TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I am not so many handticks from thirty years old and my hourly wage is only Canadian pennies more than it was when I worked at Taco Bell a decade ago. My current place of employment isn’t as pastel as the Gap or refried as Applebees or money as Wall Street and I have to wear a headset and pretend that Christmas carols don’t make my inner Jew bristle. It hasn’t actually been that bad so far, although I’ve only worked for five hours and that includes the nap I took during a PowerPoint on how to greet people today. This particular big box bookstore might actually be kind of fun—it’s quintessential stoner work, and even though I’m not a stoner, I like working with them because they make me look smart. Regardless, I’m still looking for someone to blame this employment situation on. I should be entering my last semester of graduate school, studying for comprehensive exams, working on my thesis, and wavering between spending my graduation money on a gold tooth or a power suit. But I’m not sending out CVs or introducing myself as Dr. Herzog in my bathroom mirror just to get used to the feel of the words on my tongue. Nope, instead of entering the professional world, I’m cashiering my way through seasonal employment and wondering if lo mein or pizza is more appropriate for Christmas take-out.

I suppose this job thing is another no-one-to-blame-but-yourself-situation, but I prefer to attribute my minimum wage earnings on my particular blend of nucleic acids. Some people are planners: some of us innately prefer to wait for situations to self-correct, like the rotting banana in your fruit bowl that will decompose and disappear in just seven short years, saving you a trip to the compost pile. As fundamentally as I’m not blond or diabetic or under four feet tall, I’m also not a five-year-plan-planner, or, for that matter, a five-minutes-from-now-planner. If you asked me if I’d like to get dinner at the end of this sentence, I’d be like, “Huh? Why don’t you ask me when I get to the period? I can’t think that far ahead.” This obviously flawed practice has infiltrated all parts of my decision-making process. You want to see if I can fit inside that mailbox even though I’m supposed to be on the bus in forty-five seconds? Sure! Forty-five seconds or an hour? It’s all the future!

There is one part of my life, however, that is immune from this type of juvenile thinking: I have been preparing for disaster my entire life, be it nuclear winter, vegan jihad, a neighborhood takeover by Steve the Mailman. I can barely get through the morning without peeing on myself because by the time I’ve realized that my bladder is full it’s already empty, but I am ready for far-reaching disasters, especially the ones that will probably never occur in my lifetime and/or zip code. When I’m in a particularly stressful yoga pose, for instance, I don’t try to achieve a state of meditation or mindfulness; I think about how much better shape I’ll be in than the other detainees at Gitmo. When I bathe, I ask whoever I’m living with to hold my head under water so I’ll be ready in case of a water-boarding party. No matter how much I struggle, I say, Don’t let me up. I need this. I know this is crazy. I’ve never thought that burning every employment bridge I’ve had might be problematic for my long term ability to have a cell phone and/or health insurance, and now I have all the earning power of a seven-year-old Cambodia with missing pinkies. And yet, I’ve been mentally preparing for disease and disaster since I was a child. As a five-year-old, when my twin sister asked for Barbies and Cabbage Patch dolls for Christmas, I wanted a fire extinguisher and a hacksaw. Other kids wanted to swing, I wanted to learn CPR. While most of friends would rather watch indie films that not only challenge your cultural assumptions but also make you look intelligent, I prefer to watch Bruce Willis and take notes while he dismantles bombs.

I can’t plan a dinner party, but I have disaster contingency plans locked in a fireproof safe. I like to think this is the mark of the truly pragmatic, but it might be less about survival and more about anxiety. When I lived in Portland, what started as slight and totally reasonable fear that any bridge I was on was about to wave like a homecoming queen on the back of a convertible and flip my unprepared ass into the water below turned into full-blown panics attack anytime I saw an elevated roadway. If I spotted a ten-foot-high dam in the distance, I would pull the car over and stick my head between my knees and hyperventilate until my girlfriend agreed to switch seats with me so I’d stop getting snot on the upholstery. The bridge anxiety abated with cognitive behavioral therapy and a prescription for Valium, but when I stopped stressing about bridge collapse, I became paranoid about earthquakes and other natural disasters. Over dinner, I made my girlfriend recite our plan in case of the second coming. We’ll meet under the Burnside Bridge. But what if the river is flooding over the bridges? Shit. Once I realized that there was no way to plan a meeting spot without knowing what the nature of the disaster would be, I bought us matching Walkie Talkies, insisting that even if they seemed impractical, this simple technology would be our salvation when the phone lines went out.

This fear lives inside me like a blood-borne illness but the symptoms come and go in waves. Living in a small North Carolina town has greatly reduced my fear of terrorist attack, volcanic eruption, and killer bees. Because it’s almost impossible to be afraid when you live in a town where the most terrifying sight is a group of moms hula-hooping on the co-op lawn to a high school jam band, it’s cancer that has replaced natural disaster in the dark hole of my mind. I see it everywhere. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a healthy young woman who rarely gets sick even when those around cough and wheeze, I see disease. On nights when everyone else is playing bingo or working late, I put on the bald cap I bought for my Howie Mandel costume a few years ago and stare at myself in the mirror, preparing for the day when it’s not a five dollar piece of latex that I’ll see but my actual bald head, soft and vulnerable and slightly flat from not being held enough as a child. I cover my eyebrows in concealer and suck in my cheeks. Better get used to it, I think. I look at my face and wonder if my friends will buy Livestrong bracelets and wear pink ribbons, if anyone will offer to shave their head in solidarity, a gesture I will appreciate while insisting that there’s no reason to cut that beautiful hair. I think about the ways I’ll have to change my lifestyle. Might as well buy some heavy sweaters and take up a comforting hobby; give up coffee now so I don’t have to deal with caffeine headaches on top of chemo. There goes the occasional cigarette and hamburger.

Worrying about myself, about my own disease and dismemberment and death, is far easier than worrying about other peoples’. When you love someone, the world is beautiful and terrifying at once. This is the world that made the person you love, that brought her into your space and you into hers. But it is also that world that could swallow her as easily and thoughtlessly as a piece of dust floating in the wind. With enough preparation, I can survive it all—lymphoma, nuclear wind, meteors falling from space and crushing everything but my underground bunker. I will survive just fine, my concrete walls intact, my air filtered, my water supply clear, alive and glad to have spent the energy I could have used finishing school or finding work on more practical things like stockpiling food and Geiger counters. But if she doesn’t show up at our meeting place, if the Walk Talkie doesn’t beep, if I never know what happens, I will wish for the poison to drift through a crack in my bunker, causing my skin to slough off like sheets of filo dough and my eyes to turned upward and inward before falling out and rolling across the sterile floor. I will wish that I had let the cancer take me instead of fighting to survive because there is no survival without her, without you, without the people who will hold ice cubes to my lips when the radiation that will save me feels like it is killing me; the people who will say that I look better even though I will see their fear as clearly as the hair falling from my scalp; the people who make me want to live when breathing itself hurts. There is no contingency for this, no plan b, no mental preparation, just the hope that if it does happen, if she dies with the rest, I won’t be far behind, wishing that I hadn’t fought so hard, that I let the cancer take me when it could have, knowing that this final wish is the most selfish: that she, that all of you, would have outlasted me, that you would have to mourn my death so that I wouldn’t have to mourn yours; wishing that I had spent my time planning for the future that approaches rather than the one that ends it all.

I wish I could say that I just rescued a puppy from a gun-wielding panther or found a large patch of marijuana while trail-skipping, but it’s been kind of slow around here lately. One medium funny thing did happen—I dropped out of grad school. This in itself is not really all that interesting as my life as an aspiring proletariat isn’t much different from my life as an aspiring master. When you own no textbooks, never attend class, and enrolled in school only to be able to say, “I’m in graduate school,” you don’t really feel like a student so much as a creep for only venturing to campus because there’s a lot of shade and the girls are cute. Here’s the medium funny part: you have to write your reason for leaving school on your withdrawal form, and as, in the words of my grandmother, “the dumbest smart person around,” I wrote, “I’m quitting because school makes me want to kill myself.” I turned in the form at five o’clock the Friday before Labor Day, when, presumably, everyone had left for the weekend. I’m guessing that someone glanced at my form on the secretary’s desk and made a phone call or two, because an hour later, the DEAN called me. It’s a strange experience to explain to a college administrator that if anything made you want to bake your brains in the nearest hotbox, it would have to be way more interesting than school.

Now that my formal education has come to an expensive and unsuccessful conclusion, I’m in the job market. I haven’t had much luck, which is surely more the symptom of North Carolina’s 11% unemployment rate than my absolute lack of experience and/or references. I’ve had to get a little creative with the job search, like sending, for instance, the following email to a local roasting house:

Dear [Redacted],

Love, Katie

I actually got a response to this, which went something like, You’re funny. Maybe we could talk. Send a resume.

My response:

Dear [Redacted],

Love, Katie

Shockingly, I didn’t get a response to this message, so yesterday, I sent the following:

Dear [Redacted]

Love, Katie

Again, no response, and the only person who fully appreciated this, er, cover letter, was my friend Melanie, but she walks her cat on a leash. In Harlem.

I have to cross my legs every time I sneeze so I won’t pee on myself.  I’m not leaving the house today because I accidentally drank four cups of laxative tea last night because I lost my glasses and the box was right next to Sleepytime.  My mom once pasted the following phrase that I had just cut from an email: “My girlfriend and I bid on one of Ani’s used tampons on eBay.”  The point is, it takes a lot to embarrass me.  I am such a dumb fuck that if I were a sensitive dumb fuck, I’d be one of those lesbians who wear stretchy pants and eat icing directly out of the can and have a meaningful relationship with Oprah and don’t consider having more than three cats hoarding.  But there was one day this week that challenged my ability to laugh at myself.  We’ll call this one Tuesday.

The morning was bright, hot, and duo-style.  I slept through class and this made me feel kind of terrible but my power to rationalize quickly supplanted guilt and I drank some coffee and drove my new friend/future lover home.  After that, I stopped by work to pick up a paycheck and buy some product.  It was S. Windor’s (of the Pensecola Windsors) first day on the job after a year hiatus, so I helped out and chatted for a bit, even though I wasn’t wearing socks and had wet brain and fuck head and a huge hole in the crotch of my cut-offs.  I got my check and my product and was about to leave when one of my bosses asked me how I was going to pay for the product.  Um, take it out of my paycheck?  Like always?  Turns out I longer get a paycheck from the Unmentioned Former Place of Employment because I had, unknowingly, been laid off.  And that’s cool.  I mean, I liked the shop and all the employees and that one crushtomer almost to the point of looking forward to work, but I’d been putting in all of four hours a week, so even though it sucks, it’s also not a bad spray tan or anything.  But that is a really uncool way to let someone go.  I’m sure it was less a malicious fuck up and more a communication fuck up, but the ungraceful manner of my dismissal drove me to tears, which is pretty difficult to do considering I don’t have tear ducts and/or feelings.  But, like I said before, after the number of times I’ve been fired, I look at getting laid off as a back-handed compliment.  I’ll get over it.  Eventually.

I then headed to the Chateau to bitch to Lady Mantranny and drink Bud Light and banter via text with a stranger in Austin who I want to gay marry after receiving the following messausage: I’ma woo you, bitch. A few hours and Bud Lights later, I went to the bar.  I was only going to be there for a Lima Bean or two and head home to shower off the shea butter and forge recommendation letters, but then a dear friend I haven’t seen since fucking her over in a really unfunny way walked into the bar.  We didn’t talk at first, but I had nerves like a Jonas on her wedding night, so it was chilled Stoli for my gray matter.  Eventually, my dear friend and I hugged it out and my tear ducts started working again.  And, as if crying in a bar isn’t embarrassing enough, the following occurred: for the first time in my drinking life, I vommed in a bar.  I then had to be convinced not to drive my car and/or ride my bike home (both of which were and are still are parked outside the bar), and was escorted home by a former and favorite co-worker and my new friend/future lover.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t vom in the car, but I did discover vom on the lap of my jeans when I woke up the next morning, so you never know.  This was all while the Carrboro sun with still round and yellow and perched in the sky.  Embarrassing, yes, but what are your teens, 20s, and 30s for if not a little public humiliation?  I mean, fuck, I’d just been fired.

And, yes, I recognize that I’ve been waxing and whining about jobs for a while now.  Why not just get a job and stop living off the generosity of North Carolina tax-payers, right?  What’s so great about not having a reason to get up in the morning?  The truth is—nothing.  Unemployment is boring.  But following rules beyond such OCD-imposed ones like Do Not Sit On Antique Furniture and Never Eat In Public is unpalatable like anal bleeding is unpalatable.  And because I have an unfounded faith that I don’t have to worry about boob sag because gravity doesn’t effect me, and also that I don’t have to work hard because I am immune to such things and poverty and Alzheimer’s and the second coming, I am secretly and not-so-secretly convinced that this blog is my ticket out of a working life, that if only the right person sees this and recognizes my genius use of malapropisms, I will be swooped up to the land of silk and sunny.

But even if that did happen, even if I made a few hardbacks shitting words and rainbows, I’d have to get a gender-neutral moniker and a day job as a sandwich artist just to keep my real life and my writing life completely hidden from Mazog and Pazog.  Is it crazy not to want your 60-year-old mother to read about that time you hooked up in the Christmas tree farm across from the bar and went to brunch with your friend in her mom the next morning covered in saw dust?  Do you want your dad to realize that the first hit when Googling the term “dickthroat” is your blog?  No one wants that blush to cross the parental palette.

Here’s the thing: the shit that enters my head and falls from my mouth is because I am a 26-year-old shorter version of my father.  My dad is most politically incorrect liberal white male I know.  When my parents confronted me about my taco-bumping ways, my mom’s only concern was that I was somehow hurt by my dad’s frequent use of derogatory terms to describe homos and fags, like I’m some kind of a pansy.  My father is such an adept liar that I thought that my grandparents’ dachshund Willy the Elder was my uncle until I was nine and that my dad was a Rolling Stone until I was eleven.  Take the following reviews of my father as professor culled from Rate My Professor:

this class is pretty interesting. but i think he makes a lot of the material up himself.

I will never forget the pubic hair survey or the 1910 dildo he brought into class! Hilarious and smart!

he knows his stuff. if your easily offended by cursing and blunt sex phrases, stay away. He likes to throw the word G**D*** around too. thats not cool with me but…he’s a good teacher

He is a awesome professor. He knows his sex facts!

See the problem?  My muddy mind was written in my DNA, and yet, the parental revelation of my musings is one kind of public humiliation I just can’t get down with.