DC party of one
I’m in DC for work and I am surprised at the amount of Spanish-language signage and bilingual train announcements and such. I would think Chicago has many more Latinos than DC and yet we are not nearly so accommodating. There goes Midwestern Nice, I guess. My boss is here too although we have not run in to each other yet, which I didn’t feel was too terribly surprising in a multi-tracked continuing-education broad-spectrum publishing conference with attendance numbers in the low thousands, but when I was out to dinner last night she sent me a weirdly aggressive email saying she was “worried” about “what I was up to.” I am eating lame continental breakfasts and attending sessions in this cavernous hotel, just like you! So I guess I will need to park myself somewhere obvious or else try to track her down and show my face. Meaningless-yet-fraught interactions like those are the worst part of working. The worst part of life, probably.
Maybe it is just my week to make enemies, since at one of the receptions a colleague and I were talking about our kids, and I mentioned the Amazing Nora and her very strong toughness and her decade-old refusal to wear dresses or skirts, and this woman said well you’ve got to get her in a dress at some point, and then added something about being “well-rounded” and that somehow this sartorial well-roundedness was part of “my responsibility as a parent.” I recall making a wavy gesture with my glass of Malbec and saying, “Psssh, no it isn’t,” and I think she was offended. But honestly, that was the proper response, because we are not going to have that conversation for real, are we? It would not go well for either of us.
DC has been on-and-off drizzly and hot as hell, two types of weather that both I and my hair absolutely despise. Having water fall on one’s body is the worst and I don’t know why people enjoy it. I sometimes do microeconomics thought experiments about how much I would pay to stay clean in perpetuity without ever having to wash again. It’s a bit useless since no such magical product or service exists, but I think about it more than you might expect. Does it make a difference if the not-showering cost is monthly and subscription-based or if it is a one-time fee? It does, but I am not sure why and there is probably a freshman-year college paper lurking somewhere in these thoughts.
Before leaving on this trip I got to experience the horror of water falling on my body in a big way. I went to a yoga class, one that was far away enough to necessitate driving, and the street in front of yoga was all torn up with TOW ZONE signs everywhere. It was Memorial Day, and people were ignoring the signs and parking there anyway, but I am LAW-ABIDING or maybe just CHICKENSHIT and could not do that. Also because getting out of yoga and finding my car towed because I parked illegally would have been the dumbest White Girl Problem ever.
So I parked quite a ways away, and went to get all noodly and blank-brained at yoga, and then got stuck in a total freaking downpour on the way back to the car. So so so wet. So not Zen. At the last minute before leaving the house I had decided that I was not fond of the way underwear felt under the yoga pants, so I ditched those, never planning on the rain thing, so the walk back to the car turned out to be not only wet and disgusting but also something that could have been in a hair-metal video from the 1980s, if those had featured uncool middle-aged moms instead of swimsuit models. Whee.
I am looking forward to going back to my own bed and my own kitchen and even my own job, because doing your job is way better than talking about your job or sitting in a hotel ballroom listening to other people talk about your job. OH SO MUCH TALKING. And here I am adding to the noise, so I will stop. Shhhhhhh. Rest now.
—mimi smartypants is the screaming silence of no’s knife in yes’s wound.