paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- completely ordinary uncommon day A Completely Ordinary Uncommon Day Work was incredibly boring. The new me started today and I spent the day introducing her to my former job, trying to make it appealing, trying to make her see some ray of hope that she is not desperately under-employed because of the vanities of others. This woman is a born optimist or at least she covers well. I took one look at my desk and wanted to cry when I started my job. This new woman said, I would rather sit out in the open than in a small office with a door. Yeah, my office is more of a cell, � but � it is better than the desk in the hall. The Esquire does not like cubicles, so we have horribly expensive custom-crafted plywood and steel monstrosities that are actually too small to accommodate office work. Standing over six feet tall, Stella doesn�t fit in the custom monstrosity and yet she could find some way to be positive. �Stella,� I said, �at least put your trash can deep under your desk or the Esquire will come and put a banana peel in it. Or a tuna can or something she would never deposit in her own waste receptacle.� I am uncertain why the Esquire even needs a trash can because she has spent the last year milling around in mine. She said �well, it is more convenient too.� All this fantastic attitude from a woman whose air conditioner in her apartment has been broken since she moved in three weeks ago and she grew up in Alaska�. At midnight it is over 90 degrees these days. We got the redevelopment committees to the north of us and the south of us to a common table to discuss their plans. Or, more strategically, to see how their plans and our campus plan can �marry.� Only in Nevada could those plans marry. Sometimes when people begin talking about key nodes in real estate, my mind wanders. But I have to look at them and pretend to be an active listener. One of the board members of the north plan could be twin of my favorite local-yet-national poet. I kept looking at her because it was uncanny. After the meeting she came up to me and said �How are you today, Piper? I know we have met somewhere.� Yeah, at a poetry reading when you are your other person, the one who wears fewer rings?� I know she is not a family member because the poet is from Ohio. Our campus architect began to resemble Al Gore, more and more as the meeting ran later and later. I think about this a lot. The Esquire reminds me of someone neither famous or infamous but a former preschool teacher who runs a resource and referral agency and is affiliated with another college. I staffed a committee with her in a former job and she wore the biggest Avon jewelry and the brightest colors I�ve ever seen collected on one individual. As a guest speaker at a large conference/workshop event for early childhood educators, I was treated to a sit down spaghetti lunch with 200 other speakers and conferees where she got up and read all of her favorite poems and then brought in an accordion player to serenade us. It was simultaneously class and the opposite of class. Having typing withdrawal, hoarse from talking too much, and exhausted from being so chipper, I sent Stella on an errand of discovery. With the office to myself, I sneaked onto my computer and logged on to Diaryland. To my complete amazement, Miss Charlotte Throckmorton (http://throcky.diaryland.com) dedicated an entry to Quinn and I. All of the sudden, the day became uncommon. I called Quinn, which is my first reflex when days become uncommon. Sometimes days just become uncommon in a good way. Today is a day I will remember, fondly, long after I have forgotten about the meetings, the look-alikes, the newness of Stella. But then life just pushes its way back onto the scene. Tonight Quinn and I identified several tasks that could occur in several different combinations, and spent the better part of 30 minutes determining how to approach the uneventful sequence of events. Acquire groceries; bathe the plants in our gardens; cook dinner�or at least assemble a cold pate of diet food; decide whether to exercise or to identify a new reason for avoiding it (the heat has grown stale), and exercise our right to vote. Living in a democracy has become all about voting which is consuming democracy instead of creating it. With limited time, I find it difficult to get around the little clumps of words carefully crafted for their marketing appeal and their buttressing quotient. The BQ is determined by a formula which sorts out a sound byte�s ability to hold up under analytical scrutiny. Well at the local level, I find it especially hard to know how to vote. I voted for a senator because he is proud of being a Ph.D. and had an authoritative-yet-Sherlock-Holmesian campaign sign. I thought at least he will have some thoughts about all the stuff in the white spaces between the typed lines. And the woman running against him plastered the city with a bad picture of herself. I didn�t trust the picture because even though there was clearly one woman in it, there were two subjects: her stifling hair and her clenched jaw. It made me distrust her. It made me distrust myself for not taking the time to investigative the candidates and the issues. I was motivated to get out and vote because there was one candidate who came to our neighborhood and knocked on doors. Generally, candidates do not bother with our neighborhood. We don�t have enough capital to be considered a voting population, and have multiple sets of demographics that, thankfully, I imagine do not fall neatly into any one category. I keep discovering that it is personal connection, whether it be an e-mail or a knock on a door (and really what is the difference) that brings about a change from the common to the uncommon. I think it is other people who step out of their routine who make our days uncommon. Too often the uncommon is sort of a rupture of the ordinary where something horrible just punctures its way through a veneer of calm. (Like Throcky�s wonderful entry about the Tuna Noodle Casserole evening or like a sunny day in a horror film.) To my surprise, this candidate was interested in supporting Gay and Lesbian issues, locally. And I am glad that he knocked on my door. So glad I got out and voted, even though I was not certain about the issues up for election. Now I have to go fire up the big black box, which rarely gets fired up these days, to see if he won. Dearest Throcky, I am not in the least sorry I asked. Thank you. 10:18 p.m. - 2002-08-06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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