notageek

• bug mum for sewing tape measure
• snitch sharpie from pen-can by phone
• badger brother for an old 0.7mm mechanical pencil
• rummage through pantry for an unopened box of reclosable sandwich bags
• use two pairs of pliers to bend a coathanger into a 10cm quadrat. Leave the rest of the coathanger hanging off it, as “it isn’t hurting anybody”.
• go to hardware store
  • ask the nice fellow if they have calipers
  • listen to him stutter and explain that you have to go to such-and-such forestry supply
  • find obnoxiously bright pink flagging tape
  • pick up some of the lumber chalk next to it, because it “looks useful”
  • measure off 11 yards of nylon cord and hope you calculated the conversion to metres right. Measure off 12 yards just to be sure.
• try to complete games of solitaire with three separate decks of cards to see if any of them are actually complete
• bitch about not having any B pencil graphite sticks
• demand dad show you how to melt the ends of the nylon cord
• spend 15 minutes taping yardsticks together to make a meterstick
• mark three meters on the nylon cord with the Stolen Sharpie
• pilfer embroidery floss in obnoxious colours from the sewing drawer
• decorate nylon cord creatively at 1m intervals
• curse the saw of the woodcutter who cut down the tree that made the headboard of the bed which the professor’s parents lay in to concieve him
• put a calculator in a reclosable sandwich bag and decide it “looks waterproof”
• conclude that there WAS a good reason to learn how to use that plastic slide rule
• put 100 party toothpicks in a jar
• click new pocketknife open and shut several times
• decide calipers are a project for another day
• put everything in an obnoxiously coloured mesh bag (left over from mung-bean noodle packaging)
• pronounce it Obnoxiously Delicious

At some point last term–before finals week, before my client died, before my dad found out he’d be out of a job after next fiscal year–I was walking my bike past the main library.

Something started jingling in time with my steps. I stuck my hand in my pocket to keep the leftover Canadian change from rattling around, thinking it was more melodic than the US coins, but the pocket was empty. So was the other one. Nothing on my spokes, no wires on the sidewalk, nothing in the coat I was carrying and nothing that would jingle in a backpack. Perhaps I was going nuts.

Or, then again, perhaps not. As I kept walking the jingling got louder, and eventually I was staring at a small metal bell hanging from a tree outside the Koinona Center. I read the laminated card attached:

To the finder of this bell:
This bell has been placed in memory of a strong
Wonderful person. This is meant for you to keep
To help you remember and cherish all the wonderful
People in your life.

In Loving Memory of Neila Campbell

I untwisted its scrap of wire and stuck it in my pants pocket, under my rain gear. And then I walked over to my dad’s office, and took him out for lunch.

(Neila Campbell turned out to be a local grief counselor whose specialty was workshops for parents of developmentally disabled children. Her ex-husband built a bench in her memory for the rose garden after she died of cancer.)

The old lady I look after in the morning is closing in on her dying day. She’s stopped eating and she’s very nearly stopped coughing, which means she’s close to drowning in the water on her lungs. She’s eighty-four; her every motion speaks of lethargy. Her conversation is a fragile impression her wit used to support. She stays in bed these days.

I heard what sounded like a faint honking noise as I wheeled my bicycle into her apartment at the senior storage centre the other day. I checked my spokes and brake pads and slithered out of my rain pants, since all of those have caused me noisy grief before. Microwaves don’t honk, and neither do most sleeping old ladies, and a fire alarm would certainly be much louder. I ignored it.

Old Lady wanted a sunny-side-up egg, and I think that may be the last breakfast she will ever eat. I always cook mine over easy, but I turned the burner down and produced a perfectly servicable sunny-side-up egg. After she went back to sleep, I tiptoed into the living room to read papers on H. pylori.

I flipped through a photo album instead; tucked into the back were the papers from her husband’s funeral three years ago. I helped with him, too, after he had a stroke and before he died in bed, holding the hands of his wife of sixty years. After the funeral, said Old Lady’s Christmas newsletter from that year, a flock of geese flew over the mortuary and her oldest son took a picture. “Geese,” she wrote, “mate for life. It reminded me of the sweetness of life with my dear husband.”

The twenty-year-old VCR blinked 9:30, and I left for school then. The honking returned in force when I opened the exterior door of the senior storage centre. “Hawnk,” said an enormous grey goose, sitting on the patio outside Old Lady’s living-room door. I swung myself up onto my bike. “Hawnk; Hawnk; Hawnk,” explained the goose. I thought about monogamy and the pair-bond; sexes investing more and sexes investing less; extra-pair copulations and mate guarding. I stood on my right pedal to start moving.

Hawnk, indeed.

Today’s issue of the Oregon Daily Emerald (the campus newspaper here) has a multi-page glossy full-colour anti-abortion advertising insert, similar to what I bitched about last year. I flipped through it and it’s mostly recycled pieces of bad writing that are the same as last year’s, plus some new bad writing and a piece about how preventing implantation of a fertilised egg is the same as causing an abortion.

If you think that, there’s really no sense in my trying to argue the point on my very pink weblog.

So instead, let me just express my utter disbelief that there actually existed a pregnant women, who, as some of the stock photos seem to indicate, who would wear a sleeveless blue-and-white-hawaiian-print-pantsuit with enormous round blue sunglasses, pigtails, and big tacky hoop earrings.

No wait–let me indicate my disbelief that a woman in such a state would have clear skin, be smiling with her head at such an ingratiating angle, and that she would actually let her picture be taken. Maybe she thought the sunglasses would protect her from future shame.

But more to the point, because I know models can be coerced into wearing almost anything because it is their freaking job, let me express my amazement that the people hired to design this multi-page glossy full-colour anti-abortion advertising insert for some reason thought this terrifying-looking woman on the cover would appeal to a typical college student. Or, for that matter, an atypical college student. She is the only pregnant woman depicted in the entire advertising insert, and she is dancing around in three separate photos, grinning with her mouth wide open about how she is pregnant. And she is wearing that fucking pantsuit. Maybe they are pajamas, but that doesn’t make it any better.

I don’t think the sponsors of this advertising supplement need any more advertising, so I won’t mention their actual name, but I do think they need a new advertising firm. Or some new interns. Or a better photo CD set.