Who cleans the giant inflatable panda?
External distortions and more
I've mostly been eating my lunch at my desk. People here don't really leave to have a real lunch break. I felt a little self-conscious taking a 42 minute break on Friday to walk down to the cute little farmers market and buy Christmas gifts for my loved ones. No one was even really here except for my manager, and she wanted to hear about what I had gotten my family, so I have no idea how I came to the conclusion that people are looking for reasons to dislike me.
Again, any normal person would have taken away the following: I work next to a farmers market that I can walk to! Isn't that nice? THAT'S NICE.
Naturally, I picked a weird choice for a lunch to bring back to my desk, which was... drumroll... half a rotisserie chicken. Who cares if I decided to eat a quarter of a chicken at work?
It felt furtive and secret, like something to hide from both my coworkers and my vegan husband, mostly because I’m more or less trying to not eat animals and it’s also incredibly awkward to eat JUST A CHICKEN, OUT OF A BAG. I couldn't find a knife so I had to pull the meat off the bone with a plastic fork.
This is tangentially shame-lated to the one day I got Panda Express because I didn't know what I wanted, but the simple premise of steamed buffet lo-mein and orange chicken spoke to some deep, elementary part inside of me. "Oh yeah, I don't fit your requirements of what a female body should look like? WELL HERE I AM, AT PANDA EXPRESS."
Yes, it is me, an adult woman turning my choice of chain lunch establishment into a bizarre feminist threat.
Anyway. At my (“my”) Panda Express, there's a large mural of a panda there that from certain angles makes it look like one of those blow-up Christmas lawn decorations. The first time I saw it I thought, "Wow, that probably takes up nearly half of the square footage inside that store. Who has to clean the giant inflatable panda?" WHO. HAS TO CLEAN. THE GIANT. INFLATABLE. PANDA.
You know, it's the things like this that create artful distractions from when I need to care more about actual important things, like making my doctor’s appointments and creating a baseline for lifelong health. I spend so much time worrying about things that never happen that I don't really spend time worrying about the things that probably will happen.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(P.S. That thing is called a KAOMOJI). I’ve been calling it the “shruggy guy — you know, the guy!”)
the malaise of an adult snow day
In college, we were the first in 30 years to have two snow days in a row. Something about paying lots of money for school makes schools not want to cancel. Midwesterners are just more prepared for the realities of weather so the snow days were rare to begin with. You'd just have to slog 25 minutes to the lecture hall, the ends of your raggedy old boot-cut Gap jeans dragging in the snow, where you’d overheat just in time to cram yourself into a chair while your imaginations drifted to elaborate sexy fantasies that invariably started with “dancing really cool at a really cool party.”
On the first snow day, my roommates and I bought cases of beer at the gas station down the corner, and threw ourselves into piles of snow, dragging each other around on shitty Meijer sleds in the middle of the day. We were elated baby seals. The snow just kept coming down, covering everything in that special kind of quiet that makes everything feel like magic.
We all took naps in the late afternoon and woke to streetlights shining in our living room, snow continuing to blast down on our little college town. We were all tired of drinking but there was nothing else to do. College is a time where you're not sure if you're really an alcoholic or you just go to a party school, and you have a sneaking suspicion that none of your friends are taking internet quizzes to check their own behaviors. What if the quiz knows something I don't? I'd think privately. The quiz rarely knows something you don't already know.
When we woke up to a second snow day announcement from the university administration, instead of feeling any kind of joy, low-grade dread crept in like a common slithering Pokemon. We were out of beer and we'd eaten all the Twizzlers, and all that was left in the house to eat were stale almonds and old store-brand French Onion dip. I just waited for the day to end, switching different positions on the couch and on my bed, having scoured the furthest reaches of the internet, hungover and a little depressed.
Growing up in Chicago, you learn to live with endless months of awful weather. When we were kids, I felt like we were constantly putting on or taking off bulky winter outwear which was always wet or cold or both. I don't know how my mom dealt with it. My winter sports outside of reading and making those fun native craft corn husk dolls were: 1) ice skating and 2) building caves in the hardened iceberg of snow that the snowplow repeatedly smashed into at the end of the cul-de-sac that we grew up on.
My leadership skills were developed early in this regard as I assigned cave-rooms and dreadful little domestic ice-cave tasks to various other neighborhood children. We'd sit in those hollowed out rooms for hours, delighted by our own industrious capacity for pointless winter activities that kept us out of the house. I have a number of pictures of now-unidentifiable neighbor children, roly-poly in our chunky snowsuits, faces reddened to ripe persimmon, enormous grins on our faces.
Snow days came around once every few years, and we knew the precise exact sort of nothing to do with our sober, child selves when they did.