Holiday wreath and apparently it's 2024
It's January in San Francisco. This used to mean a lot of drizzle, but these days it means dazzling sunshine or torrential rain. A few days ago I parked outside our house and asked SJ to open the front door so I could run from my car (through torrential rain, not dazzling sunshine). This is not normal (torrential rain is not normal, obnoxious requests are de rigueur).
SJ tells me about an episode of This American Life he wants us to listen to, where the producers just hang out at a rest stop in upstate New York and interview people.
Jenny: Is it recent?
SJ: No, it’s from 2009.
Jenny: It’s not really their heyday anymore, right? Like, they used to have an episode every week.
SJ: Yeah, they do a lot of reruns. It’s not like they have 56 episodes a year anymore.
Jenny (thinks for a second): They used to have 56 episodes?
SJ: Yeah, one for every week. (Then looks at me, alarmed.)
It’s the little things.
SJ also tells me about how, long before we met, he agreed to go to a sex party (!!!) with an ex-girlfriend who was far more adventurous than he was. But SJ, who is lactose-intolerant, made the striking choice to DRINK A GLASS OF EGGNOG BEFOREHAND.
I could have died happy after that part – GUESS WE KNOW WHAT MONTH IT WAS – but then he told me he "eventually got Gas-X" and "was OK" WHATEVER THAT MEANS!!!
*
A few days ago I cut a rather large chunk of my labia with scissors during a routine trim of the ever-graying hair-down-there, a completely unnecessary reminder that certain things are too important to be rushed through.
After more than four months of rush-rush-rushing — I started a new job in August — in a few days I will be taking myself and my labia (healed!) to Mendocino County and doing nothing but sleeping, reading, hiking, running, watching, drinking tea, and drinking wine for EIGHT DAYS EIGHT DAYS. The last time I did this was TEN YEARS AGO before everything, when I was suffering from unrequited love NEVER AGAIN and stayed in a cabin in Humboldt and worked on my novel (RIP) and read dozens of New Yorkers and hiked with a friend's dog and slept with a pot farmer in a damp loft that reeked of cigarette smoke NEVER AGAIN. I was three years away from 40, whereas now I'm three years away from 50, and I wonder when I'm three years away from 60, inshallah, what I'll think about how my life looks now.
*
Gargantufirstgrader has complaints. Mostly with Mommy. Mostly about, directed toward, or in the neighborhood of Mommy. Mommy never lets him watch anything. Mommy never lets him finish what he's saying. He hates brushing his teeth/washing his hands/practicing piano/not practicing piano/doing anything Mommy tells him to, or politely asks him to do, or implies he might want to do now or at some point in the future. He's just waiting for the day when he can roll out of bed in his Pokémon pajamas, skip breakfast, skip brushing his teeth, walk to the car without his shoes or coat or backpack, drive his own ass to school listening to his podcasts, park on the sidewalk, bring all his toys past the yard monitor and shout at his friends: IT'S TIME TO PLAY MOTHERFUCKERS WHO'S WITH ME.
Mommy: Honey, please stop reading in the backseat. You're going to get carsick.
GFG: I am not! I have never thrown up in the car!
Mommy: You have 100 percent thrown up in the car! Three times!
GFG: WHY IS EVERYONE ALWAYS TELLING ME WHAT TO DO (throws book on floor).
Mommy: Thank you.
GFG (two blocks from home): I’m carsick anyway. Or maybe I’m homesick (HE DOES NOT KNOW WHAT HOMESICK MEANS THAT'S WHY THIS IS CUTE).
Sometimes, blissfully, GFG's complaints are aimed at SJ.
GFG (random musing apropos of nothing while we're trapped in a room together with COVID): How is Daddy so old and he's not even good at soccer!
Jenny (after we finish the graphic novel El Deafo, which is based on a true story): Do you think you’ll ever want to write a book about your life?
GFG: Hmm. If it gets interesting, then yes.
*
Mostly, I’ve been wanting to tell this story.
This is from August, when GFG and I had COVID, immediately after which I started my new job and got distracted from telling this story because I was doused, day after day, by the proverbial fire hose of a new job plus attendant anxiety and at least one panic attack (GFG on my new job as a copy editor for a major news outlet covering Donald Trump/the crumbling of democracy/mass shootings/war in Ukraine/war in Gaza/asylum seekers at the border/Jeffrey Epstein and the destruction of children and childhood: "That job looks pretty easy. All you gotta do is write, write, write").
Sometime toward the end of the COVID week, when I was approaching negative status but not there yet, I started venturing out of the bedroom wearing my mask. Our home, a single story for more than 100 years, now has a small upstairs, achieved by a fold-out ladder installed in the ceiling of the front hall. Our desks are up there, and it's the weirdest fucking construction because we couldn't afford anything else. When I'm on work calls, anyone coming "upstairs" appears in the background first as a head, then a neck, then a body climbing a ladder. SJ's desk faces the adjoining wall and is closer to the ladder. Anyone coming up hits the floor out of sight of SJ's work calls and, once they've straightened, might appear simply to be walking behind his screen.
Unless they do what I did.
I have a habit, which everyone in my family loves, of walking around our house in a state of half-dress. Sometimes I am naked from the waist up. Sometimes I am naked from the waist down. Sometimes I am completely naked, holding a towel to my breasts in an "effort" to dash from one room to another without upsetting anyone's sensibilities when we're all aware I don't care enough to put clothes on so stop pretending Jenny.
On this particular day, I knew SJ had a meeting. I KNEW IT. Which is why, when I came out of the bedroom wearing a T-shirt, underpants, and a bright pink kid's mask, I decided I would ever-so-kindly, instead of walking half-naked behind SJ's computer, army-crawl below it across the carpet.
You guessed it.
But here's the thing.
As I was coming up the ladder, as SJ told me later, "I saw you coming." Before I'd made it to the top, Shane turned his camera off so no one saw my naked ass bobbing past. However, he failed to indicate this to me in any way. I continued to my desk, content in the knowledge that I had safely crossed the room without revealing myself. So when I was done with whatever the fuck I had decided was so important I didn't need to put pants on, without giving SJ any warning I dropped to the carpet and began army-crawling in the other direction.
SJ told me he managed to blur the screen. However, the blur function does not blur everything: anything that bobs close to the screen, such as a face, or a naked ass, comes into focus once it's close enough to the camera. Which is how I appeared to SJ, SJ's business partner, and a very understanding client who was probably all WHAT THE FUCK, IS IT 2020.
I went into hysterics almost immediately. It took SJ a few days to find it funny. It took SJ’s business partner about three seconds to find it funny.
The client forgave them. The end.
We watched “Rush Hour” this week with GFG (it holds up). After this scene SJ said, “It’s Jenny walking into a new job!”
I laughed very hard. SJ was relieved. “Whew!” he said. “That could have gone either way.”
I’m obsessed with Blue Zones and Dan Buettner. This fall there was a Netflix series so I was talking about it again. It’s very positive. It makes me think of all the things we’re doing and our parents are doing that are likely to extend our life spans: eating beans, drinking tea, walking, gardening, keeping bees and chickens, painting, writing, volunteering, shutting down bridges in Portland to protest genocide at the ages of 80 and 85, DRINKING WINE, laughing, loving.
SJ says it’s his bane because whenever I talk about it, I start telling him we need to eat less meat.
Jenny: Whenever I walk with [my friend] Kathy, I feel like I'm extending my life span – a long walk outside on the beach, breathing clean air.
SJ (bitter, inflexible, just wants to eat fried chicken sandwiches and watch zombie movies, likely to die young): Yep. All you need to do is take a cup of olive oil and sip it as you walk.
*
After I decree GFG must watch something educational on Disney+, he suggests we watch a documentary called Pride. Fine.
Five minutes in I’m holding back sobs after the VO says the first Canadian Pride protest was in 1971! So recent! So much change in so little time!
The camera shifts to an aerial shot of a seashore.
Jenny: Brighton! My ex-girlfriend went there on junior year abroad and …
GFG: You had an ex-girlfriend?
Jenny (we’ve talked about my sexuality ad nauseum but perhaps I've been talking to myself for six years): Yes, I dated women before.
GFG (happy astonishment): You’re QUEER! (Throws his arms around me.) I’m so happy you’re queer (he says from my armpit). When I grow up I’ll be queer, too. I’ll be a queer teacher. And I’ll teach queer. All I’ll teach is queer. (Which is as close to a queer agenda as I can figure.)
GFG (later, hugging me, quietly): I’m so happy you’re queer.
WELL THAT WENT WELL. SOB.
*
To make a holiday wreath, you need to:
Develop the capacity to ignore any housecleaning chores in desperate need of being done.
Collect whips from the backyard. Make sure to wear your outdoor shoes indoors.
Commandeer a dining room table.
Twist and turn the whips to make a circle and secure it with wire. Spend an inordinate amount of time doing this.
Carry a pair of shears across the street (indoor shoes, outdoors shoes, who cares?) and strip some communal plants of boughs with red berries.
Sprinkle throughout like a fucking Christmas elf.
Hang with wire from the front gate so your partner, who thinks this is actually really beautiful, can enjoy until it turns brown and droops like the unmet promises of 2023.