The Oppositist pt. I

An online profile informed me I should be looking for a 34 year old non-smoking 5’8” consultant who felt fortunate for family, friends, and health.

I walked onto the patio where only one patron sat, and without any gelato.  He looked up with the standard, twisted, excruciatingly awkward “Are you the person I’m supposed to be meeting?” expression, which I could only imagine I was emanating myself.

“Paul?” I asked, tilting my head slightly to the side inquisitively, immediately hoping this didn't come across as ditzy.

“Hi there ... uh, hiya” he replied, wiping his hands on his khaki pants before standing up.

‘He blanked on my name’ I thought, while he laughed nervously.

“Great to meet you.”  I extended my hand.

We looked at each other for a moment, mouthing the beginnings of words, both hoping this would prompt coherent spoken dialogue.   It was in this moment that I noticed Paul was neither 34 nor 5’8”.  I was with Paul, the roughly 43 year-old, 5’5” liar.

We stepped into the shop, each likely feeling as apprehensive as the other.  We’d picked this place because I’d mentioned I was a fan of their pink grapefruit gelato.  I turned hesitantly toward him.

“The grapefruit is one of my favourites, but don’t order it if it’s not your thing.”

“Oh no, I’m curious.  You said it was great, so I’d love to try it.”

‘Well he scores points for that’ I thought to myself, still trying to adjust to the height and age lie.

As we walked down the street with matching gelatos awkwardly discussing the weather and our respective jobs, I became increasingly certain that Paul was not my guy.

“You know” he said, holding up his gelato with a big grin on his face, “this is terrible.  It’s so bitter.”

“Oh ... really?” I asked, looking at my own gelato cup as if searching for shreds of dirty gym socks “mine’s fine.”

“Yeah.  I actually hate it” he said, chuckling.

I wondered why it was so funny.  Instead I kept walking and changed the topic.  My tactic was successful for about five minutes. 

“This is really terrible.  I can’t believe you would even suggest something like this.”

“Well I’m sorry you feel that way.  I guess you shouldn’t have ordered it after all.”

“It’s so bitter.  How are you eating it?” His grin widened.

“It’s pink grapefruit.” I was starting to get annoyed “It tastes like pink grapefruit.  I’m not sure what you were expecting”

“I hate pink grapefruit” he said, chuckling again

“Then why did you order it?” my voice began to rise and I made an effort to control myself.

“You said it was good.”

“It’s good for pink grapefruit.  So if you don’t like pink grapefruit, then that was a bad decision on your part, and not my fault at all actually.  What did you think it would taste like?  I mean  ... there’s a big slice of pink grapefruit sitting on top of it.  Not exactly cryptic what we were shooting for with the flavour.”

“Whatever” he said, clearly thinking both that this was a cute way of flirting, and that it was working.  “You’re just bad at making decisions.  Maybe I’ll forgive you.”  He winked at me.  “But I should probably call the shots for the rest of the night.”

Now I was angry.  His sharply tucked-in shirt began to bother me at this point.  My eyes followed the fastened buttons all the way to the collar.  His adam’s apple hit it when he laughed, reminding me of a carnival strength tester.  The date was taking a nose-dive.

 

“Hey I just want to show you something” he said with a grin as he purposefully walked over to a garbage bin.  “I want to show you how much gelato is left in my cup before I throw it out.  Terrible waste.” He feigned a dramatic sigh.  “And no one but yourself to blame” 

He was still sporting that insipid, self-satisfied grin when visions of slapping his adam’s apple and running away pranced through my mind.  The very thought caused a smile to finally spread its way across my lips, the sight of which sent him into self-congratulatory frenzy.


to be continued ...

The Gym Buddy

Having recently strained a muscle in my hip while running, I thought it would be wise to dust off my kinesiology degree and prescribe myself a healthy dose of more running to really heal it up good.

At about the fifteen minute mark of a run on one particularly uneventful day, the pain became intense enough that even through the haze of my wildly misguided desire to continue, the need to stop became clear.  Frustrated, I lumbered awkwardly off the treadmill and went to pick up the spray bottle and some paper towel to wipe it down.  Tearing the paper towel with some gusto, I became the focus of one of the newly muscular regulars.

“Wow.” He cocked his head back, jutting out his chin and smirking.  “Someone’s angry.”

I looked up at him.  The transformation over the past year had been marked.  He’d lost at least 80 lbs., from what I could tell.  His ego had overcorrected for the sudden loss by inflating to at least triple its previous size.

“It’s my hip” I said, still sweating as I was wiping down the hand sensors “I’m having a lot of trouble with it.  It’s only getting worse.  I can’t seem to stretch it out or do anything for it.”

His eyes had already glazed over.  We were talking about me way too much.  If I had said I was angry at the paper towel machine because I was jealous of his quads, his interest level would have sky-rocketed.

“Hip” he echoed, “yeah”.

I could help but smirk.

“Well here’s what you’ve got to do ..” he began.  


Was I getting advice?  Was this still about me?  I was impressed.

“You run too much.”  He had that part right.  I knew I was getting my just desserts.  I knew better than to push it the way I had been.

“And you know, running is hard on the frame.  I mean, it’s even hard on my frame, and look at me.”  He motioned up and down his body as if he was both the assistant and the prize on The Price is Right.

“Now with you” he continued ,“it would be even harder because of the extra weight”.  I froze.  He went on. 

“Yeah, your joints probably can’t take it.”

I attempted to interject , much more mildly than I should have, at this point.

“But I’ve been running for a well over a year, and I was heavier before, so I really don’t think tha-"

 “So what you need to do is quit the treadmill completely, for at least three months.  Do the bike, lose 20 lbs, then come back to the treadmill and you’ll find your joints can handle the stress way better.”

He grinned from ear to ear in wonderment at his own impeccable advice-giving skills.

I stood with paper towel in hand, mouth agape, and wondered if a man had actually just come up to tell me to lose 20 lbs while I was standing on a treadmill, still sweating and visibly upset.  Was this what worked for the ladies nowadays?  Could this guy possibly be getting laid with intros like this?  I decided it most likely that this awkward rendezvous was the result of a previously awkward wall-flower now being a nouveau-thin.

“You don’t look happy”

He was probably able to tell that from the general lack of smile on my face. 

“Correct, genius” I thought, “happiness would not be something I’m emoting at the moment.”

“Don’t worry.  You’ll get to run again soon.”  He said in an attempt at soothing, assuming incorrectly that he was right about my injury, that I would be following his advice, and that I was upset about not being able to run.

“Yeah. K. Thanks.” I mumbled as I got off the treadmill and tried to invent an excuse to be anywhere in the gym where he was not.  My workout wasn’t over, so leaving was not an option.  I saw the answer before me.  It was humiliating, but it would work and would be easier than telling him off.  I went to the bike, as he suggested, and turned up my music.

He gave a self-congratulatory smile and trod along to the next lady.

My time on the bike, unfortunately, was rife with brooding.  I had received only positive feedback regarding my efforts at the gym in the past year, and did not take a liking to what I had just heard.  I knew already what would follow.

After leaving the gym, I had to stop by the grocery store to pick up a few things.  My general after-work-out hunger was magnified intensely by my need for an emotional eating binge.  It was unmistakeable. The produce had no lustre for me.  It was carbs I wanted.  My old friends.

I picked up the items that I needed, but had only brought one bag with me.

“I’ll carry what you can’t fit in here.  It shouldn’t be much.” I told the cashier.

She carefully packed my items in as my mind wandered back to the 20 lb comment, and was still in a daze as she gave me my change and handed me the bag.  I began to walk away in a fog.

“Ma’am?”  she called out after me. 

I didn’t really appreciate the whole “ma’am” thing.

“Don’t forget this” she said with a shiny grin, handing me the loaf of warm, fresh bread.

“Oh.  Thank you so so much” I replied in earnest as I took the loaf carefully from her hands and carried it lovingly out of the store.

As I walked home, I began to brood again.  It was at least half a block before I realized how I might appear to anyone who wasn’t me.  Sweaty and dishevelled from the gym, sporting a hodgepodge of sporty and business attire, I lumbered along with a slight limp because of my hip.  With my right hand, I was tearing large chunks of bread off the now annihilated loaf tucked under my left arm.  Each chunk was being stuffed rapidly into my eager mouth.  My cheeks, the overflow reservoirs for this carb flood, were packed tightly.  I was sure that if I took off a shoe and started making pirate sounds, people would start to throw their loose change at me.

My reality check came, as they so often do in life, as a cat call.  The passenger of a passing car leaned out of his window to let me know that I was a lovely young woman with good moral fibre and an obvious heart of gold, which, for the record, is the direct translation of “yeah baby, do me.”  

I began to think of all the gems in this city and why I was beating myself up over trying to impress them, when I had a warm, non-judgemental loaf of bread who wanted nothing more than to make me happy.  As I pulled it out of the toaster oven, I chuckled to myself  thinking that this day, in the battle of common courtesy, it was Bread: 2 Humans: 0

Big Hands

About halfway through dinner on our first and last date, I looked up and realized I had long since been completely at a loss to contribute to the conversation.  My date, John, had been monologuing about the acceptable and unacceptable items any self-respecting man could hang from his rear view mirror or place on his dashboard, and I had been  little able to add more than an “Oh, I see”.  In addition, he had been nonchalantly unbuttoning his shirt throughout the meal, and fear of eventually seeing his navel had sufficiently distracted me.  

The meal was followed by his folding up the bill and using the corner to pick his teeth as he described the exact hue of his car, and why he felt Paris Hilton was legitimately a ‘hottie’.  I was ready to head home and call it a night.

After the server returned with the change, he put down the bill and, in an unexpected and abrupt change of pace, grabbed my hands in his.

“You know” he said, with something resembling a longing expression on his face

“I like your big hands”.

“What?” I asked, not quite sure if I trusted what I had heard.

“Yeah, you have short fingers, but your hands are kinda big.  Reminds me of my mom.  They’re cute.  I really like them”

My expression obviously betrayed me at this point.

“It’s a good thing.  I mean it as a compliment.”

“Thank you” I said.  “I know you meant well, and I really appreciate it ... but just so you know, that’s hard to take as a compliment.”

“Gimme a break” he said, swatting the air between us.

“Seriously” I replied, in an unusually unflinching tone for me.

Seeming almost disgusted, he took a dramatic breath.  I could see he was on the verge of formulating what he would consider a rational means of changing my obviously ludicrous opinion.

“Come walk with me.  I wanna show you something” he said, before a reasonable excuse to leave sprang to mind or escaped my lips.

“Oh – I ... okay” was my smooth response.

We walked through a charming neighbourhood.  I wondered what he would have to show me on this tree-lined residential street.  There seemed to be nothing around except houses and happily mild-mannered passers-by.  He walked down a small pathway surrounded by a yard of statues and figurines, up the front steps and pounded forcibly on the front door three times before opening it and sticking his head inside.  I remained a comfortable distance behind.

“MA!” he yelled. “MAAA!”

I was frozen in wordless disbelief.

Mere moments later, a woman in a nightdress and a man in a robe who had obviously just awoken came to the door.

“There’s someone I’d like you to meet” he announced to the sleepy, yet unfazed couple, motioning to me.  “This is Di”

I remained frozen; the shock washing over me again and again.

“Di, these are my parents.”

His mother came down the steps and extended a swarthy female hand towards me.

“It’s nice to meet you.” 

The Squirrel

"G'mornin" I said, half-interestedly perusing the paper as he slowly shuffled into the kitchen, still half asleep.  "Coffee’s just made.  How was your sleep?"

"I was talking to a squirrel" he said matter-of-factly through a yawn.

"Oh. What did he have to say?" I asked with a barely detectable smirk, knowing this opening line was the indicator of a conversation that I would reference for months to come.

"Not much" he replied, looking for orange juice with heavily-lidded eyes. "He was building a sculpture out of his own feces, so my expectations were pretty low going in."

"What was the sculpture of?" I asked, barely able to contain myself and wildly appreciative of the fact that if he were a little more alert, he wouldn't be telling me any of this.

"Another squirrel" he said, unfazed. "I couldn't tell until I got into the room, because it wasn’t that great or anything ... you know those weird little squirrel hands probably aren’t great for sculpting, but it was of another squirrel."

"The room?" I asked.  In the interest of of keeping my composure, I was trying not to focus on the image of little squirrel hands craftily working away at a squirrel-shaped sculpture, though I imagined they would actually be quite good at it.  I needed to hear more about this dream, and was afraid an outburst of laughter would shatter any opportunity.

"Yeah we were in his tree.  He had armchairs and a fireplace and stuff.  It was pretty awesome ... except for the shit sculpture.  Who does that?"  He paused and shook his head, letting his incredulity towards the squirrel's filthy behaviour have time to breathe.  "Fucking squirrel."  He paused again. "Are we out of orange juice?"

“It’s on the table.”  I began to feign interest in the Sport section in a lame effort to avoid eye contact.  It was incredible that he didn’t catch me.

“What was his name?” I was hoping for Montgomery.

“Zipper” he said.  I almost choked.

“What did you guys talk about?”

“Well we didn’t have much time for niceties, Di.  I saw what he was doing and I left.”  He was mildly annoyed, assuming I should know better than to ask a question that would intimate that he would stick around in a squirrel's living room while he was doing such a thing.

“Well you’re the one who said you guys were talking.  And you know his name.” I paused.  “So what were you and Zipper on about?” 

“It was before I went to his place.  Cooking.  We were talking about cooking.  He told me puts lemon zest in his scrambled eggs.”

A now-cold toasted English muffin was halfway to my mouth as my arm arrested in midair.  I had been preparing myself to be entertained, but I instead found myself completely prepared to take cooking tips from an imaginary squirrel named Zipper, who, in addition to being an obviously creative culinarian, had an affinity for creating fecal sculptures in his spare time. 

“What else does he put in them?” I asked while thinking about where I’d left my zester.

“Fresh oregano”

Man alive, I’d just bought some fresh oregano. 

Before I was aware of it, I was making Zipper’s signature eggs.  They were delicious.  I almost felt bad about judging the damn squirrel and his foul artistic habits.  Almost.  I felt less guilty after reminding myself that he was not in fact a person, or real, for that matter, as most talking squirrels tend not to be.  This was undoubtedly a chapter from no one’s life but mine.


**alternate ending (ooh ahh)**

I placed two plates on the table and we sat down to try the eggs.  They were delicious.  As I enjoyed them, I began to look around the room.  A newspaper clipping on the fridge of two squirrels boxing caught my eye.  I paused.  On the table, my home design magazine was open to a photo of a living room with overstuffed arm chairs and a fireplace.  The opposite page was an advertisement of a child making a sculpture from toilet paper.  My gaze darted to the fruit bowl in the middle of the table.  Oranges and lemons.  Yesterday, he had helped me unpack the groceries.

“Dear God.”  I was astounded.  “You’re Keyser Soze.”

“Thanks for the eggs, babe” he laughed, bending down to kiss my forehead as he cleared the plates and faked a limp to the sink. 

A Mint Julep Morning

The strap to my sandal had come loose when stepping off the bus, but there were a lot of passengers behind me, and I knew better than to stop and fix it.  Once in the bus bay, I stepped quickly to my right to let the pedestrian traffic by, but had overestimated my own stealth in unstrapped heels and went over on my ankle.  To my surprise, it wasn’t the sharp pain or the embarrassment of almost falling in public that horrified me most, but the gentle thud on the back of my head and the subsequent flurry of feathers in my peripheral vision as I stumbled.  

My ears recognized the soft warble, but my eyes were momentarily frozen, unable to look over and verify the fear.  The moment passed quickly enough, and I turned my gaze to find myself staring at the pigeon that had just flown into the back of my head - or rather the pigeon whose flight path I had just interrupted with my head.

Not even a small fraction of the way to work yet, I wondered if I should turn around, wash my hair, and call it a day.  I chose to persevere, all the while painfully recalling the amount of times I had recently referred to my “messy bun” hairdo as a filthy bird nest.

In an usual turn of events, I was able to get one of the last seats on the subway.  Happily sitting down, I exhaled as my lips worked their way into a grin.  I put my face in my hands to allow myself a moment to laugh at the situation when I felt something warm and soft press up against my ear. Startled, I jumped back and opened my eyes to find myself staring at the head of the cat that was sticking out of the shirt of the young man sitting beside me.

“He likes you” the young man said.

“Ah – " was my brilliant response.

“His name is Neo.”

“Hi Neo” I replied, wondering what the hell was going on with my day.  It couldn’t possibly be past 7:45 a.m.

“He doesn’t normally like people.  That’s why I carry him in my shirt – to let him know he’s safe.  You must be different”

“Oh I don’t think so” I replied confidently.

“What’s your name?”

Resisting the desperate urge to say ‘Trinity’, I volunteered “Annie.”

“Hi Annie, I’m Patrick” he said happily.  “How are you?”

“Oh I’m just great, Patrick, thanks.  How are you?”

“I’m good, thanks.”  He was nervous. “Um ... I grow my own mint.”

“Wha – um.  Okay.  Cool, Patrick.  Good for you.”

There was a long pause as he struggled with his thoughts.

“I make a mean mojito, or mint julep if that’s your poison.” He laughed nervously.

“Could Neo and I interest you in one?”

“A mint julep?”

“Yes. Or- or a mojito.”

“Thank you Patrick, but I don’t think so”

“Oh. Fine.”

The train rattled to a slow halt in the dark underground.  Patrick and I were both frozen and silent.  Neo, on the other hand, was rubbing my shoulder with his head and purring with impressive gusto for a scaredy cat.

“I’m sorry” I said.

Was this honestly happening?  Did a man with a cat sticking out of shirt just ask if I was interested in a mint julep before 8 a.m?  With the wealth of events that had happened to me on the subway in the past year, I had a hard time believing I could convince my friends of this one.

“It’s fine” he replied.

I got off at the next stop, giving Neo and Patrick a small wave and a smile.  Patrick waved back.  Neo just stared. 

“Totally worth the three extra blocks” I said to myself as I watched the train pull away and began to walk.

“Totally waiting for the next train” I said turning back to the platform as the strap to my sandal snapped.

Welcome

It's an interesting thing, writing to a crowd of no one; carefully selecting words while simultaneously hoping and fearing the future brings readers.  Sweet readers.  I think you're all lovely.  Thanks for being here.

I'll say now that, as far as I can guess (how far can you guess?), it's rare that I'll be speaking to you in this voice. I'm going to take more of a storytelling approach.  That's what this blog is about.  Taking my days and turning myself into a haphazard heroine as opposed to what I actually am, which is a common day desk jockey.  That's part of the truth about me right there.  I should tell you all now, because you'll discover soon enough that there are few secrets between us anyway.  I'm plain.  I am not a glossy socialite, beautifully rough and tumble farm girl, or soulful starving artist (though I sometimes wish I was). I don't think I possess any made-for-tv quirky idiosynchrasies, and other than my capacity to find stories (or have stories find me), I tend to think I'm uninspiringly average.  I live in the city.  I work a nine to five job.  I take public transit.  My winter coat is black.  I think that's why you might like me though, but I'll let you judge for yourself.

I suppose you may be wondering about "Pigeons and Apple Cores".  The explanation is somewhat reasonable, though multi-factoral in nature: 

1.  The first 10 names I picked were taken.
2.  These items are both things that have 'flown' into the back of my head within the past year
3.  Reason #2 gives you a good idea of the type of stories that find me, so I think it may set the tone fairly well.

Thanks again for reading, Reader.  I won't keep you, but I hope you hang out for a while.

di