IdeaJones

Month: August 2016

  • How To Shovel Shit

    I considered a few different titles for this post, then it came to me, a picture of my worst summer job.

    Mom was a landscaper and avid gardener. For a time, she and my dad would buy old houses, rehabilitate them and sell them (it wasn’t called “flipping” yet. And flipping sounds so effortless. This was hard work for all three of us).

    Then Dad announced he had accepted a promotion and we were moving to Reno, NV. Reno has things to recommend it (the most beautiful sunsets I’ve seen), but it’s hardly a gardener’s paradise. My parents had a house built, about 45 minutes from downtown Reno (at the time — now I understand it’s more like 30). It wasn’t near anything, surrounded by semi-desert, scrubby manzanita bushes, tumbleweeds, sand and hard-packed dirt, miles of it. There was a lake of sorts, mostly quicksand. The nearest town was Stead, an abandoned military base.

    Mom couldn’t live without plants around her. She’d had no desire to move to Nevada. We were living in Scotts Valley near Santa Cruz, CA, an area so verdant that people said if you dropped a seed you’d better pick it up unless you wanted it to grow right there. Green everywhere, trees you often couldn’t see the tops of, wildflowers. Gardener’s heaven.

    But now we lived in a little patch of ranch-style houses with long dirt roads. There weren’t enough houses to make it worth anyone’s while to pave the streets at that time. The main road to highway 395 was paved, but everything else was dirt so hard it could have been concrete. There weren’t many homes when we lived there, and the ones that were there usually had tiny lawns watered frugally from wells (each house depended on its own well) and perhaps a few hardy flowers.

    Desperate for a garden, Mom undertook negotiations with the desert. She rented a big cultivator to break up the ground and began amending the soil, only it was more like reconstruction. We broke up clods with hoes and rakes and tilled in a long list of additions to add everything our soil didn’t have, which was everything.

    Then Mom found out the sewage treatment plant in Reno would let you have a truckload of composted sewage for little or nothing. We had a big pickup, used to pull a horse trailer, haul hay for our little herd of horses… now it became a sewage truck. Mom and Dad returned with a large load of black stuff that smelled, well… if you’ve ever run across a Porta-potty left in the hot sun for days, like that on steroids. It remains the worst smell I’ve ever run across (which is *not* a challenge, universe, just an observation).  Mom told me with a bright smile that I would “get” to help her put it in the garden and she’d even pay me (I had regular chores but didn’t get paid for those. I did get paid for “extra” work I did).  My going rate was 50 cents an hour, but when I turned down the job, this went to 75 cents an hour, her final offer.

    That summer, I filled wheelbarrows full of dark, stinky sludge, trundled it over to the area where the garden would be, scraped the sludge out and spread it with a rake, working it into the soil. Now, that probably isn’t allowed. It would be seen as a health hazard. But then, it was seen as a sensible way to dispose of waste material, by everyone but the ten-year-old girl with a bandanna tied over her nose and mouth, out in the sun trying to pull up enough dirt to mix with sewage to tamp down the smell.

    I’ve had other jobs I hated over the years, but none to compare with that one. Mom even kicked in a bonus for doing a good job. It wasn’t enough.

    But here’s what I learned:

    *if you leave shit lying around, it doesn’t get any better. It just becomes uglier, smellier shit.

    * Shit can’t be prettied up to smell like something else. If you put, say, peppermint extract on your bandanna, you will smell shit with a hint of mint. And the longer you leave it, the more aggressively shitlike it will smell.

    * It can be composted and used to fertilize something better, but turning it into something better will be hard, smelly work without an ounce of fun to be had. There’s no song you can sing, no game you can play with yourself, that will make dealing with shit enjoyable. But if you have shit, you have to deal with it.

    * If you don’t have to deal with it all at once, you have choices. You can elect to exhaust yourself and plow through to the end, excited about the day you no longer have to deal with this shit, or you can do a bit at a time and reward yourself for dealing with the shit, knowing it’ll take longer but be less tiring.

    This has served me well over the years. While it’s true I don’t have to rake poop (if you don’t count picking up after the dogs) now, life just contains a certain amount of shit. It’s part of the natural process. Ranting against it doesn’t change that. Grab your shovel.

    Shit you deal with becomes fertilizer. Shit you don’t deal with becomes lower-grade, more disgusting shit.

    A friend once told me that people can’t bear feeling helpless. Causes anxiety and any number of problems. But if you find something you can do about the situation, however small, it eases your tension. So when you’re standing out in the yard in your beat-up sneakers, the ones you are going to throw away as soon as you can, holding your rake, watching that truck pull up, don’t look at the truck. Don’t think about how much it holds. Move one wheelbarrow full of shit and decide if you want to move another right away when you’re done with that one. But move that one wheelbarrow full of shit.

    Because every life contains a certain amount of shit, and it isn’t going to be fertilizer unless you use it.

  • Confessions Of A Fangirl

    I never did the “fangirl” thing at the point in your life when it’s normal to do so. Never had a subscription to Tiger Beat as a girl (more about that in a second), never hung posters on the wall or hugged my pillow and pretended to kiss some singer or t.v. guy. Maybe it’s because I started performing when I was about four years old. Nothing national. I was never on a show anyone outside of the area would have heard of. My biggest shows were a local Bozo The Clown/kid’s show sort of thing and one stage show with Cantinflas, a comic actor from Mexico. But I grew up with people putting on makeup and costumes, so I knew the people on television were playing pretend.

    And yet my first crush was on Mr. Ed, the talking horse. Go figure.

    We tended to live at a distance from other people. I couldn’t just have a friend over, although there were a couple of kids I would hike to meet halfway (both were boys). It wasn’t until almost junior high that I had a close female friend, and she did buy teen magazines and put up posters, of Donny Osmond. Every wall, the ceiling, there might have been some on the floor. Every surface bore his smiling, wide-eyed visage.  I went into the closet to change, hoping to change into my pajamas without eyes staring at me, only to find out she lined her closet with his posters, too.

    That was my introduction to fandom. In high school, I had some fans of my own. Acting in a traveling theater troupe, performing at schools, hospitals and events, I found out that my most popular role was a bigger hit than I knew. While trying to buy a new bra in a department store, a little boy testing a Big Wheel found me in the lingerie department and squealed, “It’s The Donkey! The Donkey is buying a bra!” I was a shy kid (how I ended up performing is a whole ‘nother story in itself), and the last thing I wanted was a lot of attention in public. No, the *last* thing was to be noticed while buying underwear.

    Kids flocked to the lingerie department, all happily talking very loudly about how The Donkey was buying a bra, what kind of bra was dangling, forgotten, from my limp hand, and begging me to sing.  I asked them please to go back to their parents. I begged them to just let me shop. But fans don’t hear things like that.

    It took me time to understand that in that moment, I was no longer a person. I was no longer a teenaged girl trying to buy underwear. I was something different, set apart, both more and less than the people around us. I think I finally did sing a song (and friends will tell you that I don’t usually sing in public, “public” being where anyone can hear me). I seem to remember doing a little dance. Then I ran away and hid in the changing room.

    So I went through my teen years without ever sighing dreamily over Mark Hamill (and if I were going to sigh dreamily over someone at that point, it would have  been Mark Hamill). I didn’t buy teen magazines and read and re-read them. It’s just a developmental phase I didn’t go through.

    When I started writing a novel that included fame as a component, and identity, it just seemed natural to explore fandom. Luckily, there were some very nice people, some of whom became friends, who were willing to lead me around and show me the landscape. I even participated, joined some fan Facebook pages, created fan art, even wrote part of a fan fiction that will *never* see the light of day (it’s awful).

    I went into chat rooms to talk about a band I was a huge fan of as a kid (and still like). Went to concerts. All that stuff. And it was fun.

    Every so often, I’d run across someone who was clearly taking it too far. It had assumed more importance than it could support the weight of, and eventually it was bound to collapse. Often that person would attack (not physically, thank God) someone else. Or try to befriend someone only because of a perceived connection to the object of desire. Why? Because of a perceived threat to a fantasy or idea. People will kill to defend an idea. Occasionally I found myself saying, “If this is important enough to you to get this angry, you need to set it down for a while and do anything else.”

    Like most things we say to one another, this was something I needed to tell myself. At some point, my own involvement started to matter to me. I let myself have that adolescent experience but neglected to keep my adult perspective on it. I never went off on anyone, but I got my feelings hurt in a very adolescent way (no offense meant to actual adolescents. Being an adolescent is just a point in the journey, unless you insist on sleeping on the benches in that train station long after your train has left it).

    My initial reaction was an emotional one. It was only when I took it out and looked at it that I realized that my emotional reaction was more fitting for someone far younger than I am. I’m an adult, with adult responsibilities and an adult’s life. Fandom, which had been sometimes fun, sometimes surprising, always quirky, had started to matter. Finding out that I wasn’t really part of “the group” the way I thought I was mattered.

    See, as a kid, we lived far enough away so that I couldn’t really just have kids over to play, or hang out easily. I usually had someone to eat lunch with if I wanted to, and got along fine with most of my classmates, but I didn’t have close friends, partially because my family had too many secrets (secrets I don’t bother hiding any more, but at the time? Our lives revolved around the dysfunction at home).  I didn’t hang out with friends. I participated in organized activities.

    Now, I do both. I have actual friends (some of them also “fangirls,” some not) and see them or chat with them when we can manage it. I also participate in events and activities, like art shows. Being in fandom too long took me back too far, past the enthusiasm and enjoyment of adolescence and into the emotions and over-reliance on “the group.”

    I’m a weird old lady, and I was a weird young lady, and a weird kid. Some people are designed to belong to a pack and some, like me, aren’t. Also, I’m an introvert. More people are extroverts and while I do like some of them, I’ll never fit in to a pack of extroverts. I was not just okay with that, I was comfortable with it, until I tried to fit in again.

    Now I’m back to writing and sculpting and being a happy introvert. I matter to the people I matter to, and the rest don’t matter (at least to me). And my journey in fandom is over. I’m an enthusiast, and I still like the music, but I’m not a fan. I’m just not cut out for it.

    But boy, it was interesting while it lasted.