Reading: Lemony Snickett, The Austere Academy, The Ersatz Elevator, and The Vile Village

Moving: weights, in a half-assed sort of way

Watching: "Giant" and "ER"

17 January 2002:

Today I was looking through an office supply catalog for an item for CoolBoss (who, I should say, hates the connotations of "boss," a factoid I didn't know when I named her). Specifically, for index dividing tabs for a 3-ring binder. She had 50-cut tabs in mind, for the 50 states, and (before I fetched the catalog) I said I was pretty sure tabs were cut only to 31.

I once worked for a marketing research firm in Windham, near UConn. Actually I worked through a temp agency at the firm. The results of the marketing research project were to be put into binders, and the office manager was looking at tabs. There were (I'm guessing, based on the catalog I saw today) fifth-, eighth-, and tenth-cut tabs; tabs cut in 26 and lettered alphabetically; and tabs cut and numbered to 31. "Why," wondered the manager, "thirty-one?"

"The days of the month," I said quietly, trying to quash any tone of "you nimwit" from my voice. This valuable bit of mind-filling nothingness is but a single gem I have gleaned in my career in administrative support, and only seven years later I put it to use.

---

My sister asked if I still had the little red Swingline, which at the moment struck her as the most long-lived and hardy of the mater's presents. I thought of swingsets and sewing machines and tricycles before I remembered the staplers. Yes, I have mine, and I am amused she still has hers. Mine is in my desk with a streak of dirty stickum along its spine where the label peeled off.

That got me thinking about label guns. I looked for their actual name and asked Gael Cooper, the pop culture junk mail queen, but we came up dry. This item had a two-layer tape on a spool that fed through a device like a dial-on-a-handle; around the dial were capital letters and numerals and maybe some punctuation; and you spun--well, not spun, but cranked with difficulty--the dial and squeezed the handle to imprint the letter on the tape, and after you had your name all punched out, you cut the tape and peeled its backing off, and you could label everything you owned with raised letters. When I first described it I didn't remember whether you had to scissor the tape fed out of the handle or whether there was a blade. A little while later I remembered that one of the settings on the dial was a little pair of scissors, which unlike the other characters bit into the tape enough to sever it.

So anyway. My spool of tape was blue and green striped on the bias, and CLH's was striped yellow and fiery red. Last week, talking about our childhood, I remarked again on how odd it is that I remember so little from our family life. But I know what color labeling tape we had. We were talking about our first school days, and I cranked out a couple of memories from first grade: how whatshisname had opened the bathroom door just when I was standing up and saw everything; how the same whatsisname tried repeatedly to kiss me at recess and how Penny and Amy (? or whoever) protected me; and the time when for some reason--either because there were observers and I wanted to make a good impression or because I was just trying to make a good impression on my schoolmates--I was pretending to consult this book and that book and this other workbook before printing whatever in yet another workbook, like I was a scholar among valuable reference books.

I remember Mrs. Plimpton reading us a story in second grade that had the word "bosom" or "bust" or "breast" in it, and either pretending or not actually knowing why that was so incendiary to the seven-year-olds at her feet. I remember Bill's birthday party, early enough in elementary school for it to be coed, during which we were permitted to decorate our own cupcakes. I remember the playground before the spider-shaped climby thing and afterward, and playing dodgeball against the wall that held Mrs. McIntyre's classroom. I remember a lot about Mrs. Plimpton because I loved her, and the next year a lot about Mrs. Pontello because I hated her. We sang "Mrs. Pontello was a bullfrog!" at recess and felt subversive.

Speaking of which, Dot Org has as wee a budget as you would expect from a non-profit to hire entertainment at a meeting. Apparently whoever is coordinating or supposedly having ideas is promoting Three Dog Night to us. When CoolBoss told us that during staff meeting, we all snickered. Someone said that they did have some songs, and suggested "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog" and someone else added, "And they did 'Joy to the World.'" I had to point out that they had just named a single song.

Because I didn't like my teacher, I remember this as happening in third grade, but it could have been first or second. Hopefully not fourth, when my retarded grasping of long division foretold my mathematical defeat. (Can I even say "retarded" anymore and be understood to mean "slow and impeded" rather than "cruelly derogatory of the mentally challenged"?) On a math worksheet, we were comparing money and computing sums represented by illustrations of coins. (At some point, I also feared that these illustrations of coins and bills were illegal, since I had picked up that making fake money was bad. Perhaps this is why I always sucked at Monopoly.) One question asked the smallest coin, and I wrote in "dime." But this was wrong and the correct answer was penny.

I was so frustrated. Anyone looking at a handful of Usan coins easily can discern that a dime is smaller than a penny. A penny represents the smallest amount of money, sure, but that's not what the question asked. I don't remember if I petitioned that one.

When CLH was here, she wanted to visit friends who live in Castle Pines. We went to Bump & Grind for its Sunday morning Petticoat Bruncheon, which disappointingly was served by men in dresses, not the drag queens I had been led to expect, and afterward headed south for Castle Pines and Castle Rock, on whose northern border lies an outlet mall. Castle Pines is a bunch of houses off the highway, few yet inhabited. CLH had left the directions on the dining table and decided we didn't need to turn back for them, because she remembered them well enough. Except for the house number. And she didn't have the phone number, which wasn't listed elsewhere, and we had unsuccessfully emailed to an AOL address. She said she always has trouble emailing them, even replying to email the friends initiate. Typing in an address from her printed-out directions (which weren't worth turning back for, as they didn't list the house number either), I wondered whether one character was a lowercase l or a numeral 1, so I tried both and neither worked. So anyway, we were driving to a place we'd never been, without directions but those she remembered, without a house number should we find the street, and no phone number to call when we were lost.

We found Castle Pines Parkway and turned west on that. She remembered that much. We drove west on that for a couple of miles until the pavement (and its sidewalk) ended. Shel Silverstein, we miss you! One of the streets we had passed sounded familiar to her, so we turned onto that, and followed that until the pavement ended again, looking for the nth street on the left. Castle Pines is all big boxy houses on lots only square inches larger than the houses' footprints, but on the other side of the fences at the ends of the streets, prairie started. We turned back to the Parkway and took the familiarly-named street in the opposite direction, and here we did find X, the nth street on the left. So we had the street. But no house number. She didn't know what color house (they were all beige) or what kind of car but was hopeful about finding a mailbox with a name on it. No. Or someone walking a dog. No. Or anyone outside. We did see two people about to get into their car, and asked if they knew them, a new family ("Everyone here is new").

So we gave up.

As we drove back to the highway, she said that if we had had a house number but not a street, we probably could have found them, since it's such a small new development. "And that Thelma and Louise overlook at the end of X street," she commented, and I corrected, "That was Y street." Why did I correct, when I knew what she meant? Because I'm a wench. "No, it was on X that [whatever her point was]." "I know what you mean, but it was Y." This could swiftly have degenerated into the same is not-is too fights we had when we were small, until two things happened simultaneously:

• I realized I was being needlessly argumentative
• She realized she was wrong.

"I mean, the Thelma and Louise overlook at Y street," she said smoothly, never having been wrong in her life. We laughed, and I told her about how I have struggled to learn to shut up when being right but without proof makes me argumentative and defensive. She said she'd've reacted the same way. That means she understands, not that our behavior is correct. I think, for me, it's because I'm so seldom positively certain I'm right about whatever datum that I cannot stand not to be recognized.