When my daughter was in her early teens, there were times when I would imitate one of those old-time radio ads: “W-T-M-I! Way Too Much Information, ’round the clock, seven days a week!”  The Gentle Reader is either familiar with kids that age or is one her or himself, and you know the sort of stuff I mean.

I mean, don’t we? We’re talking about “the ills that flesh is heir to,” as the saying goes–but we’re NOT. That’s not how it really goes–either in the original, or in life.
It’s a misquotation of part of Hamlet’s soliloquy in III,i:

To be or not to be . . .
the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to . . .

Not that mushy “ills” stuff. Thousand, natural, and shocks. Art is in the details. There are lots of them, they are part of life, and they hit our outraged system with the impact of tiny bullets. It’s important to us that we share the details of our best friend’s philandering, all about what happened at that party, just what trick our digestive system is up to today, and exactly what the surgery entailed.

And the auditor usually doesn’t need or want to hear it. They desire that whatever happens in the bathroom, stays in the bathroom (unless there’s some impact upon the host’s rug or plumbing). They don’t want to have to meet those saucy people, knowing what they know, because they’ll have to shake hands while knowing where those saucy hands have been. And anybody with an imagination (or a penchant for the Discovery Channel) can picture all that ucky medical stuff performed upon their own flesh.

And we know this, but we want to share anyway. Pity the pharmacist, bartender to the afflicted. It’s best explained by going back to the primal overshare: toilet training, where information is joyously announced because it is a milestone of control over that mysterious sack of stuff we come packed in. It is a triumph! No poop, there I was!

I survived the surgery, and it was some ordeal, let me tell you! But I kicked its ass! Hey, you know how hard it is to find that much fiber? And I’m sorry you don’t want to hear about my sexual awakening at that Mazola party, but that’s because you’re square and I must preach the word! This last betrays the lot, because the oversharing is “all about me.”

I think the unwilling audience should remember that, either in being sympathetic to the impulse to overshare and bring somebody else into the me-ness, or as ammunition against the onslaught of I-don’t-care-how-uncomfortable-this-makes-you. Because whether you want to admit it or not, it is all about you on some level much of the time, and your lack of oversharing is due only to your greater desire for control; you have a stopper on the bottle preventing the exuberant genie from emerging.

Besides, admit it: Half the time, deep down, there’s a piece of you that kind of wants to know.

So! Guess what happened to me to inspire this blog?

My very first job was as a file clerk at a place called City Electric, tucked into a corner of New York's garment district, near my high school. I made minimum wage, which at the time was $3.35. (Isn't it horrific how little that's gone up, considering the comparative economic changes of the ensuing 35 years?)

It's sad how little I remember about it (and a lot of stuff at that age); I recall the warm creamy yellow of the second-sheet carbon copies and the red invoice numbers in the upper left-hand corner. There was a subset of older numbers, which were in other file drawers. I realize now that those were just the ones where the individual store or salesman still had an old pad, but they seemed to be miniature archaeological exhibits.

I worked for some affable old men, Ben and Archie–and the big boss, who might have been a George–and who worked in the same room with the rest of us, with its high ceilings, hanging fluorescent lamps, and aged linoleum in beige, maroon, and black. No desk toys in those days–everybody's desks were piled high with stacks of paper. I think Ben was the accountant. (Which, if you think about it, made sense, him being in the invoice department.) They were incredibly nice, and I grew to love them dearly. I don't remember not wanting to come in to work.

I don't really remember exactly what City Electric did. I know they'd been around for at least a couple of decades at that time; their logo was one of those solid old-timey things with Art Deco lettering. But it had a sense of warmth and comfort that you find very rarely in the job market; a sense of timelessness.

I lasted the school year. I'm not sure if I got fired. I hope not. My memory is of not getting the job back the following year, or something like that. I'm not sure. The next job was at a company which bought up scrap steel and aluminum (with the creative name of Metal Purchasing); I think they both essentially laid me off because there wasn't any more work to do in the slow summer months.

(No, come to think of it, I wasn't fired, because I remember the first time I was, and what a shock it was to my system: I'd been working making sandwiches on a line in a fern bar somewhere, and I went pee too often. It's a jungle out there, with perilous roads overhung with alfalfa sprouts.)

But City Electric lives on in my memory as a cozy place, with it somehow raining outside, and the kindly Ben and Archie in their paper-filled corners providing a sense of stability. Working wasn't scary back then–no resumes, no training sessions, no pressure. I had a basic little job, and being able to handle integer counting, I did it well, and they liked me. I think on some level I've wanted to re-create that sense of solidity ever since.

But now I have the security (if not the money) of being my own boss. As I write this, the sky is that same comfortable grey, and I can have all the hot tea I want. It's just that writing is almost infinitely harder than counting some days (an irony if you look at the scores from every standardized test I've ever taken), and I don't have Ben and Archie to metaphorically cuddle me warm.

Oh well. Plinky prompt answered, blog posted. First stacks of the day put where they're supposed to be in the drawers of cyberspace. What next, those old-number outliers in the rich and strange land of original composition, or the humdrum task of wearing down my desk's stack of edit?

Ben? Archie?

(Plinky prompt: What do you do to stay healthy?)

Feh. Although at least I can answer this without gym guilt.

 Right now my main exercise routine comes under the Taoist philosophy of wu wei–do nothing, and everything shall be done. It’s making me crazy. This is me, being healthy on my butt. I’m the one transcribing New York Public Library menus (http://menus.nypl.org/ — kidding aside, it’s for a good cause) as part of my attempt to amuse myself while anchored to my couch.

And why, you ask? It happened like this:

I have arthritis in my knees, partially a side effect  of an endocrine glitch, hyperparathyroiditis, which is the adult form of rickets. Being quite heavy hasn’t helped, and I am solidly middle-aged on top of it. Thus, I’ve become used to being in pain when I walk. But by the spring of last year, it had become damn near crippling, and I limped my sorry butt into orthopedics.

The nice orthopods gave me cortisone shots which made me feel as if I were Gene Kelly doing a number entitled, “I Can Walk!” I continue to have a spiffy response to it, and every three or four months, I go in for a tune-up. Unfortunately, I’m one of those curious little souls who ask questions, and at tune-up #1, it was, “By the way, what’s this funny shooting pain?”

(ominous music)

Well, Skipper, it’s a sign that your Achilles tendon is considering going blooie. You hurt it over a year ago, but ignored it because everything else hurt too. It’s grown a lump the size of a large prune. ‘ja think that maybe you shoulda looked into this before?

I limped out in a boot, and was told to come back in six weeks. That was in the very beginning of last September, eight months ago.

It was the black foam variety, and after about a month it fell apart and was flapping like a pirate boot. They put me in an Aircast that was a smidgy too small because that was what they had.

(Re Aircasts: See the pic; they’re the things that look like part of stormtrooper costumes. The small weighs four pounds, and the medium five, which is like clumping around with a bag of sugar stapled to your shin. They have chambers which can be inflated to fit snugly, and three massively no-nonsense velcro straps. And every single time I would think of the shorter, heavier, infinitely less-cool-looking foam thing that had disintegrated, I would put it on with big chirpy love.)

Happily, when I went back for my checkup the prune had diminished–but now that it was gone, there was obviously a walnut underneath. Another month or so.

And for five months, I would go in every month or so, and the damned thing just refused to heal. Finally, the PA and I both saw the hand writing on the wall, or the toe scrabbling weakly in the sand, and the attending came in and said that I either spent six weeks booted-crutched-AND *O*F*F* it–or there would be surgery, which would entail the same thing anyway.

(more ominous music)

I’d seen a blog the night before (complete with oversharing pictures) about the horrors of this procedure, and I just . . . sort of . . . stopped after a while. I’ve had (really) over a dozen full-throttle abdominal procedures (girly stuff mostly) and think autopsies are kewl. But it looked like ow-ow-ow-ow-ow, so even though I know damn well you don’t blog if you have a normal outcome, I decided to be uncharacteristically compliant. I am now on a couch in a corner containing seemingly everything I own so I don’t have to fetch it. (You have NO idea how much you walk around at home until you hurt yourself.)

At least the new Aircast fits, which is a vast improvement, but it’s about a pound heavier, bringing it up to five pounds. The lump is getting smaller. But at five weeks, I’m not completely hopeful. One way or another, I see the truly spiffy PA in about ten days, and I will *not* be doing the Gene Kelly on my way out.

I want to dance. Hell, I want to walk. I want to not have carrying things up and down stairs to be tactically planned–it was enough of a pain in the ass without the boot, but at least once I was on level ground . . .

. . . it hurt, and I keep forgetting that. But I walked and danced anyway, and because pain is for weenies (as we are told by everything remotely associated with athletics), I toughed it out. I Just Did It . . . and now I’m Just Sitting On It.

I have a fish phobia. It’s not dire–I’m fine with pictures and whatnot, and I’m usually down with the Nova, but fishtanks can give me the willies, free or not.

The first time I saw one of those sucky fish glued to the side of an aquarium, I did the girly scream and dance. I was an adult. In public. And my most terrifying moment in recent memory, in terms of a sense of imminent doom, came while snorkeling in Hawaii. OK, coral–goes with the rest of the surreal I’m-really-here Hawaii experience; fish, yeah, they live here, I suppose, but they’re over there and I’m over . . . um, they’re over . . . um, there are a lot . . .

I heard myself scream through my snorkel, which was pathetic beyond belief, and I banged a uey and swam back to shore as hard and as fast as I could, which wasn’t very impressive, as I’m not much of a swimmer. It still literally makes me shudder to remember that desperate terrified battle to avoid . . . being touched or eaten or something.

I sobbed on the shore, until my spouse came to console me. He was nice enough to not be laughing very hard, but I was homicidal, as he’d checked the sitch out ahead of time and pronounced it largely fish-free. Apparently, between the time he’d been there and the time he’d fetched me back, somebody must have fed them one of those candy bar things, and they were . . . looking for more food. Which I already viscerally knew. (You can get these nummy sticks of about the size of a banana that will attract swarms of the things so they will come and nibble it out of your hand. This is incomprehensible to me.)

Big aquariums require me to be brave. But I like them. They’re sort of like horror movies with a gift shop. In fact, I like fish in the abstract–and in an attempt to man up to the piscine world, I used to own an aquarium. One with teeny fish, not the ones the size of a salad plate like in my doctor’s waiting room. I grew fond of them, and declared war on a snail infestation with self-righteous fervor.

But I never knew what the deal was. I’ve had a fair share of trauma in my fascinating life, but none involving fish as far as I knew. The flopping and skittering maybe? Nah. There are lots of things I’m not keen on touching because they move like that, but I don’t go screaming through my snorkel over them.

Then tonight, one of those childhood memories hit, and it makes sense now.

My dad was a fish tank guy, and I loved them. I would watch them for hours. Back when I was five, I loved going to the fish store and helping pick new ones out. He had a Jack Dempsey whom he named “Hannibal the Cannibal” for good reason, so we went to the fish store regularly. (Dad eventually gave up on the defenseless mollies and snackfood neons and switched to bigger, tougher fish.)

On one trip, I saw a tank full of the cutest itty frogs you ever did see. Adorable. Maybe two inches long. They stayed in the water, and swam around, and ate fish food. I was completely enamored, so Dad got some. That afternoon, I woke up from my post-shopping nap and heard my father cursing in the living room. I ran in to see Hannibal swimming around with the still-kicking legs of one of my tiny frogs protruding from his mouth. Oh, the poor, poor little frog! How horrible to get digested to death! My father extracted him, but of course it was too late.

Thinking back, this was the first time I had ever seen something I cared about being killed before my eyes–I had no control; I didn’t even see justice for my dead: Dad refused to flush him; for some reason he really liked the bastard. Hannibal the Cannibal became the repository for all my rage and fear; he himself had been a trusted (if despised) part of my life. Now this slimy little creature was swimming around unscathed and unrebuked, despite being a bringer of death.

Obviously an overreading in adult terms, but I was five. Come on now. Besides, 43 years later, I still want to bludgeon the sheeping thing to death with a chopstick. Poor little frog. I’m curious now as to whether the peaceable and upright, the clean-living and frog-eschewing fish I meet in the future will lose some of their terror after my squarely facing my trauma. I hope so.

Do sharks count?

1.5.10

(Plinky prompt: What are the 3 most significant historic events that have occurred in your lifetime?)

1) The 1969 Apollo landing. I was six, and what I remember was hardly being able to keep my eyes open, but gamely being there for it. I was on the fold-out couch in the living room, and had to be awoken when it got near. So I remember that small step for man being taken while I was in the unpleasant why-am-I-up? and why-am-I-doing-this? state of having pulled an all-nighter or getting up at an hour before oh-dawn-thirty for May Day to see the Morris dancers sing the sun up.

(I’d say something sententious involving the sunrise and celestial motifs, but then I’d have to slap myself.)

I did some quick Wikisearch, and found that it was at about 11-ish at night for me. I was allowed to stay up for New Year’s Eve, but I think this was different because of the anticipation involved. I did find myself crying; I think it may have been the first time I realized that there was something poignant about human history being made.

2) Right after I turned 27 in November of ’89, my world was small. I didn’t read the news, because it was depressing. I was an art major, and I admitted cheerfully that I was avoiding reality by reading science fiction. Then one night in the car, my husband turned to me, and casually asked, “So what do you make of all that stuff going on in Berlin?”

“What stuff going on in Berlin?” I asked innocently. I got myself a subscription to Newsweek the next day. Thus, the failure of totalitarian socialism marked the beginning of my understanding that I was forced to be a political animal. I realized that I *had* to start paying attention.

3) Just like everybody else over ten, 9/11. I was 38. Kid #2 and I were on our way to where I was teaching college. It was a horrible jolt when that plane crashed into Tower One. But I’d grown up knowing that planes hit skyscrapers; just ask the Empire State Building. Then the DJ came on again–and Kid #2, whom I’d thought oblivious in the back seat with his Game Boy, said “Ohhh shit.” I remember looking around at all the other cars on that stunning September morning, and the world driving by Johns Hopkins and the art museum looked just the same as it had 15 minutes ago.

About a half hour after that I was standing in front of my composition class at Morgan State. I had to be the grownup for a room full of terrified 18-year-old children. One young man said something bitter about how horrible it was to be stuck with Bush right then. I found myself digging within that amazing surge of patriotism those planes dredged out of most of us, and said, “He may be an asshole, but right now, he’s *our* asshole, and right now is when we all have to stick together.”

Right now I’m 48, and it looks as if we’re about to be plunged into an era of totalitarian conservatism. I feel powerless, and afraid–but deep down hopeful, because I know that our intellects can even break us out of our gravity well, that freedom chips and chips away against repression–and that when it all comes down to it, nothing is monolithic, and people find their bravery despite their fear.