Still hard to do?

Last night I went out for dinner with Theatre MILF and she informed me that she’s broken up with Dunkin Donuts.  “It’s for real,” she assured me, “I’ve taken my CDs back and everything.”

Then I pictured my friend emerging from the back room of a Dunkin Donuts with a box piled high with jewel cases and a few t-shirts.  She’d cast one forlorn glance back at the coffee maker and display case before squaring her jaw and walking out, head held high.

Taking back your CDs at the end of a breakup used to be the one action that signaled things were really over.  If you were one of those couples that broke up and got back together regularly, that would be the one step you’d have to take to communicate to your former flame, “I’m ready to bang someone else/I may already be banging someone else.”  So that begs the question: Is it easier/less final to break up now that no one has CDs anymore?  What’s the new equivalent of CDs when breaking up with someone?

When I was with my first long-term boyfriend, we consolidated CDs and DVDs because we were going to be together forever and who wanted the extra clutter.  It was an unspoken vow, a show of fidelity, like a ring, but entertaining.  Then when I broke up with him, he inventoried all our stuff while I was at work and I lost my Pixies collection.

“I like them better.” He told me, “It’s only fair.”

“Most of those CDs were mine initially, remember?  You were all excited that I had them so you could save money.”

“Well, I had planned to buy them.  You never listened to them, and I had on Trompe Le Monde just last week.”

“Fine, take that one.” I said, thinking that he should have picked a better album if that was his angle but also wondering if citing one of the weakest albums was meant to be a testament of true Pixies love on his part.  Saying Doolittle would have been too obvious, Bossanova just unbelievable, but Trompe walked the line.

Over the following months, I noticed that a lot of things that were mine, purchased with my money, had wandered off.  In the moment, when you own something like 400 CDs and 100 DVDs, it’s hard to recall which ones are missing, but on a Tuesday night when you want to watch Edward Scissorhands and there’s a gaping hole on the shelf, you start to become awfully bitter.

There’s nothing you can do about it though.  Calling that person up three months later seems both crazy and sad, and gives the other person the upper hand.  I have to hand it to my ex, it was a bold and inspired move, and had I been less lazy/not keeping the apartment, I might have tried the same thing.

So what do the young kids these days do to stick it to their new ex?  You leave with the same Mp3s you brought into the relationship, a lot of people just don’t have that many DVDs, what’s the new stick-it-to-them item?  Or was it never really about the CDs, just anything that the other person cared about that you could fuck with?

Scouting for Hobbies

I was a Girl Scout for a number of years.  I started as a Brownie, then dropped out because I hated selling cookies. My mother had this notion in her head (for reasons still unknown) that I should sell 100 boxes in my first year so that I could get the “100 Boxes” badge for my Brownie sash.  This idea sounded very good in theory, as that sash was the ugliest of browns, and I hadn’t really earned any badges other than the ones you just get for showing up.  In practice, what we both failed to realize, is that I hate selling things, and I am shockingly bad at it even as an adorable, freckled little kid, which should have meant that all I needed to do was smile and proffer a box of Thin Mints.

When I was Brownie age–must have been second grade, I was shy around strangers.  This is certainly not a bad thing since it’s something I was taught to be to avoid being kidnapped, but it was tremendously unhelpful in the art of cookie selling.  My mother dragged me from door to door trying to persuade me to go up alone and sell someone some overpriced (but delicious!) cookies, and I just wouldn’t do it. If she got me to the door, I certainly wouldn’t smile.  Finally, she acquiesced and went up with me, eventually she just let me stay in the car or at home because my foot dragging was just too much to deal with.  That is one of the nice things about my mother, my brother and I both realized early that she had little patience for incompetence.   That realization got us both out of many, many unpleasant tasks.

I earned my badge, sewed it on my sash, and then promptly quit vowing that I would never again sell a cookie.  Over the years my mother would bring home box after box of girl scout cookies that her co-workers would sell at work.  “I don’t know why I never thought to just do that,” she remarked, “It really saves time.”

Years later, a friend convinced me to come back to the troop.  By that point, I would be automatically upgraded to Girl Scout (no more of that Brownie crap) just by virtue of my age.  I liked the idea of  earning a promotion for doing nothing other than getting older, but I was wary of scouting.  “It’s fun,” she assured me, “Besides, you can always quit.”  That is the kind of convincing I respond well to, so I demanded that my mother buy me an ugly green vest (“I have to wear it to meetings or they’ll laugh at me!” I said), which I never wore, and gave it another shot.  By this point, my brother was a Boy Scout, and had a Swiss Army Knife, which I coveted, so I figured that if he was learning and doing cool stuff, I might as well too.

Of course, I never got a Swiss Army knife, until I bought one for myself years later, but I actually do have fond memories of my time as a Girl Scout.  Gentleman Scholar asked me recently, “what do you actually do as a Girl Scout? Do you guys camp and stuff?”  I had to think about that, because I honestly never quite knew what the point of it all was.  Boy Scouts is very cut and dried, everyone knows what they do, but the point of Girl Scouts, at least my personal experience with it, seemed to be quite ambiguous.

I remember vividly when I was a Brownie, we had a cooking lesson one day.  As our troop leader was not, apparently, much of a cook, we made ants on a log and then mixed a can of corn with a can of chicken with stars.  It was insanely delicious, and I frequently made it for myself over the years.  I get embarrassed actually thinking about what we did and learned because it seems to antiquated and 1950s housewife.  Because I have a huge crush on Mike Rowe, I’ve read his wikipedia page more than once, and learned that he was an Eagle Scout.  That’s a title that carries weight and prestige–I don’t think Girl Scouts have an equivalent, do they?

Regardless, I’m sure the scouts of today are quite different than the scouts of my time, and I tried to find out by being an assistant troop leader, but no one ever called me back (still a bit bitter).  What I finally told Gentleman Scholar to sell him about why scouting was awesome, was the series of weeks when we talked about hobbies.

Everyone has hobbies, or is supposed to have hobbies, I’ve talked about this before at length.  Except, just like I often struggle to understand what people do for work, I also don’t quite get what people do for hobbies.  Gardening, running, knitting–these are all pretty obvious and straightforward, but I have a sneaking suspicion that people out there are either pursuing some pretty unusual hobbies that they don’t talk about, or watching more tv than they’ll admit to, also that lack of hobbies or things to do is why people end up having kids.  Since my hobby for many years was going to college or grad school, and the whole lifestyle that goes with that, I still don’t have an hobbies besides running, drinking and reading.

In the hobby exercise that we did for Girl Scouts, each girl had either one meeting or part of a meeting to talk about a particular hobby that she did.  It could be anything, the more unusual the better, and even in our small group, we had some good, weird stuff.  One girl taught us to make gum-wrapper chains.  This was fantastically rewarding to me because the girls in Babysitters Club books were always making gum wrapper chains and they never explained how to do it.  Learning, finally, how to do this made me feel somehow more normal, and more like a character in a novel.  Another girl taught us how to latch hook, which was amazing because we had always had this hideously ugly latch-hooked scene hanging on the wall in our house, and I always wondered how it came to be.  After each meeting, I would rush out to get the supplies necessary to try this stuff out, and then abandon it after a few weeks, but it was fun to try something new.

The best part was that though some of these hobbies were a bit embarrassing, each girl started out a bit sheepish, then transitioned to authoritative, and finally landed on proud.  It was like all of a sudden, this weird thing that you learned from your grandma was cool.  So I still don’t really know what real Girl Scouts do, I suspect it’s better than this, but this was what we did, and it was pretty awesome.  Thankfully, selling the cookies didn’t render me unable to enjoy eating them, or I’d probably be a lot more bitter about the whole thing.

The 4th of July is a 3-day holiday

Rhode Island is a state that is very emphatic about getting Mondays off for Federal  and state holidays.  When I first moved here, I was shocked to get out of school for Columbus Day (which we never got in Minnesota or North Dakota), and even more flummoxed when I realized that this is the only state that still celebrates VJ Day–now called “Victory Day”.

When I asked a native Rhode Islander about this, she just looked at me blankly and said, “Why would we voluntarily give up a Monday off?  We get one Monday off per month for holidays like this, and I’m certainly not going to say we shouldn’t just because it’s a bit insensitive.  We don’t call it Victory over Japan Day anymore, so what’s the harm?”  I can get on board with that, I guess, I like days off.  Plus, when Jewish Friend was working for Brown University over the summer, she told me that their answering machine message for why they’re closed on that day is hilarious in its non-specificity.

Likewise, this year the 4th of July falls on a Sunday, so all 4th of July festivities are postponed until the 5th in order for all of us to get a day off work.  George M. Cohan plaza, just a few blocks from my house, has a banner proudly stating that there are 4th of July festivities July 3, & 5-6.  July 4th is now just a blank day in the middle of these other July 4th celebrations which are not taking place on the 4th.  America’s oldest 4th of July parade, in Bristol, RI, is also taking place on the 5th, which people have started calling the 4th, which is terribly confusing, as you can imagine.

I spoke to my brother on the phone last night, and asked what he was doing for the holiday.

“The parents are coming up for the 4th.” he said.

“Does your town do a big 4th of July celebration?” I asked.

“Well, they do, but it all happened today, so I have no idea what they’re expecting when they show up.  I read the list of all the stuff going on this morning, and it was impressive, but I had to work.  There’s nothing really happening on the actual 4th.”

Part of me assumed that the combination of a heavily Catholic state and a love of Mondays off is what brought the 4th of July to the 5th, but Minnesota, where little brother lives, is not a very Catholic state, and Lutherans are far less tenacious in their church-going.  So there’s that theory dashed against the rocks.  Though it looks like Minnesota may not be getting July 5th off…correct me if I’m wrong.

Rhode Island also recently revamped its laws concerning what kind of fireworks can be bought and used in the state, so things have been all the more boisterous and explodey because of that, making it feel like it’s been the 4th for about two days already.  Basically, it’s the 4th of July right now, and if it wasn’t for a friend’s wedding tonight, I would have nothing going on today.  The fireworks in the park by my house were last night, there may be more on the 5th, who knows?

Am I meant to treat today as a day of reprieve before the revelry re-starts tomorrow?  It’s baffling.