23 February 1999: Frog and Toad

I have to write to RML. She gave me a pair of earrings for my birthday last year, but in June of last year (my birthday's in May) I wasn't wearing contacts and therefore I wasn't wearing dangling earrings. So I put them away and haven't remembered them since November, when I returned to my previously scheduled unbespectacled self. Now we're moving, and this weekend when I packed up the bedroom I discovered the earrings.

They're fun little earrings, with three different moving parts. The framework is an arch of silver, a little more than half an inch long and embossed with leaping frog silhouettes. At the top of the arch a wee silver ball spins on a horizontal axis, and a sun-shaped ring flips on a hinge around the ball. Between the feet of the arch a tiny gold toad head spins on its horizontal axis. It is a Janus toad, so however it spins a face is always forward. When I don't think of decapitated frogs and think of Mr. Toad instead, I quite like them.

I got up at 6:40 this morning and had only a large glass of orange juice to break my fast. That wouldn't last. As soon as I got to work, I dragged A. out with me. When we do go, we usually wait until after her shower (she bikes in almost every day). As we walked the two blocks, she noticed the earrings. It's the first day I've worn them. I pay her to be so attentive.

At Starbuck's, I wanted to stand guard over the pastry case--just in case. No one ahead of us asked for the last cinnamon scone and there were plenty of maple scones, however so bloody combat was not required for us to obtain our breakfasts o' choice. Grande double-whipped mocha frappucino and maple scone for me, grande double-whipped decaf coffee frap and cinnamon scone for her, and the day could begin.

I told her the morning's bus story. All the front seats were occupied, one by me. A woman got on at a later stop and, instead of moving back toward an empty seat, stood between the aisles in the front, to talk to an acquaintance I thought. At a stop light I hopped up to snag a paper towel from the driver's box, and when I turned back I saw that the woman had sat down in the seat I'd vacated. Whatever, thought I, and stooped to pick up my backpack from the floor and take another seat. As I grabbed the pack by her feet, she realized what she'd done, apologized, and scooted, though I called after her that I would have moved. If she wished a front seat for physical reasons, I'd've moved immediately had I perceived the problem. I just hadn't. An infirm person wouldn't've stood waiting and facing forward if she wanted a seat, would she have, but would have looked around at us able-bodied folk with that excuse-me expression? And the bus had stopped for a light, not a stop, so she couldn't've thought the seat was vacated because someone had gotten off, and also I was moving directly in front of her as I snitched the towel. I don't know how she mistook my seat as available, but whatever. Anyway I felt bad for embarrassing her. I only wanted my pack before I moved.

Does this explain why I get so bent out of shape when someone is deliberately, extremely discourteous?

Talking about that incident last night, someone pointed out what I already knew, that if I had enough ego the man's rudeness wouldn't've bothered me. There's an Ursula LeGuin novella, maybe The Eye of the Heron, kind of like The Dispossessed insofar as it features a subordinate society and a stronger force. A bully demands a boy give him his ball, and the boy does so, simply, easily, unresenting. Someone asks the boy how this can not bother him, and I do try to keep the boy's response before my own eyes in similar situations: he says something about his being whole enough in himself that the intrusion by this other person cannot affect him. Or something. I should find that passage, since I do wish I could follow it.

He also reminded me that I initiated the second confrontation and would have been unprepared had it escalated past the man's shove. The man could have been just fired or his SO just have broken up with him and he could have been packing (more common in Denver than in other cities of its size, I'd bet) and about to go postal. All his points were valid, but still. He sympathized with the "but still" and reminded me that if a man initiating the second confrontation wouldn't've done so unless he was prepared to fight. I agreed I wouldn't've said anything if we hadn't been in a building lobby with a lot of foot traffic. I also wouldn't've said anything if he'd looked less like a rational being--if he'd been shabbily dressed or obviously raving I would have ignored the incident, and it would have been nothing to let it go because I wouldn't've considered the fellow my equal to begin with.

Moving report: I packed up the smaller bits of the pantry. The appliances I won't pack and some of the tools should stay out. I found the measuring tape, too. That's why I love packing.

By the way, are there different words for the measuring tape a carpenter uses, made of thin metal and several yards long, that stays stretched out until you wind up into a little plastic case, and the measuring tape a tailor uses, a yard or two of nylon?

We just recently bought the carpenter's tape and almost as recently misplaced it--lodged amongst the tools where neither of us hunted enough--and were back to using my seamstress's tape to theorize furniture placement. Anyway, now it's found, to be useful in mysterious ways this weekend.

Hmm. The moving bits of these earrings please me to look at and play with, but actually walking around wearing them can be loud. I think only for me, not for passersby, but I have issues with audible jewelry.

If anyone ever asks, almost everything that one person ever said to me, or near me, burned itself into my tortured mind. There's nothing like temporary insanity to improve short-term memory, especially when one is a compulsive journal-writer. Anyway, in some awkwardly desperate attempt to invent small talk, I mentioned that I had just bought a pair of earrings that I liked but that made rather a lot of noise. She-whom-I-could-not-resist-memorizing said she loved audible earrings, actually favored them. This comment slammed me straight between the horns of yet another dilemma (there was a flock of 'em): I liked my earrings, but if I wore them would I be trying to emulate her? Beause, you know, if I became exactly like her, he'd like me again too. Or should I assert my individuality, which I preferred but which had driven me insane?

Gee, did this happen during the Bad Year™?

Anyway, that year I wore those earrings a lot, along with a large Gemini pendant (for PLT) and an amethyst pendant, given by HEB (the pendants were not meant to be earrings and threatened to slit the second holes in my ears). And all that metal did indeed make noise, but since they were gifts, each jingle-jangle was a murmur from a friend. One character in "Mountains of the Moon" wore human ears (of questionable origin) as earrings, through which he could hear the voices of spirits. Every time I heard my earrings, I was reminded of the friends who'd given me them, when I needed all the support I could get.

Faulty logic, maybe, but it reassured me at the time. And now when I wear RML's earrings, I can remember my birthday party.