| Day 17 |
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June 17, 2004 This month's Day 17 submissions revealed a great spirit of tranquility and zestfulness in the face of unspeakable calamity. With almost Zenlike calm, our contributors faced weirdness of every kind, a great storm of reincarnation, dismay, wasted faith, death, inappropriate public nakedness, grocery theft and office-park ennui, and emerged on the other side jaunty and unscathed. We would like to report that this month's theme was one of redemption, that when the catastrophic and the inexplicable are faced down with courage they disappear and are destroyed. Instead, we learned a far more subtle and valuable lesson: when the catastrophic and the inexplicable occur, they should be noted, reported, examined carefully for the funny parts, and returned to the river. Jill McElmurry (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
Brian Minter (Brooklyn, New York)
Bob Brumfield (Washington, DC)
Joe Janda (Port Jefferson, New York)
Cheryl Huber (Brooklyn, New York)
Constance Chang (Astoria, New York)
Amanda Cardone (Port Jefferson, New York)
Tara Ballentine (Seattle, Washington)
Meredith Bragg (Alexandria, Virginia)
JILL McELMURRY
6 a.m.: I drink Orangina because it’s fizzy and sweet and more fun than drinking water. I worry that the sugar will make me feel sick but I don’t stop drinking until the glass is empty. I never drank a fizzy drink at six am before. It’s fun. 8 a.m.: I don’t feel sick. 10 a.m.: I eat the grapes because I forgot we had them. They are still taut and juicy and pop in my mouth like eyeballs might pop if I were to eat eyeballs. I will never eat eyeballs. I think of grapes as fun food and I want today to be fun. :: website ::
BRIAN MINTER
She was late to the club where her friend's band was playing, so I talked to two girls from Queens. There was a cute one, who went to NYU, and her cousin, who was kind of crazy, and kept touching my arm and telling me I was "hysterical", even though I wasn't saying anything funny.
J: What do you want to do?
We went to the bar where we first met, although that was an accident. We weren't trying to be cute or anything. We drank ciders and talked about the wearying complexity of love, and the British. The cider tasted weird and old, and she lost our "no punching" bet, because she kept punching me.
B: Do you KNOW what time it is?
Standing outside on 1st Avenue, we spent a while trying to figure out if we were going this way, or that way, and if we were going the same way or not, because it was, after all, very late for a school night. It was one of those moments that should be awkward (like that period of time between when you know it would be weird to kiss someone, and that that period of time when it would be weird not to kiss them) but wasn't. That keeps happening, and I can't figure out why. If I believed in things like knowing someone from another life, I would think that we must have known each other in another life.
B: Are you sleepy?
I was a mess at work all day, bleary-eyed and useless. We sent each other a series of emails about how tired we were, and how cranky we were, and how we should agree never stay up that late again on a school night. It's nice to stay up late with someone if you know you can complain to them about it the next day.
:: website ::
BOB BRUMFIELD
Some dude just dropped dead in the Vie de France shop at L'Enfant Plaza. Except he wasn't really dead. He just decided he needed an immediate nap in the floor, a little time to not breath at all until someone performed the Heimlich ... er... CPR. It was weird. Then the woman
who's always there when I go in told me that he was the second person to pass out in the floor today, today being Day 17. I took the coffee
anyway, but I've summoned my food taster.
The incident was doubly weird because I'd just wasted an hour and a half of my life at the Sprint store and I was walking into the building that
houses Vie de France thinking "I'm going to kill someone today." Then I did! But I didn't really mean it, so Jesus let him live.
JOE JANDA
Today a tall, Russian-accented man came into the lab and asked, "Do you have a hacksaw?"
I sometimes forget how obtuse and abstract are the objects and ideas of my work-a-day life. We deal in the invisibly small. We play on a molecular scale. Our tools are themselves genetically engineered molecular machines. We looked at this man in utter bewilderment. "Do you have a hacksaw?" he repeated.
Turns out we *did* have a hacksaw. He took it without another word and wandered off. And all day I could not shake the nagging thought that somewhere there was a man with a hacksaw, hacksawing something. Getting something productively (or destructively, but in any case visibly) accomplished.
CHERYL HUBER
Now that I'm a working girl, my days consist of roaming around city parks filling out little surveys about the state of our city's “green” space.
Today I went to Harlem with a 22-year-old blond boy from Minnesota, in our matching t-shirts bearing the name of our non-profit, toting water bottles and cameras. I said, "I feel like we're missionaries or something." The only white people battling the wide streets of fume-infested East Harlem. As he stared at a woman who was taking off her shirt under a bridge, engaging in activities dubiously appropriate for the public realm, I kept my head down, eyes averted. East-coast style.
My internship means I earn less than minimum wage. Late the night before, my friends and I were parting ways after karaoke, and as they filled up a cab heading away from my neighborhood, I drunkenly told them I'd be taking the train home. I'd spent all my cash on booze. As their car was pulling away, my friend jumped out, ran over to me and handed me a $20 for the cab home, knowing he'd never see it again. I used what was left of the money to cure my hangover with Advil and a Milky Way.
CONSTANCE CHANG
What I Did Not Eat On Day 17
I've found that listening to Cat Power on my morning commute makes me wistful and sad all the way up to my office, at which point I become decidedly businesslike. Which is great for business at the job I hate.
But businesslikeness has its own distinct set of pratfalls, like inducing its own brand of capitalist-alienation-onset depression. By lunchtime, I had a bad case of such depression. What cheers me up? Thinking about food. But what am I not allowed to discuss here? What I ate. Hrumph.
I went to the fancypants market over lunch to plan my dinner. I was only thinking to replicate one course of a delicious meal my genius friends once concocted, a delicate fish in coconut milk soup. I bought beautiful-sounding ingredients like lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, cuminseed, almond extract, things for infusing into a coconut broth. I returned from my shopping lunch clutching my purchases the way I once did my one-eyed teddy bear while sitting in the dentist's chair.
I worked until 8. I locked up and headed to the elevators without my purchases. Without my purchases! I had mistaken a small melon on my desk for my purchases! You cannot make curry fish with a small melon!
I stood outside my locked office door. I have no idea where my office key is. I never use it. It has not gotten bad enough that I am the first one in yet.
I stare at the door. I try to use my credit card to pick the lock. I am remembering how the kaffir lime leaves smell and thinking of cilantro fainting delicately inside.
I wait ten long minutes waiting vainly by the door before giving up and going home.
It is raining quite hard.
I buy pre-prepared foodstuffs. I scare my partner by throwing a groceries-locked-behind-doors hissyfit in the kitchen. He prepares the prepared foodstuffs. I clean the apartment.
I go to bed sad because of what I did not eat today.
AMANDA CARDONE
Tonight one my interviewers had problems talking with a respondent because he was unwilling to give answers which would fit into our
closed-ended research questions. So I picked up the phone and spoke to him myself.
When I asked him if he had to choose, whether he'd take a pay increase or improved medical coverage, he replied that if it would
work, he would take a pay decrease and no medical coverage if he could see all of the kids in the country have a guaranteed education and be
fed for free until they're eighteen. Furthermore, when asked which candidate he would vote for in the upcoming election, he said he didn't
like Bush or Kerry because they are "too greedy" and "in with the companies," so instead he'd like to vote for his mom.
It truly made my night to converse with this man who was, for the interviewer, simply a frustrating weirdo on the other end of the line.
Maybe I'll vote for his mom, too.
TARA BALLENTINE
Today I drove down I-5, to work, in an office building that used to be a Minolta Camera company building. I have a summer job there, in Tukwila, or "Land of the Hazelnut."
On lunch, you can't walk anywhere to eat, so I drove to Quizno's, then walked through a HUGE parking lot to a Starbuck's. After work I had to
drive to Costco, to pick up my new budget glasses. This day 17 made me realize that you really can't afford to have a crappy office job in a dumpy building in a crummy part of town for too long, or else you turn into a real lame-o.
MEREDITH BRAGG
As my friends can well attest, I am not known for my follow-through. The index to my biography would be filled with lists of abandoned projects:
Creperie, 223-225
So it was with my desire to grow tomatoes. As with most of my projects it is only when someone with a level of concentration above that of a kitten steps in that anything gets accomplished. In an obviously subversive move to get me away from the Guitar Center catalogue, Cindy bought me a tomato planter for my birthday. Actually, "planter" doesn't do it justice. What she bought me was a "Tomato Success Kit" - a fully functioning, self watering idiot-proof uber-pot. It is perfect for me. All that needed to be done is to snap two pieces of plastic together, fill with dirt (already supplied) stick the tomato plants in, cover with a red plastic film and shove the preassembled cage into the dirt. This is easy. Super easy. Probably takes no more than 15 minutes. Probably... See, I wouldn't know how long it actually takes because I got sidetracked after completing the first few steps. So instead of adding the cage, I was able to fully savor those extra two minutes thinking about the latest movie concept -- Jesus Christ Supercop. It has been sitting in the backyard half built ever since. A swift and sadistic mix of wind and rain swept through DC on the 17th tossing upturning lawn furniture and other unsecured items. When I came home I found the tomato plants were no longer standing proudly to greet me. Instead the stalks lay helpless on the ground like Medical Alert patients. Without a cage to brace them the plants were battered to near ruin. I can only imagine my overall hubris whipped the gods into a frenzy… Vayu: That damn prick didn't put his tomato cage up. It's been weeks!
As I knelt in my back yard feebly trying to stand the wounded plants upright I cursed myself for not being a better steward. I vowed to take better care of plants. I vowed to never forget to tend my tomatoes with diligence, just as I wouldn't forget that John Vanderslice was playing with Pedro the Lion at the Black Cat that night. And I should probably change first. Cause I don't want to go in my work clothes. And man would it suck if it sold out. Where is Cindy, I want to leave? Should I eat beforehand or get something there? I want pasta. And a puppy. Puppies are fun. Maybe Jesus can have a Puppy sidekick! Like Turner and Hootch! One day I'll put that cage up. |