Snow Days Give Me Time to Think About My Age

Checked the Seattle school's website last night and discovered that I'd have *today* off of work as well... so I went to the video store. I got "Live, Nude Girls Unite" (we're watching it at our union meeting this week, because that's the kind of bad-ass pro-feminist pro-sex kind of union I'm in) and Clerks II because I am a woman of a certain age, who hung out with certain comic book geeks in high school and had no choice really, even though I was pretty certain it would suck.

While the soundtrack did have Talking Heads, Jackson 5, Samantha Fox and Soul Asylum on it, the movie wasn't very good. (When I was in fourth grade, Ms. Fox caused such a stir that it was against the rules to say her name in class! Can you imagine being so sexy that your name is a cuss for preadolesents?!) I love Kevin Smith, I do. I've seen every movie he's ever made. Even Jersey Girl which really really really sucked. In this one, they cast an incredibly beautiful woman with all of these average-looking dudes... it was very jarring.

I found it easy to watch 20-something non-actors on the screen in the first Clerks, but man, those guys haven't aged well... or probably they've aged no better than me, but I'm used to seeing actors/pretty people on screen portraying folks in their beautiful thirties and not those guys... in their real thirties. I also found it easy to watch those same 20 something non-actors talk about incredibly dirty sex acts (found it pretty hysterical, actually) and not as funny this time around. Has Mr. Smith lost his talent for making bestiality and anal sex jokes? Is it easier to imagine younger non-actors saying these things than older ones? Or... am I getting older, and no longer find as much humor in people discussing whether it's ok or not "to go ass to mouth"?!

In the last year or so I've found myself thinking more about my age, particularly how it affects how I see other folks and how they see me. My 27th birthday was the first one that people didn't alternately say "Oh, you're such a baby." or "I always thought you were so much older." This was strange. Around 25, I'd reflexively think of the near-teen skateboarders, students, and others I saw on the bus or on the street as "kids" and "about my age", and then realize that it was no longer true. Also strange. It used to be kind of funny when kids in my program asked me if I had a kid their age because it was so unlikely, but now, it's actually a perfectly appropriate question!

It's not that I feel bad about moving into what is undoubtedly and unarguably adulthood at all. It's just that my mind can't quite come to grips with it. In "A Seperate Peace" the narrator says that certain times and places stay with us for our lifetimes. For him, it was train stations full of soldiers saying goodbye and rejoining their loved ones. Train stations would always look that way. I will always instinctively choose clothes that are two sizes too big, because that's how I felt attractive when I was 18 (with practice and emotional support, I've learned to put them back and pick clothes that fit, which is how I feel attractive now).

When I went home recently, I had the strangest sensation of looking at a city and seeing what was really there superimposed on the architecture, the faces I knew, and the stories that I lived there mostly in my teens. For me, the river will always be under construction, the highway to Boston will always be glimpsed from a Greyhound (instead of our cushy rental car) and walking through downtown at night means that I'm going to an avant garde sort of show, or dancing (instead of sitting with old friends for hours at Trinity).

Even smoking outside when there's snow on the ground with a cup of coffee (something I haven't done often here in Seattle) tastes like adolescence on my mother's porch! (Don't get me started on the prospect of being a smoker when I turn thirty... ugh.) Snow also makes me introspective apparently... or was that all those dick and fart jokes last night?

It's only mid-afternoon, and I've already done my civic duty

I awoke early this a.m. (see yesterday's post) and was featured on many a neighborhood security camera as I wandered around Kent WA knocking on suburban doors beseeching voters to support a woman named Darcy Burner.

Stunningly, the script that our union handed us did not mention the fact that Darcy Burner is simply a much better name than Dave Riechart... It seems to me that if you're not sure which person to send to Congress at this late date, you don't care about vetrans' benefits, minimum wage, or medicare. You are the person in the wine aisle looking for the mauve label with a stylized icon of a bunny and a shoe on it. You are the person who buys the album because the folks in the picture are pretty. You are the person who should vote for Darcy Burner.

The only other notable thing we encountered was a six-inch tall statue of a pug in a window next to a door. It was not a trompe l'oise statue that I may somehow have mistaken for the real deal, in part because of the small hole carved in it's throat, and of course the fact that it was only 6 inches tall. As Rebecca and I rang the bell and waited, we realized that it housed a motion sensor and that it barked at us as we shuffled around peering in their window. To my mind, the hard-wired "barking at the doorbell" instinct is the most annoying part of dogginess, and these people had a dog that didn't do anything else! Because I believed that the people were probably hiding in their three car garage pretending not to be home, I shifted from one foot to the other a few times, forcing little fido to bark a few times more before we checked the "rotten interior decorator" box on our form and moved on.