1. Up to that point, I’d maintained a good girl reputation, having never graced the halls of detention or Saturday School, and also, I was a member of Moorpark High School’s award-winning, ass-kicking Academic Decathlon team, which had dessicated the county competition and came within inches of a first place spot in the state of California.  The school’s security guards just assumed that when I was leaving campus, I was doing something academically challenging and rigorous, and that of course I had permission to go.  I could literally drive out the front gate waving cheerfully at the guards, who’d wave back with big grins before busting the football player trying to sneak off campus over the back fence.  It was the one time in my high school life that being a nerd brought me any kind of power, and I relished it.

2. I finally had a car, my mother’s old 1986 Volkswagen Golf replete with broken roll-up windows, no air-conditioning, no radio, torn seats, and a heater that occasionally fried out the engine.  Despite the fact that the Golf was essentially an ugly piece of moving tin, I adored it: it handled well, and all the boys I knew said it had “good pickup.”  I was never really sure what that meant, but I had a feeling that “good pickup” was the force that slammed me back in my seat after my right foot tapped the gas pedal, the force that scooted the car across the road and made fast, tight turns around corners.  In other words, it was unsafe and fantastic, and I loved driving that thing.

These two privileges combined — my own car, and what I interpreted as an endlessly free off-campus pass — I began skipping a whole lot of school.

At first, I’d just drive back to my house and hang around there.  That got boring.

Then I’d go for drives in the farm and ranch land surrounding my town.  I’d explore the back roads, get lost in acres of orange groves, and zip through the canyons.  As wild as that was, it also got boring.

Then, I got bold enough to drive to the Valley to visit the college I’d be attending in the fall.  I has zero interest in college in general, but driving around the campus (literally driving in circles around the campus block) was kind of exciting.  Eventually, though, the San Fernando Valley lost its allure, became one more series of parking lots and strip malls, and I yearned for a wider Earth.

One day I drove to Santa Barbara.

And one day I drove all the way down to Hollywood.  I spent the whole morning exploring Mulholland and thus falling deeply and irreversibly in love with Laurel Canyon.  I drove up and down Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset, Melrose, Highland, all the streets with their near mythical names and the drunks on the corner were sadly dusted with glamor magic in my youthful stupidity and I just wanted to bury myself under the Hollywood sidewalks and become a part of the city forever.  Hollywood.  HOLLYWOOD.  I still can’t explain my love for that crapfest city.  It’s not the fame thing.  It’s the Hollywood-ness of Hollywood.

I found a road up to one of the lookouts in lower Beachwood Canyon and the panorama of the city spread out before me like Oz.  One day, I swore to myself, one day I would live in a little house here and write stories and people would visit me in my little house and we’d all sit on cushions on the floor and drink iced coffee and talk about books and movies and listen to music and laugh and dance and people would say, “Man, have you seen Vanessa’s place, it’s so great there.”

Satisfied — sated, even — I cheerfully drove home.

On the way back to Moorpark, I stopped in Simi Valley to have lunch at In-n-Out, as one does when one ditches high school in southern California.  I felt good.  Another day I’d spent in the valuable pursuit of wasting gas and daydreaming about living in Hollywood when I could have been learning about economics and French.  As I walked into the restaurant, I heard a number of people gasp and laugh.  “Look at that car!” someone hissed.  “Man, I’d hate to be the owner of that car!”

Eager to take share in what promised to be a spectacle, I began to turn.

I remember turning around took a long, long time.  Somewhere in me, I knew — I knew – that the car everyone was pointing and laughing at was mine, but 98% of me had no clue, no premonition whatsoever, that the inevitable had inevitably occurred.  Denial is a powerful force, you know, squashing even the sharpest sense of lyrical justice.

When I finally finished the turn, I saw it: the hood of my little VW was spewing volumes of steam (though at the time I thought it was smoke) so thick and viscous that the body of the car literally disappeared in it.  The steam wafted in streams up to the tall maple trees that framed the parking lot.  People’s voices seemed to come at me distorted, distant, like a bad telephone connection back in the day of landlines.  And slow, as if some giant cosmic sound editor had warped the track.

“Doooooo yooooouuuu neeeeeeeeeeed heeeeeeelllllpppp?” someone asked me.  No surprise that he guessed I belonged to the steaming pile of scrap metal  I was clearly the owner of the car now — my shock was palpable.

Of course I needed help.  I had no idea what to do.  I’d never dealt with a car breakdown before, and I had absolutely no understanding of how a car engine worked.  As far as I knew, the steam (or smoke, as I still thought) signaled the ultimate demise of my old VW beater, and all I could think about in that moment was that I would never again be able to drive so freely and so far again.

Shock, luckily, does wear off, and somehow I figured out how to work my arms and legs again.  The someone who had spoken to me — a very nice man — helped me open the hood of my car, informed me of the difference between smoke (gray) and steam (white), and told me that he guessed something was wrong with the water pump (whatever that was) or the radiator (I’d take his word for it).  I needed, he told me, to call my mechanic and a tow truck because there was no way I could drive the car off the parking lot, much less back to Moorpark.

I thanked him woodenly.  The reality of the situation had set in.  The world wouldn’t end, of course: the car could be repaired.

Of course, in order to do that, I’d have to call my parents.

And tell them that the car was broken down.

In Simi Valley.

Miles away from home.

In the middle of the school day.

I dragged my feet to the pay phone (by the way, remember pay phones?), picked up the heavy-yet-sticky receiver, and began to dial.

Well — do I need to go on?  Five minutes into the conversation with my mother, who was hard at work in downtown Los Angeles making money to support me, she figured out that I’d a) ditched school, b) to drive for miles in an ill-equipped car, c) managed to break said car, and d) needed money and transportation in a hurry.

It didn’t really go well.

A few hours later, I was ensconced in my bedroom, the keys of the car taken away, and my social calendar curtailed until I was able to pay my folks back for the repair (which, gratefully, managed to be relatively small).  Nor would I reclaim possession of the car once it was repaired — oh no, I was car grounded as well as home grounded.

Ever since that fateful day, I’ve had a strong sense of the absolute rightness of the universe.  At least, the universe of me.  Any time I’m about to do something intentionally wrong or stupid, I think of this event.  I think of the time I ditched school and drove to Hollywood and broke down the car and had to admit to my parents that I’d wasted my time and their money.  And I reconsider.

At least, some of the time.

It’s a long story, but essentially the reason I called was because the office had given me two very different stories about a particular issue and I wanted to resolve the miscommunication, especially considering that the fallout from the miscommunication is going to cost me some change.

The guy I spoke to — ooh, he gave me the willies.  Rude doesn’t quite cut it.  He wasn’t rude per se, at least at first.  No, at first he was smarmy.  He spoke to me as if I was a slightly hard-of-hearing idiot who needed to be guided through the steps of my rental agreement.  He actually asked me — very slowly, enunciating each word — if I knew that my rent was due every month on the first.  (I can’t tell you, I can’t begin to describe the quality of his voice when he said that.)  The fact that such a question had nothing to do with the reason why I was calling in the first place makes the whole situation even more infuriating.

(I should quickly mention that I think the men who work at that management office are trained to talk to women renters as if they’re hard-of-hearing idiots.  Whenever I call to talk about something that’s not working correctly in my apartment, I get spoken to as if I don’t understand how to operate a doorknob.)

The conversation, and the man’s tone of voice, were both so infuriating that it was all I could do from turning into a shrew and lambasting him.  As it was, I got snippy and strangely eloquent, which sometimes happens when I’m in a ridiculous argument that should not have even begun.  This didn’t seem to help the situation, because I was using big words that he probably thought I wasn’t capable of (judging by the fact that he was treating me like a hard-of-hearing, can’t-use-a-doorknob idiot).

He repeated himself several times.  When I tried to clarify my position, he repeated himself some more.

He interrupted me.  Like, a lot.  Just about every time I was trying to make a point, in fact.

When I wouldn’t back down, he suddenly gave up and essentially hung up on me.

I then jumped up and down, kicked at the air, tore some paper, and wrote an angry rant of letter to the management copy complaining about the man’s behavior and decrying their customer service policy as a whole.

Then, as it usually happens, the act of writing the angry rant cleansed me of my anger and left me sober and more thoughtful.  I probably won’t send it — though I’m tempted to — mostly because I doubt anything will actually happen in terms of the office changing the way they deal with their tenants.  If anything, I could be placed in an awkward situation.  If you don’t like us, I’m imagining them saying, then why don’t you just leave?

And when it comes down to it, this guy is probably some mid-level functionary who couldn’t really help me anyway and was just trying to handle another phone call.

So what am I thoughtful about?

Well, this: I think my major issue is that I’m a school teacher.  Here’s what I mean.

As a teacher, my role in the classroom isn’t just to lead discussions and make sure that everyone knows that Hamlet is a revenge tragedy and that Fortinbras is a foil, and what a foil is, and the double meaning of the word foil, and so on.  My role in the classroom is to teach the students how to be — this is going to sound corny — good together.  Good citizens.

Most of the hour-and-forty-five-minute teaching blocks I have are discussion-based.  This means that students have to learn how to listen to each other, how to talk about their ideas fluently, how to be polite, and how not to interrupt and get snarky or smarmy or lofty or in any way unproductive.

In fact, the large portion of my job is about helping shape citizenship.  It’s why I insist that students ask for help appropriately, and it’s why I get them to pick up after themselves when they leave the classroom and turn work in on time and ask for permission when they borrow items from my classroom and on and on.  “Appropriate” is a term I use constantly in my work.  Teaching citizenship — teaching respect — is a full-time job, as anyone who has children or works with them can testify to — but it’s valuable and important.

And as a teacher, I’m afforded the extra benefit of — well, being listened to.  I teach fantastic students, and they listen to me when I ask them not to interrupt, to pick up after themselves, to speak directly and intelligently, to listen to each other, and to not treat each other like hard-of-hearing idiots (not that I’ve used that term).

This benefit means that I get to be one of the team of people — the franchise of parents, teachers, coaches, and other mentors — who help to shape a young person.

It’s pretty awesome.

And it’s made me extra aware of the extraordinary rudeness out there in the world.  More than that, it’s made me aware of the callous way many of us treat each other, and aware of the fact that many people don’t actually know how to listen or have a conversation or work through an argument.  Including, at times, me.

So after I wrote my angry letter, I realized that its content focused more on the nature of the conversation I had with that guy, his rude smarminess, than on the real issue at hand.

I wanted him, his boss, and his parents to know that he needs to work on listening, on not interrupting, and on developing his argument rather than repeating his thesis.

Seriously, I almost used those words.

And I began to think that maybe the reason why the phone call was so unpleasant, or at least one of the reasons, was because I wanted to be treated like a schoolteacher when really I was just a tenant.

I don’t mean to imply that anyone deserves to be treated disrespectfully.  I mean that I wasn’t in a position to correct the fellow, despite the fact that every fiber in my professional being was screaming at me to tell him,

“Please don’t interrupt.  When someone is speaking, you need to be quiet, listen, and wait until the floor is yours.”

Or

“I don’t appreciate your tone of voice.  You’re making it difficult for me to listen to you.”

Or

“What are you trying to say?  What’s your argument?  Don’t just rephrase the prompt.  Think about what’s at stake here, where the contention lies.”

Or

“Please email me to set up an appointment to discuss this further.  And let me check in with your advisor.”

But I couldn’t.  I can’t.  Because basically, I’m not his teacher.

I’m not everyone’s teacher.

That’s sort of what it comes down to.

I’m only three years in to my full-time high school teaching gig, and I’m still in the process of differentiating my work mode from my personal life mode.  It’s difficult to separate these modes, especially at the end of a long school day.

So when I made that phone call and I was met with rude smarminess, I reacted like a teacher.  Which wasn’t really helpful.

And yes, I’m angry with myself for getting snippy and strangely eloquent, and for not really getting my point across.

But mostly I’m aware, once again, of this giant world of rudeness that exists in the universe, and maybe specifically in Los Angeles, and despite the fact that I’m not everyone’s schoolteacher, I would like anyone reading this to agree with me on the following:

Listen, speak clearly, make your point, don’t interrupt, don’t put anyone down.

And let people out of the elevator before getting in.

When I get really excited about something I want to do, like join a kickboxing class or get a cat or move to a cabin in Alaska, I’ll plan every inch of the experience and talk about my plans with everyone — everyone — and then when it comes down to actually doing the kickboxing or cat-getting or cabin-Alaska-moving, I’ll lose all interest and momentum, and won’t do it.

I don’t know why I do this.

For one thing, it’s a major waste of time.  It’s also really annoying for everyone I know, including random people I stand in line next to at the Whole Foods, to listen to me prattle on about Alaskan land values and expect me to actually one day do something, and then for it not to happen.

Half the time, I think I know I’m not going to do the thing I keep telling everyone I’m going to do, and I wish I could somehow communicate to my friends, my family, my coworkers, and the people in line at the Whole Foods that I just need to talk about this stupid kite-building project or learning-how-to-use-a-gun thing for a little while, and then it’ll go away.

It’s like writing: if I talk about a project too much before it’s complete, then the urge to finish the project sort of disappears and suddenly, I’m completely uninterested in this novel and/or short story cycle that I’ve been describing in rapturous language to all and sundry.

This has to be really confusing for people.  My complete, almost weirdly obsessive passion gives way to utter indifference for no apparent reason, and I seem to expect everyone to keep up.

I once spent hours and hours deciding what color to paint my kitchen.  I put at least three of my loved ones through the torture of an explanation of the light quality in my kitchen (poor), the weird amount of blank wall space, and the desire to be contemporary but not too contemporary, and when I finally landed on an apple green, there was much rejoicing.  Of course, I never did anything like actually paint the kitchen — choosing the color seemed to be all I needed to do in order to satisfy my need to — I don’t know, plan something.  And then friends would come over expecting to see a green kitchen, and then when it’s not there, and when the paint swatch is still taped to the bare white wall a year and a half later, we’ll have the following conversation:

Friend: So what happened to the green kitchen?

Me: Oh.  Yeah.  I’ll get around to painting it soon.

Friend: But we had that conversation, like, a year ago.

Me: …

This has to be such a frustrating process, and I’m grateful to my friends for sticking it out with me.

Confession: I once spent the better part of a weekend meticulously planning a road trip that would hit every state in the contiguous United States.  This required significant research and at least four different websites: Google maps so I could plan the route (and examine road conditions with Google earth), Wunderground  so that I could approximate the weather conditions of Topeka, KS or Billings, MT or Augusta, ME at a particular time of year, Super8 so that I could book motels (I like staying in the same motel chain when I’m on a road trip, and I like that the chain is Super8, and please don’t ask why because I don’t know), and finally, Yelp so that I could find the best local restaurants in each of my planned stops.  I also researched each state’s tourism attractions and checked out campsites for the evening that I’d want to spend outdoors instead of a Super8 motel.  By the end of the weekend, I had a thoroughly planned itinerary, which remains unspoiled in a file somewhere on my computer.  That weekend happened about eight months ago, and up until this point, I haven’t thought about it once.

So the reason why I’m posting this today is because I have a problem.

It’s Easter Sunday, and now that I’m an adult in the family, I want to contribute to the holiday meals.  I offered to bring a dish to Easter Sunday, and it was decided that I would bring a delicious dessert.  Now, I have three brown bananas that must be used or thrown away, so I decided that I would make a decadent, deep-flavored espresso chocolate chip banana bread.  (Appropriate Easter food?  Fuck you.)

I’ve spent a good deal of time this week telling people that I’m bringing espresso chocolate chip banana bread to the Easter Sunday meal, including people who won’t be there and could care less about espresso, chocolate chips, banana or bread, or my dessert-making prowess in general.

And then I spent a good deal of time last night planning the shopping trip to buy the essential ingredients for the banana bread.  Of all stupid things to do at 10 pm on a Saturday night.

And now, it’s Sunday morning.  The skies are overcast; the air is cool.  It’s the perfect morning to spend inside baking.  And of course, as usual, as is now expected, I have no desire to bake this dessert at all.

It’s not that I don’t want my family to have dessert on Easter.  It’s that the urge to create espresso chocolate chip banana bread was spent in the urgent and obsessive planning of said bread.

In fact, my desire to bake is so low that I’m writing this blog post, on a blog that I’ve more or less forgotten about (but to which I am re-committing and have detailed plans to update and awesome-ify).

But there’s no getting out of this.  I promised, and promises must be kept.  I must venture out alone to gather supplies and make this dessert.

I must.

I must.

(I’ll let you know how it goes.)

Updated:

I managed to do this:

This took an hour.

It took over an hour and was slightly traumatic because at the supermarket I ran into these two girls my age that I sort of know, and I’m pretty sure they pretended not to recognize me.  It was awful.  We just sort of eyed each other in the baking supplies aisle and didn’t say a word.

Note: I so prefer running into men acquaintances than women acquaintances.  Men acquaintances will never recognize you and pretend that they don’t, at least in my experience.  They’ll either genuinely not recognize you, or else they will, and you can enjoy an awkwardly short conversation about how weird it is to buy baking powder, and how is so-and-so, and goodbye.

Anyway, the excursion to the supermarket has made me relive my middle school years and so I just ate a French quesadilla and a banana and drank my third cup of coffee this morning, and I really feel as if I’ve done something very important.

If unfinished.

Updated Again:

Done

In case you are an alien, Sephora is a terrifying beauty products boutique filled with designer fragrances, a variety of high-end brand make-up, and certain high-end beauty supplies.

I don’t go to Sephora much, mostly because I don’t go to malls much, and Sephora is usually found in malls.  And it’s most likely one of the stores I’d pass by unthinkingly while headed toward Barnes and Noble or something.

I don’t wear much make-up.  I do tend to go in for really expensive beauty products like “body sugar” and mud masks and so on, and I love good perfume, but I will scrupulously go without those kinds of products when I’m on a tight budget (which is my usual state of being these days).

What I’m saying is that I haven’t had any kind of beauty indulgence in months (not counting Burt’s Bees tinted lip balm at Walgreen’s), so with my heavy wallet and my light step, I walked into Sephora ready to splurge.

Sephora is… well, it’s like another world.  The color scheme is black and white and glossy. The entire store looks laminated.  And the lights are as bright as possible, probably to point out all your physical flaws so that you’ll buy all the creams and unguents and balms and bronzers needed to cover them.  Perfumes and colognes are arranged all along the perimeter of the store.  Cosmetics are sold in aisles that get, I think, classier and classier as you enter the depths of the store.  At the back of the store are the bath goodies, and the sales counter is in the middle of everything, approached by a winding path of last-minute beauty goodies that suddenly seem like the most logical addition to your purchase ever. Finally, there’s a “beauty station,” and the head of each aisle is a magnified mirror, back-lit, and a bunch of make-up applicators and removers.  The whole place throbs with techno-pop music and the occasional Nirvana remix, and it’s stuffed with women and girls.

It’s an aggressively feminized space.  As soon as I walked into the store, I realized I was way out of my ken.

For one thing, I was shoddily dressed.  It’s Winter Break, and I’m basically a zombie, and I’d only put a momentary thought into what I wore out today: my blue A Serious Man promo t-shirt (hawt), a terribly stretched-out and hole-y gray raglan jersey top over that, my one pair of jeans, and my orange, patent leather Steve Madden flats that have seen better days and are now clearly half a size too big for me (how did that happen?).  I know.  I know.  To complete the look, I scooped my somewhat dirty hair into a ponytail, pinned back the bangs, and was ready to hit the town.  No make-up.  Eyebrows a perennial mess.  Nails un-manicured.  Skin un-moisturized.  And (I hate to admit this) I don’t think I even wore deodorant.

So you see, I was in no way ready to compete with the women and girls of Sephora.  Everyone in there was coiffed and shellacked to perfection.  They were dressed up to shop (a concept I’ve never really understood, since shopping to me is basically like a marathon or a long-distance flight that requires comfort and ease of movement), and they were all lacquered with make-up, and they all smelled way, way better than I did.

I felt exactly as I felt back in the seventh grade, when we first started “dressing out” for P.E.  In the girls’ locker room, I had quickly learned that I wasn’t really a girl because a) I did not put on a copious amount of fruit-scented lotion before and after the workout, and b) I was not allowed to shave my legs yet.  All the other seventh grade girls had smooth, tanned legs, de-haired thanks to Lady Bic and slatherings of strawberry-papaya body lotion.  I, on the other hand, had pale legs, probably dry, fluffed with dark leg hair.  (Seventh grade, by the way, was one long lesson in my failure to be adequately feminine: I did not have straight hair, I did not wear make-up, I did not spend a ton of time primping, I did not need to be accompanied to the bathroom by a gaggle of girlfriends, etcetera.)  I saw the other girls’ sneers and burned with shame, so within a couple of weeks I brought my own fruit-scented lotion to school and gooped it onto my legs with the rest of the girls in the locker room, ignoring the cheap scent and feeling at least somewhat more accepted.  Unfortunately, the lotion only succeeding in plastering my leg hair to down to my legs, which is considerably uglier and less feminine than fluffy, dry leg hair.  I was a locker room outsider until the second semester, when I finally got the guts up to shave my legs secretly.  I was never tan, though.  Some things remained out of my reach.

Being in that Sephora today brought back those memories triple-fold.  I suddenly felt like a little kid or worse, a make-up moron.  For a while I stuck by the perfumes, testing Dior and Givenchy and Chanel before settling on my old standby, Stella McCartney.  Then I wandered over to the bath and body area, snatching up a jar of “body sugar” by fresh, which is honestly the most incredible body scrub you’ll ever come across.  Then, feeling bolder, I finally decided to trespass into the cosmetics aisles.

I felt a rising sense of panic as I tried to negotiate the different cosmetics brands.  Which brand represents me? I still feel too young and too un-classy for Lancome and Dior, but too old and too square for Urban Decay and that brand that makes you look like a hooker.

I hovered around Stila for a while, trying desperately to look like I knew what I was doing.  I gazed at bronzers and blushes unseeingly; I spent way more time than necessary examining the “smudge pots” and tinted eyebrow liner.  Finally, to stave off a tailspin of despair, I decided that I needed to focus on finding one beauty item and decided that I’d buy a new lipstick.  Every girl needs lipstick, right?

As I crouched down to examine the lip glosses, two girls appeared behind me.  These were your typical Valley girls, the kind that used to terrify me when I was younger: aggressively pretty, over made-up, scented to the nines, and wearing the official Valley girl uniform, which consists of an over-sized t-shirt, a fussy coat, a draping scarf unnecessary in 62 degree weather, leggings, and Ugg boots.

To tell you the truth, I was still terrified.  I could have been twelve again, and the only girl at Chaparral Middle School who was still not allowed to shave her legs.

Then one of the girls hissed to the other, “Isn’t that the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen?”

Immediately, I froze.  Me?  Were they talking about me?  Am I the most disgusting thing they’d ever seen?  Me? I wasn’t doing anything especially disgusting, unless browsing for lip gloss is disgusting, but considering they were doing the same thing, it couldn’t be my actions.  Or could it?  As they breezed by me, I made brief but unforgettable eye contact with one of the girls, whose frosted pink lips smirked at me and whose perfectly arched eyebrow arched even further.

I was suddenly seized with the urge to approach her and tell her off.  Or to advise her to do something more important with her life than sneer at a strange woman who was just trying to buy some lip gloss.  Or to tell her it’s OK, she doesn’t have to criticize other women in order to feel good about herself.  Or to run away from the store and never come back.

Instead of doing these things, I simply decided to pay for my two purchases and get the hell out of Sephora.  I spent the next ten minutes skilfully negotiating the store, keeping myself separate from the sneering girls by at least twenty feet, and purchasing the perfume and body scrub from a woman whose eyebrows could cure cancer, or something.  (At least, they were beautifully groomed.)

Then I vamoosed.

As I vamoosed, I passed by the Aveda store.  Now, I’ve been toying with the idea of chopping off my curly, shoulder-length bob, the growth of two and a half years.  I used to have this cute, short curly cut that I loved — made me feel fierce — and then and there, still reeling from my Sephora adventure, I decided I’d get that old cut again.  Then and there.  At that Aveda store.

Now, I know that most likely those Valley girls were probably not talking about me at all.  I’d just heard the word “disgusting,” derisively uttered, and feeling like an outsider, I’d attributed it to me.  Probably the girl was sneering at something completely different, and I’d just given her the stank eye for no particular reason, at least in her perspective.

But man, I felt like shit. I felt completely un-feminine.  And gross.  And yeah, a bit disgusting.  So even though getting a short haircut is something you prepare carefully for, I just walked right into that Aveda and asked for a haircut.

And I got one.

Thankfully — I mean, thankfully — my stylist knew what she was doing and managed to give me a close approximation of my old cut.  It could have turned out very, very wrong, and it didn’t.  And at Aveda, at least this Aveda, you get a head massage and a hand massage during the shampoo, which were blissful.  And for some reason, my stylist insisted on having me wear a little lipstick and bronzer before I left the salon (do they do this for everybody, or did she take pity on my make-upless self?).  So it really was like a little makeover.

I left Aveda with a kicky new ‘do, softly scented arms and hands, lipsticked (finally!), and feeling a lot more victorious and feminine.  I walked right back to that Sephora, took a victory lap around the store, and the skedaddled for my car.

I didn’t end up buying any clothes.

And it did. But not quite the way we Angelenos were promised.

All week, we heard it about it. Weather blogs promised it; local newscasters issued dire warnings about high winds and “frigid” temperatures (relatively speaking). Two full days of rain, the first real “fall” weekend we’ve had all year. People stocked up on rainy day goodies (hot cocoa in some cases, wine in others) and made indoor plans. Couples talked about cuddling all day. I overheard a woman talking with someone on her cell phone and thanking God for the cold weather so that she had an excuse to spend all weekend curled up with a good book.  As if she couldn’t spend the weekend doing that if it was sunny.

I think that people in L.A. think that weather is essentially personal — that it comes and goes based on the personal needs of the city.  And to be totally fair, there’s a decent reason why that’s the case.  The weather is basically always good here. It’s a lazy truth, but a truth nonetheless. For a good eight or nine months out of the year, we have bright sunshine, comfortably warm temperatures, and cool nights.  And, like, fairies and unicorns.  Sure it can get unbearably hot and occasionally too windy, and there are fires sometimes, and the occasional earthquake, but for the most part the weather is the reason to live here. And all this good sunshine has addled us.  It’s become so normal that it’s entirely neutral – we’re blind to it. We’re not used to weather that changes. The concept that it could rain in the morning and then be sunny and maybe rain again later in the day is essentially foreign to us. Weather is steady in L.A. Even bad weather tends to hang around steadily before getting pushed out.

So when we’re promised something like two days of rain, it’s enough for the city to go into spasms of joy, the kind that obliterate any collective memory of the fact that it might not — actually — rain — the whole time. I’m not kidding when I say that I’ve had at least ten or twelve ecstatic conversations this week about the promise of rain over the weekend.

And rain it did — mostly at night.

Today was gorgeous: cool and crisp, blue skies strewn with passing clouds, and wind that rustled the clean-fronded palm trees and made them shimmer in the light. Yes, it was that beautiful.

And just about everyone I’ve talked to today is pissed off.

Neighbor: I’d planned on going to my friend’s rain party today, but it got canceled. Stupid rain.

(PS, what’s a rain party?)

Barista: The only reason I was happy to work today was because it was supposed to rain. Stupid rain.

Friend: It’s not as fun to cuddle with your boyf when the sun is shining. Stupid rain.

Restauranteur: It took us an hour to get the rain gear set up for the patio, and then it clears up just as we finish. Stupid rain.

Crazy Lady at Starbucks: **&^#$%^%$##$%!!!!

It’s like the weather decided to play a monumental trick on the entire city by promising us all kinds of wish-fulfillment rain fantasies and shattering our hopes with sunshine.

1. Sleep.

2. Eat tomatoes (and take pictures of them).

It was seven weeks of bliss.

I was alone a lot of that time.  More than normal, I mean.  During the school year, I at least talk to my colleagues and friends at school, and of course, my students.  In fact, during the school year I’m over-socialized, which is why I spend most of my weeknights curled up on my couch watching DVDs of The Simpsons and ignoring phone calls.  So in the summer, without school and without much of a social life, I’d spend days on end entirely alone.  And I’d spend a good chunk of that time in my apartment, except for the occasional foray out to the Whole Foods where I’d buy tomatoes or sometimes to late night movies at the New Beverly or the Sunset Laemmle.  I was essentially a shut-in.  It was awesome.

Me this summer.

I already have a tendency to be a highly imaginative, fantasy-prone weirdo, and the isolation only exacerbated my interior world.  I became convinced that the only cool thing left to do in the world was to move to Alaska and build my own cabin and live in it.  And, like, hunt for food.

I’d stumbled upon an Alaskan land auction website and was completely floored to discover that you can buy land in Alaska for next to nothing.  In some cases, wooded land was going for $1,000 an acre.  Considering that I pay more than that per month to live in a 700 square foot apartment in Los Angeles, I was both freaked out and enthralled, and I immediately saw the economic benefit of an acre of cheap land in Alaska: I could camp on it and not have to pay a camp fee!  Yowsa!  The cost of outfitting myself for a camping trip to Alaska, the cost of getting to Alaska, and then the extra time and cost of hiring a bush pilot to drop me off on the remote tip of some mountain in the middle of nowhere aside, this was clearly a bargain.  I imagined myself canoeing majestically up some river to my own campsite with nothing but a knife and a bed roll and sleeping under the stars on my own freaking acre of land.   No one else’s!  For the first time, I understood Manifest Destiny.

Around the same time, I was rereading all my childhood books and happened to pick up The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  In that book, Laura’s dad is just driving along across the prairie in his covered wagon and one day he stops and says, “We’re building a house here!”  And then he builds a house there! Without even asking anyone!  He just chopped down some trees and rolled the logs on top of each other and boom, he had a house!  When he needed water, he started digging a hole and after awhile, there was water!  When he wanted something to eat, he’d go kill it and eat it!  Pa Ingalls quickly became the raddest person ever until I started picturing myself as a frontierswoman.

Raddest woman on the prairie.

Soon, my days spent perusing the Alaskan land auction website and my nights spent reading The Little House on the Prairie were fused into one super-awesome goal: buy land in Alaska and build a cabin.  I began researching guides on building log cabins.  Then I designed my own log cabin.

Detailed architectural plans

Clearly an amateur log cabin builder could construct this.

I even picked out a 7-acre parcel of land out on the Kenai Peninsula and used the Google satellite thing to stare ceaselessly at it (green treetops), and I began to read up on different kind of logs and the difference between spruce and pine and how you should only use beetle-killed trees that have been left to “season” for two years.  I planned out a water-pump system and an outhouse, and I designed a woodshed and a workshop, where I would obviously spend my days making my own furniture.  Then I started reading up on how to make my own furniture.  Then I started planning my road trip from Los Angeles, California to the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska and I studied up on the road conditions of the Al-Can and even checked the prices for the Best Westerns between Vancouver and Anchorage.

The fantasy turned serious.  I imagined myself fishing in the river, hunting moose (never killing the moose or eating the moose, though, for some reason), and befriending a good-natured bear.  I imagined myself finding a little wolf pup and raising it as my wolf friend.  Somehow I would have kindly neighbors five miles away and we would share Sunday dinner together, but for the most part, I would be alone in the cabin that I built with my own two hands made from logs from my own freaking woods on my own freaking acreage.  On top of a mountain.

The fantasy became so real that I was half-convinced that it would actually happen soon.  Like, one day I’d just place a bid on one of those land auctions and get a small property and suddenly my compact sedan would be a giant truck and I’d know how to skin rabbits and use a compass.  On the rare occasions that I’d venture out of the apartment to talk to other human beings, I’d be so obsessed with the log cabin in Alaska that I’d eventually bring up the TOTALLY PLAUSIBLE REALITY that I was soon to become a frontierswoman.

Other Human Being: Talk talk talk life talk interesting things happening talk talk goals achieved talk.

Me: Hey, have you ever thought about moving to Alaska?

Other Human Being: Alaska?

Me: I think I want to live in a cabin in Alaska.  What do you think?

Other Human Being: Um.

Me: I could build my own cabin on my own piece of land.  It’s so cheap there.  And I could hunt and live off the land.  Don’t you think?

Other Human Being: Wouldn’t Alaska be a bit too cold for you?

Me: WHY ARE YOU CRUSHING MY HOPES AND DREAMS????

The only problem was that I had no real survival skills whatsoever.  I can’t make fire.  I can’t find food.  I can’t find water.  I can’t make a shelter.  I can’t pitch a tent.  I can’t canoe.  I can’t hike without falling down.  I can’t befriend wolves.  I can’t cut down a tree.  I can’t pick up a log.  I can’t use tools.  I can’t make furniture.  I can’t shoot a gun.  I can’t kill a moose.  I can’t even kill a spider.  I can’t handle cold weather.  I can’t handle mosquitoes.  I can’t handle the sun going down any earlier than 5 pm.

Essentially, I’m inherently unable to cope with Alaska.  In fact, Alaska would probably not even let me in.  I’d get to the border, all tired and happy and excited and stupid, and Alaska would take one look at my hopeful face and my Toyota Corolla and my pup tent with a hole in it, and go, “OK, ha ha ha, very funny, now go home.”

And yet, the fantasy persists.

Thus!

I went out to eat at a restaurant near my apartment, and I happened to walk in right behind a couple who were clearly on a date.  I know the date they’re on quite well: the date you have with someone you’ve gone out with before, someone you’re about to start dating exclusively, but not yet someone you’d call a boyfriend or girlfriend.  The liminal stage of dating, the date when the door swings both ways, and often it’s the date when I realize that things are moving way too fast and that I should follow my instinct to run home, cover my head with a pillow, and pretend that I’m going to move to the Alaskan wilderness and build a cabin in the woods where I’ll chop firewood and write books about the northern lights and thus won’t have time to go out with anyone anyway.

Anyway, this couple was on that date.  They were both good-looking and only halfway comfortable with each other, and they were also dressed really, really casually for a date at a semi-nice restaurant (not that I should talk).  When the hostess saw me standing behind them, she thought that I was the third wheel in their party, and I had to do that awkward I’m-a-weird-single-person dance of showing her the trashy novel I’d brought with me as a dinner companion instead of another human being and demanding a table for one.  The couple smiled stiffly.  The whole experience was a bit humiliating.

I ended up getting a small table about two feet away from the couple.  That two feet ended up being the most crucial area of space of the evening as it determined which table got what waiter.  The couple’s waiter was a nice, normal waiter who took their order and brought their food and filled up their glasses with water and wine.

My waiter was — well, there’s no other word for it.  He was dumb.  I mean, really, really dumb.  Beautiful, but stupid.  Completely unable to follow through on any of his commitments as a waiter.  Here’s an example of an interaction:

Waiter: OK, what can I get for you this evening?

Me: Blah blah blah food blah blah water, please.

Waiter: All right, let me tell you about the chef’s special.  They’re blah blah food-I-don’t-want blah blah.

Me: …I’ll just have the blah blah blah food blah blah water, please.

Waiter: All right, sounds good.  And to drink?

Me: …Water, please.

Waiter: All right, sounds good.

Then he’d disappear for about ten minutes.  When he came back:

Waiter: OK, are you ready to order?

Me: You took my order a few minutes ago.

Waiter: Oh, I did?  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.  That’s funny, I must have forgotten.

Me: It’s the blah blah blah food.

Waiter: All right, sounds good.  And to drink?

You get the picture.

And the whole time, whenever he’d take my order (the three times he did), he’d put his face really, really close to mine.  Uncomfortably close.  Mere inches, in fact.  And then I’d sort of lean back to get away, and he’d follow until eventually I was pressed up against the wall and he was leaning halfway across the table.  Come to think of it, he might have been hard of hearing.  In any case, I found myself bitterly eyeing the couple two feet away from me and cursing my waiter fate.

And in fact, the restaurant was so small and a little intimate, and I couldn’t help overhearing most of the couple’s conversation.  About half of it was about the new Harry Potter movie, which they were apparently going to go see at midnight (maybe that explains their casual attire?).  A quarter of it was about their jobs (snooze).  Then they’d occasionally make references to the status of their relationship, but in this really roundabout kind of way.  Like, the guy would say, “I talked about you at work today,” and the girl would say, “Oh really, ha ha ha, what did you say, ha ha ha,” and he would say, “I told them that we were going to the Harry Potter movie and that you have a hot ass,” and she would say, “Ha ha ha, why did you tell them that about my ass, now I’ll be embarrassed if I meet them” and he’d say, “I might have called you my girlfriend” and she’d say, “Might have?”  And it would go on that way.

Finally, my waiter realized that I’d come to dinner to eat food and he brought me a plate of what I ordered just as the couple was finishing their own meal.  My waiter noticed the couple apparently for the first time, and then this happened.  I swear to you that it happened exactly like this, give or take a few words:

Waiter: Hey, aren’t you Tom So-and-So?  I think we know each other through Millie Whocares.  I’m Patrick Blahblah.

Tom: Oh, hey, man.  How’s it going?

Waiter: Good, good.  Yeah, how’s Millie?

Tom: Uh.

Waiter: I haven’t seen her in ages.  How’s she doing?  How’s the baby?

Tom: Uhm.

Waiter: She was huge the last time I saw her.

Tom: Uh, she’s good.  The baby’s fine.

Tom’s Date: Who’s Millie Whocares?

Tom: Um.

Tom’s Date: Tom, who is Millie Whocares?

Tom: Uh.

Waiter: Oh, wait, did you and Millie split up?

Tom’s Date: Tom, what’s going on?

Waiter: Oh, Jesus, are you guys on a date?

At that point, pandemonium ensued, including water thrown in faces (IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED!!!).  I don’t remember verbatim what Tom’s Date said to him but it included several profanities, and I also don’t remember verbatim what Tom said to her but it included the words “we’re not divorced quite yet.”  From what I surmise, 1. Tom was cheating on his preggo wife, kinda, 2. Tom’s Date deduced this, and 3. my waiter is absolutely clueless because after Tom’s Date threw a glass of water at Tom (splashing me in the process) and after Tom shamefacedly paid the bill and it was only me and a couple of other patrons staring after them, my waiter said to no one in particular,

“Dude, they were on a date. He was cheating on Millie.“

That got me to thinking: I don’t remember much of what I studied in high school English.  I remember reading “The Lady of Shalott” by Lord Tennyson and The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.  I know I read The Red Badge of Courage and The Scarlet Letter and at least three of Shakespeare’s plays, but I don’t actually have a memory of reading those texts and talking about them or anything in class.  Or writing about them, even though I have evidence that I did (making claims without evidence, no less).  I know I must have read some Langston Hughes, because I found a response poem I wrote entitled “The Alpine Path,” a really gloriously bad misinterpretation of the central metaphor of “Mother to Son.”  I also know that I was supposed to read Whitman’s Leaves of Grass for some kind of paper (maybe a literary analysis?), read only a couple of poems instead, and tried to write something about Abraham Lincoln.  I had no idea what I was doing, in other words.

Thinking about English got me thinking about high school in general.  I know I learned stuff — of course I did — but I don’t actually remember the learning experience for most of my classes.  I remember the social dynamics of high school; I remember avoiding certain bullies and getting into fights with friends; I remember the three different locations on campus where I had lunch; I remember having too many unexcused absences to be allowed to leave campus for lunch, thus ensuring that I would continue to ditch school; I remember sitting in classrooms and I even remember who I sat next to in most cases (vividly: the first semester of sophomore year Biology).  I remember teachers: the ones who inspired me, the ones who bored me, the ones who were actually football coaches and had no business teaching social studies.  I even remember fighting with my chemistry teacher, whom I loved, in front of the entire class about whether women should be allowed in combat (not my finest hour).  But memories of learning are few and far between.

In fact, I realize that the one class I really remember learning in is Band.  Marching band, jazz band, wind ensemble; I’m not sure why, though I guess it probably has to do with the fact that we were applying our learning right away, and everything we learned felt necessary.  And here’s the kicker: I’ve always loved to read.  I didn’t especially like English (odd, considering what I do now) but I liked most of what we read.  I’m a reader.  I’m a writer.  You’d think I’d remember.  But I don’t.

All of this has been very troubling.  I teach English now, 11th and 12th grade, and of course I want my students to remember the experience of my class.  Out of ego, of course, I want them to remember my class because it’s my class and I don’t want to be forgotten.  More importantly, though, I want them to remember, in twelve or fourteen years, the characters and plots of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Stranger.  I want them to remember understanding the betrayals in Beloved and the meaning of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet. I want them to feel that their experience in literature class was necessary.

But will they?

Of course they won’t.

At least, they won’t remember everything.  It’s not their job to, really.  They’re still kids.  High school kids, with high school worries: other classes, social lives, college, personal identities, music, rebellion, everything teenagers think about.  And for some of them, literature is merely a class they’re required to take.  They may enjoy it, but they probably wouldn’t have chosen it in the first place.  A sobering, but useful thought.

Now, I do aim to ensure that the students I teach leave my class with more than a vague feeling that they disliked a book or might have written a paper.  Definitely the latter: they do write a lot, a lot, a lot more than I did, at least.  And I’m confident that the school I teach at has made the experience of learning such a cornerstone that most students will remember at least something that happened, if not a whole bunch of things.  But I might need to shake off the (ego-driven?) desire for them to remember everything we read.  For my sake as well as theirs.  For the sake of literacy, it’s important that they do remember what we read — but maybe that’s not the most important thing.

This is what I hope my students will take with them:

1. The pleasure and usefulness of reading literature.

2. The pleasure and usefulness of talking about and developing ideas with other people.

3. The understanding that literature has the power to convey essential truths about ourselves and our experiences.

4. The ability to understand and analyze symbols, metaphors, and images; the ability to see subtext.

5. The ability to argue, to defend their arguments with evidence, and to express that argument on paper with a personal writing style.

I think I’d be satisfied with that.

That, and the knowledge that Hamlet is a play.  Not a novel.