The Norm of Evil

I told my neighbor once that I want to be Kathleen when I grow up. “Oh really!” He said, looking at me sideways. Though we love her, she has a reputation for being — mean. Kathleen’s old, 87, and lives two floors down from me. She never married and rides her bike everyday. I gave her the bike helmet my dad bought me fifteen years ago. I was too vain to wear it. She still uses it. She’s feisty, independent and has a foul-mouth. She’s pretty with a pixie cut, sharply-defined chin and clear eyes. Kathleen came from Ireland in the ‘50s and has a slight brogue. When I’m running to and from like most people, she’s ambling along the street with Molly Malone, the tiny dog she named after a prostitute. “Oh hurry, hurry, hurry! — It’ll be the death of you, dear!” She’ll screech after me, her way of expressing the slight she feels when “we youngins” don’t have time to shoot the shit with her.

Her voice sweeps up in cadence at the end of her biting observations. I found her “observations” at one time quaint and refreshing. “Ooohhh what a little cunt that one is!” She’d say referring to the old French woman Hélène who lived in this building. I sort of agreed with that observation, but later decided that Kathleen had too many “observations” about people and that perhaps I didn’t want to be like her. She was too damn mean.

On her way to church, she told me about the woman she took to emergency one night. “Oh, Sandee she’s ab-solutely looney tunes! I picked her up and she was dripping in jewels as if she were going to the ball – when we were just going to the fucking emergency room.” The woman happened to have just walked by. Kathleen more or less talked about her in front of her face. “That’s not nice, Kathleen,” I said.

Another time she said she hated the banality, “Have a nice day.” I told her that we could use it as a euphemism for “fuck off and die.” So then I’d see her while I was rushing in and out the way she hates and I’d say in passing “Have a nice daaay!”

Yesterday she had the sweetest demeanor. I hadn’t seen her in a while. I hugged her. I know she needs love. She just gets on my nerves with that negativity shit – to the point where I avoided her last summer. She said, “I don’t know why I’m so happy all the time now.” There was a trembling vulnerability about her. We talked. “I was even humming earlier – that’s not me — for God’s sake Sandee, I think I’m going senile!” She said. Before I finished laughing she asked if I had planned to freeze my eggs, switching the subject quickly the way old people do often because of the ticking clock. “I hate eggs,” I told her. “These eggs.” She pointed to her stomach. “Hell no. I hate kids – I mean I don’t hate kids, I just never thought I needed any,” I said. Perhaps she was advising me on the regrets of not seizing time.

As we departed, she told me that I was the second person who’d hugged her that day. Finally, she said she got a diagnosis from the doctor. She had dyscrasia, she explained. But she said she felt healthier than a horse. “I’m ill,” she said, however. She didn’t look the least bit. I told her to please call or come up anytime – she has my keys. “Get a second opinion,” I advised. She was so pretty, small and delicate, possibly the side-effect of the news. It was a definite departure from her norm of evil.

Balance

If you’re me, your shape changes in middle-age.  Other things happen but I’ve been sworn to secrecy by the Coven of Middle-aged Women with Fancy Handbags.  I’m mad.  I work out, jog, but I am not shaped the way I used to be shaped, a subtle shifting of body mass.  I was warned by the Coven.  I didn’t think it would happen to me though.  I eat quinoa.

And also, not to brag — I just did 50 sit ups but my stomach still protrudes. Why? Fucking fibroids.  Yeah I said it.  It happens more so at a certain time of the month.  Why now, a few days before my author reading?  I’m tired of this.  I could have my uterus surgically removed.  I just don’t want to be knocked out and cut so that I can have my guts ripped out.

I was waiting for that device in Star Trek to come out.  Captain Kirk, Bones and Spock time-traveled.  They went back in time and witnessed a 20^th century surgery.  Bones said it was barbaric.  Their time era is the future where Bones just waves this wand thing over the part that needs surgery and – bam!  I could be uterus-free in seconds with not a one scratch on me.  I think it’ll be a while before this is invented, so I’ll just wait for menopause.  That’s when my estrogen level is supposed to decrease, which ideally would mean that these things will shrink.  But we’ll see with the luck I have.

All’s not awful though.  I’ve always had kind of a big ass even when I was a skeleton.  But I don’t look good bone thin anymore and that’s a good thing – like it was ever a good thing.  Now I don’t need to be always worried about staying a certain weight.  I’m more relaxed.  The effort would be wasted anyway.  When you’re this age two carrots, plus 3 walnuts, plus one celery stick does not equal ninety-eight pounds soaking wet.  It equals what your metabolism tells you it will equal.  Listen youngsters – eat, smoke and be reckless, because, you won’t be able to later on.  I’m not killing myself to be skinny anymore, so I don’t have to smoke cigarettes and eat grass.  Since my shape has changed I look like a bobble head if I’m too thin.  And I realized recently that the big ass balances off my big head nicely.

*A post of vanity, by Sandee Harris

Can’t I have anything!?

When I was 12, a friend said I’d get titties in the springtime.  I did.  Sort of.  I got A’s.  Wasn’t bad actually.  Had returning customers.  (No. I wasn’t a prostitute.  Maybe I should have been.  You know, charged money?)  But if my breasts were gonna be small I’d have a tight body I reasoned.  I exercised stringently and smoked cigarettes — crack diets didn’t come out ‘til later. The payoff was being skinny, which wasn’t always good enough.

I told my dad I was getting implants.  He said I needed to go explore, be around different types of people – I like to think he meant I needed to be around classy, arty people who were too deep, too brilliant to focus on titties — haha yeah, that’s what he meant — and my friend said smaller breasts are aristocratic; and my other friend said, Yeah, yeah, I like your titties like that – ah shhhhit yeah!  And as I’ve said before, if you have smaller ones all the energy is focused, you know, down there.

So at times I wasn’t bothered, though I wondered what it would be like to have big ones.  Summer would come and I saw how big women’s breasts were – wow – this is where mine went – these bitches got my portion!  I’d go in and out of feeling inadequate.  I regretted not being able to ‘have sex with my breasts’ or not being able to slap somebody silly with my titties.  Then it would be okay again because I was a waifish nymph, or a nymphish waif, or a nymph-waif-pirate drunk.

Now that I’ll be 50, I’m more relaxed.  I spent years going in and out of being skinny and nearly sick because of it, and obsessively weighing myself, because I valued myself that way.  It all came from being flat-chested.  I still exercise regularly, but it started out as an obsession having more to do with vanity than fitness.  I gained weight here and there, freaked out, and went on a holistic diet.  I thought of becoming a vegan not for health reasons, but because I thought it would keep me skinny.

Now I have fibroids that cause a slight protrusion in my abdomen.  Menopause, which is soon, may shrink them.  I don’t want surgery because I’m asymptomatic. Along with running and working out regularly, I do fifty sit-ups at least three times a week.  My stomach was flat until a couple of years ago.  Can’t I have anything?  I feel like all my effort is futile at times, just as I do with my other efforts that yield minimal results. Are my biorhythms off?  Did I kill somebody in a past life?

No, I just need to find my worth in areas that don’t require external approval.  Who I am is not any certification, degree, award, Pulitzer Prize, or drooling admiration. Unfortunately I didn’t get that until now.

I Don’t Need Titties Because I’m That Good

 

I like it when people tell you that you don’t have any titties.  I forgive them.  My sister, who’s 18 years younger than I am, was only 10 when she pointed at my chest and said ‘you don’t have NO tit-tays!’  And my mom, she’s extremely complimentary regarding everything about me, so it didn’t really count when she said, while I was getting dressed:  “Oh my, you didn’t get any at all.”  At the café where I work, as I approached the register with my grilled Panini, my friend, the worker in the cafe teased, “where your titties at girl?”  So I told her with a bravado-tinged inflection, “I don’t need titties because I’m that good.”  Sometimes when I see a sexy flat-chested woman (Hey, buddy, they do exist!) I’m thinking, wow, you know it’s kind of cool to not have any because all the energy is focused you know, down there.  Well, this is what I tell myself.

I do have something there.  I’m not flat as a board – they just might not be that noticeable if you’re standing far away from me and your vision isn’t good.  Maybe then I could be mistaken for a man.  Back when, I used to get really thin for a period of time – I’d smoke lots of cigarettes, run, walk and ride my bike everywhere – you can do that in your twenties without keeling over.  My figure might have been described as boyish.  A woman quite a few yards away in the locker room at the gym yelled out “There’s a man in here!” as she pointed in my direction.  I have a sense of humor so I didn’t cry over it.  As a kid, the boys called me “Chester.”  But damn if I wasn’t confused when the neighborhood early-developed girl with the big ones said, “Wait, they call me “Chester.”  These little dudes needed to get their shit straight – how in the hell do you recycle an epithet like that?!

When I was eleven I was with my little friends who talked about just getting theirs after winter.  It was springtime.  My one friend — this is so sweet — she says to me, nodding, “Don’t worry, you’ll get yours too, probably after next winter…”  Well, I’m waiting.  Though I hear that there is time because sometimes in menopause they grow.  But then it would be too fucking late!

I had at one time, long ago in my youth, thought about breast implants.  I figured God didn’t program me for big titties because it would be too much for people to take, why, with me being such a nymph already – I jest!  But seriously folks, I learned not to give a damn, which is the attitude most older people have to take about shortcomings, because we’ve reluctantly accepted that we don’t have a @#*! choice anyway!  Dad told me not to get breast implants.  He said that I needed to surround myself with different types of people and to expand my mind and to be more creative about the way that I perceived myself – I really only just added that last part – because it seemed to be in the gist of what he was saying anyway.

The titty-less thing happened when I put a curse on myself.  When I was 11, I told my cousin Nay Nay that when I turned13 like she was then, mine would be bigger than hers.  Somebody shoulda tol’ me — could this not be more hilarious?!  My cousin didn’t let me live that one down for a while!  I guess my cousin could say that karma’s a bitch, but I’ve got another word to the wise for the prepubescent girls of America – okay now look this up – it’s hubris!