Every Day is Marne Gras

This is part of a letter I would send to my friend Emily if I had her address.

Dear Emily,
  I’m writing you a letter because one of my housemates is a letter writer. I watch her open our mailbox every day to something new and exciting and homemade and full of love and intention from far away friends and places and I was thought, ‘boy I want one of those’ and I decided that the best way to receive a letter is probably to write someone a letter (although send it rather than post it to the internet).  So here is a letter!

Emily, I am dealing with a lot right now. A best friend is mad at me; I am frustrated with another best friend, and I am coming off of a weeklooong visit with my mother (she slept on the couch in my living room for a week; that’s a whole other letter). I am depleted from my brand spanking new union food service job at the University and I want to curl up into a ball and have it all go away. We both know that image is far more melodramatic than it needs be, but right now I would really, really much rather be lying fetal in front of a fireplace than here in this coffee shop, writing you this letter. And I love a good coffee shop.
Instead of a letter about my drama-dramz, here is a letter about where I am expending my physical (if not mental) energy these days.

My housemates and I went hiking in the Cascades last weekend, which was good for me, even though hiking makes my knees hurt, and my knees hurt makes me realize that I am getting older and dying (thus hiking gives me existential panic attacks). It is 45 degrees and perpetually drizzly here in Seattle, but it is winter in the Cascades; there was two inches on the ground by the trailhead and in the parking lot, enough to make us feel like we were in a different state and time by itself. After climbing straight up for an hour and a half, there was somewhere between more than that and a foot, the first snow of the year in the Cascades. The perfect texture. The perfect color. It fell as we hiked. We threw snowballs and made handprints and stuck out our tongues to catch falling flakes and in the euphoria of the moment I picked up a handful of snow and ate it. I blame Obama. My housemates reminded me afterwards that this is an excellent way to pick up Giardia. I am now on the lookout for strange poops and a fever (when am I not?).

It was great to get out of this city and into the snow for awhile. I hadn’t seen any significant snowfall since I moved out here a year and a half ago (year and a half! If Seattle were my girlfriend I’d be sabotaging our relationship right about now! Oh wait); it got my mind off my troubles and reminded me of home something awful.

I have three jobs right now, so finally I feel like I am working towards saving for the big trip, but I am working sixty or more hours each week. I work from 7-3:30 M-F in food service at the University. I’m basically a cashier cum barista cum stocker cum moveable warm body with a reasonable grasp of the English language. The pay is unremarkable, but its a union job, so I’m a barista/stockperson with denal and paid vacation. I get tuition remission too– 6 free credits each quarter. I get a cheap transit pass. None of this completely makes up for the fact that I now spend forty hours a week rubbing a steam wand in sexually suggestive ways, burning my fingers and earning dirty knowing looks from all sorts of otherwise forgettable male students and professors who pass through the student union.
It feels very strange to be on a college campus again. I spend a good quarter of my waking hours in the hub of this campus, pumping caffeine and carbs and money (so much money) through this system. How did I get here?
It feels very strange; I see things like the patterns of scuff marks on the stairs, the bathroom doors that don’t latch correctly, the faded chairs with upholstery that had to be new at some point (but maybe not?), and I think about how those things must be so wrapped up in the students’ memories of this place and their lives and themselves at college and it amkes me think of and miss Oberlin and places like the mailroom and the fourth floor bathrooms of the library there, and all of the other quirks and odd places that are permanently engraved into my memories. Working here in this place makes me feel like I am inside John Malkovich (you’ve seen that movie, right?), like I am in some place I should not be, experiencing the wrong reality, and it feels kind of indulgent and very, very weird.
I keep telling myself, though. I have dental. I have life insurance. Life insurance! I know so few people my age with a solid day job and benefits. I feel proud and self-sufficient and (almost) stable and okay. I am making it. I know you know exactly how this feels.

I am still nannyinh, for one five year old, a few times a week. He is the son of two power lesbians (both lawyers, maybe in their fifties?). This is what I do: I pick him up at pre-school a couple nights a week, we go out to eat, we go to the zoo, we read books at the library.

It is easy and simple and good. Being five is a lot of fun. When you are five, the adults around you still think there is a lot you can learn from play, so that is what you do, and nobody minds. In fact, they see this as stimulating. Five year olds see so many more things that you forget to see when you are a grownup. We spend a lot of time walking places and then not walking, so we can stop to touch a tree or pick a dandelion or look through a book (or knock over a display or dump water on the dog to see what will happen or or or). He is very verbal, very not shy, and extremely cute. He is also adopted (from Ethiopia), and the white people who surround him in his neighborhood, his life, fawn all over him in ways that are often problematic and overcompensatory. White people really, really like small brown babies. Going places with him is like getting more attention than a sexy lady who walks around with a box of puppies and cupcakes for everyone. He talks to everyone; everyone laughs knowingly. I took him to a diner last week and he talked to every single person eating in the restaurant, and then every single person who worked in the kitchen. His favorite food is chocolate chip pancakes.

Life is a lot less confounding in all fo the bad ways and much more interesting in all the ways it should be. Plus, when you are five you can cry whenever you need to. The adults nearby just smile.

I am also (ALSO!) still working a shift per week at the farmers market, on Sundays, hawking vegetables. This job involves waking up at 4:30, standing outside for hours in the rain, lifting too much cumbersome, heavy shit, and trying REALLY hard not to back my big truck (that I am so not qualified to drive) into any more city light poles or people. Last week I hit the broad side of the barn. Don’t ever say my life had no comedic timing. But (but!) I love this job, and I love that I love it with the fire I have for it. I finish each day more energized; after twelve hours of hauling and driving and talking I arrive home flushed with excitement and things like good cheer and merriment (I also tend to stumble in the door grumbling about how I forgot to eat and my ass itches but life is complicated. Remember, I’m not five). This job gives me strength, gives me back myself every week. It reminds me of who I am, that I am a definable ‘who’, with a character all my own. I am still surprised to come upon this every week; I am so laid back about my tastes in music and movies, things I like to do, places that I like to be, it is reassuring to feel so intensly about something.

As you might have gathered, life oscillates between hard extremes, something like what I imagine the weather in Kansas might be like, a life without the buffering and mediation of something as calm and steady as an ocean. Or a family. Or a history. it is beautiful to feel things in the way I do right now; the word ‘wild’ comes to mind but I can’t use it without laughing and conjuring up weird imagery of women with flowers in their hair and flowy skirts, but I’ll just say I feel everything more deeply and with more of myself than I ever have. This is also terrifying, and I feel like I am constantly on the edge of being blown away at any particular moment by the contents of my life, even moreso than I was a year ago, when I was barely a part of my own life in this place. Somehow I thought things would be different now.
And that is all. I love and miss you and hope this letter finds you strong and well. I want to hear about Albequerque. And you.

love
marne