ramblings

I was tagged.

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
2. Find page 123
3. Find the first 5 sentences
4. Post the next 3 sentences
5. Tag 5 people

He didn’t see América. She must be down one of the aisles pushing a basket. He tried to look nonchalant as he passed by the checkers and entered the vast cornucopia of the place.

The book is The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle. I read it some years ago for my grandmother’s novel study group, and I’m supposed to be reading it for the library book discussion group on Wednesday. Since the reading I am supposed to do is always the last thing I want to read (even if it’s good), I had the book near my laptop to try to make myself pick it up. The meme has, I suppose, succeeded in making me do that, although I doubt I can get by on only eight sentences when the time for the discussion comes.

I try avoid tagging, as I was never fond of the game, but if you want to be It, go for it.

Update 2/20/08: I forgot to point out that, once again, this post is all the Hermits’ fault.
In 2003 and 2004 I was 27 and 28 years old and living in suburban Chicago. I was mostly unemployed; I was thoroughly directionless; and I was defensive, bitter, and not very happy.

Because I had a lot of time on my hands and high speed wireless internet and a laptop (the same one I’m typing this on now, actually), I read a lot of things online, including just about every article in the Life section of Salon.com. A lot of them bore a strong resemblance to Lori Gottlieb’s argument for settling for Mr. Good Enough instead of holding out for Mr. Perfect. The people who wrote for Salon were not necessarily giving the same advice that Gottlieb does, but they were writing about the same sorts of things, often from the same place–twenty- and thirty-something professional white woman considers the vicissitudes of romance.

Of course, I was also an upper middle class twenty-something white woman, only I didn’t have a profession, and what I thought when reading those pieces was mostly along the lines of “maybe I should just get married and have kids, because then I would have something to do.”

Having something to do is very much a feature of having children, from what I can tell–in fact, quite frequently parents are unable to do much of anything else–but it’s not a particularly good reason to have children, and so I think it’s just as well that I didn’t meet anyone I wanted to marry and I ended up going to library school and getting a job and fulfilling my dream of living in a small town in the West and traveling and hiking and blogging and other things that are more difficult to fit in if you have kids.

That takes care of the kids part, but what about the marriage part?

I’ve always figured that the chances of my marrying are slim to nonexistent. The marriage track record in my family is not very good–so much so that I once burst out laughing when a therapist suggested that in order to make my own relationships work I look to the successful relationships of close family. members and people I knew grewing up. And although, as Laurie Colwin points out in an essay in one of her books about food, you do not have to be beautiful or talented or even thin to fall in love, that entirely sensible argument is hard to uphold against the romantic comedy paradigm that is so heavily promoted by popular culture.

According to Gottlieb, if I tell you I’m not particularly worried about marriage, I’m either in denial or I’m lying. If I’d said that at 27, I would have been. At 32–when, in the world according to your biological clock, I should be more worried–I’m not.

The world according to your biological clock view promoted by the sort of professional white women who write articles like Gottlieb’s–and there are many, many such articles–is only one view of the world, and, however prevalent it may be, it’s not necessarily the best one.

I suspect that Gottlieb is right that your chances of finding Mr. Absolutely Right are pretty slim. The reality she doesn’t acknowledge, however, is that you might not find anybody at all–and that that, too, may be all right.

I did not, as a rule, attend athletic events when I was in high school. I went to the cross-town rivals football game my sophomore year, but since I got into the game by pretending to be a member of the opposing team’s art club, I’m not sure that counts. (The art club was painting faces at the game as a fundraiser, and my best friend went to that school.)

Since I moved to Meeteetse, though, I try to go to a few games. As a result, as I frequently tell people, I have gone to more sporting events since I moved here than in the entire thirty prior years of my life combined.

Basketball is my favorite sport to attend (a good thing, since it’s one of the few offered here), probably because it moves quickly and I even sometimes have some notion of what’s going on. I hadn’t been to a game yet this year, though, and I heard that tonight’s game would be a good one.

Games are well-attended here–I’ve only seen larger crowds at funerals. People quickly drop attending concerts and plays once their kids have graduated, but many of them still show up for games. Never having been to games elsewhere, I can’t offer much by way of comparison, although I imagine they are a lot the same–people yelling advice to the players and cursing the refs from the sidelines, teenagers clambering over one another and rearranging themselves according to complicated and esoteric teenage pecking order rules, little kids trying to see the action, parents trying to keep track of their little kids, and so on.
During half time I chatted with my neighbor from down the street, who asked if I’d made the cheese soup yet and said to come knock on his door if I needed a bottle of beer for it. He’s also trying to organize a moonlight ski for next month, but sadly I’ll be in Salt Lake City at a library conference.

The superintendent, one of the old school board members, and a couple of other guys are always standing and leaning against the wall with their arms crossed at these events. I told them at the school concert back in December that I was going to buy them all white t-shirts and packs of cigarettes to roll in their sleeves. “It’d send the wrong message about smoking, but it’d be such a great photo op,” I said. And I suppose the 50s image is appropriate for these small town moments and small town games.

We started out strong but lost by 11 points. There are a few more games to go, though–perhaps I’ll even make it to another.