Funny Day-to-Day Stuff

what’s in your inbin?

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email inbin

Do you hoarde, or do you delete?

37,369. THAT’S THE NUMBER OF EMAILS Ithaca Post Editor Luke Fenchel had in his Gmail inbin the last time I peeked.

After recovering from the shock that it is even possible for an inbin to hold that many emails without making the entire Internet freeze up, I wondered, what do our inbins say about us?

I retain emails I’ve read because I’m afraid I might need them someday, whether for the email address or the details in the content. I feel responsible for tracking other people’s information. I hang onto things. Those of us who fear the delete button also tend to rely on wall calendars and sticky notes. We plan. We cling.

I envy those who can forget, whether a dentist appointment, an oil change or Mother’s Day. Those people can read an email, delete it and never think of it again. Are they Zen, or irresponsible?

To better understand the psychology that underlies people’s habits, I did a little research, and, to spice things up and increase my column’s SEO potential, I included some Really Famous People in my inquiries.

Side note: Really Famous People tend not to respond to media requests from lowly unknown writers like myself. Take Steve Jobs, for example. I know he’s busy, but he’s got an entire office dedicated to handling his media requests, and still, no one returned my call. Same with Ellen DeGeneres. I’ll bet both of their inbins are embarrassingly overflowing. Bastards.

I did hear back from Penn Jillette, the tech-savvy, larger and louder half of the magician duo Penn & Teller. (Thanks, Penn.) Penn wrote, “I always keep my inbox at zero. With very few exceptions, once I open an email, I do everything I have to do with that email, and move it to an archive. Touch everything once.” And “Poof!” the emails magically disappear.

Locally, I heard back from everyone I queried, even the native celebrities. Like Penn, Central New York promoter Dan Smalls reads and replies immediately, “even if it’s the same band begging for another impossible opening slot.” Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton’s assistants sort her 600+ daily emails as they come in. I had to reassure an insecure staff person at her office that an empty inbin was not a reflection of a lack of popularity, and suggested it was instead a statement about one’s anal retentive characteristics. She said they do it to keep the server from crashing.

A wise person once told me that clutter represents delayed decisions. If that’s the case, Mayor Carolyn Peterson and musicians Sim Redmond and Jennie Lowe Stearns are serious avoiders: each of them has thousands of emails saved.

As a result of my extensive and exhaustive research which included Really Famous People*, I started to imagine that our inbins might say something about both our individual personalities as well as our relationships with others. I came up with the following rating scale correlating our emails with our personal lives:

0-10 (Penn Jillette-0) Either you are extremely efficient and very, very lonely, or you can perform magic. You are an all-or-nothing guy when it comes to relationships. You don’t tolerate bullshit.

10-99 (Dan Smalls – 25; my dad – 43) You have a Zen attitude toward attachment. Let it go, dude, let it go. This philosophy has pissed off your significant other on more than one occasion when you have thrown out an old newspaper before he/she read it, or washed a mug out when there was still a sip of coffee in it.

100-499 (Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton – 230; me – 165) You try to find balance, and you succeed most of the time, though you can be a little clingy. If you want love, it’s waiting for you; you just have to make time for it. (Doesn’t this sound like a good place to be? That’s because I’m in this category.)

500-999 You try to find balance in your life, and you fail most of the time. I can say anything here because I don’t know anyone in this category.

1000+ (Mayor Carolyn Peterson – 3700; Jennie Lowe Stearns – 5417; Sim Redmond – 2502) You are a somewhat anxious person who worries about making the people you care about happy. One of those emails might contain something really, really important, so you better not delete any of them. If only you had the time to go through all these emails and sort them, which you don’t, so you just hang on tightly and worry. Red wine helps.

37,000+ (Luke Fenchel – 37,369) You need a therapist. Or an assistant. Or both.

-Amelia Sauter

*Ashton and Demi could not be reached for comment.


facelift

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facelift

This will be me in forty years

ON THE EVE OF MY FORTIETH BIRTHDAY, I found myself in a Midwest hotel with a bottle of Hendrick’s gin. True, the hotel boasted a state-of-the-art fitness center, and my room had a fridge, but I was in the middle of Ohio, for chrissake, and furthermore I was in the company of a mob of conservative mini-van driving women with perfect hair, perfect makeup, and perfect wedding bands. It was the first time I celebrated a birthday alone, and I was surrounded by the type of women I always swore I’d never become.

Sitting on my king bed, I suspected I had made a mistake coming to this writers’ conference when I read the first line of the brochure: “Catholic in our faith, global in our mission.” My email in-bin provided a second unwelcome clue: my one-on-one session was scheduled with a man who worked for a publishing company that represented books with catchy titles like The Faithful and the Flawed, Your Phone Connection Vs. Your Prayer Connection, and The Trinity Diet. I cancelled my appointment. Someone overflowing with the holy spirit could have my spot.

At the registration table in the lobby, I was surrounded by what appeared to be suburban mommy bloggers and frumpy granny writers: the room overflowed with flat-ironed hair, penciled eyebrows and a disproportionate number of blondes. They all picked up their information packets and then sat down on the couches, meeting, greeting, chatting.  I hesitated. Should I join them, make some new friends? I thought perhaps I should hang out in the bar instead. Maybe I’d find the other degenerates in there, you know, the tattooed writers and socialists and gays with inappropriate senses of humor and foul mouths, the ones more than ready for a drink at two o’ clock on a Thursday afternoon. I changed my mind and hid in my room until dinner; if the bar ended up being full of drunken soccer moms, it could be a scary sight.

I used to insist I would age gracefully, that the phrase “plastic surgery” would never escape my lips, which would never be injected with collagen. During the height of my teenage soap opera addiction, I watched a character from The Young and the Restless, Katherine Chancellor, receive an on-air facelift. A written warning flashed across the screen, followed by scalpels, bloody flesh, heavy bandages and later, bruising. I was mortified that a beautiful woman would elect to have someone loosen the skin on her face with a knife and then yank it up like a pair of knee socks.

As I get older, procedures like laser skin resurfacing and facelifts no longer bring to my mind torture methods from old school horror movies. Rather, these treatments fall into the suspense or adventure comedy genre, like when I recently found myself engrossed in an older friend’s story about flying to Costa Rica for a bargain facelift. I was on the edge of my seat, asking, “And then what happened?”

“It was fabulous!” she raved, recounting her experience as more like a vacation than a major surgery, complete with handsome doctors with sexy accents, euphoria-inducing drugs and cocktails on the beach. All that was missing were the slides.

I didn’t meet any women at the conference who had facelifts, or if they did, we didn’t talk about it. But I did have more in common with the mommy bloggers than I imagined. We were all women with body issues, food issues and self esteem issues, trying to find balance in our lives, saving our money to buy the next anti-aging cream or an awesome pair of girly shoes, and escaping our day-to-days to immerse ourselves in something we each loved to do: write. We read each others’ humor blogs, giggled when the priest said grace before the meals (which was the only time God showed up) and saved each other seats at lunch like we were in high school.

One mother of two with a painted face, Jamie, advocated for me at the dinner table, helping me explain my innumerable food allergies to the catering manager (without apologizing nine times in one sentence). She was funny and supportive, and even took the stage during amateur comic night at the conference, an act of bravery that I deeply admired. Jamie said she refuses to leave her house without makeup, and I had a flash of judgment before I realized, wait a minute, I won’t leave my house without makeup, either! Another gal I met wrote for The Man Show on Comedy Central, every episode of which included girls with big boobs and bikinis bouncing up and down on a trampoline. That, I can definitely appreciate.

About to turn forty, and in a four-star hotel for four days with four hundred women, I celebrated my birthday by sharing a drink and laughter in the bar with my new friends, and I pondered whether my similarities to the other women outweighed the differences. I won’t pop out any kids, I can’t straighten my hair without resembling Gilda Radner, and since I haven’t had eyebrows my whole life, I don’t plan to start drawing them on now. However, I recently became a proud owner of Ellen DeGeneres-endorsed eye serum, and last year a dermatologist lasered some spots off my face. She did it for free the first time, because she knows those laser treatments are as addictive as crack. She stands to make a lot of money off my vanity.

And as for the facelift, I haven’t made up my mind yet. Ask me when I turn 50.

-Amelia Sauter

david sedaris in lil ol’ ithaca

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Taughannock Falls

Apparently David Sedaris likes Ithaca.

DAVID SEDARIS IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE PEOPLE THAT I’LL NEVER MEET, second only to Hillary Clinton. Last night at the State Theater marked the first time I’ve seen him in person, and I was more than a little excited.

On Sedaris’ second day of a thirty-six day tour, the show appeared to be close to sold out. Security personnel hovered in every corner – in case someone rushed the stage for a hug? I’ve seen hug attacks happen before in seemingly civilized venues, once at an assembly at my all-girls Catholic high school when a pile of my peers tackled a morning show DJ who came to encourage our chocolate drive sales. You can never be too careful.

“No photographs,” the introducer announced, “and turn off your cell phones.” In response, I pulled my iPhone from my bag and snapped Sedaris’ picture. From the front row of the balcony, my view included the top of his balding head.

$44 per ticket was a lot of money to pay to hear an author read for an hour and a half. Dinner and drinks for two at the Trumansburg Pourhouse costs less, as does a day pass to the Grassroots Festival, and that buys you ten hours, multiple musicians, priceless face time and unbeatable people-watching opportunities.

What is it about Sedaris that leads us to hand over our money – and our hearts – to him? The universality of his topics combined with the ability to turn everyday occurrences into outlandishly funny moments results in stories that quickly draw in the audience. We envy his ability to say inappropriate things out loud that we would not dare whisper.

Two of his readings at the State were from his forthcoming “bestiary,” a collection of fables about animals, though as Sedaris put it, “Fables have morals.” He also shared excerpts from his diary and a piece on the angst of airline travel, where he translated stewardess-speak for the layperson, the underlying meaning of the request “Your trash?” being a judgment: “You’re trash.”

Sedaris’ appeal is as much about his presentation as about his writing. His dramatic pauses drive home punch lines. He knows this, and throughout the show, he jotted on his notes each time the audience laughed, which happened after almost every sentence. We laughed because we expected to laugh, because he’s David Sedaris. Even the things that weren’t really funny left us chuckling, like rats with pancreatic cancer or a dog who gets hungry when he smells burning flesh.

The woman seated beside us was infected with this anticipatory laughter, snorting uncontrollably throughout the reading, when Sedaris read benign sentences like, “He shakes the crumbs out of his mustache,” or “The bull terrier had creepy eyes.” If I wrote those lines, no one would laugh. Nor would they find it humorous if I said a woman left her teenage son in a burning house. Sedaris’ stories are as dark as they are comical.

But the main reason I think we all love Sedaris is that it feels he’s like one of us, but funnier, a regular curmudgeon who swears and complains a lot and checks his watch every ten minutes. During the question and answer period at the end of the show, when asked what animal he would cast himself as in a fable, he said a muppet, or a snail. To another question he quipped, “If I had a beach house, I’d name it Sea Section.”

We related even more when he said he visited one of our gorges. “If I were here longer, I’d go to…” Sedaris paused dramatically, and we waited, to hear his answer. Taughannock Falls? John Thomas Steakhouse? Rasa Spa? And he finished his sentence like a true local:  “…Pudgies and Cobblers Cottage,” he said. “These are prize winners.”

-Amelia Sauter

progressive destruction disorder

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getouttabedaphobia

I'm crazy, you're crazy, we're all crazy.

WHEN YOU STUDY THE DSM-IV (which will soon be the DSM-V), you suddenly discover every single one of your friends and family members has a serious mental illness. You read it, therefore you diagnose it, as matter-of-factly as you wake up, therefore you get out of bed. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, is the current psychotherapist’s bible. It describes in painstaking detail every psychological disorder officially recognized by an elite team of mental health professionals.

I’ve heard the same phenomenon seizes wanna-be doctors when they attend medical school. They get a bellyache and wonder, Do I have appendicitis? Diverticulitis? Abdominal cutaneous nerve entrapment syndrome?

For those studying abnormal psychology, the diagnosing starts with ex-boyfriends, loved ones and pets. Your mother-in-law is histrionic. Your sister has obsessive-compulsive tendencies. The cat has panic attacks. Your ex-boyfriend is an asshole – oh, wait, that’s not a diagnosis – your ex-boyfriend has narcissistic personality disorder. The realization that everyone in the whole world is certifiably crazy soon extends to people you’ve never met, like the child throwing a tantrum in the grocery store who obviously has oppositional defiant disorder, sure to blossom into conduct disorder since his mother appears to be bipolar.

At three o’clock in the morning, when your partner is fast asleep beside you, and you are mid-way through reading the DSM-IV, all eight hundred eighty-six pages that your professor has insisted you memorize from beginning to end, you realize that you have the symptoms of two-thirds of the two hundred ninety-seven mental illnesses in the book. You, too, are diagnosably crazy, nuts, cuckoo, bonkers, wacko.

Panicked, you shake your partner awake. “I think I might be autistic,” you whisper. “Shut up,” she mumbles.

Now you can’t fall back to sleep until you’ve pinned it down. You have been feeling a little insane lately. You find yourself reading the DSM-IV late into the night like a cheap romance novel, scanning for the exciting parts, the detailed descriptions of dirty little secrets. Do you have Generalized Anxiety Disorder (300.02)? Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Disturbance of Emotions and Conduct (309.4)? Rumination Disorder (307.53)? Borderline Personality Disorder (301.83)?

While I was studying the DSM-IV, I arrived home one day to find my partner in the bedroom. The sheets lay in a heap on the floor, the mattress leaned up against the wall, and she had disassembled the bed frame into now unrecognizable chunks of pine that were once legs and slats and a headboard. This deconstruction of critical household objects happened frequently while I was out. My partner would tear apart a piece of furniture she had built or knock a hole in the wall, because she had a vision in her head of something better, stronger, more amazing. She was either schizophrenic, or she had an artist’s brain. I hoped it was the latter.

“Hey!” I shouted as she hammered and banged amidst a pile of debris. “Maybe you’ve got progressive destructive disorder!”

She looked up at me. “What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s when you build something new, and you’re pleased with yourself for about ten seconds and then you get disgusted because you realize you can do better, so you rip it all apart and start over again. You feel your creations are never good enough, so you have to constantly destroy and rebuild them.”

“Oh my god, that’s me!” she said. “There’s a name for what I have. I feel so relieved I’m not alone.”

“Actually, I just made it up,” I said, laughing. I stopped laughing when her face fell.

She glared at me. “For a split second, I felt understood,” she said. She turned back to the bed-to-be, and I grabbed my DSM-IV to look up the diagnosis for someone who derives great pleasure from picking on a loved one.

-Amelia Sauter

rejected

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rejection letter

Look familiar?

WRITERS GET REJECTED SOMETIMES. A LOT. Fact. The rejection letter in the image showed up in my email bin a mere four hours after I submitted a work of fiction online to a respected literary magazine. I had been working on the piece for over a year.

This generic letter reminds me of another letter that Leah and I received after we spent the night in Virginia at a Super 8 that must have just finished starring in a horror film. At 2am, after driving for six hours, we drove for two more hours in a torrential downpour and never-ending thunderstorm to find a hotel.  Everyone was booked due to the “model train show.”  Toot.

We finally pulled into a the parking lot of a Super 8 with a vacancy sign, right next to the drug dealer selling crack on the corner. The man behind the bullet proof glass asked us how many hours we wanted the room for. Bad sign.

Worse sign:  Once inside, Eesah refused to lay down. He paced the room over and over, past its dirt-streaked walls and torn off outlet covers. He’s a dog. He eats poop and rolls in dirt, but he refused to settle anywhere in the room.

When Leah pulled back the bedclothes, we gasped in unison. The underside of the comforter was stained with blood. That did it. We threw open the door. Add lightning strike and crash of thunder here.  It was raining so heavily we couldn’t even see the lobby.

Exhaustion took over. We threw our sleeping bags on top of the bed and let the dog join us there.  When we got home, I called 1-800-Super-8 and complained.  A few weeks later we got a letter in the mail from the Virginia Super 8:

Dear Amelia Sauter:

Thank you for your feedback on your recent stay at the Super 8.  We appreciate your business and hope you stay with us again in the future.

Sincerely,

Neal Manager

Do you think Manager was really his last name?  Do you think The Editors had names? And do you think the literary magazine should have waited more than four hours to reject me, you know, so it could look like they maybe sorta kinda considered publishing my piece, just a little?

-Amelia Sauter

angstgiving

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angstgiving meal

Teeth not required.

MY MOTHER SAID IT WOULD JUST BE THE FOUR OF US. Usually on Thanksgiving, Leah and I end up at Leah’s parents’ house. Or we end up staying home and Leah makes turkey meatballs and mashes every type of root vegetable she can locate at Wegmans. This year, I wanted to spend Thanksgiving with my parents for the first time in about ten years.

I asked Leah if she was interested in joining me. “Who’s going to be there?” she asked tentatively. Leah did not like holidays, and she did not like people, which meant she only attended events where Vicodin was on the menu. My parents served wine, port and whiskey which she deemed acceptable substitutes.

Creating holiday traditions with Leah is like trying to convince a seven-year-old boy to take a bath. Okay, I have no idea what it is like to convince a kid to bathe. But I do know what it is like to try to talk my girlfriend into doing something festive that she thinks is fundamentally stupid. But with some pushy coaxing, she finally tries whatever activity I want, like carving a pumpkin or decorating a Christmas tree, and in the end she loves it. The next year we start all over again with her grumpy refusal to partake in celebrations without a kick in the ass.

On Thanksgiving day this year, an hour or two into wine-inspired conversation with my parents, the doorbell rang.

“Well, that’s a lot of ice cream for five of us,” my mom said, taking their friend Jim’s grocery bag. On cue, the phone rang. Judy had decided to come early with her husband and two young boys to have dinner at my parents instead of at her in-laws. The turkey was taking too long and the boys were getting hungry. Just the four of us was morphing into just the nine of us. I refilled Leah’s wine glass.

A few minutes later, I was sipping wine in the kitchen with my sister as her kids ran around. “I loved your memoir essays,” she said to me. “Thanks for sending them. I like your creative take on things, especially that rum incident when you were fourteen.”

I asked her what she meant.

“You know, everyone remembers things differently,” she said. “And you were drunk.”

My mom chimed in. “And you get to use creative license and make up stuff, since it’s your memoir.”

I was pleasantly surprised that they supported my “creative take” when it included things they had said and done, but their support also made me uneasy, because, well, I thought the memory was fact when I wrote it. I prodded my sister to share her version of the evening.

Judy recalled that she did not say she was going to tell my parents I was drunk on the night she picked me up at the roller skating rink. She claimed she never told them, that she said to me that night in the car as I threw up into a Styrofoam cup, “I’m not going to tell them, you are.”

I asked my mother how she found out. “Your sister had us paged at the movie theater,” she said. “We came home and she asked us to wait until morning to confront you. She was very protective over you.”

My sister? Protective? “I thought you wanted to see me get in trouble,” I said to Judy. “You were so competitive.”

“I was not competitive,” Judy said.

“Yes, you were,” I said.

“No, YOU were.”

“But you told me how competitive you felt in high school.”

“No, you told me YOU were competitive,” she said. “That’s so funny you remember it that way.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I said. I turned to my mother who was stirring the gravy and asked if she had ungrounded me early because she was worried about my mental health, which was what I had assumed because I was so miserable after I got caught.

She said no, that she and my father did talk to me that night while I was drunk, a conversation I have no recollection of, and in the heat of the moment they grounded me for a month “because that’s the kind of thing you do when you’re mad.” They recognized later that two weeks would be sufficient and reasonable for the offense.

“What about the rum cake?” I asked my mom. Suffering from a tortuous hangover and the dry heaves, I had to serve rum cake at the church rectory the day after my drunken escapade. “Did you call the cook and tell her to make rum cake?”

That, my mother said, was divine intervention.

-Amelia Sauter

paying rent

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writing studio

Whether I deserve it or not, there it is.

I JUSTIFY MY NEW STUDIO LIKE THIS:  I dismissed the lawn mower and the driveway plower.  The lawn mower dudes would have charged us even more this summer due to the number of objects they would need to maneuver around, since Leah planted 23 – count ‘em, 23 – fruit trees.  All of which are being snacked upon like gourmet hors d’oeuvres by our resident deer, Piggy Pet (who glares at us and pees when we come outside to yell at her), her sister Fatty and their fawns.  Now I mow the lawn, which is an ass-pain and a half.  It’s an obstacle course, I tell Leah.  But just think of the fruit we’ll have in the years to come, she says, as Piggy Pet munches, glares and pees.

The shop/studio took up half the driveway, so I’m sure shoveling won’t be so bad this winter.  I say that now.  Ask me again in a few months when the mail carrier leaves one of those “I can’t get to your mailbox, bitches” notes.

I also quit going to shiatsu regularly.  We haven’t played much music this summer so I haven’t been hauling around my 30 pound body bag (bass case), hence I have less aches and pains.  Getting enough Vitamin D helps.  Lawn mowing and anticipating shoveling does not help.

So lawn mowing ($50/week), driveway plowing ($30 a pop) and shiatsu ($65 twice a month) is my portion of the “rent” also known as a home equity loan payment towards the new shop.  Downstairs will be Leah’s woodworking and upstairs will be a creative space for both of us.

I think I can justify not taking any freelancing writing on for now, and just working on my Lounge book.  Here’s an excerpt:

People think being a social worker for 13 years should have prepared me for being a bartender.  My theory is that counseling people is about as similar to bartending as being a surgeon is to chopping vegetables.  Some of the tools may be vaguely related, but a serrated kitchen knife is not the same instrument as a scalpel, and with the exception of Hannibal Lecter, a scalpel would not be used to prepare dinner.

I never dreamed of being a bartender.  When I was 14, I decided I wanted spending money to buy a pair of tight Jordache jeans, the ones with the signature squiggle stitched onto the back pocket where I could keep my oversized plastic hair-feathering comb while I was roller skating, so I applied for a job at the Char Pit and for one at the Catholic Church rectory. I spent the next four years stuffing inserts into Sunday bulletins and emptying priests’ ashtrays.  I never heard from the Char Pit.  I assumed this was a message from God that I was not meant to work in the food service industry.

Not that I didn’t learn some useful skills at the rectory.  I became an expert at answering the phone in a sing-song voice, “Our Lady of Mercy Rectory, may I help you?” and when the priest said, “Oh shit, him again?”  I learned to shamelessly lie to the poor wretched soul in need of spiritual counseling on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry, sir, Father Quinn is not available at the moment.  May I take a message?”

Going to an all girls’ Catholic high school that pushed community service fed my belief that I should be selflessly serving others.  When I was 15, Sister Damien, who chose her unfortunate religious name long before The Omen was released, had me stay back after history class so she could ask me if I had ever considered that God might be calling me to join the Sisterhood. “You mean like be a nun?” I asked her in disbelief.  She was convinced I was being called to the ministry.  I was positive God was not talking to me, not like that anyway.  I liked boys too much to even remotely consider the possibility of a life of chastity.  I had been chasing the high of my first kiss and seeking my Prince Charming since I was 12 (Tomboy Princess).  Sixteen Candles was – and embarrassingly still is – my favorite movie of all time.  I continue to faithfully follow the careers of Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall and John (and Joan) Cusak.  While watching the Breakfast Club, I intensely lusted Molly Ringwald’s boots.  I was positive nuns did not have such worldly desires.

What was more deeply concerning to me was why Sister Damien had approached me out of 100 girls in my class of ’88, because I assumed I was the only one. What was it about me that made her think I would make a good nun? Did I come off as a bland, asexual being who craved short man-hair and practical shoes? I was mortified at the image that I might be projecting to others.  Did Sister Damien think I would develop an apple-shaped body and cankles, the unofficial yet unquestionable archetype of the Sisterhood? I only told my best friend about Sister Damien’s epiphany, and I swore her to secrecy.

I admit I was a bit of a prissy do-gooder.  Amy Two-Shoes, my driver’s ed instructor called me, which was markedly better than the nicknames given by him to the other kids in my car, “Crash,” “Andy-Pants,” and “Dopey.”  Other than the time I told an elderly Nazi-style nun to fuck off  during a fit of PMS-related hall wandering without a pass, I tried to be good.  Fortunately most of the nuns at my high school leaned toward liberal.  After my parents insisted that I attend a Catholic high school, they probably regretted it when I came home and announced how cool it was that Sister Marilyn had chained herself to the fence at the Seneca Army Depot in protest of nuclear warheads, and that I wanted to go to the warring El Salvador like Sister Donna and be a missionary.  I most definitely, however, did not want to become a nun, at least not if it meant giving up boys and never having sex.

When Sister Damien approached me again my junior year about the start of a peer counseling program at our high school, I jumped at the chance to ignore my own emotional issues and help those less fortunate than I.  Though the program never got off the ground, I felt far ahead of my peers at dealing with depressed coeds and chronic masturbating callers when I volunteered for the crisis line at my college.

Like being a receptionist at the church, counseling also inspired me to put on a happy, how-can-I-help-you face.  Later, as a client-centered therapist with a Masters degree in social work, when I wanted to yell “Snap out of it!” to a college student distressed because he got B’s instead of A’s, or, to an 85 lb anorexic sorority girl, “ Would you just freaking eat already,” I instead encouraged them to describe their early childhood relationships with their parents and how those might have instilled an unrealistic sense of perfectionism into their damaged psyches.

Bartenders, on the other hand, can walk away from their customers when things get weird or annoying.  I still offer service with a smile, but if I ask someone, “How are you?” as I greet them with a napkin and a menu and they say, “I just had the worst day of my life,” my response is, “What can I get you to drink?”  Easy fix.  You feel bad, I get you a drink, you feel better. I’ve done my job, and I don’t go home at night worrying that you might kill yourself because I paused too long before responding to your deep, vulnerable over-sharing of emotions with a near-stranger.

-Amelia Sauter

recurring nightmare

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school bus

The school bus: Love it, or hate it.

YOU’VE HAD THIS NIGHTMARE. You suddenly realize you aren’t wearing any pants, in the mall. Your teacher throws a pop quiz on a subject you know nothing about.  You are onstage and you forget your lines; in fact, you don’t even know what play you are in. Your mouth is full of pounds of stretchy gum that you can’t pull out.  You try to run from a dangerous person and you can only move in slow motion. You have to pee real bad and all the toilets are clogged and overflowing so you have to go in the sink (this one runs in my family).  You try to dial 911 when someone attacks you and you keep hitting the numbers wrong or no one answers.

Twenty years after graduating high school, I still have dreams where I am running to catch the school bus as it pulls away, or I get on the wrong bus and it drops me off in a strange place.  A few weeks ago, I experienced one of these unfortunate nightmares while I was awake.

It was about 7:30pm when I sat down by the fire to read the newspaper, specifically the Ithaca Journal business section that had come in the mail that day.  As I sipped my bourbon and flipped through the pages, I saw a blurb on the blogging workshop that I would be teaching next month in Trumansburg.  “That’s advertised about four weeks early,” I thought.  “Wow, those T-burg Chamber people really plan ahead.”  I turned the page and started reading another article.  Leah came in from the kitchen.  “Look, honey,” I said.  “My blog class is advertised in the paper already.”  As I flipped back to the page to show her, my eye caught the date of the workshop:  November 17.  I stopped breathing.  “What’s today’s date?”  I asked Leah.  “November 17,” she said.  My heart turned to ice.  I looked at the article again.  The workshop starts at 7pm, it read.  I looked at the clock.  7:36pm.

“Sh*t!” I hollered as I leapt out of my chair.  “Sh*t-sh*t-sh*t!” I said as I frantically changed into a pair of jeans and put my boots and coat on.  “Sh*t!” I muttered as I jumped into the car and drove really fast the half-mile to the library, hoping the cops weren’t taking radar in the middle of town like usual.  The library was dark.  “Sh*t,” I said as I turned the car around.  I had a sinking feeling that I had messed up really, really badly.

I stopped at Gimme coffee on the way home and the girl was just closing up.  I banged on the door and gave her my best pleading face.  She laughed at me as she unlocked the door.  “You need coffee that badly?” she asked.  “No,” I said as I walked over to the bulletin board.  “I need this.”  I pulled down the poster advertising my workshop that I had noticed hanging there earlier in the week.  November 17, 7pm.  “I missed my own workshop,” I told her.

Later I found out that the Chamber of Commerce, the Library and I had all written the date down as Dec 17, but the woman who did the publicity had accidentally switched it to Nov 17.  The blogging workshop technically was scheduled for December 17; it was just advertised wrong to, say, around ninety thousand people.

I was off the hook, but the anxiety was all too familiar.  I had dreamed about missing the school bus the night before.  Last week, all my teeth crumbled and fell out.  And the week before that, I tried to stab an intruder with a butcher knife and it turned into a compostable plastic spoon.  My near-miss was an all-too-real reminder of where these anxiety-provoked dreams come from.

Sweet dreams, and see you at the workshop…

-Amelia Sauter

html emotions

/ amelia sauter / Leave a comment
emoticons

Feelings wrapped up in cute manageable packages

I AM TAKING AN HTML CLASS and I love it. Let me explain that I am a woman comprised of conflicting opposites.  If I was a cake, I would be marble.  Or better yet, a chocolate cake with a vanilla pudding center.  I crave creativity and spontaneity, and yet I am addicted to predictability and the illusion that I can control my tiny little world.  I am anal retentive yet rebellious.   I love change and I hate change.  I accept who I am and please get me out of this skin.  I desire the unknown and I want a formula that will explain everything.

Take emotions.  Sure, it’s great to embrace your emotions, experience catharsis, accept your feelings as organic, blah, blah, blah.  But what if we could easily change our feelings or make them go away?

I propose that we should use html to program our emotions.  I imagine, for example, that anxiety would look something like this:

<body>
<emote type=”anxiety” degree=”high” express=”outward” action=”scream”></emote>
</body>

And then I could simply go in and change it to something more like:

<body>
<emote type=”contentment” degree=”medium” express=”internal” action=”smile”></emote>
</body>

Oh, yes, this could be good.  I think I’m on to something.  Any thoughts on this one?

-Amelia Sauter