Missives from Wonderland

Unconventional Otakon Staff

Black staff shirts: orchids
amidst pastel blooms, bouquets
of anime fans.


Just got back from staffing Otakon!

Me with the head of Otakon Media Productions

Mario and Princess Peach in the Otakon Dealers Room

This is my entry for Week 11 of LJ Idol. This week's topic is "Surgery often looks like murder if you judge it halfway through.”

Me, sweaty and strong, after a workout

Halfway (to an After Picture)

Frizzled hair, sweat-
beaded. Ruddy, puffy, muscles
strained and trembling. The work
leaves me breathless, my shirt
taut and pungent. Stained
with salt.

---

My mind is in so many places right now, but I always go with the strongest idea, the one I can realize more completely. But if I were going to ramble in a hundred other directions, I'd tell you about a hike I took with a small group of Scouts recently, going up at a steep angle for roughly two hours. No switchbacks. Just me reaching the point of breaking. My breath coming in ragged gasps, my legs buckling under me, my ankles and even little muscles in my feet on fire from the bed of rocks we climbed over.

The Scout leader, an old friend and the father of one of my son's best friends, hung back with me for awhile, talking about the state of the world. I told him, "I'm just so tired of evil winning." And he said to me something that reminded me of a story I once heard.

"What's the end point?" he asked me. "Nothing is over. We keep fighting."

We both acknowledged that maybe our brilliant, sensitive, kind-hearted sons will be the ones to bring about a cycle of healing. We are doing our part, raising them. Keeping strong in the face of challenges.

And I kept going. I kept climbing. Until the boys decided it was time to go home.

Light shining through the trees the morning after a difficult hike

Mood:

This is my entry for Week 9 of LJ Idol. This week's topic is "All Hat, No Cattle."

Abstract art in a parking lot; oil on pavement

death becomes my essence

gossamer wings of
squid glisten at the bottomless
abyss, a mystic cloud of porcelain sugar
raps lightly, clamoring in my ancient yearnings
i have injected thorny abstract distress
into the mad penumbra of my ebony consciousness
surreal fragments descend to the brim
of the darkening gulf
careening to the resounding roar
of forlorn frenzy
hypnotic trance, condemned existence,
my invincible soul is a small
trumpet
playing Taps

for a poem
by a bad poet
to the garbage disposal

---

This was inspired by one of the more overblown submissions I have received to my online literary magazine, Wild Violet. That particular poet was given to excessive use of modifiers, as this poem emulates.

I'm going to be participating in the new upcoming season of LJ Idol! I'm planning on posting on Dreamwidth, crossposting to LJ.

This week, I'm dog-sitting my sister's adorable doggo, Leia. Here's a video from yesterday of us (sort of) having a dance party.


Dancing with a Doggo

This is my entry for week four of LJ Idol Minor+, with the topic "Happy." You can read the rest of the entries here: https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1107400.html

The Pony

One-handed, she leads you
across the twilit loam,
matching your loose gait.
You are gray as doves with
a mane of dried grass. She
is milk and treebark. Later
she will brush burrs
and pollen from your
flax; feed you grained
goodness and, sometimes
sing a lullaby. Though
you would call it a sweet
neighing, melodic
whinny calling you
to sleep's fields.

This is my entry for this week of therealljidol (LJ Idol Survivor). The topic this week is "You Shook Me."

As I punched in at the blue-plated metal time clock, Alistair* strode toward me with his long legs, intoning my name with a sing-song pitch that could turn anything into an insult. My skin crawled.

I slipped my time card back into its slot as quickly as I could, intent on slipping away to the dish room. But I wasn't quick enough. He stepped in front of me, asking me with a sneer what I'd done last night. It felt less like small talk than an accusation, and I didn't understand why. Something in his tone turned a simple question into an interrogation.

Alistair towered over me, his square jaw set in his long face, his limp brown hair falling in his eyes beneath the white dining hall cap. I wanted nothing more than to get away from him.

"Have fun in the dish room," he snarled after me as I scurried away. "I'll send some dirty trays your way." Alistair was a busser, which was a coveted position. Unlike the dish-room people, who were rooted to our spots and spent our shifts wearing plastic aprons that got splattered with other people's half-eaten food, he wore a clean white cloth apron and bustled about the dining hall, filling empty soda machines, and bringing clean racks of dishes and glasses from the dish room into the dining area as needed.

This evening, I was stationed in the dirty section, where we took trays from a conveyor belt, banged them over a trough, and placed them in racks to go through the automatic dish washer. Usually, I preferred the clean side, where you pulled the steamy-hot dishes off the automatic line and stacked them in rolling boxes to be delivered to the food line. Tonight, however, I was glad to be thumping dirty plates over a trough, because it meant I wouldn't have to deal with Alistair.

Whenever I was stacking clean plates, every time he passed through, he found a way to get in my face. He'd "accidentally" bump into me when my back was turned, so that I was in danger of dropping the heavy, stoneware plates and breaking them. While we didn't have to reimburse the dining hall for broken plates, we did have to immediately shut down the line and clean up the broken shards. Fortunately, I'd never dropped one, but that was no thanks to Alistair.

If he wasn't physically invading my space, he was staring me down with a predatorial gaze, throwing off a sneered comment, sometimes half-heard in the din. At least, when I was bullied in grade school, I'd had options. I could run away, or find a friend, or rush to class to sit in my safe assigned seat. But working here, I was locked into one location, designated by the manager to stay a sitting duck for the entire three-hour shift. And since the dish-stacking station was for a single worker, I didn't even have witnesses.

It had gotten to the point where I dreaded coming to work. Each time the weekly schedules came out, I frantically scanned them to see if Alistair was working with me. If he was, my stomach turned itself in knots for hours before I had to turn up. I thought about quitting.

One night, he was waiting for me outside the locker room, right after I changed for my shift. "Nice pants," he snarled, gesturing at my baggy red jersey pants, which I wore because I didn't care if they got covered with hamburger bits and salad dressing.

"Whatever," I threw back, walking briskly past him down the empty hall.

"Why are you walking so fast?" he asked. "Afraid of me?"

Yes, I realized. I felt a desperate need to put distance between myself and this man. My fellow co-workers had already gone upstairs to clock in. I'd been delayed because my locker wouldn't close right. Would anyone even hear me from down here in the basement, through the thick, brick walls and concrete slab floors?

As I picked up my pace, he did, too. My legs no match for his stride at walking pace, I began to run. He picked up the pace, too, and my heart sank into my stomach.

"Stop running!" he yelled. He was only a few steps behind me. In another few paces, he could have grabbed my arm.

As I turned a corner, I nearly bumped into Laurie from the Cook's Help station. We often worked together in Cook's Help at Saturday breakfast, where I got to work with food on the more appetizing side of the process. Even though Laurie and I didn't normally chat much, I cheerfully asked how she was doing. How was the Art History class that she loved to talk about? I steered her into conversation about the Renaissance period as we walked up the steps to the hallway behind the kitchen where the time clock resided. Frustrated, huffing loudly, Alistair ambled past us. He turned to throw me a glare as he passed.

I dallied with Laurie near the time clock, asking her if she'd be on shift Saturday, making chit-chat about the weather, until Alistair had no choice but to proceed to the Busser's closet to pick up his apron and check the clipboard for his tasks.

Dropping my card briskly into its slot, I called "See you later" to Laurie and walked with purpose down the hallway to the manager's office. Knocking on the light-wood frame of her open door, I asked, "Can I talk to you?"

Mrs. Hanlon++ had always intimidated me, with her no-nonsense attitude. Her ash-blonde, straight hair pulled into a long, shapeless ponytail, her large rounded glasses perched on her aquiline nose, always wearing a baggy suit in nondescript earth tones, Mrs. Hanlon clearly had no time for frivolity. Nothing so pointless as a smile ever crept across her thin lips, at least not in my months of being her employee.

"Yes?" she said, with the air of someone who had just been interrupted from something terribly important.

My hand trembling involuntarily, I took a deep breath and muttered quietly, "It's about Alistair."

Mrs. Hanlon's stern visage melted subtly, and I saw concern creep into her eyes. "What about Alistair?" she asked.

"He's -- he's been bothering me," I confessed.

Gracefully, she hopped to her feet, gesturing me to take a seat in the blocky wood upholstered chair in front of her desk, as she swept to the door and closed it with a quiet click.

Back in her seat, she said simply, "Tell me what happened."

The words tumbled out of my mouth: the threatening air he exuded, the way he hovered around me like a vengeful ghost. (In those days, I didn't know to call it stalking.) I ended the saga with, "I didn't know if I should say anything. He never threatened me, or made sexual jokes, or hurt me. I didn't know if it qualified as harassment."

She said simply, "It's harassment if it makes you feel uncomfortable." Reassuringly, she told me she'd take care of it. She promised me that he'd talk to him and that, if he ever did it again, she'd fire him on the spot.

I exhaled.

In the weeks after my talk with Mrs. Hanlon, our schedules changed. I rarely, if ever, got a shift that coincided with Alistair. When I did, he looked through me as if I didn't even exist, briskly walking past me, all business. I still got a sinking feeling in my stomach when I caught sight of him, but at least I knew I was no longer alone. Mrs. Hanlon had my back.

~~~

Though I rarely think of Alistair any more, I think of Mrs. Hanlon every time the issue of harassment surfaces. I've repeated her words to many people who may have needed to hear them: "If you feel uncomfortable, it's harassment." And while my memories of the exact details of what Alistair said and did to me have faded like a long-ago scraped knee, I can remember the exact quality of light in Mrs. Hanlon's office that afternoon. I can remember exactly what she was wearing and how her face softened, looking at young adult me, a little wavy-haired 19-year-old, trembling in the late afternoon golden sun through her many large windows.

Because of Mrs. Hanlon, the moment that shook me did not break me but only shored up my foundations.


*Not his real name

++ Not her real name

Me participating in the Penn State Monty Python Society's Mall Climb in the spring of 1990 with (left) Damon Buckwalter and (right) Pete Uoth. I don't have a lot of pictures handy from the time this story took place, so it's sort of ironic that the one I do have shows me loosely tied to Pete. I assure you, though, it was consensual, and he and I were just friends. You can see he carefully kept his hands in his pockets.

Findlay Commons at Penn State in 2012, before renovation. It looked like this when I worked there in the late 1980s to early 1990s.

This is my entry for therealljidol. This week's topic is "Uncomfortably Numb."

At my age, sleeping is an extreme sport. I have woken up with neck pain, shoulder pain and, once, a literal pain in my butt. While I was sleeping, I must have been doing deadlifts.

Not too long ago, my arm and hand tingled when I awoke. As a side sleeper, I'd experienced that before, usually with sensation returning within minutes. (Which makes it OK, right?) This time, someone had hit my hand's "off" button: my hand stayed numb, with little pinpricks of sensation, for much of the day.

I did what everyone does when they face an odd malady: I Googled it. Through this stellar research, I discovered that I must be suffering a heart attack or about to lose my arm to diabetes. After panicking for a relatively short time (not being a champion panicker like I am now), I told myself it's usually a horse, not a zebra. And most definitely not a unicorn. I called my dad. As an osteopath, Dad used his expertise to ask me weed-out questions for the most serious diagnoses. He then surmised the most likely scenario: my sleep position had pinched a nerve. His recommendation was to look for a more supportive pillow.

The situation was soon resolved by buying an ergonomic pillow with its own carrying case, which goes everywhere with me now and probably should be given a name (feel free to offer suggestions in the comments). Foolishly, I forgot to write it off as a business expense, considering that it made it possible for me to type again. You don't get very far in the transcription business without being able to type.

If only my other age-related ailments could be solved so easily.

Hot flashes, for instance, feel like someone continually monkeying with my internal thermostat. I go to bed shivering in the chill night air, but then three hours later, I'm throwing off the covers, flushed and panting, like a dog on a summer sidewalk. Really, there's not much you can do about this except to dress in layers.

My hot flashes, however, turned out to be a hidden super power. The last time we met with my sister's family for a group activity, an eon ago in December 2019, we strolled through bitter cold to view the Christmas lights at Longwood Gardens. As we took in the fairyland of trees wrapped in brilliantly bright colors, my sister clapped her gloved hands together and the little ones complained about cold toes. I, on the other hand, had a spring in my step, buoyed by the toasty waves of menopausal hormones. I even unzipped my coat.

While carrying an unreliable furnace inside my chest may occasionally prove useful, I can't find the bright side to my new propensity for injury. Somehow, actions that, in younger years, would barely have left a bruise now lay me up for a week, or months, with debilitating pain. In my late 20s, I took a spill on ice-covered marble steps, my feet flying forward as I fell in a nearly perfect backfall, arms stretched out at my sides. After that outrageous mishap, I walked away with a slightly bruised hamstring and a bit of a stiff neck. I think I went jogging later.

Compare that to eighteen months ago, when I looked the wrong way while walking, stepped on uneven pavement, and twisted my knee with a "pop." Yes, you read that right. I actually injured myself by stepping on a sidewalk crack. (Perhaps all those years of avoiding them as a kid were not in vain.) While my knee has returned to full strength, these many months later it still twinges sometimes, to remind me how foolish I was to think that I can engage in such risky behavior as looking at things while walking.

I lifted a laundry basket wrong and tweaked an obscure muscle in my elbow more than a year ago, and the pain persists, like a boring guest who won't take a hint. Until I did that, I had no idea there was a wrong way to pick up a laundry basket.

The magic of aging is that you learn so much, like there is a wrong way to do everything. For heaven's sake, I threw out my back once by bending over to pick up my beloved ergonomic pillow. Turns out you can even do that wrong.

Or perhaps my hand was getting revenge, because now that I have feeling in it again, I make it do ridiculous things like writing more than 750 words of nonsense about growing older.

---

I don't often include an explanation of why I went a particular direction with the topic. This week, I sought ideas from friends on social media, and many of them talked about feeling numb in the face of all the stress and fear we're all facing these days. I thought about that, and I even contemplated going in that direction. Then I remembered what has helped me deal with stress throughout the pandemic, and that has been humor. I binged on "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" and then flew through "Schitt's Creek," feeling carefree and even joyous. Watching those cheerful, ridiculous stories about other people, facing their own troubles with laughter and love, I felt better. So whether or not I succeeded in making you laugh out loud, hopefully, reading this piece helped you in some way. And I'm not just saying that to get you to vote for me. (Unless it worked.)

This is my entry for LJ Idol (http://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org) for this week. The topic is "When It Rains, It Pours."

My car started it. A few days ago, I had bundled up and headed out to run errands, my head full of mist. Grabbing my scraper out of the back seat, I begrudgingly slid on the gloves I keep in my coat pockets. Before I could start with the back window, though, I noticed that my car, Photon, a.k.a. Ford Vader, had gifted me with a work of art.

Delicate arches scalloped Ford Vader's roof, as if someone had taken a palette knife and created a layered texture of silver rainbows. I stood and appreciated it for a moment before clearing off the windows.

Silvery frost arches on Ford Vader's roof

Next to jump in the game was my Christmas tree: specifically, one of the Martha Stewart ornaments we'd bought when we moved into our apartment a few years ago. It had been our first year with enough room to display a tree, and apart from scattered ornaments I'd received as gifts over the years, we had nothing to hang. This set of classic balls with gold glitter reminded me of the glass bulbs my mom had when I was growing up. She insisted we hang them at the top of the tree so that errant cats wouldn't get curious, bat at them, and break them.

I was in the middle of my exercise routine, jumping in time to the music, when I saw the tree twinkling to the beat. Did I have my own personal light show? After a moment, I figured out the clever game. The ornament swung back and forth as my feet hit the floor, obscuring and then displaying the light behind it. Hence, the strobe light. Well played, ornament. Subtle but evocative.

My tree in between light shows

Then my dish washer found its voice, playing a little musique mechanique as it did its work. Along with the steady, circular whooshing rhythm rang a leit motif of tingling sounds. If you could play the glass organ and combine it with the comforting sounds of the womb, you'd create the sort of music my dishwasher casually tossed into the apartment. Another masterpiece.

I wish I had a recording, but you can get a good approximation of the performance by combining the following videos:

A Street Performer Plays Harry Potter's Theme on Glass Harp

Dishwasher Sounds like Womb

As if this wasn't enough, then I was completely outdone, in my own chosen medium, no less. That is to say that Google Home wrote me a poem.

Yesterday, I was putting together a shopping list for my weekly outing to the grocery store, nearly the only place I go these days. I added "candy canes," but then I continued talking to my son, telling him why I was getting candy canes to go with the hot chocolate. Because you can use them to stir the hot, delicious drink, I told him, and it adds just a little bit of mint. Or, you can hang them over the side of your cup and let them slowly melt into the chocolate. Mmm.

Google Home was still listening. "OK, I've added those four things," it announced.

What?

I checked my shopping list, only to laugh out loud with delight at the brilliant poem Google Home had composed from my mutterings.

the edge of your of your cup
then you can
stir your hot chocolate
thin as a little man
candy canes
hot chocolate

Google Home's shopping list poem

Finally, I threw up my hands in exasperation. Are you all completely done now? How is it fair that all of you have creative ideas to share, and I have absolutely none? Fine. You can write my entry.

---

The title "Musique Mechanique" was borrowed from the Carla Bley Band track of the same name, which doesn't sound at all like my dishwasher's music, but can be found here: "Music Mechanique" by Carla Bley Band

ETA: Finally got a recording of the dishwasher music! Dishwasher music