She's Writing a Novel

The first day of wearing a brand-new white cotton oxford shirt is bliss. The fabric is still stiff and spotless. The buttons are still firmly sewn on -- every one of them. It is the very essence of clean.

It's a little bit like slipping into the perfect white sheets of a hotel bed. So luxurious and yet...sterile. Not quite me, not quite mine. Yet there is an immediate tactile satisfaction from donning something so unsullied.

White oxford shirts are not something you want to "break in." You want it to stay that way forever - a clean slate, a flawless canvas. Jeans and sweaters....those get better with time, and with being borrowed and abused and washed endlessly.
But white oxford shirts just become...depressed with time. The glistening white develops a dinge. The threads begin their slow unraveling, the buttons their breaks for freedom. Hints of pit stains refuse to come clean, and a small coffee stain makes a permanant presense. The fabric grows tired and limp. No longer perky and paper white, the saggy oxford now has all the appeal of old dishwater. And then even its collars and cuffs curl in on themselves as though dying, withering under the touch of a hot iron, and it can no longer be counted on to reliably add a touch of class under winter sweaters. It's all over for the white oxford then, and it's into the trash with it.

But a new white cotton oxford soon takes its place, and so it goes.

The Russian lover has been teaching me to play tennis this summer.

Before we started, I had a vision of myself learning to play tennis. It was not unlike a vision of myself being attacked by a swarm of bees. Racket in hand, swinging wildly at the air, fending off things flying at my head. Given my history of athletic reticence, this was a realistic expectation.

It went better than that, but not by much. Apparently somewhere on the long list of his life accomplishments, talents, and miscellania of things he can do better than most people, is the fact that the Russian lover was a world-ranked amateur tennis player in his teens. Oh excellent, I thought. Either I have just found myself the kind of tennis coach I could never afford, or I have just provided my boyfriend with a whole new demonstration of fail.

But tennis is a prerequisite in any social climber's course of study, and I knew I should learn it eventually. And besides, I was excited to learn a sport that was NOT a team sport. More like a dual than anything else, I figured tennis was a sport I could actually enjoy. Then I remembered that, like nearly all sports, tennis involves a ball. Coming at you.

Something about a ball on a trajectory for my body drains all thought from my mind, and instinct takes over. Then my only objective is to avoid the ball, avoid the ball...don't try to hit it, might make it angry...

It's so shameful, to be that stereotype of a girl who cringes and ducks and flails. At some point since my childhood, I became The Girl Who is Afraid of the Ball. Instead of demonstrating fierce athletic prowress, I go all damsel in distress. It doesn't make for successful tennis playing.

Slowly, however, I started getting past that mental block. Being forced to concentrate on successfully hitting the ball, I forgot that I'd generally prefer to just avoid it.

And now? Now the ball is my bitch.

Last night I dreamt that I was hiking in the woods with some friends, when we came across a camp. My companions and I explored it for awhile before we came across a pavillion where people were gathered. The children there were milling around, and I struck up a conversation with some of the adults. It turned out to be a Christian camp, not unlike the camp I attended as a child. I was talking to a man from Africa; he was older, and a little bit sad. And he started to talk about what had happened to his home continent over the past few decades:
"Then, the people in Africa started getting enough to eat. No one was hungry, and the children did not die. They went to schools, because there were many schools. And we had doctors and hospitals and there were not so many diseases anymore. Now, most Africans are living long and happy lives."
And I thought, this is incredible, this is amazing, it seems like just yesterday when celebrities were buying African babies as part of their charity cause du jour, and now Africa is a continent of thriving first-world nations. But his face was dejected as he continued:
"The African people believed in God when they were starving. Now that they are not sick and dying and they have food to eat, they no longer need God. It was better when they lived in poverty, because then they had amazing faith in God."
I became indignant and enraged. My hands gestured wildly and I was shouting into his face:
"How dare you say that! How dare you suggest that it is better for people to starve and die, if that is what preserves their belief in the supernatural! How dare you suggest that poverty is anything good! This God did not see fit to save these people from their poverty for so many centuries, and now that they -- they themselves, and not God -- have pulled themselves up to live healthy and full lives, you would say that this is worse than the days when they watched their children die of AIDS. You are pathetic and inhuman to think such a thing!" I continued berating him as the other people watched in a stunned silence before I stormed back out into the woods.

And then I woke up.

Remember photo albums? Remember when you just put pictures in a book and that was enough?

Apparently, it's not. There's this trend called "scrapbooking," which I have been oblivious to - mostly because I didn't get married at 20 and pop out kids; young married moms and older married housewives are the main devotees of this hobby. Apparently, the more intrinsically uneventful your life is, the more fastidiously and ornately you memorialize it.

In a scrap book, you don't just put your photos in. Oh no. There are brightly colored pages, and stickers with pictures and lettering. So, say you have a picture of your child's birthday. You put the photo on the page. Then you stencil the words "Happy Birthday Son!" across the page, and plaster on some stickers of presents and cake, and maybe you glue in a paper napkin or some wrapping paper from the party for good measure. Now you have a whole birthday collage, a vibrant and exciting theme. This livens up the dullness of the photographs because really, what's so interesting about those that they could stand on their own?

This phenomenon of scrapbooking has indicated one thing to me: People take really shitty pictures. Instead of taking good pictures that are interesting to look at, they throw lots of color and glitter on the page and hope you won't notice how boring, badly composed, and otherwise substandard their photographs are. Not unlike a fat woman wearing fuschia -- the goal is distraction.

My personal feeling is that if you have the time to stencil, paste, and decorate an album...maybe, just maybe, you have the time to learn how to photograph. But then again, maybe these people are like the fat lady in fuschia, and would rather just wear really bright colors than make the effort to get on a treadmill. Oh hell, these people ARE fat ladies in fuschia.

It all makes sense to me now...