Allison Unfiltered

Because there's nothing else to write about.

"So, your book's about... writing, right?"

"No, I'm writing a book."

When he stared at me with a blank face while I laughed my ass off at the pun only I'd perceived, I knew my dorkiness was confirmed forever.

My morning finish line

This is the view I'm greeted by each morning when I walk the half-mile from the metro station to work. 

I used to take the bus to the back of campus where I'd drop L'il Red off at school before walking to the main campus for my classes.  If that sounds tedious, shut up. 

The walk from L'il Red's building to mine was less than the length of a football field, and yet I stumbled over, gasping and panting, stopping every few feet to plant my hands on my knees and curse the world for making me take that hike.  And those were just the mornings when I'd missed the bus that would ferry me one block over to the next building; walking was something I did under pain of social death (translation: only when someone gave me a dirty look for waiting for the bus).

So excuse me while I greet these mornings with the sheer thrill of accomplishment.  Sometimes I imagine that blinding hot sun is the incessant flashing of cameras at a finish line and my sweaty neck and cleavage is the sign of victory.  I've come a long way, baby.

 

p.s. This morning I did the walk in heeled sandals.  Five thousand one hundred sixty three bonus points for me. I win.

Why I'm okay being a terrible friend.

I was never a popular girl.   That's okay... now. 

I'se all grown up big now -- bemoaning my exclusion from social circles seems much less important than stuff like, y'know, "oh my god what did the dog just eat?" and "I just paid the electricity bill last month, I swear, why are the lights flickering... what do you mean it's MAY already?!"

I could come up with theories:

• I never learned to be well-socialized because growing up I lived a half-hour's drive from any of my school friends and asking for rides or sleepovers was like asking my parents to kamikaze their own lives and all the important things they had to do right that minute (who cares if the clothes in the dryer get wrinkly, seriously?  There's a party and everybody's going BUT ME! Wahhh wahh).
• Or I'm a nerd, spent my life in books and no one in real life ever seemed a cool enough character as a result.
• Or I could fall back on the old tried-and-true: I'm a freakin' introvert-slash-misanthrope-slash-recovering from social anxiety, people.  One conversation in a crowded room and the timer starts ticking before I collapse from exhaustion.  Literally.
• Or I can find myself somewhere on the autism spectrum.

The fact of the matter is I've had it hammered home these last few months how bad a friend I am.  I'm a grade-A asshole and I know it.  And I'm not gonna do any damn thing about it.

My sin?  I don't invite people to go out.  I don't stay in touch.

The thing about sins, though, is that they're transgressions against laws someone else made up. 

I do have good friends.  And I love them all.  So I have a choice these days when I receive complaints, either perceived or explicit, that I'm not making enough of an effort. 

I can go on the defensive -- "No, no, you mean the world to me, I do want to know what's going on with you.  I just suck, I suck, I do.  No, no, PLEASE, let's go out.  Uh, well I have my daughter this weekend and a paper due next week, but umm...Tuesday, 4 am? I'm so sorry, yes, yes, I'll go to couples therapy with you... I LOVE YOU!  Marry me?"

Or I can revert to my passive stance -- trust that the people I consider friends understand the way I view them: cherished people I'm very happy to know.  From whom I'm always honored to hear or receive invitations. The rest becomes socially constructed flotsam.

I have to hope that these people don't view their efforts as ballast thrown overboard to no avail; that their repeated efforts to get me out of my cave don't represent a dwindling supply of goodwill before they give up on me entirely.

I think there are many kinds of people in this world; some are social butterflies, and some are cave-dwellers who love watching the butterflies flutter about from the safety of the mouth of their cave. 

Just because I have no interest in sprouting my wings and packing my schedule full of outings, it doesn't mean I'll stop watching.  I never will.

My literary luddite tendencies reveal themselves.

Yesterday I tried out a friend's Kindle.  It was in a nifty leather cover and when I opened it up there was a screensaver sort of thingy up on the screen, with the very helpful instruction: "Slide and release the power switch to turn on." 

So I touched the screen, thinking I'd unlock it like I've seen others do on their iPhones and other devices.  Slid my finger across it.  Nothing happened.

Tried again, pressing a bit harder with my finger pad.  Nada.

Hm.  Maybe I was sliding in the wrong direction.  Touched left to right this time.

Saw something of the corner of my eye, looked up, and my dear friend -- who I'm going to call Kindle Snob from now -- on was busting out.  Post-giggle, he said, "THAT's funny!" Wow.  Helpful.  Very helpful.

Good thing my momsie sent this earlier today, or my day's worth of self-esteem would have been completely shot.  (Can always count on mama to save the day.)  In an article talking about old technology to keep or get rid of, this was the BOOKS comment:

BOOKS -- Keep them (with one exception). Yes, e-readers are amazing, and yes, they will probably become a more dominant reading platform over time, but consider this about a book: It has a terrific, high-resolution display. It is pretty durable; you could get it a little wet and all would not be lost. It has tremendous battery life. It is often inexpensive enough that, if you misplaced it, you would not be too upset. You can even borrow them free at sites called libraries.

But there is one area where printed matter is going to give way to digital content: cookbooks. Martha Stewart Makes Cookies a $5 app for the iPad, is the wave of the future. Every recipe has a photo of the dish (something far too expensive for many printed cookbooks).

Complicated procedures can be explained by an embedded video. When something needs to be timed, there’s a digital timer built right into the recipe. You can e-mail yourself the ingredients list to take to the grocery store. The app does what cookbooks cannot, providing a better version of everything that came before it.

Now all Martha has to do is make a decorative splashguard for a tablet and you will be all set.

P.S. I figured out how to open the Kindle all on my own. (Why, hello there, actual physical switch!) Boo-yah.

Why spring allergies are like a fetish gone bad

Yep.  It's starting.  Just when I get giddy about seeing the cherry trees blossom I can't see them anymore; my nose itches and my eyes water and I start fantasizing about shoving my hands up my nostrils so I can scratch the prickly caverns of my sinuses back there.

Times like these, I curse our attempt to be Mother Nature's dominant top.  I read an article years ago that explained where all these allergies come from and why so many of us (especially in the cities and suburbs) have them compared to say, 60 years ago.  I'm sure it's not entirely accurate, what I just told you, or that the article had some arguable points, but the porniness seared itself into my pervy head.

See, some trees are gendered.  Some are male and some are female.  And way back when, some geniuses figured out that the way to keep our sidewalks and streets free of annoying female clutter like fruit and other tree crotch-droppings -- and therefore easier and cheaper to maintain -- was to plant only male trees.

Problem is -- where female trees drop fruit in our pathways (the audacity!), the male trees are kinder to our cleaning efforts and are considerate enough to spurt their seed into the air. So with the abundance of male, non-fruit-bearing trees lining our boulevards now, we get an overage of spores and pollen and whatever the hell else trees use to breed in the air ...and then we inhale it.

So next time you're wishing you could use a cheese grater to scratch the inside of your head, take a moment to appreciate what you're experiencing: 

Mother Nature just came all over your face. Take it all, baby -- oohhh yeah.

Hum(ble)... borg

So I spent last weekend officiating a slew of matches for the Academic Bowl at Gally, which was not only a trip down memory lane, potholes and all, but also a marathon event that humbled me because it reminded me how old I was.

Sixteen years ago I competed on a four-person team, which you'd never know, because it was apparently a dry run for the real thing and forever doomed to be left out of the record books.  No matter, 'cause I competed again with a different school two years later, winning our regionals and making it to the Championship Match at Nationals before  running into my mother's arms accepting the second place trophy while breaking down in tears on the stage (which I'm about to do again after realizing I just typed out the words "sixteen years ago."  Ohh, Mommy!).

It felt like the end of the world for seventeen-year-old me when we fell short at the Championships.  But dang, they've really ramped the competition up since then.  This year 78 teams from all over the country came to Gally to compete in a four-day behemoth of an event.  The final matches were broadcast live via webcast.  I had friends in Canada watching.  Holy molee.

And somewhere within that writhing mass of over 300 teenagers hopped up on dry erase marker fumes, bubble gum, and adrenaline and the nearly 150 coaches faithfully trailing their kids as they took over the campus was l'il ol' me, sitting in my assigned room for nine hours straight with my trusty green and red signs with "YES" and "NO" printed across them.

Basically my job was to look at the kids' answers and decide if they got points.  Easy cheesy, except there's a whole freakin' manual of rules about capitalization, spelling, handwriting, punctuation, whether the answer sheet can be horizontal or vertical, how much time the kids get to answer, et cetera, et cetera, and et freakin' cetera.  And then there was scorekeeping and making sure the other volunteers were in place and ready to go and room set up and there was listening to objections and then telling them to sit down and shut up carefully evaluating the merit of said objections.

Side note: I got home with severely sore trapezii and levator scapulae from lifing those damn YES and NO signs.  If they ask me back next year I hope they tell me a month before so I can hire a personal trainer.

The hardest part of officiating was remembering that I was no longer eligible to compete.  I had a sneaking suspicion that upending the table, hurling my laptop across the room and screaming, "BOISE!  NO! The capital of Idaho is BOISE!!!!" wouldn't go over too well with these kids.  Especially if it was quite obvious to everyone that I had yet to look at the official answer.

And also especially since, for many of these kids, it was their first time seeing so many deaf people in the same place.  If it wasn't a deaf university, I'd swear you could hear a choir of angels singing overhead as these kids looked around and saw a sea of people just like them.  And so different from them too. 

There were teams of students who could barely sign their own names and needing voice/oral interpreters going head to head with teams of students who introduced themselves in the casual blitzkrieg fingerspelling style you see on residential schools' campuses.  Not just different worlds, but different universes.  And the look I saw in their eyes as they realized that this was a place where they nonetheless shared common experiential DNA with everyone else was just priceless, priceless.

While these kids were in the midst of their individual epiphanies, I was having a little bit of a surreal experience of my own.  It was my first time seeing so many kids with cochlear implants in one place.  They ran the gamut from having deaf parents and being fluent in ASL to having one of those terps following them around.

Confession: I couldn't stop staring at these CIs.  When I was growing up it was rare to meet a kid with a CI who wasn't, umm... socially awkward, shall we say?  And I am was very special in a special-ed sort of way, so for me to say that is pretty telling.  That's the way I found myself looking at these kids' heads. 

Then I started talking with the kids wearing these CIs after matches.  Some of them were pretty dorky.  Some of them were pretty cool.  Most of them were a mixture of both, exactly what you should be at that age.  After we said our goodbyes, I saw them melt back into that ocean of deaf teenagers and disappear.

"Weird," I thought to myself.  Just way weird to see so many people with hardware hanging from their heads. 

Then I tossed my hair over my shoulder and was slammed into sudden silence.  The processor on my head had just detached from the magnet grafted into my skull.

Oh, right.  I am one of them now.  Every time I have one of those queasy thoughts staring at someone else's CI, I have to remember someone could be staring at my head too.  Hmm, bonus mini-revelation.

One thing, though: If I'm going to continue re-examining and re-shaping my identity and how the deaf thing fits into it, I am so glad I'm doing it while standing on Gallaudet's campus.  No other place, dude.  No other place.

 

Illiteracy of a different kind.

I can't seem to dig myself out of my token deaf student mentality here at Goddard.  Found out one of my schoolmates didn't bother going to workshops, choosing instead to spend her day revising her work and her night attending faculty and student readings.

Readings?  Yeah, readings.  As in the THING to DO around here where people get up in front of the mic, stare down at their papers and "perform" their writing.  Everyone else sits back in the shadows and listens in rapture and lavishes everyone else with literary praise or criticism.  

It’s constructive, connecting, networking, trying out your work on other writers, a vital part of the process.   I avoid it as much as I can.

I could dust off my voice like the deaf student who came through the program before me.  Every time I consider doing that, though, it feels like a violation. It feels like capitulating to the pressures that have marginalized me since I arrived, letting the status quo dominate me.

I can attend readings.  I have attended readings -- I get print copies and just follow along with my hearing aid.  Which is okay, but redundant as I read the text.

The big events, the big draws, this week are the visiting writers.  We’ve got some cool people coming: Shelley Jackson, Christian Peet, Erik Davis.  And what do they do when they get here? Yep.  Readings. 

Graduating students do a special reading during their last week here.  Makes me very glad I haven't gotten to that stage yet.  I get into such a schizophrenic political snit anytime I forget I forbade myself to think about it the first week I came.

I have this fantasy about doing my graduate reading differently:

I convert my thesis into video, presenting in visual situ.  Their readings drone across sound waves; mine will sear into their corneas.  I'll recruit signing actors, superimpose text, emblazon images on a wall. 

I'll show them what they've been missing, stuck behind their podiums and chained to the mic, enslaved by the public address system in the theater.

They'll fall to their knees, their minds blown.  And they'll forget about their strictly larynx-and-eardrum readings.

Then I remember I am just one student out of many. A freak fighting the machine.  And the only battle plan (desperate tactics for a war I didn't choose) I can think of is to present myself not as a writer, but as an ersatz filmmaker.

Sigh.

Doing it my way.

Week one of being officially in my own apartment went by in one supersonic, sleep-deprived blur.  But I do remember a few things.  Allow me to impart my hard-earned single-woman wisdom:

1. When a spider marches nonchalantly across your chest on its way across the living room floor and you do nothing but stare at it, you know that a) you're officially home, and b) your lack of screamage says you're growing up all by yourself.
2. Hissing "THERE ARE PEOPLE DOWNSTAIRS!" at a seven-year-old does nothing to deter the screaming, the jumping, the running, and perhaps most of all, the brattitude.
3. People who live in third-floor apartments with a dog are either dumbtards or gluttons for glute workouts.  GUESS WHICH ONE I'M VOTING FOR?
4. Never ever move into your own place without at least one chair.  The toilet does not count.
5. When you're worried about paying the bills, or when your legs have fallen asleep or your back is aching from sitting on the floor, or you're hit all over again with the realization that for the first time in your life, you are truly, honest-to-goodness, on your own, take a look around, remember all the good people in your life that helped you get here, and...

shut the fuck up.  You're doing pretty damn good so far, lady.

Pantoum for the broken-hearted

I knew I grew up on fairy tales
Even though they were just stories
Read of a happily ever after
And it sucked the wind out of my sails.

Even though they were just stories,
Held them close to my heart
And it sucked the wind out of my sails
The day I woke up crying.

Held them close to my heart
Out of desperation, perhaps
The day I woke up crying.
I turned within and re-read my story,

Out of desperation, perhaps.
Took a red pen to the mistakes I'd made;
I turned within and re-read my story,
Trying to edit my character flaws.

Took a red pen to the mistakes I'd made;
Found it was a lost cause,
Trying to edit my character flaws.
I fell back asleep, smiling.

Found it was a lost cause;
Read of a happily ever after.
I fell back asleep, smiling:
I knew I grew up on fairy tales.

Botarded.

 So I went to the library to get one book -- ONE BOOK -- that a friend from work had suggested. 

That was dumb.  Came back with eight.

Especially dumber because I already have literally hundreds of new books here at home, spines not yet devirginized.

Maybe this was doable when I was unemployed, waiting for employers out there to realize what an amazing asset I would be to their company and how reedonkulous they would be not to hire me and throw wads of cash at me.

But, dude.  I'm a full-time droid now.  A droid that sits in front of a computer by day and lives on a couch by night and can barely track which days are mine with the kid now, never mind remember that I'm also a full-time grad student (wait, I'm a WHAT?!  Oh, crap). 

Reading books is a luxury I can nay afford.  And yet... EIGHT books.  Octo-idiot. 

What the hell am I thinking?  With this logic system my brain is currently using, I wouldn't be surprised to find myself cooking Thanksgiving dinner tonight for eight when I only need to feed one and a half people.  And a dog.  Or to find myself submitting photos for Playboy's next playmate search.

Okay, so that last paragraph didn't make much sense.  BUT THAT IS KIND OF THE POINT EXACTLY.  There, now you see where I'm coming from.