Author: Melanie

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Lighten Up, It’s Just Fashion

Melanie

Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.
— Coco Chanel

D.C. is a great town for people watching. There are tourists everywhere, and you can spot them in a second (the next one I spot standing on the left side of the escalator – standers to the right, walkers to the left, it’s not a hard system – may get an “unintentional” nudge). They dress like you would expect, and they’re easy targets for snark. This post is not about them. This post is about the people who work in the city, whatever their jobs may be (as will become clear in a moment).

Now, look: I don’t claim to be a fashion plate. I don’t subscribe to Vogue or Elle or In Style, I don’t really care what’s “in,” so long as I don’t stick out, and I skip the parts of Glamour (to which I do subscribe) that instruct me to “layer with sheers,” and “don’t forget the girly touches,” and “wear his clothes your way,” because: No. However, I have seen several episodes of What Not To Wear, and I can honestly say I’ve never left the house in any of the following:

1. A hot pink (nearly fluorescent) business suit. With Adidas slides. And ankle socks. (If she had been on the Metro in the morning, I might have excused the footwear; a lot of people change at the office, but this was midday in the middle of the street).

2. Blue (closer to teal) suede cowboy boots, with capri pants. I’m not sure where she was going with this look, but she didn’t get there.

3. A seersucker suit, with bow-tie. In fairness to this guy, this is Virginia (I saw him at my morning Metro station) and I think this is where seersucker country starts, but still. It’s not like he was old, either. He was probably in his 40s. My Torts professor and Tom Wolfe are fond of seersucker, but . . .  they’re in their 60s.

4. Silver lamé halter top with denim (super)short-shorts, and silver pumps. At 9:45 on a Tuesday morning, in a business district. She’s the one I was referring to above when I said “whatever their jobs may be.” I’m not saying she was a prostitute – hey, maybe she was doing a walk of shame, what do I know – but if the silver shoe fits . . .

and my favorite:

5. A navy blue skirt suit. Great, right? What’s wrong with that? Well, when I first noticed her getting off the Metro, she was in front of me. She caught my eye because she was wearing red, patent leather, sling-back, peep-toe pumps with her sort of average, everyday navy suit. At the top of the escalator, she stopped and turned around for a second, and that’s when I hit the jackpot: white oxford shirt with a red and white striped men’s tie. Oh, and big, puffy 80s bangs. I really wanted to follow her to find out where she worked. I’m guessing T.G.I.H&RPatentPalace.

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Everyone Is Doing It

Melanie

Resolve, and thou art free.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

New Year’s resolutions, that is. I thought I’d go ahead and share mine as well. As if you care. There are only a couple; I know myself, and any more than that would overwhelm me.

1. Become more informed. The primaries are upon us, and I don’t have any idea, beyond the bare bones, what any of the candidates stand for. I read Express (the condensed version of the Washington Post given out free to Metro commuters) from cover to cover every morning, I get the NY Times headlines emailed to me every day (and I read probably 50% of the stories), plus I read the Yahoo headlines and numerous blogs (what do you mean, none of them are news blogs?), and I still feel like I don’t understand what’s going on in the world. Maybe my brain is broken, but it’s like I’m reading the information and it’s not staying in my head. I live in the center of the political world, and I am hopelessly out of touch. But I can tell you what Britney’s latest legal trouble is, so there’s that.

2. Get back on track, weight-wise. I haven’t talked about it, maybe at all, here, but I’ve been on Weight Watchers for nearly 20 months now. I’ve lost 60 pounds, which is great, and I’m thrilled, but I have a long way to go (30-40 more pounds), and I’ve not lost anything since September (in that go up one week, down a couple weeks, back up a couple the next week, kind of way). I am so not one of those people who whines that I’m working the program perfectly and it just isn’t happening. No: I’ve kind of gone off the rails, and I take full responsibility for that. It’s time to get my head back in the game, because WW does work, but you can’t fool the program. Or the scale.

3. Get more involved. I do nothing. Nothing. I get up, go to work, come home, sometimes go to the gym (in my complex, so I don’t even have to drive), make and eat dinner, watch some TV, travel the information superhighway, read a little, and go to bed. Wash, rinse, repeat. The weekends are marginally better because I accomplish more (read: clean my apartment, go grocery shopping, and cook lunches for the week), but they are largely the same. If I don’t go down to Richmond or have someone from Richmond come here, I don’t do anything. It turns out that my “work friends” are just that: friends at work. Which sucks, but it is what it is. One person I thought would be more than that (not the same one from early November – a boy – but not a boyfriend, just a boy friend) is apparently tired of me.

So, now I have to make my own fun. This goes along with that “I swore my life would be different when I moved here” thing I talked about early on. I want to meet people. I don’t know how I forgot about church (I’m Unitarian), but I never even thought to look one up when I moved here. I’m going to do it. And I joined the local bar association when I passed the bar in October, and god knows they send me enough crap about getting involved, so I want to try to do that, especially volunteer work.

Thinking about the effort it will take makes me tired, and I’m tempted to say I don’t have enough time, but: wash, rinse, repeat. Thinking about having to talk to people I don’t know at all makes me kind of nauseous, and I’d rather stay home and watch TV, writers’ strike or not (you guys, they’re bringing back American Gladiators – how freaking awesome is that??), but you get the life you make for yourself, right?

4. Go on a date. I don’t know if that’s so much a resolution as it is a hope, but here’s where I’ll do my part: if I meet someone I’m attracted to, I will ask him out. If someone asks me out, I will say yes, even if I think there’s no way in hell we’ll hit it off, under the heading of “Hey, you never know.” Unless it’s, like, one of the homeless guys who hang out at the top of the escalator at my Metro stop in the city or something. Give me a break: he can’t buy me dinner (don’t worry, I’ve got my room in hell all picked out.).

So there you go. My new year in four easy steps. How about you – what’s your big resolution?

Now, I think I heard something about some political brouhaha in Iowa tonight? (I’m kidding, I promise. I know it’s Idaho.)

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Things to Be Happy About, Vol. 9

Melanie

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course.  Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word “happy” would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
—  Carl Jung

Happy new year!  As predicted last week, I spent the evening drinking champagne (mostly from a glass, though I got one very satisfactory swig from the bottle) and watching movies (Reign Over Me – very good).  I would have liked to be out, but somehow, when you don’t make the effort to make plans, they tend not to materialize on their own, so . . .

My trip to Buffalo was very nice, minus the sad parts about my grandpa from my last post.  I got to see some cousins I hadn’t seen in a while and hang out in a (very) small-town bar on a Friday night, which was definitely an experience.  It’s not a stereotype for nothin’.  Those of you who know me from the interwebs will understand who I’m talking about when I say that I got to meet Suby, SubyJr, Skipper, and ThinIdentity for lunch on Saturday – what a great time that was!  Such funny, smart, beautiful women.

It’s back to work tomorrow; at least it’s a three-day week to ease back into it.  I don’t think I could handle a full five-day week just yet.  It’s been nice to relax and travel to visit family.  The holidays were good to us; I’ve got no complaints, really.

Here’s this week’s list:

1. cousins
2. a 28-mile canoe trip [I’m not gonna lie – I ended up across the river from the rest of the group at the end of the weekend because I lost my paddle in the last mile or so, but a Good Samaritan saw me and drove me back to the other side]
3. creme brulee
4. people who know that money is not a prerequisite for happiness
5.  going down swinging
6. two-hour lunches
7. floor seats at a great concert
8. curtain calls
9. breakfast foods: eggs, bacon, toast, hash browns, grits, pancakes, and orange juice
10. doing all your laundry and housework on December 31 so you start the new year with everything clean and fresh

I hope your new year is getting off to a great start!

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How the Mighty Have Fallen

Melanie

No young man believes he shall ever die. . . . There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything.  To be young is to be as one of the Immortals.  One half of time is indeed spent — the other half remains in store for us, with all its countless treasures . . . .
— William Hazlitt

Getting old bites.  I saw both of my grandfathers over the holidays, and it’s clear to me that they are both not the men they used to be.

My dad’s dad (whom my brother and I always called Grandfather, but is now generally referred to as G2, because he’s Great-Grandfather to Nate’s kids and that’s what they call him) is 76.  He had a stroke last year shortly after his 75th birthday.  He had a difficult time in the immediate aftermath – a lot of physical therapy, mind exercises, and the like – but was steadily improving.  He was certainly more forgetful than he had been, and his hearing was going, but he was still working 4 days a week, just like before the stroke.  A week or so before Christmas this year, he had what’s been confirmed as another small stroke.  Testing shows he’s mostly back to where he was prior to that, with some small exceptions, but it’s obvious to everyone that this could be the beginning of the end for him mentally.

He’s a lawyer, and he practices alone.  Word in my family is that Grandfather’s wife, to whom he’s been married more than 25 years, has convinced him to stop working this year because it’s getting to be too much of a struggle for him, between having to remember minute details and trying to hear in the courtroom.  He’s agreed, but the nature of his job is such that he can’t just quit.  He has to close out the cases he has and make sure his clients have other representation if there are outstanding issues.  He’s agreed, though, not to take on any new cases, and he expects it to take him a full year to wind down the practice.

I can’t imagine what he must be going through.  This is a man who sits at the head of the Thanksgiving table and tosses out legal quandaries for the family to discuss, then offers up his solution.  He’s starting to tell the same stories multiple times in one evening.  This is a genius Hearts player who knows in his head exactly what’s left to be played and who took what trick; he’s the official scorekeeper, and when he’s winning, he slyly asks the rest of us, “Does anyone want the scores read?”  The math is getting harder for him.  This is a man who does the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen every Sunday.  The last several I’ve seen on his coffee table have been unfinished.

Physically he’s mostly fine, and people in our family are long-lived, and so I envision a future for him where he has a body that can do everything he needs it to do but behind his bright blue eyes he’s reaching for words that don’t come.  I hate to say it, but if it comes to that, I hope he’s too far gone to know any different.

My mom’s dad, my Grandpa, is having the opposite problem.  He’s 86, and he has spinal stenosis, which Google tells me is “A condition due to narrowing of the spinal cord causing nerve pinching which leads to persistent pain in the buttocks, limping, lack of feeling in the lower extremities, and decreased physical activity.”

This is a fairly recent development; I saw him in early June and he either was not symptomatic or he hadn’t had any problems yet.  This time, he’s walking with two canes (I can only assume using a walker would make him feel old) and it is slow going.  It was actually painful for me to watch him try to walk up and down steps, and when we got to wherever we were going, he would find the chair nearest the door and station himself there for the duration.  No one can blame him, of course; he doesn’t complain, but he’s clearly in a lot of pain.

My Grandpa is a character.  He’s also a lawyer, though he hasn’t officially practiced in years.  When I was a kid, he terrified me because he’s Italian and loud and prone to yelling over the voices of anyone who disagrees with him.  I’ve come to learn that he doesn’t mean any harm by it; he lives for debate, and the yelling was largely a product of hearing loss, which he only corrected with hearing aids in the last couple of years (the aids have not, however, resulted in a reduction in yelling; I think he just knows it’s expected of him).

The other thing about my Grandpa, which makes the physical problems he’s having so hard to bear, is that he is a real get-up-and-go guy, from the crack of dawn til midnight.  He raised six kids with my Grandma (they’ve been married more than 61 years) and worked as a criminal defense attorney for over 50 years, in addition to volunteer work in the community, and since he retired, running the public golf course my uncles own (he’s out on the mowers in the spring and summer, in the kitchen hollering and cooking up a storm, and just generally commanding his troops).  There’s more that he does, but I’m exhausted just telling you all of that!

Needless to say, being limited to essentially moving from one stationary position to another all day is no picnic for him.  He’s mellowed a bit in his old age, and he’s a good sport about the pain he’s in, but you can tell he wishes he could be as much a part of life as he was before.  He loves to be in the middle of the action getting things done.  It’s hard to watch him watching life going on around him.  My biggest fear is that he’s going to end up confined to a bed.  He would be miserable; no one does things exactly the way he wants them done, of course, and so he prefers to do them himself; not being able to would be a nightmare for him.

I can’t decide which grandfather has it worse – and maybe it’s equally bad for both of them, considering their personalities – but that isn’t the point of this at all.  I love and admire these men: They are pillars of goodness, wisdom, and strength in my life, and seeing them end up human like the rest of us is breaking my heart.

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Memory Lane of Men, Part 1

Melanie

Still, there is a sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it’s as simple as that. [He] was the person [she] loved at her most optimistic moment.
— from The Hours, by Michael Cunningham

I heard a story the other day about someone whose brother got engaged to his high school sweetheart – the brother is in his 40s, and he and the woman had been out of touch for more than 20 years when they reconnected and fell in love again. I’m a sucker for stories like that, and it made me think of my first love. I’ve had three (what I consider) “real” relationships in my life – one in high school and two in college. None of them lasted longer than 10 months. I don’t know what that says about me. Since then (ages ago, if you must know), I haven’t dated anyone seriously. It’s kind of sad, actually. Anyway, I thought I’d do a little deconstructing of those three relationships and see what I come up with, and lucky you gets to come along for the ride.

So: J. We met when we were 16; we both worked at an amusement park during the summers, and he worked with my best friend. I don’t remember exactly how we met, but I remember that our connection was pretty immediate. We didn’t date right away, at least not officially, because by the time we met, there wasn’t much time left before I was leaving for Spain for four months. We intended to have “a two-week fling” (yes, that’s what we called it – what the hell did we know from flings), but at least on my end, I was head over heels well before the end of the two weeks.

We used to sit in his car in the parking lot after work, late at night, just talking for hours. I didn’t have my own car then, and my parents used to have to come pick me up when I was finished closing. I don’t know how many times I made them wait, or for how long, because J and I never wanted to leave each other. And I’m telling you honestly, for weeks, we didn’t do anything but talk. He’d never kissed anybody before, and I was not that much more experienced. We had our first kiss in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven across the street from the amusement park. It was a Tuesday. I remember what I was wearing and the date, too.

I was heartbroken when I had to leave for Spain. J came over the day before I left, and we spent the afternoon making out and saying goodbye (my mom was out of town, my dad was already in Spain, and my brother was at college). In the weeks leading up to my leaving, J would joke that I would meet a hot Spanish guy named Don Flamenco and fall in love and never come home. As I was walking back up to my house after leaving him at his car that day in September, he called my name. When I turned around, he said with a grin, “If you see Don Flamenco, tell ‘im I said hi.” It was kind of a movie moment.

Spain was torture for me early on. I must have written J 10 letters before I ever got one from him. When I finally did, what he’d written broke my heart. He said he’d started dating someone at school (we went to different high schools), and told me how her eyes sparkled and some other crap I used to know by heart but have apparently forgotten. We had agreed before I left that we could date while I was gone, but I never intended to, and I hadn’t expected him to. I sent him even more letters after that, and thinking about what they probably said makes me cringe. I had a bit of a melodramatic streak back then (which is, I think, marginally more controlled these days).

By the time I got home from Spain in January, J and Sparkles had broken up, but he wasn’t ready to date me again yet. The day he told me he was – “I think we should try it your way” – was probably the happiest day of my high school life. I adored him – he was the funniest guy I’d ever met (and still is), he was thoughtful, I thought he was so handsome (baseball hat, crooked smile, and all) – and I felt like, at 16, I was done. I attribute a lot of that thinking to the fact that I’d never had a real boyfriend before him, and I assumed (from my extensive reading of young adult novels) that “love” was all you needed to end up together. I learned, though, that it doesn’t quite work like that.

Six weeks later, sitting in his car in front of my house, J broke up with me. That may have been the first time I heard “It’s not you, it’s me,” but I can’t be sure (it definitely was not the last). He said that he felt confined by the relationship, that when he was at school and girls flirted with him, he felt bad if he flirted back, like that meant he was cheating on me (since I wasn’t there). The true irony in that is that I used to feel that way with every “boyfriend” I’d ever had before J – I never wanted anyone to know I was “dating” (you know, dating like you hold hands in the hallway, and meet at your locker between classes) a guy at school because what if another guy I liked better than this guy saw me and then didn’t ask me out if he liked me because he thought I wasn’t interested but I really was interested? (I told you I was a little dramatic back then. Next time you’ll believe me when I tell you something.) When I met J, I realized for the first time that flirting is natural, and just because you flirt doesn’t mean you’re interested in that person or not interested in the person you’re dating. I never wanted to be with anyone but him from the day I met him, and I told everyone who would listen that we were dating. Even my parents.

When he broke up with me, I thought it was the end of the world. I thought for a long time, even between and after those other two relationships, that J and I were meant to end up together, and I spent a long, long time trying to make him see that. We danced around each other several times over the years, but he always backed off first. In the end, he married and moved to Texas, and he’s getting his PhD in something ridiculously right-brained like Renaissance Literature. To his credit, he put up with every crying phone call, every pleading letter, every sappy birthday card, every angry email (he wasn’t good about staying in touch – I just cannot imagine why), and we came out as friends at the other end.

A few years ago, I read through all the emails that had gone back and forth between us, and I was aghast. I immediately emailed him and said, essentially, “Dude, I realize I was crazy, and I’m so sorry.” I can’t imagine what it must have been like on his end to get these emails (and letters and phone calls) from me, and what it must have taken for him to not tell me just to leave him the hell alone already. I promised him then that he would never get another email (or letter or phone call) like that from me again, and I’ve kept my word. Partly it’s because our friendship is more important to me than anything else. Partly it’s because I respect him and his marriage. Mostly, though, I think it’s because I grew up somewhere prior to that and realized, as great a story as it would make, that we are not going to end up together. My life is not a movie Becca would watch on Lifetime.

The quote that begins this post brings tears to my eyes every time I read it because I think it’s exactly why J occupied such a huge place in my heart for so long: he was the one I loved when I first learned what love was. I know, looking back, that our relationship couldn’t possibly have been everything I thought it was. We were together for too little time, and I was a fool for drama back then. I overlooked a lot and gave him too much credit. I mean, objectively, when someone says, “I love you, Melanie. I don’t know if I mean it, so don’t hold me to it, but I think I do,” that’s not exactly a solid foundation for a lasting relationship, to say the least. At 16, though, the only part I heard was, “I love you, Melanie.” He was never ready to be what I thought he was, what I wanted him to be, and that’s ok. It’s enough that I got to love him for the time that I did, and that I learned, eventually, that you have to listen to everything, you can’t just pick and choose the parts that fit the story you’re telling in your head.