Domestiphobia

So.

I’m no stranger to embarrassment.

I mean… I survived a 3-hour interview with a spider bite on my ass.  I showed a middle-aged woman at the airport a vagina on my kindle.  I read every book in the Gossip Girl series until the original author stopped writing them and they tried to continue the series with ghost writers and then they started sucking.

Because I’m pretty positive they didn’t suck before that.

And admitting that is embarrassing.

Which is probably why my face didn’t even flush a little yesterday when it probably should have.  Because the good thing about embarrassing yourself on a regular basis is that you actually get used to it.  You learn how to laugh at yourself in a way that says to any witnesses, Yeah I just did that.  Yuck it up, Chuckles.  It’s just another day.

And yesterday was no exception.

It was supposed to be a balmy 78-degrees, so I figured I’d take advantage of possibly the last unseasonably warm day this year by wearing a lightweight dress to work that had a wrap skirt.  For the fellas, this is basically a skirt that overlaps on itself, like when you wrap a towel around your waist coming out of the shower.

The whole ensemble was probably around $28 at Tarjay.  Because I’m spendy like that.

What I didn’t realize is that if I want to start earning a little extra cash, wearing this dress would be a good place to start.  Following a lunch meeting yesterday, my boss, Alpha and I were standing outside of the restaurant along one of the busiest streets in town, engaging in a healthy work debate that had spilled out into the parking lot.

My boss was mid-point, and it was a good one at that, when a mischievous gust of wind decided to entangle itself in my skirt, “unwrapping” it, so to speak, in one of those Marilyn Monroe moments that would be all hot and glamorous if I were… you know… Marilyn Monroe, but I’m clearly not,  and instead I was just a 29-year-old woman flashing her undergarments to her co-worker, her boss, and countless passerby on a 5 lane road.

Yeah, that’s not me.

All I can say is, thank God I was wearing undergarments.  Cute ones.

Lately I’ve been pouring over maps.

I’m not sure why, or for what, but I keep finding them everywhere.

Plastered to the pages of the books I read, tucked into the behind-the-seat pouches of the Tracker, hidden away in the depths of my file drawers from the times I’d hop in the car with only a map and a foggy destination in mind — the days before Google Maps and those monstrosities known as GPS.

I mean, I know I used to make Geographic Information Systems my career, so it’s not like GPS is too far of a stretch.  But I don’t know… there’s something about the crinkling of a map.  About the inherent dangers of slitting open your finger as you carelessly run it across craggy lines and mountain slopes and curvy, alluring rivers.

About getting the whole picture, all at once, seeing as far ahead as the map-edge horizon, versus staring at a mindless blue sheep of a triangle that only knows how to point in one direction at a time.

Maps don’t talk back or tell you when you’re going the wrong way, because to a map, there is no wrong way.  It won’t yell at you when you decide to try out a short cut or discover a new road.  It doesn’t try to conform you to one path — to tell you the way to go, because a map knows.  It knows there’s more than one way to go.

And sometimes your chosen path might present a challenge.  But really, is that such a bad thing?

“It’s supposed to be a challenge– that’s why they call it a short cut. If it was easy, it would just be the way.”  – From the movie, Road Trip

And sometimes there’s not more than one way to go.

And maps know that, too.

Sometimes they can be wrong.

But when they are, they don’t insist that they’re right.  They don’t insist that you’ve arrived, when really you haven’t.  They don’t claim to be smarter than you.

When we depend only on the narrow sights of our GPS, we only ever learn one habitual path to take.  We become stuck in our way, and we don’t ever really learn the way.  We just follow instructions, and there we are.

Maybe we’ve arrived, but we’ve missed so much.  We might be there, but we’re already thinking about the next place we need to be.

A GPS speeds life along.  It’s bossy and enigmatic.

Maps meander and amble.

And I think we could all use some of that, you know?  More aimless wander and less darting from one goal to the next.

The tracker is starting to slow down in her old age.

We’ve been together for 10 years, and the thought of road trippin’ without her leaves me scared and confused.

I think something might need to be planned.  A summer road trip, perhaps.  It’s been too long, and I have the itch.

Does anyone else know how this feels?

Does anyone ever just want to sing, “Hallelujah, I’m a bum, bum again” a la Kerouac with his friend Dean Moriarty in On the Road?

Does anyone else believe, like the ill-fated Chris McCandless from Into the Wild, that “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun”?

Or.

Am I really as crazy as I think that you think that I just might be?

Sometimes I’m just not sure.

Back in 3rd grade, they made us do the dreaded Mile Run in school as part of physical training.

Do they still make kids do The Mile?  Or has that gone the way of Red Rover and those plastic things we used to use to corral our giant t-shirts into a fashionable dangling cloth tail on the side of our hip?

Source

Anyway.  They made us run a mile, then they would herd us back inside the school and make us stand in those double lines — do you remember the double lines?  I guess they did that because single lines were too long, and they worried kids might start falling off the back or that the end would get pinched off like the tail of a lizard and then they’d have to explain to parents that their children are missing because line length got way out of control and no one wants that job, so it was best to double up the lines to keep everyone together yet still encourage a little healthy competition and line placement envy among classmates.

For example.

My BFFTTILIM (Best Friend For The Time I Lived In Minnesota) ended up in line A, while I was in line B.  And, via careful eye judgment (I was so good, I didn’t even have to count to measure someone’s line placement), I could tell that she was effectively 2 spots ahead of me.

Not cool.

It was a known fact that ideally, BFs would be in the exact same spot if they found themselves in separate lines, so they could walk directly next to each other down the hallway.

No hierarchy in a healthy friendship, nosiree.

But, if they were in the same line, then one needed to be directly in front of the other.  There could be no intruders between them in the friendship bubble.

So the fact that I was in a separate line and approximately 2 spaces back served up a bit of a predicament.  In third grade, this was the kind of thing that could ruin a whole day.  Something had to be done.

I decided to employ Heads or Tails.

In case you’re unfamiliar, this isn’t the heads or tails of a coin flip.  No, it’s much more elementary with a decidedly higher risk factor because the outcome is not based on chance, but on a person’s decision.  See, any good kid knew that  you couldn’t just cut in line.  But, if you had the permission of the person in front of whom you wanted to cut, it was acceptable.  The rest of the line just had to deal with it.

Pensively, I glanced over at my BFFTTILIM.  She knew what I was thinking.  I smiled, knowingly, and asked, “Heads?” just loud enough for the students in close proximity to hear.  The girl behind me perked up, knowing this could potentially lead to a line promotion for her.

My BFFTTILIM thought for a second, then, to my slight dismay and embarrassment, smiled and said, “Tails.”

I sighed.  Tails was acceptable, meaning I could come over and stand behind her, rather than in front, but the public slight introduced that hierarchy thing back into the sitch, and no one is comfortable when that happens.  Everyone knew that Heads was better, because it showed true faith in the friendship.  Heads was about loyalty.  Heads was about trust.

A boy named Jason was standing behind my BF, and he did not look pleased about the fact that I would be cutting in front of him.  But them’s the rules in Heads or Tails, and there was no logic in arguing with that.

He had a slight frown, and looked a little upset.  I shot him a sheepish smile and sauntered over to the spot directly behind my friend.  ”Everyone face forward!” directed the teacher, and that we did, but not before exchanging a quick BF high-five.

Then it hit me.

Quite literally.

A powerful blow of projectile vomit all over my back and in my hair and down my shirt.

It was red.

The smell was not pleasant.

I was right.  Jason had been upset.  But not about me cutting in line.  More likely, he was regretting the apparent gallon of Kool-aid he’d decided to drink before running the mile.  So he expelled it.

A small drop got onto BF’s shirt, and she was quite distraught.

I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I ever wanted to punch someone in the face.

I don’t remember much of what happened after that — riding home in a garbage bag, a very long shower, then cheerily walking back to school with BF and homemade ice-tray popsicles.

They were orange.

Not red.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had learned 2 valuable lessons that day:

Heads isn’t better because it represents loyalty and trust.  Heads is better because you know the person standing behind you.

Also, if you’re going to screw someone over, make sure that what you get out of the deal is worth it.

In most cases, it’s probably not.

P.S. My first post got published on Re-Nest — check it out!