyzing.
76. By "writing a book" I mean "have worked out the plot in my head and now just need to get it down."
77. Perhaps the announcement was premature.
78. What are you gonna do.
79. I want people to like me
80. even if I hate them.
81. I want to make you laugh, and will bludgeon you with jokes increasingly offensive out of desperation at your not laughing.
82. It's better if you get me liquored up.
83. Then I just start showing off tattoos and telling bystanders how I totally would do them.
84. You might be surprised at how very many people find that sort of behavior off-putting.
85. I know I always am.
86. And yet I persist.
87. I am such a fucking dork.
88. No, man, really.
89. I feel pretty good about it though.
90. I am good at taking care of myself. Emotionally.
91. It took me a while to learn, but it's true.
92. I'm not sure this is the sort of thing one legitimately could be proud of, but I am.
93. I wish I were better at keeping in touch with people. And interacting.
94. I love people, I really do, both in general and in particular
95. but evidently I have a very low threshhold for contact.
96. I am thinking that has to do with the huge amount of energy I am expending keeping myself on an even keel.
97. That means it belongs to this period in my life, and will go away.
98. So I forgive myself my hermit-ness.
99. And I hope you forgive me for hiding out, as much as I do.
100. Because I do need you, and I do love you.

Comments

[Kim]

One of your list items should have been that you're good at being honest to yourself and in your writing. That's what makes you such a good writer. I hope you get that book out of your head and on to paper soon.

xo,
Kim C.

[jilbur]

You had perfected the art of transforming dorkiness into extraordinary grace, beauty, wit and devastating sex appeal. Also? You're the best downright friend any girl could have. love you endlessly ...

[Danae]

And now I love you even more.

[Mollie]

So many feelings of sisterhood with you, my beloved Jo. And I'm not just saying that because you made me say it.

But I still maintain that I'm a bit wary of subjecting my whoopie to anything related to the production of insecticide.

[zeno]

I feel a girly moment coming on... tissues please... I am enormously moved and challenged by so many of the items in your top hunnert but the one that stands out for me, and touches me places that people seldom touch is number 83. We may be related.

[OliviaDrab]

What's to forgive? You're awesome.

[colette]

just found your blog today and your list of a hunnert things has convinced me that YOU. ROCK.