The Latest Improvement to the Quality of My Life in Hauwekan County

I've been pedaling to work the past few weeks. I couldn't afford to fill my tank last time at the pump, so I decided to just make it last. I car up to Cabin Run Park--about halfway--and cycle up through the woods to the Clover Hunt subdivision and connect up with Knotts Road where it widens to four lanes. From there it's probably only a couple miles to work. Somehow, I get there in the same time it takes to drive the whole way.

It's on a bike that I'm most comfortable and assertive. I take the road I need and cars be damned. Front and center in the right lane at the red light at Knotts and Broad yesterday the car behind me sounded his horn, just a little toot. I ignored it. Another toot. Ignored it. Then, a protracted blast. Resisting the strong impulse to signal upwards with a long finger, I compromised with my pride and half turned my head--enough to recognize a dark blue Bimmer--and said, not loudly, but with clear and readable lip formation, "Fuck off!" I braced for a nudge. What I got was, "I'd like to make a right turn," almost entreating. Despite the apparent politeness, my hackles remained bristling, and I replied, with much less comparative civility, "I'm a car, idiot!" When the light turned I half expected (and hoped) to be followed, but was disappointed (and relieved).

My trip up through the woods is pleasant but too short. All of the parking is on the north side of the park, and just a sliver of the park remains on the north side of the only road in. North is the direction to work from here, so I'm in the woods for only a few minutes. Lately, though, I've tried to lenghten my stay there by parking in a closer lot (across the road from the new "recreation center," billing itself as "THE LATEST IMPROVEMENT TO THE QUALITY OF LIFE IN HAUWEKAN COUNTY"--an ironic claim at best, considering it's a wildlife graveyard of blacktop and metal covering several acres) and meeting the trail at an earlier point, but the only thing that ever lengthened my stay in the woods and mitigated my pleasure amidst its beauty was increased along with the distance: Pedestrians. The asphalt trail, about six feet wide, is, understandably, a favorite exercise venue for the folks living around there, and morning apparently the favorite time to be on it. That's just the way it is, of course, but polite philosophy does not temper my annoyance at having to slow down and announce my presence upon my approach from behind in order to pass, or make me feel any friendlier toward the walkers facing me who respond to my "Good morning!" with a tight mouth and squinting glare, as to an interloper or an unwanted new technology.

So I took to the dirt trails that web the park, rutty, rooty, meandering paths never more than a foot wide, rarlely in a straight line and searched for my Northwest Passage. I haven't found it yet. Stottering over roots, twisting around trees, always somehow going too fast and braking too much, I haven't emerged onto the asphalt in the same place twice, coming or going, likely because the immediate object of my attention seems always to be just a few feet in front of my wheel. I've added five minutes to my ride, and haven't had to excuse myself or expose myself to snobbery. I love it.

Take It, It's Mine

I have a problem: With this new position I don't how well I'll be able to maintain my lifestyle. For four years I've made do with no more than 15K a year, but it's because I've had to. I'm naturally thrifty and very good at not buying things I don't need, and without the money to spend I've raised thrift to an art form. I've simplified my life, but simplicity was thrust upon me. Divorce chased sudden unemployment, and I was soon paying rent to the tune of twice what I'd been paying on a mortgage of which I was only half responsible. Forced though it was, simplicity was a desirable state. I'd been trying for years, probably all my life when I think about it. Thrift, I've found, is relative. I made two-and-a-half times the amount of money I make now. I ate out maybe once a week, bought about a book a month, and rented a couple movies each week. I didn't think about the bills, because I didn't write the checks. I knew we had the money--it's all I needed to know. That's extravagance now.

It's been exciting to not know how I'd make the month's bills, and more exciting to pull it off. It's survival. That will soon no longer be a challenge, and I will honestly welcome it, but where will I find the challenge? For I find I need it. I think of the things I'll be able to do again and fear they'll be too easy to take for granted. When I need something at the store will I hop on the bike or in the car? Will I always buy my toothpaste, soap and shave cream from the dollar store? or will I think, "Oh, it's only a couple of bucks"? How close am I to getting a cell phone, a computer less than eight years old, broadband and HDTV? But to ask those questions is to acknowledge my commitment to this lifestyle. The money is simply a freedom, a freedom to live this way without the stress. Yet without the stress what is the quality of my survival? I don't want what everyone else has. I want what I need. If it's too easy to get what I need, how do I make my life worth something? Comfort--how much comfort can I stand before I roar and shred it to useless bits? How I've always hated security! How I've always craved it. Am I pushing away what I deserve? Am I just the animal I say I am?

My Soul to Keep

Paul told me he got my position approved and that he'll be ready to send it to HR Monday to have it posted. He said I, Tara, and he will have to get together then. I don't know why, what the meeting will be about. I suppose there's some strange etiquette involved in posting a job you already have filled. You have to interview, but how does an interviewer ethically waste his and an applicant's time going through the motions. I feel uneasy about it, though not so much so as to give up the ruse. I will still feel somewhat dishonest about it, but will anything dishonest have been done? I've worked hard the past four years, trying to find my place in the work-world, taken many a part-time or temporary job, scrimped to a virtually ascetic degree, and now I'm having a job handed to me. I should accept that this is what I deserve, but I've worked so hard for so long for so little that I'd just about taken this life for granted. After all, I've deserved it before now. I suppose this is what I've been working toward all along. All these damned interviews, and I get the job by doing it. That's how I always get the job. The last time an interview actually landed me the job was my first one, as a prospective stockboy. I've had my last interview, unless I have to do one for appearance's sake for this, my last ever, job. It's too late to rescind my Kilmartin application. I'll be getting a call from Lois next week, likely. I'll be glad to tell her I'm not interested. I've imagined her asking, "May I ask why you're no longer interested?" and me answering, "You're as free to ask as I am to not answer." Believe me, that's the best I can say. She doesn't really want the truth--that I don't intend to slough off flakes of my soul into a jar on her desk for her to stir into her coffee until I'm just a Stepford shell of a human being. Hell, even if I told her that, though she might be offended she wouldn't take it to heart as a symptom so much of her behavior as my attitude. Her kind of neurosis didn't get where it is today without buliding up a mighty callous of denial. It wouldn't be worth my effort to add another layer.

Nature Abhors Kilmartin

Lois wasn't at Kilmartin, but she was there. The place reeked of her, from the timid, suspicious employees to the books packed tighter on the shelves than the stick up the library's ass. A great, smothering Lois blanket. A personality vacuum. By the time I was done with that boring day I was exhausted, starved for humanity.

The Kilmartin staff ranged from annoying to grotesque with a ltttle nice thrown in. I encountered the grotesque first. Katie, the branch manager, strode toward me leaning back, right arm stick straight, hand like a cleaver pointing at me, as with a foil, preparing for duel. I couldn't tell if her shoulders were padded by her blouse or surgically augmented with half a broomstick. The closer she got the more pronounced the grotesquerie: Her face was skinless, covered entirely with flesh-colored spackling; when she spoke it was without the least genuineness, betrayed by the intonation of a local newscaster appallingly but obliviously misapprehending what she's reading. My repulsion, which could not have been writ more boldly across my face, she didn't read at all. She introduced me to everyone except the reference librarian, even though he interrupted our tour of the facilities to let her know one of the maintenance guys was in the mechanical room.

Christie showed me the RFID setup. It wasn't rocket science. I didn't have trouble with it all day, but I couldn't tell that it was any more efficient than the old way, except that relatively fewer patrons came to the desk to check out, preferring instead to use the self-check. Christie was okay--not on the annoying end of the scale, and cutish in an artsy way--though every time our eyes met she would say, "Hi," with a tiny forced smile. So I tried not to make eye contact, though I looked at her at every opportunity. She was several inches shorter than I, but her hands seemed larger than my own, and were somewhat beaten, rough and a bit scarred, the skin shiny but creased, like chair leather.

Cheryl was the annoying one. Around me, she seemed to think that I cared about everything she was doing, and would rationalize every one of her actions. I couldn't have cared less about anything she was doing, especially after she expressed shock over my not flipping through each book before I discharged it.

On the circulation desk there were no chairs, and reading was not allowed (books, books everywhere! and not a word to read!), both contrary to what I'm used to, and the desk shifts were ninety minutes long, not sixty as at my branch. I paced along the padded padded mat from one terminal to the other; I poked in the drawers, but everything was so geometrically aligned I was afraid to touch anything; I perused what slivers of sky I could see through the skylights. I did one card registration, wondering all the while what Lois would find wrong with it.

Shelving and shelf-reading were supposed to be done concurrently, not discretely. I shelf-read the shelves on which I placed books, and hoped that that was what was meant, because I wasn't going to do any more than that, opting to get all the books on the shelf with which I came out on the floor. All of the bookends were shoved so hard against the books that it was difficult to squeeze a book in or pull one out, despite the room on the shelf.

I could not get out of there soon enough, and was probably the first one to the car though I was parked much the furthest away. I was already regretting I'd applied for the position there.

Lo(is)(,) Me

Applied for a full-time position at the Kilmartin branch. I was reluctant to do so. Much as this position is what I've been aching for for years, I don't want to work with Lois again. Life's too short to spend any time under the thumb of an OCD freak, and my life was shortened well beyond the three years I spent walking on eggshells for her at my first library job. Tight as a drum, she had to have everyone else around her at the same brittle pitch. I was always relieved to not see her decrepit two-tone (three, if you count the rust) Broncosaurus when I drove in after school. And the sight of her puckered matchstick head, the dirt-brown hair painted on skin of ruddy transluscence, set on a cadaverous frame inverted my sphincter and whacked my nuts around a tetherball pole. No, I don't want to work for her again.

But I have to have that job. I all but dream about it. Going to movies or out to eat--they seem like rich-people things to do, and have for four years. All that time without health insurance, too. I sometimes wonder how I have survived the continuous stress of timing my bills to meet my paychecks, praying my car doesn't break down. And now the perennial rent-rise is higher than ever while my pay remains serfish. I see getting this job as an almost orgasmic catharsis, the Dutch boy pulling his thumb out of the dike and replacing it with a stick of lit dynamite.

Friday I'm going to be working over at Kilmartin just to help out while Lois is on vacation. Tara arranged it. She didn't say so, but I think she intends it to be some kind of showcase of my talents meant to give me a leg up on the competition. Then Paul told me in confidence yesterday that the hiring is about to begin for the new branch due open next summer, and that he's lobbying for the first opening to be the one he's promised me, the equivalent of the Kilmartin job. The opening seemed so far away that I thought I'd just hang on at Kilmartin (provided Lois would hire me) until the new branch opened, then crawl over to the new place with what's left of my sanity, but it certainly would be nice to skip that middle and last part and start my new position where I am and make the move to the new place with everybody else. Because Lois is away, she won't be getting to hiring over there till the end of June, which happens to be the time frame Paul gave me for hiring me on fulltime where I am (or at least letting me know more definitely what's going on about it).

285

The White Hour is 285 pages long. At first it seemed like all I had was three and five--thirds and fifths--to work with. Then three and five led me to 15; 15 to 19 and 285. 19 is one fifteenth; 15, one nineteenth; 57, one fifth; 95, one third. I could measure my progress through the pages in any number of ways: On page 93 I would be 27 ninety-fifths--a thick, brutish fraction (four numerals and still nowhere near whole)--through the book, yet two pages later be a clean, combed one third on my way. I can never be halfway through the book, but at page 150 I can be 10 nineteenths; at 152, eight fifteenths; at 145, 29 fifty-sevenths; and at 141, 47 ninety-fiths. A number of many faces and strong, independent character, 285 has chosen compatriots of distinction.

Mr. Deeps?

Mr. Peeps is reading The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner. Yesterday he came in earlier than usual, maybe anticipating the warm day, wearing a baseball cap for the first time and a dirty slate-gray polo. He pulled a book from Fiction, the same one as on every previous visit for the past two weeks, and parked himself in Young Adult, whence he could get a clear shot of the entrance without being seen from the circ desk because of the newspaper shelf in between. At noon he left, leaving the book behind on the end table beside the chair. Julie and I both were curious about the book, and I volunteered immediately and wordlessly to go see what it was. Tara and Julie seemed surprised at Mr. Peeps' choice of reading, but, moreso, disappointed: This somehow made him more of a real, thinking human being,; a little more sympathetic than just pathetic. None of us want that. We want him to be a conscienceless, amoral villain. Moreover, I want him to be less like me. He came back a half-hour later in a pink polo but still in the ball cap.

Today Mr. Peeps didn't come in. Every now and then Paul would make a sweep of the library, peering down each aisle, eyes slitted. I'm sure Mary told him. Paul would be just the guy to confront him and give him every reason to yell, "Harassment!" Peeps missed a good show, though. Multitudes of pulchritude. I know, horny as I am right now, that my standards of beauty broaden every day, but today's display would have held up to my highest, most sated standards, if only for showing more skin. I'm glad Peeps wasn't in, I wanted that show to myself and I didn't want to be reminded of who I might be. The book reminded me well enough.