MadMup.com

Though I hate hate HATE call waiting I still have it activated on my cell phone as a favor to others who do like it. I hate it because I feel pressured to answer another call while I’m already on a call and I feel an equal and opposite pressure to not answer another call while I’m on a call already. I feel voicemail was created for this exact reason. Leave me a message, I’ll call you back.

I also do not answer cals from numbers I don’t recognize, for the most part. If it’s a local number, I’m a bit more inclined to do so, but there’s no guarantees. My cell phone’s caller ID will show the number but will only show a name if it’s one that’s in my address book. If there’s no name, I’m guessing I don’t know you and, again, this is why voicemail was created.

Yesterday I was on the phone with Josh when I heard the call waiting beep. I looked at the number (another thing I hate doing since I have to pull the phone away from my ear to do it) and didn’t recognize it, so I didn’t answer it. A minute later, the beep again: same number. Then again. On the fourth call, I was pretty sure who it was and told Josh, “Hey, I guess I need to answer this.”

I answered it and it was Kat, as I suspected. She knew why I hadn’t answered, as she’s aware of my behavior in both the unknown number and the call waiting situation.

Her pronouncement when I finally answered?

“You have too many quirks.”

As I was getting out of my car to go into Barnes & Noble this past Saturday night, I gathered up some bits and pieces of paper that had accumulated in the car so I could throw them out in the trash can on the way into the store. When I had the van, I had ample room for a trash can, but with the car I was constantly having to shuffle it so people could sit in the backseat, so I took it out. I still keep the car fairly tidy, but sometimes there’s a straw wrapper or a newspaper section or something and it needs to be dealt with.

There were two girls walking through the parking lot as I made my way to the trashcan, and one of them called out, “You dropped it,” and pointed behind me. I don’t like to litter (and think that people who do it should have to work on a chain gang for a month), so I turned to look for whatever it was I had dropped. I couldn’t see anything, so I asked what I had dropped. “Your smile!” she replied.

I must have been in a receptive mood for whatever reason because I actually did smile at that point. I even said “Thanks for the reminder!” threw away my trash, and went in to get a hot chocolate. I mused over the exchange as I sipped my drink and browsed the store. I’m not a big fan of being talked to by strangers, but I had to admit it was a good reminder that people get an immediate impression of us based on what they see. I imagine that most people think I’m grouchy when they first see me since I don’t usually think to try to look pleasant. If I’m being introduced to someone I think I’m pretty good at being pleasant and agreeable, but my walking-around face defaults to “leave me alone” I’m pretty sure. I don’t know this for a fact since I don’t see myself walking around, but I’m guessing that’s how it is.

By the time I’d bought a book and a DVD, I was actually considering the experience a positive one and hoping I’d remember to smile more in public.

I headed back out to my car when I noticed the girl was still out there, wandering the sidewalk. When she saw me, she started to say something – most likely her “smile” line again – then she must have remembered me because she stopped and said, “Oh… never mind.” Then she took a step away, but then turned around and came back. “Hey…”

She engaged me in conversation as I headed to my car – “You seem nice, are you nice?”

“No, I’m super-creepy.”

She took a mock-step away, “Uh… see ya! Nah, just kidding. Are you this nice all the time.”

“I try to be.”

“Well, then, you want to help me?”

I, in my naiveté, had no idea what was going on. “Uh, with what?”

At that point she went into a sort of spiel that became more and more recognizable as she went on. “I’d like to send you postcard from [some country] when I win this trip I’m working towards because you were so nice. Let me get your name and address.”

“I’m not so much about giving my full name and address out to strangers in parking lots.”

“Oh, me neither. So how about helping me?“ She takes out a laminated card. “Do you read magazines?”

Ugh. It’s the old “I’m selling magazines to win a contest” bit. This one’s got a twist to it, though. See, normally I can find a magazine that I could buy to help someone out, but when I said I couldn’t this time (I really couldn’t), she said, “Oh, but see, if there’s nothing you want personally, the ones in pink you could buy and have sent to a children’s hospital.”

Wow. That’s really laying it on thick. Now if I don’t buy something, I’ve not only betrayed this pseudo-friendship she’s whipped up but I’m also letting down scores of sick children.

“I don’t have checks or cash on me.”

“There’s an ATM across the parking lot, and I’ll not only pay the fee, I’ll give you a piggyback ride over to it.”

Now who’s the super-creepy one?

“Uh… I don’t –“

At that point, my cell phone rang. I pulled the phone out of my pocket, saw that it was Brian, said “Hello? Really? Hang on…” Then, to her, “I’m sorry, I really need to take this.”

Utter contempt. The façade was gone. She ripped out the order sheet where she had ever-so-hopefully written my first name and scribbled it out. She turned and left, muttering curses at me, I’m sure. Her six-minute investment in me had gone belly-up – I should have warned her: only long-term investors need apply. There are too many highs and lows here to get your money’s worth in the short term.

As I drove off and tried to explain the situation to a very confused Brian, it struck me that she’d ruined everything. Her reminder to me to smile was still valid, but now it had the taint of salesmanship on it and I felt tricked. Even now as I write this that makes me want to scowl in rebellion.

Thanks a lot, random parking lot girl.

When I was younger, it struck me that I might like to be a writer. I tried my hand at writing some poems, some songs, and some short stories. It is the conceit of the young that pouring oneself out on paper in paper means something, and I signed on to the program wholeheartedly. There was angst, there was joy, there was pain, there was more angst – pretty much the whole gamut of teenage emotion.

The older I got, the more I felt silly putting emotions rawly on paper. I still had the emotions, but it never felt like they got transferred to the page well enough. Somewhere along the line, I just stopped. Stopped writing, that is. My brain still had delusions of powering a writer and would occasionally still throw ideas at me – snippets of poetry, a line of a song, characters for a story. Once my brain even made me dream a whole movie plot while I was sleeping. I woke myself up and wrote it down and still have it somewhere, but that’s probably all the farther it will ever go.

Still… I just couldn’t get past that what I would write wouldn’t ever come out anything like what I imagined it should come out like. If I couldn’t do it right, I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t know how to work at it, and there was no guarantee that I’d work at it even if I knew how to – I’m notoriously resistant to working on things, especially if it’s something to better myself. I couldn’t seem to give up on it completely, though. I’d still mull the plots and snippets over in my mind, I just wouldn’t put anything in writing.

One of the things I always heard that writers should do is carry a notepad around with them to write down ideas as they would strike. Writers, painters, poets, comedians, any creative sort – it was a practice they all held to. I’d tried it a time or two, but the notepads that were the right size all were spiral-bound, and they didn’t fit in a pocket very well. They’d constantly get caught on threads in the pocket and even tear holes at times. I gave up quickly any time I tried.

A while back I noticed these very nice notebooks at Barnes & Noble that were perfectly sized and not spiral bound. They were like mini-books, bound on the side with a heavier outer cover. They were called “Moleskine” and the packaging proclaimed they had a history. The website says

“Moleskine is the legendary notebook that the European artists and intellectuals who made twentieth-century culture used: from Henri Matisse to the turn-of-the-century Parisian “avant-garde, from Louis Férdinand Céline to Ernest Hemingway.”

Quite the pedigree.

I didn’t buy one right away. They cost enough to make it a bit more than an impulse purchase, and I wasn’t convinced that a better notepad would make a difference. After a couple of weeks, though, I decided to get one. Just as it proclaimed, it’s the perfect size. It doesn’t have a place for a writing utensil and I still don’t have enough pockets to comfortably carry it around, but it’s a first step. It’s a long journey from here to The Old Man and the Sea, but only time will tell.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, right?