Niche Market

Hello, my name is Frecklepelt. I'm here today because I'm forty years old and I still haven't figured out what to do with my hair.

(This is a support group, right? You guys are supporting me in my lack of hair awareness? Cool, thx.)

I feel about my hair like old people feel about technology: it's mysterious and confusing, and although I am somewhat envious of others' abilities to wrangle the technology, frankly I'm not terribly inclined to learn how to use it myself. I'm all like, Why isn't it working today? It worked yesterday and I didn't change a thing! Why does it hate me?! Screw it, I'm going to deal with this the old-fashioned way that I understand (i.e., ponytail).

This is not to say that I haven't gotten some solid mileage out of my hair over the years - there's always been a certain market for the red hair/green eyes thing. Often of the basement-dwelling variety (thanks, perhaps, to the fantasy genre?), but y'know, in a pinch, I figure I can always catch some D&D D. I'd also like to thank kids' shows for deeply ingraining in people that the redhead with glasses is the smart one - I got glasses at the ripe old age of 6 so I feel I've benefitted from that unconscious bias for most of my life.

So I don't hate my hair, it's just that our relationship is somewhat... adversarial. I wake up every day knowing there's going to be some kind of battle with it, and I approach the mirror with the same look of grim determination on my face that my Grandma Mabel got every time she had to use her cell phone. I can remember her mashing the absolute hell out of those tiny buttons (wise of her to pass on before the advent of the touch screen), then getting angry-scared something had gone wrong and starting over, over and over, until she finally rage quit and just put it in a fucking ponytail again.

Oh wait, sorry, got my analogy a little tangled there.

To give Grandma credit, she had her hair absolutely 100% figured out - you've never seen a more luxurious head of winter-white weekly-set curls than she had. Never a lock out of place. I suspect she was just as frustrated by my apparent inability to do anything with my hair as I was whenever she tried to make a cell phone call. "If you'd only..."

I'm starting to get a few grey hairs myself - or rather, winter-white hairs. I like to arrange them on top for business meetings to give myself some street cred. Because it seems as if it will turn white I've been envisioning my hair one day magically becoming just like Grandma's, but the reality is that she maintained a complex hair regimen that she guarded as closely as her molasses cookies recipe and it is unlikely I'll ever be able to recreate either in my lifetime. Probably my hair will be just as mental as ever, except white. 

I'd like to tell you that I'm at least keeping up on technology to make up for my hair-styling ineptitude, but that would be a lie. By this point, it's looking like I'm going to have to cultivate some other skill set for my grandkids to appreciate me for. I'll be sure to let you know when I figure out what that's going to be, in case anyone else in the support group is in a similar boat.

Proceed with Caution

Situations sometimes arise in a relationship where you realize things aren't going to go well unless you tread verrrry carefully. For instance, DH and I were admiring the lovely blue of a periwinkle's flowers one day and he asked me whether the colour had a name. He's right: it's such a good colour that it deserves its own name, and our experiences doing crosswords together indicate that I am the person in the relationship who is most likely to know the words for things like that. In that moment, however, I could not find a good way to say "periwinkle blue" without sounding like a sarcastic asshole. The proceed-with-caution alarm started going off in my head, and I'm reasonably certain I have a matching facial expression that goes with the alarm. It feels as if it might resemble a deer caught in headlights who also happens to be eating a lemon, but since I've never witnessed it personally I can't attest to how it translates externally.

On another occasion, I butt-dialed DH from the field. I had never experienced a butt-dial before that moment and since subsequent experiments with those field pants suggest a generally low ability to effect any dialing unless dampened, I believe it was literally my ass sweat that dialed him. I'm not much of a phone person so DH was pleased that I had (ostensibly) taken time out of my busy work day to call him. "It's so nice to hear from you! Why did you call?"

*Alarm sounds in head. Possible deer-lemon face. Long pause while considering my options.*

"... Um, because I miss you?"

This, by the way, was found to be The Correct Answer, and further proof IMHO that the exact truth is not always the exact best thing for a given situation. "Because it's 35 degrees and my ass sweat has increased the conductivity of my field pants such that they were able to work my smart phone" would surely not have gone over so well. Crisis averted.

Because I only get to live in my own brain, I'm only aware of when these situations come up from my own perspective. (Or some degree of aware, anyway: I've been told that I'm offensive frequently enough that I'm guessing my batting average isn't spectacular.) I've always wondered whether other people have similar alarm systems wired up, or if they just sail smoothly along with a minimum of anxiety involved in the telling of their lies (or truths, as befits the situation).

* * *

Have I ever mentioned that I've decided to do any future Mrs. Small Fry a solid and really normalize the heck out of weird woman-things, so she won't have to worry about him finding them weird? Don't fret about, say, shaving your ankles in the sink so you can wear cropped pants that day, future potential daughters-in-law - I have got that shit covered. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as if DH received any such training so we have developed a workaround wherein basically neither of us acknowledges anything, ever. Frankly, it's exhausting, and becoming less and less feasible the older I get, so here's a huge "you're welcome" to the future Mrs. Small Fry.

* * *

I was making good use one evening of the wax left over from doing Medium Fry's brows when DH came into the room. As per our usual approach, I pretended to simply be casually standing around in the bathroom for no waxing-related reasons whatsoever, and he pretended not to notice my telltale hot pink reverse-'stache (et al.). He had an odd look on his face, sortof like he was afraid but had also recently eaten something sour?

"Um," he said, "I have a message for you from Small Fry, that is definitely not from me."

"Okaaay...?"

"He has asked me to ask you that when you are done waxing your knuckles, would you please go give him a goodnight hug?"

Ah. So that really is what the alarm face looks like in reality. Good to know.

Cake Pans

Not to boast, but people come to me for advice about things sometimes. It is of course possible that they come to me to find out the things they definitely shouldn't be doing - like when that one weirdo at the office with no eyebrows tells you they like your outfit - but I prefer to believe that I give the impression of knowing what I'm doing at least some of the time, so any requests for advice usually leave me feeling that happy little glow one feels when successfully faking one's way through life.

I got just such a call one day from my old buddy Cornelis; yes, even he of the annoyingly perfect family, teeth, career path, positive attitude, blah-fucking-blah, had come to seek my sage advice. Damn - I must be faking the hell out of life. Win!

He wanted to know... what dish to bake a cake in.

Okay, only slightly deflating, I could work with that: "Um, a cake pan?"

"We don't have cake pans. Can I use a casserole dish?"

"Wait, what? No cake pans?! What kind of... y'know what, never mind. Sure, you can use a casserole dish. You might have to change the baking time a little, though - what size have you got?"

"Umm..."

"It should say on the bottom."

"Oh. Uh... nine by thirteen inches."

"Hold up, what does this casserole dish look like?"

"You know, just a regular casserole dish - clear, says Pyrex on the bottom?"

Full disclosure, in my house, a 9x13" Pyrex is called a cake pan, because cake obviously trumps casserole. OBVIOUSLY. I send a brief prayer of apology to the cake gods if I'm ever forced to debase one of their sacred vessels with a lowly casserole. What the hell kind of heathen household must this guy live in if he thinks a cake pan is called a casserole dish? What do they call cookie sheets, "vegetable roasting platforms"? When was the last time he's even seen a dessert? My lawd, think of the children!

"Hey, wait a minute - why did you call me about this?"

"I dunno, I guess you just seem like someone who knows about cakes."

And there, implicit in his statement, was the answer to my question: he lives in a much thinner household than I do. This conversation took place several years ago and honestly, I've been trying to transmogrify it into a compliment ever since, but sometimes I'll look in a mirror and realize, Yeah. I definitely look like the sort of person who knows a thing or two about cakes. Like, maybe I'm BFFs with cake but it's gotten a little toxic over the years and we probably should consider seeing other people once in a while. (It's not you, it's me?)

Definitely not putting that one in my Feel-Good Folder. Maybe I'll tuck it away in a drawer for when I finally lose those last, stubborn eighty pounds; it's just the sort of thing that might fit more comfortably then.

Word Addict

When someone says they're so hungry they could eat a horse, is it the mass of the horse that they're referring to, or the fact that we don't typically eat companion animals? Like, are we talking a large volume of food amount of hungry or a violating societal norms amount of hungry? For comparison, if I said I was so hungry I could eat a therapy dog, would that convey less, more, or the same amount of hungriness as if I said I could eat a horse? Or if I went to a horse-eating sort of country and said I could eat a horse would they be like, Yeah - so?

In light of this confusion I've been trying to say more accurate things like, "I'm so hungry I could take a stab at this sad apple that's been living in my field vest for the past week," or, "I could really purchase a footlong sub then only finish half of it because I consistently overestimate how much food I can consume in one sitting."

The whole accurate communication business came about because I keep seeing people posting things online about these four (or sometimes five?) "Agreements", which I'm mostly cool with but the first one is about always being impeccable with my words and I am definitely sloppy as fuck with my words. Or as I prefer to think of it, I expend oodles of energy being precise and thorough with my words at my job, so I really like to let loose with my words in my free time.

I've been encountering some issues during my efforts to rein my words in to something closer to "impeccable". First off, it's obvious that I'm not just a casual or social user of non-impeccable words; I'm a full-blown addict. It feels indescribably dull to convey things without verbally BeDazzling them: having "several ripe tomatoes" in my garden is simply not as punchy as having a metric fuck-ton of them. Saying I'm "somewhat over capacity" at work lacks the exhilarating dramatic flair of being adrift in a choppy sea of needy projects. And honestly, if I'm so hungry I could eat a normal quantity of a socially-acceptable food item, why would I even bother mentioning it?

Ugh, I can barely get it up to say anything at all without at least a little hit of non-impeccableness.

Secondly, I guess after all this time as a non-impeccable-word-addict maybe I've gotten bad at regular words? Without the usual suite of weather-related topics to discuss during routine interactions with strangers (trouble being that I obviously can believe the smoke/heat/humidity/whatever because it's fricking August and BC is on fire, duh, so it doesn't seem very impeccable to claim that I can't), I'm out of tricks. I panicked a little at my blood draw appointment on Saturday and asked the phlebotomist whether she prefers her orange juice with pulp or without.

Which brings me to my third problem: weather is the ultimate neutral topic in Canada. Without fallbacks like how you just can't buhleeeve this weather we're having, you get risk entering uncomfortably intimate territory like orange juice or the pharmacist's nice eyebrows, where everything somehow sounds like a pickup line despite your most impeccable of intentions.

So I'm going to make you all a deal: you stop posting this "Agreements" bullshit and making me accidentally hit on my pharmacist, and I will carry on in my usual highly entertaining (to me) manner, with the mutual understanding that I'm employing a (to me) standard degree of artistic license in the telling.

The Hungryman Special

I'm roughly at the mid-point of my field season, which is about the time of year when I like to dive on down to the basement of Maslow's pyramid and become a sort of plaid-wearing lizard-brain person. In the summer, a field person's fancy turns to - well, mostly to food, to be honest. (Sorry, DH.) But there's also a pretty consistent refrain of Too hot. Too cold. Too tired. So much pee. Fuck mosquitoes. Extra double-fuck canola. Hate rubber boots. Etcetera. Basically, every thought in my head seems to revolve around my immediate physical state: I would cut a bitch for some dry socks. Fuck this hill, and the glacier it rode in on. If I see a bear I'm going to ride that fucker right out of this forest and never look back.

Oh yeah, parental warning: my lizard brain swears even more than my regular brain. I went with a documentary effect 'cause that's where I'm at today.

I like to think I mostly keep it together, most of the time, but down in the lizard basement you just never know what might happen - sometimes, a gal just snaps. One summer's day a little while ago I was standing in a wetland minding my own business (actually the wetland's business, I suppose) when I was completely overcome by the need for a burger. Like, my very soul needed a burger, and all I had in my field vest was a sad apple and a crushed granola bar. Lizard-me drove to the nearest town (population 382*) and clomped my sweaty, grimy arse into the lone cafe. (It was was basically a self-kidnapping - is that a thing?) I destroyed a burger named "The Hungryman Special", slapped down a twenty and clomped off into the sunset, never to be seen again. I figure the six old coffee-swilling farmers who (after un-subtly rearranging their chairs for a better view) watched me eat, plus the chef who came out of the kitchen to watch me eat, are still talking about that one time that mysterious, muddy New Human stopped by for lunch.

For this precise reason, even at my lizard-basement hungriest I sometimes lack the emotional fortitude to dine alone in small towns - it's the performance anxiety that gets me. Which makes me think how truly terrible it would be to be famous: you would never be able to eat a Hungryman Special in peace, no matter where you went or how self-actualized you were that day.

That's why I like being a regular not-famous field biologist. It's like being the world's crappiest rock star. You get all the glamour of being on the road - waking up in a different seedy motel each morning and not knowing where the hell you are, being openly gawked at by everyone in town anytime you try to eat a meal - without any of the fuss and bother of, say, heaps of money, or cushy tour buses, or groupies. In fact, the only action I get all summer is humping my way over endless logs in the forest. (Platonically, of course; it's just that I have short legs.)

But I think of myself as a crappy rock star in the best way possible, because at the end of the season I get to return to my regular, non-plaid-wearing self, and eat all the burgers I like in total, blissful anonymity.

* Statistics Canada, 2016 census data: http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E

Lovin' It

There used to be a regular at the McDonald's I worked at in high school who would order a double Quarter Pounder with extra grease every time he came through the drive-thru. And he was deadly serious about that extra grease - serious like the heart attack I wonder if he's had yet when I remember him now, twenty-plus years later. If he saw you were new to the job or felt you weren't taking his request heart-attackily enough, he would describe the exact method for making his custom grease burger: Cook the patties fresh, and do not drain them when you take them off the grill (you're supposed to sortof shake them off otherwise), then use the spatula to scrape up all the extra grease sitting on the grill and pour it over the patties.

... Delicious??

There was also the gal who always ordered a Big Mac with no meat, a "lady of the evening" (or more realistically, of the streets) who used the ladies' washroom as her place of, ahem, business, and an older woman who would insist that you press the "extra" button no less than 10 times when ordering her cheeseburger with extra pickles. She would then whip the burger open right on the counter to check that there was at least a half-inch slab of pickles inside, and either silently nod her approval and stalk briskly off with her pickleburger, or slam the counter in anger and demand! more! pickles!

As you might have already suspected, we found everything from dirty diapers to drug paraphernalia in the PlayPlace. A certain elderly gentleman couldn't seem to pronounce "fajita" and thus shyly ordered up two chicken vaginas every time he came through (thru?). One time, a little kid got his head stuck between the rungs of a chair and we had to grease him with a block of fryer vat shortening to get him out. Another time, a kid went "missing" and was eventually found standing - uninvited - under some woman's privacy cover, watching a complete fricking stranger nurse her baby.

(Oh, wait. That last one was Medium Fry, age 4 or so, when I was no longer the disgruntled employee but rather the profoundly embarrassed patron. What is it with PlayPlaces that brings out the weird in people?!)  

In short, by the time I had been there a couple of years months, I had all the world-weary indifference of a hardened fast food veteran: nothing anyone could order, say or do could surprise me. (Okay, until it was my own kid.) So one day when a friend of the family came through and ordered his meal with extra salt, I simply drawled, "How much salt do you want?"

"Haha! I was being facetious! Did you really think that I wanted extra salt with my McDonald's?!"

I stored the word facetious for later research, and thought of Extra Grease Man. "Um... yeah. I did."

He drove off chuckling to himself. Maybe he left with the impression that I was a very literal or humourless person - who knows. It wasn't that I felt the request for extra salt at a fast food joint was a particularly sound life choice, but in comparison to certain life choices I had seen people make while in the safe haven of mother McDonald's golden bosoms, let's just say that it was pretty low on the crazy scale.

I worked at that job for three and a half years. It paid for my orthodontics, my first basement apartment with the orange shag carpet that resembled Barkley from Sesame Street, and a great many sweet, sweet employee-discounted meals. With meat, mind you, and only the standard allotment of grease. I actually referenced my McJob at a professional interview years later, as an illustration of my experience dealing with crazy/angry/aggressive people. DH poked fun of me a bit for this, and I have no idea what my interviewers thought of it, but I stand by the decision - honestly, I can't think of a better place of employment for experience interacting with a wide variety of nutjobs.

As Medium Fry searches ever more frantically for a summer job - and she seems to be angling for one of the anything-but-fast-food variety - I hold a secret small hope that she will end up spending at least a little time at a McJob one day. It's a great place to earn a bit of perspective along with your pocket money, plus I feel it would really bring her full-circle from being the weird kid, to dealing with them.

The Pure Pumpkin Polka

I think we've established that I'm a bit of an over-sharer, but lately I've been thinking maybe that's not such a bad thing. Maybe it's not over-sharing so much as the right amount of sharing - in fact, I've been percolating a theory around the benefits of over-sharing, and was planning to one day flesh it out for y'all right here on my blog. Something to the tune of sharing your shit being a public service. If nothing else, I figure it can help other people feel less alone in dealing with their own personal steaming heaps, y'know?

So I was standing in the coffee aisle at the Co-op last night, deciding which beans looked most likely to get me through the coming week, and this middle-aged woman stopped to tell me what kind of coffee she thought was best. Awesome, right? Thanks, rando lady. But then she just... stayed. And started telling me about her dog. Who was sick. With - and I quote - "the green apple two-step." And needed canned pumpkin. But not pumpkin pie filling, just pure pumpkin, and Co-op is the only store that stocks it year-round, and the reason the dog needs pumpkin is because it's a bowel regulator (in case I missed out on what "the green apple two-step" might imply).

She acted all of this out for me while telling me about it, and let me just say: I had no idea pumpkin could be such powerful medicine. The very. forceful. hand gestures. she used to demonstrate what a "bowel regulator" might accomplish in the case of a green-apple-two-stepping dog led me to believe that if she's not careful with the dosage, she may be back again in a day or two buying her dog a bottle of remedial prune juice. I didn't think to ask what euphemism she preferred to use for that particular affliction, so let's call it the pure pumpkin polka and imagine her cornering some poor fellow and telling him all about it under the pretext of helping him select a nice brand of cereal.

It was right around "bowel regulator" that I realized I was seeing the future.

My future.

In addition to being a chronic over-sharer, I'm also an incorrigible over-explainer; a persistent hand-talker; an unrelenting user of euphemisms; and a habitual maker of unsolicited recommendations to confused-looking grocery shoppers. I helped a guy navigate curry pastes just last weekend! I'm like a ticking time bomb of over-sharing. It is only a matter of time before I literally transmogrify into that exact woman and start offering up vast amounts of unrelated personal information alongside my, say, cantaloupe selection expertise.

In light of this new evidence I must entertain the possibility that over-sharing may not be the public service I once thought it was, and if I can't feel bonded with you because of whatever natural reticence you happen to possess, that's my own problem.

I don't know if I can turn this thing around for myself, but it might not be too late for you, my friends: please know that you don't have to share your shit if you don't want to. And you really, really never have to share your dog's shit.

Thank you for your attention to this important public service announcement.