Mumbling Madly

The bubblings of our High School Reunion have begun. I can’t shut-up about how excited I am…ok, here’s a little background:
Little Mara begins her education by attending Preschool. She cries her heart out for the first two weeks. Her Mom has to stand in the doorway, holding her baby brother, or else Mara will freak out. Courage is slow but soon Mom no longer has to attend Preschool…Mara can go at it alone.
5 Year Old Mara attends Kindergarten; it’s off to a shaky start. She is a huge crybaby. She cries over not being able to find scissors, (it’s even recorded in her progress report). Gradually things improve. She is sloppy and creative and loud and bossy. She gains support, a few friends, and joins Bluebirds. She begins formal ballet training in second grade.
In third grade everything goes downhill. Mara can’t afford a Cabbage Patch Doll. All the other girls play with their dolls during recess, Mara plays with her cheap knock off doll. Her huge crush on Ryan R. goes unnoticed for the next three years. She realizes that she is unpopular and unliked. She responds by dressing outlandishly, ridiculous clothes and multiple scrunchies in her hair. Mara is trying to imitate her favorite sassy character, Claudia, from the Babysitter’s Club series. It fails, the kids think she’s a freak. Mara brags about being a ballet dancer, but no one cares.
By 6th grade she’s pretty beat down. At the height of the “Just Say No to Drugs” 80’s campaign, Mara is terrified by the crack cocaine videos, the AIDS epidemic, and falling down a well like Baby Jessica. She has become an insomniac.
In 7th grade Mara attempts to shed her nerdy past and reinvent herself. She sneaks lip-gloss into her backpack, she wears her long hair in a ponytail at the crown of her head, and she fluffs out her bangs with Aqua Net. She rolls her skirts up to make them micro-minis once she’s out the door and in school. She falls in love with many skater boys–who don’t return the feelings. She keeps a record in her Snoopy Diary of which guys talk to her in school, who likes who, and who her best friends are at the moment.
It all goes to hell in 8th grade. Mara is recognized as an aspiring writer, and is moved to Honors English and Social Studies with all the Talented & Gifted Kids. They immediately reject her. The boys rip her a new one every time the teacher leaves the room. The girls scoot their desks away, talk shit about her in the locker room, and threaten to beat her up occasionally. At the school talent show Mara further embarrasses herself by performing a lyrical dance piece to the electronic sounds of “Silk Road.” It gets so bad, that on a day Mara is absent the English Teacher has a sit-down talk with the entire class about how “you all need to be nicer to Mara, she’s sensitive.” This further sabotages any chance Mara ever has to redeem her once fledging popularity.
High School is looked at as a fresh start. Mara goes all out and gives her stick straight hair a spiral perm for her upcoming freshman year. She decides to wear only black and white–preferably polka dots if possible. She buys a fresh pair of white Keds and pulls her bangs back in a sort of Elaine from Seinfeld coif. 9th grade is incredibly shaky. Mara doesn’t really know who her friends are, who she is, what her expectations should be. She flounders in Math, and is put in the dreaded Assist Math Class with all the kids who flunked out, ran away, got expelled, and hate school. Several of the gentlemen in the class develop unhealthy crushes on Mara, and she spends a lot of time avoiding flirtation. One of these men was allegedly a real church-going psycho and was rumored to have actually thrown a pair of open scissors at a person.
Despite all this Mara excels at English and Drama. She slowly meets other quirky Theater kids…like Kris, Kay, Hanna, Beth, Genevieve, Todd, and Ben. A lot of these kids are thrown in the New Waver category and wear clunky Doc Martins and weird, asymmetrical hair-do’s. She is in school plays, dance recitals, and begins to tour with the Children’s Touring Ensemble. She continues to always “Say NO to drugs and alcohol.”
Mara is still struggling to beat down the mockery in Honors English and History. She meets other people in class, people who like her writing and think the Popular Kids are stupid. She has random, vague, crushes that don’t go anywhere. She suffers every time she stays home on a school dance night. Her Mom laments that there aren’t any nice guys out there for her to go to dances with…what’s wrong with these guys? Mara craves romance, the kind you read in books, the kind you see on TV. She has a brief, disastrous, affair with a guy who irons his socks before school and wears jean shorts with a shirt and tie. Than she goes after the unattainable jazz sax player who everyone likes, and he dumps her on the ride home from Junior Prom.
At the end of 11th grade, the Epic Love Story begins, as she is seduced by a crazy punk rocker who sends her love letters written on the peels of oranges. She begins a ridiculous, mostly long-distance relationship with this man, who graduates a year ahead of her and joins the navy. The rest of high school is clouded with her sudden punk rock life style: Multiple concerts, many backstage break-ins, and numerous nights at La Luna. She starts hanging around a certain band, making them origami animals, and attending their sober house parties (the whole band is in a 12 Step Alcohol Recovery Program). She quits dancing. She quits performing. She is lost and confused, about to graduate from High School with a very reasonable GPA of 3.4, but Mara bombs the SAT. Her score is below 800, (let’s just get that out in the open). Because she can’t afford the private tuition of a certain Catholic college, she settles on going to the U of WA.
9 Days before graduation, a classmate of Mara’s dies while hiking at Mount St. Helen’s. The class of ‘95 is heartbroken because he had been nominated as “Most Likely to Succeed.” What do you do when that person dies? Everything feels surreal and horrible and amazing–because life is precious of course.
Mara finds a summer job at the Portland Saturday Market selling hemp bracelets and phemo beads. Her long-distance relationship failing, she briefly goes out with a 23 year old hippie who works at The Grateful Dead booth at the market. This is the summer that Jerry Garcia Dies, and the hippie ceremoniously decides to wear a Grateful Dead Bear every day of the week. Mara’s punk rock sensibilities have no problem dumping his ass.
Mara goes to college where she lives with high school friend, Dena, and it’s all so big and terrifying. Seattle treats Mara well, and she joins a late night comedy group, performs on the radio for Savage Love Live, and dabbles with an English major which she promptly rejects for a Drama major.
The summer after her freshman year, Mara works at the Port of Portland importing Hyundai’s. This is where she meets Josh…She is 19 and he is 20. (Looking back on it now, Mara had no idea she was kicking it with her future husband). They both have old-school, Canon, cameras. They walk all over Portland and take black and white pictures. Josh moves to Colorado and becomes a pen-pal. Mara reconnects with the Navy Punk Rocker and breaks up with him once she realizes his speed addiction is serious.
Mara begins dancing again, working on a Dance Minor in addition to the Drama. She writes one woman shows. She founds Origami Girl Productions. She becomes notorious around town. After graduating with her liberal arts degree, she goes through five jobs in seven months. She leaves it all to move to Colorado and become a snowboard bum with Josh. She becomes a choreographer…a teacher…a continuous lover of dance clothing. She decides, the hell with it, let’s get married.
All of this and now, boom, high school reunion. Do I want to parade myself around in front of all those mean Honor class boys? Do I want to flaunt myself in front of Ryan R.? Do I want to pay tribute to our dear friend who died so shortly before graduation? You bet I do…and maybe these are all the wrong reasons and I will be incredibly disappointed. But I’m just so damn curious. I spent so much time with these people, fretting over grades and papers and school dances…I want to see where they’ve gone with the education we were given. I want to share my successes and failures because I practically wear them on my sleeve…I really do.

I was on the bus (of course) and I was sitting in front of two high school students from the alternative school, NOVA. I was listening in to their conversation and was shocked to learn that each girl had respectively witnessed a chicken beheading sometime in the past. One girl referenced a crazy friend of hers whose Mom raised everything they ate. Supposedly she went into her friend’s backyard and there was the Mom, slicing off the head of a chicken for dinner, with a chainsaw. This scarred the young lady and was a contrubuting factor to her new vegetarian lifestyle. Her companion had also recently seen a chicken beheading while on a high school field trip. Appearently they went to some farm and the farmer impressed upon them this grand decapitating. “So what did you do?” Girl #1 inquired, her own memories of chicken slaughter fresh in her mind. “Oh, I just left,” Girl #2 said.

In this case I’m answering my own question: NOT. I bought these pants out of frustration. I had all this pressure placed on myself because we were in the Portland Nordstrom’s Rack. I felt like I just HAD to buy something because here I was, everything was so reasonably priced, and there was no tax! Needless to say I tried on endless pairs of designer jeans only to find myself firmly between sizes–29 and 30 to be exact. For those of you who have no idea what that means, a 29 is a 7-8 and a 30 is a 10-12. And I was neither. Again, I’ll complain about the ridiculous sizing across the hips, the low-rise impossibility, and the pant cuffs that went on for miles–as if the average size 8 woman is obviously 5′11. So I almost cried right there, over the fact that my ass wouldn’t fit into a pair of Juicy Couture or Lucky jeans–because they were so goddam cheap! I felt obligated to buy them. So long story short, the above Express capris were a pity buy, a rebound romance, a wishful hope. It was the last place we went to. Josh had totally made out at Nordstrom Rack, and while he looked at watches I attacked Express’ sale rack like a scorned woman. 1/2 all capris? You bet your ass I’m leaving with a pair! OK, so white capris just aren’t my bag, and of course Express is pushing their new “White Line.” I could just see myself sitting in something fantastically sticky on the bus in my white capris. Other than the white pants, Express thinks grown women are perfectly happy cavorting around in bright pastel capris. Did I miss the memo? Only size 2 chicks look good in pink pants…it’s really the truth. No matter, after ferociously searching every rack I found the above pair of denim “Editor Capris.”
I actually read the tag before I squeezed them on. For some reason: I BELIEVED THE TAG. “Designed to be the best fitting pants in America. It took 20 designers nearly 1000 hours to create the Editor Pant. So, making the Editor Crop was really very simple. We just took the best fitting pant in America and made it shorter.” I don’t know why, maybe I was just so beaten down I wanted to believe. Sure, I knew in the back of my mind it was all a marketing ploy. But I had just broken up with Nordstrom’s Rack, I was shunned and scorned, reduced to tears while holding a too-small pair of size 30 Diesel jeans. I hooked the pants in, squatted in the dressing room to check for accidental ass exposure, decided they would eventually stretch out to where I really needed them, and said, “yes.”
The problem is they hit me in the worst spot across my hips. The front pockets pooch out a little which makes my hips look even wider. The back pockets are inconveniently sewn shut, (where am I supposed to put my bus pass?) Because of the top button being a big long strap, I seem to ALWAYS forget to zip up that teeny tiny zipper. Yesterday I wore them to work, and I suddenly realized I had sold several pairs of shoes with my fly wide open. I tell you, how is the Editor Crop the best fitting pant in America?
I ironed them tonight, laid them out on my table, reattached the tags, and lovingly placed them back in their Express bag. The li’l guys are going back to their store front home tomorrow afternoon.

I couldn’t help but want to try this little layering trick I saw during Tory Burch’s spring fashion march on the Oprah Show. I tried it today, safely using only black on black. I think it worked. I’m always looking for new ways to reinvent my boring clothes.

In the U District, written on a frat boy’s shirt following several Greek letters: “Handing out more beatings than people hand out letters.”
I’m trying to pick out a new pair of glasses. I hadn’t been to the eye doctor in six years and I learned some interesting things about my eyes. I’ve had “reading glasses” since I was 13. I used to get horrible headaches when staring at the computer screen or reading. I just learned that my eyes focus on far away stuff using a very tiring method. Instead of processing light like everyone else, my eyes exert all sorts of unnecessary energy in order for me to see in the distance. Eventually my eyes will tire, and when I’m forty I will start needing to wear glasses all the time. In the meantime, I don’t really need my glasses to focus on close up reading; rather I need them to help my eyes relax. Of course there is all sorts of medical jargon I’m leaving out, (like the actual names of my eye parts), but that’s the basic sum up. I learned that my right eye is worse than my left. I learned that to get a cool pair of glasses they cost a lot…or do they? How much should a good pair of frames cost? Where should I go? It should also be noted that my father has been long impressed by the stellar eyesight of my siblings and I. He started wearing glasses at 6.
I had a moment today where I looked at myself walking by a window and thought: “God, I look ridiculous.” It’s funny how clothes can do that to you…at one point I thought the Keens combined with denim capris was pretty smashing. Not so today…or maybe it’s just that combination. Let me tell you, I think it’s this crappy job I’ve been hanging on to–barely–by a thread. Last Wednesday I worked with a Chronic Complainer–this time it was about her back pain, last week the topic of complaint was the stinky smell of garlic fries ingested 24 hours ago that would just NOT go away. (You’d think that after she swore for the tenth time she would ‘never eat them again’ that would be the last of it). I keep trying to be so shiny and happy, like if I force myself into this silly smile I’ll somehow believe it. I bite my tongue and force all the mean things I want to say back inside my throat. Example: Me: “These tights are sized Youth Junior, why does it say 2-4 on the store tag?” Manager: “(Sigh) That was Rachel….she got confused….I HATE that company, their size chart is SO CONFUSING, stupid French Canadians and their sizing…” In my head I was thinking: “That’s all fine and good, but c’mon…who the hell cares, let’s just get this job done correctly and stop complaining.” But it went without resolution, because I can’t officially change anything in the computer…and the job never got done. I can’t tell you how that rubs me the wrong way…I actually find myself coming across mismarked stuff and not bothering to change it because of my newly budding “poor work ethic.” Recently I had a second interview with a certain high end designer store on 5th Ave. The women there are flawless, work on commission, and fantastically driven. I’m totally ready to exercise my retail chops in the high end market…we’ll see. I’m sure it would present a whole new set of problems (my shabby wardrobe for starters), but anything is better than what I have right now. OK, so that’s not true. On the bus ride home I watched four guys on four corners of the street hold mortgage broker signs and wave to passing cars. They were waving mechanically, as if they had been told sternly: “Look you must wave…no matter what. The sign could be crooked or held at an angle, but you have to wave the entire time.”