get your grandma out of here
COME GAWK AT ME
I was stopped on the street for what turned out to be very complicated directions. People always ask me for directions, because I look safe. People think, “That short bespectacled woman with the gray streak on one side of her hair and the Sleater-Kinney pins on her overcoat is clearly a bookish mom-type who is clinging to the last tattered shreds of her punk-rock past, and thus is probably cool enough to know where things are but not so cool that she will sneer at me for not knowing, plus she is so short and feeble that she is unlikely to roll me for my wallet.” Little do people know that on the inside I am a seething ninja cobra of fury. And I don’t sneer at them for not knowing where things are—shit, we’ve all been tourists—but I do sneer at them for being WEIRD SUBURBAN FREAKS.
These people wanted to know where a certain restaurant was, and I was relying on my vague memories of having walked by it a few times on my way to somewhere else. Then I was like wait, I have a phone that can look this up, why are we fucking around? While I was firing up the browser the direction-seekers decided to interrogate me. Do you live here? [Yes.] IN the city? [Yes.] Like, actually IN the city? [Yes.] Do you live in an apartment? [I live in a house, in a neighborhood on the north side.] Like a regular house? [I…guess, yeah. It’s a bungalow. Brick. Two-story. Basement.] [Unspoken: will you shut up and let me browse for your restaurant?] Do you have kids? [Yes, one.] Does she go to school in the city? [Yes.] Public school? [Yes.] IN the city? [Yes!]
I do not know what remote region of the galaxy these people came from that they were so agog at the thought of living in the city. It’s not that hard a concept! Cities have…populations!
THESE ARE THE LIMITS OF YOUR LIFE
While I don’t feel like going into the details here, my husband recently had an MRI of his spine to get the scoop on some lower-back pain. Bad news is that yeah, there’s something kind of wrong. Good news is that the wrong thing is manageable, reversible, and has inspired him to get with a program of personal training and physical therapy. (LT also insists, once again, that this course of action is extremely therapeutic.) So he is fired up to become a core-strength warrior, and will soon be asking people to punch him in the stomach Houdini-style (hopefully without the tragic results), as well as tirelessly sexing me in new acrobatic ways.
On the day when the MRI results became available, I had the more flexible schedule and thus was supposed to go pick up the CD of images at one hospital (in Evanston) and deliver them to a specialist in another hospital (here in good old Chicago, where people actually LIVE in HOUSES and go to SCHOOL). I drove to the suburban hospital, accidentally parked in the wrong parking garage (not the actual hospital’s parking garage but some nearby medical office building parking garage with scary-ass two-way traffic), made my confused way through the hospital maze to the concierge desk, and told the nice lady that I am here to pick up Mr. Smartypants’ MRI results, which he has authorized you via fax to release to me, blah blah blah. No problem, said the nice lady, they are right here. Just need to see your ID.
I dug around in my purse and realized I have forgotten my wallet. Oh man. Seriously? I offered the nice lady my work ID, my library card, business cards with my name on them, my checkbook—no. No one is taking an MRI CD out of here without a state-issued ID. I will have to drive back to Chicago, get my wallet, drive to Evanston again, and then drive the stupid CD to the other hospital. And that is what I proceeded to do. I made an angry call to LT first, but that was just to vent, because it was not his fault, not the hospital’s fault, no one’s fault but that of my own dumb self.
When you leave a parking garage, even a scary-ass two-way traffic parking garage, the person in the little booth expects payment! Without my wallet, there could be none! So I got to do a whole Fargo-style “I decided not to park here” thing, although I did not kill anyone or make a big memorable fuss. They made me write my address on the back of the parking ticket, so either someone will come to my house in the night to beat me up or I will get a bill for three dollars in the mail. Who knows.
—mimi smartypants is fleeing the interview!