Seamo the Nine-Fingered

There’s something about one’s home airport that’s hard to explain. At least if you travel enough, there’s a kind of comfort that comes to be associated with the airport you know best. Airports at their best aren’t generally pleasant spaces, and by most lights DIA in particular is sort of an abomination; vast, strange, awkwardly placed miles from the city, hard to get around quickly. Still, for me, it feels like my living room. I know where everything is. I know which bathrooms are likely to be clean and not crowded, where you can get coffee at 3am, how long I need to get to whatever concourse I need to reach. I have, if I’m honest, a weird affection for it.

There’s no stress, is the thing. I may or may not be happy about where I’m going (and since I travel for work, I rarely am) but the airport itself is a place where I can almost decompress before I have to fly; something I appreciate. This is made more true by the knowledge that when I get where I’m going, the contrast will always be stark. I don’t really know my way, for example, around the airport in Atlanta. I’ll figure it out, but this will take effort. I’ll have to have my head up, pay attention to the signage and concentrate. I don’t like having to do that. It makes me feel like a rube, even though I realize that it’s just part and parcel of the whole experience. At DIA, by contrast, I don’t have to look at anything. I put on headphones the moment I arrive and tune out everything happening around me. It’s peaceful.

It’s a little after four in the morning on a Thursday, and I’m off for a quick but demanding, one-day trip to see a couple of clients. At least one of those is an impossible situation: I’ve been dispatched to try and navigate a technical integration that I already know is basically impossible. I mean, it’s software, so almost nothing is absolutely impossible, but it will be expensive and cumbersome to such a degree that I simply can’t see it actually happening. The sales guy in charge of the account is unable, for reasons of financial fantasy, to accept this, and stares off dreamily into space every time I bring it up. If that meeting were the only reason for the trip, I wouldn’t have gone, but since I had to travel this week anyway I reluctantly agreed to go preside over what I already know will be an embarrassing cluster. But, in its way, that’s alright. There’s a skill set involved in handling that kind of crap and I need to keep it sharp. Cynicism all around, but off I go.

My only really substantive complaint is that I’m struggling a bit to type, having lost most of the use of my right forefinger last night. This is because I was obliged to attend a corporate happy hour, where I was obliged to bowl. Now I hate bowling and don’t do it well at all, so somewhere in my awkward striving I managed to fairly seriously strain a tendon in my finger which, because of this, doesn’t really work anymore.

The corporate happy hour is an idiotic construct that needs to be stopped. The logic behind it, in essence, is this: in the working world, the only meaningful reward that anyone can imagine for one’s labor is the freedom to drink. If one is successful and works hard, one gets to drink in many different places, and if one really achieves success, once a year or so you can go to a beach and drink for an entire week. When it’s time for a team to be “rewarded”, the company in question ponies up a few dollars and buys said team some drinks at a bar. The team gets alcohol that they don’t have to pay for, and gets to spend a couple extra hours with people they’ve already been forced to spend an entire day with.

This is idiotic on several layers. First, most of the team is drinking quite a bit anyway, simply as a means of numbing the pain of their thoroughly unrealized lives. So adding a few bucks worth of free booze to the pile isn’t really improving anyone’s life. Second, at the point that I’ve got to go to one of these things, I’ve already spent a full day interacting with a group of people with whom, left to my own devices, I probably wouldn’t really spend any time at all. I long ago gave up on the whole “team building” aspect of the ritual as well. All this means is that with enough lubrication, most people will eventually do or say something regrettable, likely involving the disclosure of improper personal information. In this way, we say that we now “know” our teammates better than we did, and try to convince ourselves that this somehow makes the group more effective as a whole. It doesn’t, however. It just means that we’ll all be slightly more uncomfortable with one another, sober, than we already were.

But, if corporate America is good at anything, it’s the unquestioned upholding and mindless repetition of pointless rituals, destructive habits and threadbare tropes. Thus, in the name of team cohesion, I have to go twist my finger halfway off, drinking beer I don’t like in a bar I don’t care for, while practicing a sport that I despise. Landing me here, now, typing up my reactions with nine fingers. But at least, at the ass-end of Concourse C, I’m at home.

Pain is beauty; Beauty is pain

As I hurry as fast as my heels allow me, down Larimer Square to my first of three classes today, a woman opening up a fashionable boutiquey clothing and accessories shop calls out to my departing back, “Really cute skirt!”

Huh.
“Thank you!” I reply over my shoulder, even as I feel my underwear sag down to a level that would make a teenaged gang member blush if it were his jeans. Should have bought a medium.

I need to get insoles for these shoes, too, as I have worn them down to painful levels inside the already-used-when-I-bought them structure of each. Particularly the right one; I must favor my dominant foot as I walk.

Later, to rest my feet and decompress before traveling up to Longmont for class two of three, I sit at the aesthetically pleasing speakeasy style bar near the bus terminal. Bartender Adrian, smooth as butter, remembers my name and my order. I pray my debit card won’t get declined as I get as comfortable as (what I’m assuming are) menstrual cramps allow, for to read with a professor’s eye the new section of Seamus’ book.

I am interrupted by a young man with a stylish haircut, asking me how I am.
See, this is something that doesn’t often occur to men when they go sit at a bar alone, methinks. The moment this young man asks how I am, I know that he’s going to begin chatting me up, and that he’s chatting me up because he’s hitting on me. Sure, he may be a naturally friendly guy, but as a woman in this culture, wearing a skirt that falls a certain way around my long, lean legs as I sit, I know he’s not just making friendly conversation, even as he remarks he’s seen me here before and asks if I work nearby. My belly twinges, and I wince, tearing my eyes away from my tiny phone screen, where waits the ascerbic wit of my beloved.

I’m not in a social mood–I came here to decompress, not fend off the attentions of an amiable young crane operator named Floyd (I soon find out, as I don’t have the heart to tell him to fuck off. He doesn’t deserve that, I don’t think, and to be fair, I’m not wearing a ring on my wedding finger as I often do when I want to appear “taken.” But still. More things a man wouldn’t necessarily have to worry about, or even would cross his mind in most cases: the safety protocol of needing to appear already claimed).

Dear little Floyd lives in Vegas but work in his field is mostly here in Denver, he says. I believe him, judging from all the construction all over here, all the time. He’s impressed by my profession (though I aver he makes a lot more money than me), and declares English was the only subject he was good at and enjoyed in school. Dropped out in 7th grade, did Floyd. I tell him that school isn’t for everybody.

This is actually something I really do believe in: academia isn’t for everyone, and the morphing of universities into trade schools, college degrees into required job credentials, irks me royally. There’s job skills training, and there’s education. Not saying that ne’er the twain should meet (hopefully they do meet, and even share nodes or bridges), but they ain’t the same thing. More and more, though, I feel like I’m the only one who thinks this.

However, I don’t bother telling Floyd that anyone short of an uber-intellectual is not going to get the romantic time of day from me, let alone the fact that nobody but Seamus will be getting any sort of attention in that vein ever again to begin with, and so the point is double moot, and his manly efforts doubly futile.

But I’m too tired to pull the social gymnastics all women learn to do (at a younger age than you might think): the I Have A Boyfriend deflection. Floyd won’t take the hint that I’m absorbed in my phone, but I’m done w my coffee-beer anyway and my bus comes soon enough. I make my exit.

I feel a bit guilty that I’ve allowed wee Floyd to, with slumped disappointed shoulders, watch me walk away and fantasize what destiny will do for him next time he runs into me there, but only a bit. It’s not my problem, and I’m still in a little physical pain plus a grandiose depression hangover and so I truly don’t have the extra energy to care.

Cheers, Floyd. May your crane operating bring you prosperity. I’m off to attempt to teach critical thinking to a group of people who’ve never read a book all the way through.

All’s fair and etc., right?

Pocket(s of) Monsters

I write this post, rather against our premise, not in a parallel bar, but….perpendicular?

Ever since Seamus’ Return From Exile, then our subsequent evisceration of and reconciliation with each other, until now, as we begin to experience something resembling getting to know what it means to be Us, Seamus has been enjoying custody of me whenever he’s not enjoying custody of his children. Part of me feels bad about this: the poor dear gets precious little time truly all to himself, but. He does insist. And I treasure each Pocket of Cohabitation I can get at this point, both of us living alone still, in cities an hour away by car, near two by public transportation.

So, point is: we’re together today, Sunday, as we have been all weekend, starting with Thursday evening. A big Pocket. Gives me a small modicum of an idea what One Household To Rule Them All may one day be like. Wee snippets, as I don’t like fantasizing further, knowing nothing ever turns out as imagined or planned. Our parallel universe of Relationship 1.0 crashed and burned into twisted wreckage, and I like to think I’ve learned my lesson, natural daydreamer though I am. So I enjoy the Pockets as they are, and gaze only blurrily down that path into a future where life is all one Pocket.

It’s fun to go on dates together (like that fantastic concert the other day that maybe he’ll write about), but almost nicer is day to day stuff like grading on his couch while he’s at the gym, wine and deep thoughts after a homecooked dinner, living room massage turning into sex…(well, maybe not that last one; sex isn’t “normal” nor “everyday” for us, after all. I don’t mean in terms of frequency; in terms of everyday-ness. As opposed to the two-word meaning “every day.” But I digress).

Sitting perpendicular to Seamus at the short end of the bar, I look up at two people (a couple?) sitting at the normal-height bar just across from Seamus and I as he pores over my book on revision, and I muse:

The man is blond and horribly obese: cheek to jowl, a rosy pink tire ballooning out from where his chin should be. Just watched him shovel a burger in his pouchy mouth.
She has dyed dark hair and a sharp nose: looks more “normal” sized, but as I look, I see she’s got three chins herself.
After eating his sandwich, the blond man looks red-faced, exhausted. They both seem bored with each other, though her plucked eyebrows make her appearance a frowning one.

I look over at Seamus and his lean, strong, inked self radiates. We were just talking about what it means to be “hungry”; that lean wolf version of it: the active predatory energy we both get when engaged in life, still hungry for more. We had just been discussing the corporate ideal: you work only enough that you get the reward of drinking a lot of alcoholic sugar for a week in a tropical place. Sitting there in a chair outside in the sun, doing nothing but drinking things with umbrellas stuck in. For a whole week.
Which sounds like hell to both Seamus and me. Which explains a lot. I think.

Seamus had also mentioned that he noticed I appreciate the entire mess that is him, not just a couple select bits, and then try to force the rest into a pigeonhole. But I want, and like, and appreciate the entire angel, shadow, monster. Man.

That very pigeonholing is what both of us are emerging and escaping from our previous marriages, and each of us celebrating the other fully is both terrifying and gratifying. Embracing the complete monster that both of us are. I explained to him something nearing my true feelings of comfort whilst in a Pocket of Cohabitation, and we both chuckled at the fact that I indeed find deep comfort in being in intimate relations with such a dangerous person. Not sure what it means, that lean, inked, savagely smart, and hungry makes me feel comforted, but.
Wait. Did I just describe myself, or Seamus?

Makes me think of what I’ve come to call the Three Month Intimacy, which is the emotional and social rhythm I was forced into, coming into adulthood in the theatre as I have. But that’s an explanation for another day, and anyway: there’s Seamus’ book to be discussed, his hand to hold and tug on like the kite string it is, and it’s nice to sit at the bar and look into his eyes, while I’m here, still perpendicular.