My work, in progress
I do not like skirts.
Part of the reason, I will admit, has to do with aesthetics; girls in this day and age aren’t really raised to like their legs, certainly not when their legs are as pleasantly curvy as the rest of them, and pantyhose can only do so much.
Really, though, it comes down to the fact that though I enjoy my femininity, I’ll take dignity over flowiness any day of the week. And so, I’ll take pants for one simple reason: they know how to behave in public. One never has to worry, while walking along in a pair of pants, that the wind or a tree branch or the roving hand of a passing stranger might catch them and throw them up at your face, exposing you from the waist down. They don’t slowly climb up when you sit (or stand, or walk wrong, or think about it) and subsequently form unpressable creases at strange angles. One never has to worry, wearing pants, that they might spontaneously decide to turn themselves back to front, just to spice things up. And there is very little danger of a nice pair of slacks inviting a cold and dusty gust of air up to play where strangers do not belong.
Still, when one’s erstwhile landlady and ultimate employer suggests that a skirt might be appropriate for the evening’s banquet, there’s not much one can do other than smile, nod, and wrestle with a pair of panty hose.
So began what I’m now considering to be my first day as a Real Person.
Wake up at 7:30, raise one eyebrow at the alarm clock and another at myself, roll over. Wake up at five to eight; get up; make bed; make bed again, having found the pillows. Find kitchen; get out juice, yoghurt, orange; get dressed, hair and makeup, brush teeth; return for breakfast; drink half of juice, realise that after having brushed teeth everything tastes absolutely disgusting. Yoghurt and orange return to fridge. Shoes, bag, coat, keys, and we’re off.
One might think, if one were innocent, naïve, and inexperienced, that putting on a pair of nylons would make shoes fit better. They’re another layer, after all, and a textured one. Another layer, bigger feet, better fit.
One might be wrong. The moment I put on my stockings, some capricious god of mischief apparently saw fit to grease my shoes with something much akin to butter, that sends pretty new high heels flying off across the front lawn as soon as I dared to leave the safety of the front foyer. My pretty new flats fared a little better, being lower to the ground and therefore (as every race car expert knows) more difficult to tip over. Still, by the time I reached the bus stop I was inordinately grateful for the chance to stop moving, and an inkling of premonition began to settle over me.
For all that I started a new job today, in a new home in a new city, the bane of my existence was to be clothing.
Which makes somewhat easier the fact that I can’t really talk about work. That will undoubtedly become important later, when everything even remotely interesting would violate the confidentiality agreement that I haven’t signed yet, and is for the moment being completely glossed over in hopes that no one will notice.
Notice what?
My office is beautiful. It’s bright, and the desk is dark, and the view is out of several postcards most of which I think are on sale within a half a block radius from where I sit. The woman who works by me (though not necessarily with me) is pleasant, and friendly, has been around this particular block more times than anyone can probably count, and will from here on in be called Dee. She showed me the washroom, my desk, the office supplies, the larger washroom with better sinks for things like washing faces and impromptu showers when coffee cups explode all over your lap, and told me what she could about my job: that is to say, she had absolutely no idea. Which made two of us.
She also told me something for which I will be indebted to her for the rest of my life, or until it stops being convenient; the aforementioned banquet had been cancelled. Some time ago, which I might have known had I had internet from A’s guest bedroom. My skirt, it was unnecessary.
I have never in my life been happier not to go to a banquet. I confess, I don’t entirely know what it is that I’m not going to get to experience: the invitation, even if I were to be forthright about its contents, was oblique and uninformative, and A wasn’t much better, though I did get the impression that a lot of people more important than I would be talking about things I knew very little about, for what would undoubtedly be a tedious amount of time. That sort of prestige does not really thrill me, and the moment my mind found out it could stop running in bewildered loops around ways to get out of conversation, a weight lifted from my back.
After that, at 9:30 am, the day was something of a dream. Not knowing what my job was didn’t mean not doing it; there were papers aplenty on my desk, most of them with words on them. Having very little else to do, I set about reading them, taking notes, rereading, taking better notes, and trying to figure out what if any of it I was supposed to come away understanding. Dee chatted with me every now and then, somehow managing to make me feel like I’d known her for months rather than an hour and a half, and every few minutes whipped off an email to tech support asking why the new girl wasn’t on the system yet, while I checked the only email account I had access to and pretended to be Sarah Duluth* (*names have been changed to protect the utterly uninvolved) when I inadvertently replied to them.
Lunch break came and went, pleasant smiles at security guards (all of whom seem to be francophone) and fellow office workers (Anglophone), and tech support (linguistic identity unknown) finally told my computer that it was alright to let me be myself, so long as I behaved. With my username came an email address, very official and impressive, which I promptly sent to my bosses.
Moments later, Bea was on the phone. If A calls the ultimate shots, and Dee shows the ropes, Bea is the one who knows the middle bits. She is my direct supervisor, and talking with her put all of my fears to rest and made my purpose here clear as crystal; my job is to read things, and then read other things as they are sent to me, unless one of them is sent to me with a date on it at which point I read it immediately, unless the date isn’t for a while now in which case I read it later. I may at some points have to go other places to read other things ... and at some point my job won’t involve reading at all, but we’ll deal with that when we get there.
Oh, well. Good.
Reading it was, then, as offices around me emptied out and Dee ultimately waved goodbye to me and left me on my own. I clung to the fragile light of work-internet for a few minutes, then gave up the goat myself and wandered homeward.
My intent, it should be stated, was to take the bus. I like busses; they go where you want them to, so long as you want to go where they’re headed, and do it relatively quickly, unless there’s traffic. They certainly don’t pinch your toes, or waft tempting takeout smells at you. They do, however, occasionally come slightly ahead of schedule. Watching the rear lights of my bus blink tauntingly at me from the bus stop, I decided that I could either wait for twenty ish minutes for the next bus to come, or I could get some exercise, and that there was really no question there.
I’ve always known that I’m a bit crazy.
A long forty-five minutes later, I arrived home, and have decided that I’m never walking home in tights again, unless I do. My flats might not have fallen off, much, but they certainly weren’t comfortable, and my damned skirt seemed to have formed a pact with my bag and the previously mentioned capricious god of mischief; every step I took, my bag rubbed slightly against my skirt, which in turn crept slightly higher up my knees until I might have been better off wearing one of those belt-fabric things they advertise on incomprehensible Korean fashion websites. Every few steps I had to tug it back down to my knees, looking neither dignified nor flowy but rather disgruntled, and trying to straighten it as I did so. I finally stopped at one corner a heavenly two blocks away from A’s apartment, to realise that lo! The power of the skirt is far beyond that of any mere mortal; the entire thing was spun around neatly backwards, and I want nothing more to do with it.
So ends my first day as a real person; not flopping as soon as I got through the door but rather taking off jacket and scarf, hanging them neatly; hanging up blazer-vest to air before it goes back into the closet; flattening out horrible skirt in hopes of willing away some of the creases; pantyhose go far away, until I am less cross with them, all of that traded for striped pyjama bottoms and an oversized McGill sweatshirt, in which I will blog self-referentially for a bit and then make myself a real-person dinner, before abandoning myself to video games and teddy grahams.
Baby steps.
Part of the reason, I will admit, has to do with aesthetics; girls in this day and age aren’t really raised to like their legs, certainly not when their legs are as pleasantly curvy as the rest of them, and pantyhose can only do so much.
Really, though, it comes down to the fact that though I enjoy my femininity, I’ll take dignity over flowiness any day of the week. And so, I’ll take pants for one simple reason: they know how to behave in public. One never has to worry, while walking along in a pair of pants, that the wind or a tree branch or the roving hand of a passing stranger might catch them and throw them up at your face, exposing you from the waist down. They don’t slowly climb up when you sit (or stand, or walk wrong, or think about it) and subsequently form unpressable creases at strange angles. One never has to worry, wearing pants, that they might spontaneously decide to turn themselves back to front, just to spice things up. And there is very little danger of a nice pair of slacks inviting a cold and dusty gust of air up to play where strangers do not belong.
Still, when one’s erstwhile landlady and ultimate employer suggests that a skirt might be appropriate for the evening’s banquet, there’s not much one can do other than smile, nod, and wrestle with a pair of panty hose.
So began what I’m now considering to be my first day as a Real Person.
Wake up at 7:30, raise one eyebrow at the alarm clock and another at myself, roll over. Wake up at five to eight; get up; make bed; make bed again, having found the pillows. Find kitchen; get out juice, yoghurt, orange; get dressed, hair and makeup, brush teeth; return for breakfast; drink half of juice, realise that after having brushed teeth everything tastes absolutely disgusting. Yoghurt and orange return to fridge. Shoes, bag, coat, keys, and we’re off.
One might think, if one were innocent, naïve, and inexperienced, that putting on a pair of nylons would make shoes fit better. They’re another layer, after all, and a textured one. Another layer, bigger feet, better fit.
One might be wrong. The moment I put on my stockings, some capricious god of mischief apparently saw fit to grease my shoes with something much akin to butter, that sends pretty new high heels flying off across the front lawn as soon as I dared to leave the safety of the front foyer. My pretty new flats fared a little better, being lower to the ground and therefore (as every race car expert knows) more difficult to tip over. Still, by the time I reached the bus stop I was inordinately grateful for the chance to stop moving, and an inkling of premonition began to settle over me.
For all that I started a new job today, in a new home in a new city, the bane of my existence was to be clothing.
Which makes somewhat easier the fact that I can’t really talk about work. That will undoubtedly become important later, when everything even remotely interesting would violate the confidentiality agreement that I haven’t signed yet, and is for the moment being completely glossed over in hopes that no one will notice.
Notice what?
My office is beautiful. It’s bright, and the desk is dark, and the view is out of several postcards most of which I think are on sale within a half a block radius from where I sit. The woman who works by me (though not necessarily with me) is pleasant, and friendly, has been around this particular block more times than anyone can probably count, and will from here on in be called Dee. She showed me the washroom, my desk, the office supplies, the larger washroom with better sinks for things like washing faces and impromptu showers when coffee cups explode all over your lap, and told me what she could about my job: that is to say, she had absolutely no idea. Which made two of us.
She also told me something for which I will be indebted to her for the rest of my life, or until it stops being convenient; the aforementioned banquet had been cancelled. Some time ago, which I might have known had I had internet from A’s guest bedroom. My skirt, it was unnecessary.
I have never in my life been happier not to go to a banquet. I confess, I don’t entirely know what it is that I’m not going to get to experience: the invitation, even if I were to be forthright about its contents, was oblique and uninformative, and A wasn’t much better, though I did get the impression that a lot of people more important than I would be talking about things I knew very little about, for what would undoubtedly be a tedious amount of time. That sort of prestige does not really thrill me, and the moment my mind found out it could stop running in bewildered loops around ways to get out of conversation, a weight lifted from my back.
After that, at 9:30 am, the day was something of a dream. Not knowing what my job was didn’t mean not doing it; there were papers aplenty on my desk, most of them with words on them. Having very little else to do, I set about reading them, taking notes, rereading, taking better notes, and trying to figure out what if any of it I was supposed to come away understanding. Dee chatted with me every now and then, somehow managing to make me feel like I’d known her for months rather than an hour and a half, and every few minutes whipped off an email to tech support asking why the new girl wasn’t on the system yet, while I checked the only email account I had access to and pretended to be Sarah Duluth* (*names have been changed to protect the utterly uninvolved) when I inadvertently replied to them.
Lunch break came and went, pleasant smiles at security guards (all of whom seem to be francophone) and fellow office workers (Anglophone), and tech support (linguistic identity unknown) finally told my computer that it was alright to let me be myself, so long as I behaved. With my username came an email address, very official and impressive, which I promptly sent to my bosses.
Moments later, Bea was on the phone. If A calls the ultimate shots, and Dee shows the ropes, Bea is the one who knows the middle bits. She is my direct supervisor, and talking with her put all of my fears to rest and made my purpose here clear as crystal; my job is to read things, and then read other things as they are sent to me, unless one of them is sent to me with a date on it at which point I read it immediately, unless the date isn’t for a while now in which case I read it later. I may at some points have to go other places to read other things ... and at some point my job won’t involve reading at all, but we’ll deal with that when we get there.
Oh, well. Good.
Reading it was, then, as offices around me emptied out and Dee ultimately waved goodbye to me and left me on my own. I clung to the fragile light of work-internet for a few minutes, then gave up the goat myself and wandered homeward.
My intent, it should be stated, was to take the bus. I like busses; they go where you want them to, so long as you want to go where they’re headed, and do it relatively quickly, unless there’s traffic. They certainly don’t pinch your toes, or waft tempting takeout smells at you. They do, however, occasionally come slightly ahead of schedule. Watching the rear lights of my bus blink tauntingly at me from the bus stop, I decided that I could either wait for twenty ish minutes for the next bus to come, or I could get some exercise, and that there was really no question there.
I’ve always known that I’m a bit crazy.
A long forty-five minutes later, I arrived home, and have decided that I’m never walking home in tights again, unless I do. My flats might not have fallen off, much, but they certainly weren’t comfortable, and my damned skirt seemed to have formed a pact with my bag and the previously mentioned capricious god of mischief; every step I took, my bag rubbed slightly against my skirt, which in turn crept slightly higher up my knees until I might have been better off wearing one of those belt-fabric things they advertise on incomprehensible Korean fashion websites. Every few steps I had to tug it back down to my knees, looking neither dignified nor flowy but rather disgruntled, and trying to straighten it as I did so. I finally stopped at one corner a heavenly two blocks away from A’s apartment, to realise that lo! The power of the skirt is far beyond that of any mere mortal; the entire thing was spun around neatly backwards, and I want nothing more to do with it.
So ends my first day as a real person; not flopping as soon as I got through the door but rather taking off jacket and scarf, hanging them neatly; hanging up blazer-vest to air before it goes back into the closet; flattening out horrible skirt in hopes of willing away some of the creases; pantyhose go far away, until I am less cross with them, all of that traded for striped pyjama bottoms and an oversized McGill sweatshirt, in which I will blog self-referentially for a bit and then make myself a real-person dinner, before abandoning myself to video games and teddy grahams.
Baby steps.