The Fustiness of Fluids

I am increasingly perplexed by the fact that my family seems not to require a normal intake of fluids. On a daily basis, I’d say we each consume less than two glasses of liquid, sometimes less. This is far below the “eight glasses a day” average. Are we living in a perpetual state of dehydration? Or have we adapted, boasting some evolutionary advantage that will benefit future generations should the DFW metroplex take on certain desert-like attributes?

The dearth of fluids in our lives is not a recent development. My childhood was peppered with extremely small glasses and cups, so small that one of my mother’s former boyfriends actually went out and bought a set of large glasses so that he could get more than two sips of a drink without having to refill. A good thirty percent of our kitchen glassware is actually composed of tiny shot glasses collected from a variety of places... none of which have ever contained alcohol. Instead it’s, “Here, have a shot of milk with that sandwich” or “Throw that limeade back like you mean it.” Needless to say, the top half of our dishwasher is increasingly aggravated over the difficulty of keeping multiple small shot glasses upright during the cleansing process.

At some meals we forgo beverages all together. It’s not so much that we forget; we’re just not thirsty. Nobody feels the need to pour a cup of water or orange juice. Why dirty more glassware?

This could explain a lot of things, like how mealtimes often degenerate into spirited rounds of choking on chicken. (Don’t ask why it’s always chicken, but somehow, it always is.) My mother hardly ever eats chicken without choking on it. It’s become an expected part of the chicken-eating routine. Mom cooks chicken, we sit down to eat chicken, and mom chokes on chicken. Once she has dislodged the unruly chicken parts, business continues as usual. Thus our typical dinner conversations are punctuated by the sounds of violent hacking, a sweet serenade indeed.

Maybe if we imbibed more fluids—or if we at least featured them at the dinner table as a pleasant side-option—incidences of chicken-choking could be averted or eliminated entirely. Are there other health risks we’ve yet to face? Will our skin reflect poorly on our strange liquid denial? Should we attempt to cultivate a dependence on fluids that we have hitherto ignored?

Then again, maybe there are hidden advantages. I remember going on an Outward Bound Trip after my senior year of high school where the instructors insisted we consume a minimum of four Nalgenes of water each day. I usually managed to down about ¾ of one—after that, my body repudiated my efforts at hydration. Did my lack of fluids impinge upon my athletic and physical ability? Au contraire: I was the first to reach the mountaintop. Other kids fell to the wayside in droves, succumbing to altitude sickness, sunburns, and one hearty rockslide. Coincidence? Or did mysterious powers lie in the water I was not drinking?

There are other pleasing advantages to requiring less fluid: we rarely have to go to the bathroom. Our car trips are never beset by children whining “I have to go to the baaathrooom.” In fact we have more trouble pushing it out than keeping it in.

Of course this can presents an interesting problem, too, primarily in one setting: the doctor’s office. As a child, I could never never NEVER pee on command. Looking back, I recognize this as a necessary consequence of the fact that I didn’t have any liquids inside me that I could pee out. But at the time, it was devastating. My failing would come to light in great embarrassment as I sat in the doctor’s bathroom, focusing intently on the job at hand. As I clenched the small cup provided, I’d parade all sorts of images through my mind—pools, fountains, trickling streams, gushing waterfalls—all to no avail. “Just pee in the cup, Bree,” I’d say to myself through clenched teeth. “Just pee in the cup.” Sometimes I’d be in the bathroom for half an hour or more before I’d reemerge, empty cup clasped in my sad little hand, cheeks stained from frustrated tears at my lack of success.

When the powers of positive thinking didn’t work, I tried other tactics, downing multiple cone cups of water from the Ozarka cooler in rapid succession. But my bladder, peeved by this unusual deluge of water, would stubbornly refuse to concede. Only hours after I’d left the doctor’s office would the water come out in torrents, long after I had a cup to pee into. I didn't even have Pee Post™.

These days it’s a rare occasion in which I’m demanded to pee in a cup. Only serious firms and companies demand that prospective employees submit to drug tests, and as I am currently not a member of the “real adult” working elite, I’m exempt from compulsory liquid output. Until then, maybe I’ll try to drink more water.

But only from a shot glass.

Pee Post ™: The Legacy

…(continued from previous post)

Pee Post ™ stood before me in all its yellow glory, a beacon of light in a dark age of sex, drugs, and dogs who pee impulsively. It cast its subtle spell over Petsmart's aisle 11, wedged unceremoniously between sacks of kitty litter and one charming bird feeder with “protect your seed from squirrels!” on the front.

The fundamental allure was more than alliterative. Pee Post ™’s appeal was not merely in its brightly colored box, or even in the large plastic stake that looked like it belonged on an episode of Buffy For Toddlers. The raw potency of Pee Post ™ was something else, something bigger, something lurking behind the mystical beauty of the letters “TM.”

Eager for a closer look, I found the instructions on the back of the box. They touched me so deeply that I copied them down. They read:

Remove Pee Post ™ from its package. Place it in a quiet and grassy area by pushing it into the ground. Once Pee Post ™ is in the ground, bring your pet back outside, preferably after eating or drinking. Lead your pet to Pee Post ™ and let him sniff the area. With great enthusiasm, praise him when he performs. If he does not perform, do not scold him, but continue to bring him back to Pee Post ™ whenever you anticipate he may need “to go.” Continue this process until your pet consistently eliminates next to Pee Post ™.

There are so many magnificent things about these instructions. Some of them are uplifting, while others stir my very soul. The flexibility of the word “perform” is troubling. Pee Post ™ inventors obviously assume that most shrewd people will understand what the word “perform” means. In fact the whole article is filled with euphemistic ways of saying “poop.” They seem to have no problem with the word “pee:” after all, their clever title hinges on it. But the act of pooping demands nicer, more culturally acceptable expressions like “perform” and “eliminate.”

The social politeness of Pee Post ™ has left me in a quandary. In a few weeks I’ll be going to see a show in which several of my friends are the actors.
Should I tell them “good performance” after the show? Pee Post ™ has altered my perceptions of performance to such a degree that I no longer feel comfortable casually tossing that word around. Maybe every time someone uses a variation of the word “perform,” the shrewder members of society cluck their teeth and try to banish images of feces from their mind. Sentences like “She’s a really great performer” and “I love to watch when he performs” have now taken on a more sinister meaning. My resume currently lists “performance” under my special skills and interests. Does this label me as some kind of sick pervert? No wonder I haven’t been getting calls for jobs.

I also enjoy the unquestioned supremacy of Pee Post ™ . There is no the Pee Post ™” or a Pee Post ™. Pee Post ™ has apparently become such a worldwide phenomenon that it no longer requires an article. “The” or “a” seem obsolete in the Era of Pee Post ™. Does God require a “the”? Does Jesus? Only in The Big Lebowski.

In my opinion, this distinction puts Pee Post ™ on the level of Facebook. Once, before the days of photo albums, graffiti, and the honesty box, and long before you could throw sheep, there was thefacebook.com. But now Facebook, in its colossal monopoly over the world, requires no modifiers. It hardly requires a www. The fact that Microsoft Word’s built-in dictionary does not accept “Facebook” is pure blasphemy. When will technology catch up with itself?

In the wake of Pee Post ™, soon all kinds of articles will be eliminated (and I actually mean eliminated, not pooped out). Imagine a kind of newspeak in which conversations go something like this:

“Honey, did you fix Television?”

“Called Repair Man, Jerry. He’s coming to look at Computer, too.”

“Tell me you at least walked Dog.”

“Oops—got caught up in Children. Thank god for Pee Post ™!”

And so forth.

I am left with one unalienable truth: Pee Post ™ is more than an accessory. It is far more significant than a post where dogs learn to pee. It is a revolution. Linguistically, spiritually, urinarily. It is social change in a (pee)post. Its siren song promises a better tomorrow for the lost, the hungry, and those who speak with articles. It is a testament to the creative use of plastic and trademarks in this wondrous modern world.

I now anticipate I may need “to go.”

The Nanny [substitute word for "diaries" here], Part 1

I wouldn’t consider myself a “kid person.” Plenty of girls my age go gaga over anything under two feet, but I find babies to be rather ugly. It’s probably a most unmotherly confession, but I can’t help it: they’re shriveled and pink and hopelessly scrunchy. Maybe my biological clock just isn’t ticking yet. Or maybe it’s telling the wrong time.

Babies remind me of a story from my mother’s babyhood, who was—as she puts it—not the most attractive of newborns. Eager friends and family who came to pay homage to the new arrival would peep over her lacy bassinet, faces aglow, ready to spout out effervescent adjectives about this adorable child. As they leaned carefully over the side of the cradle, their smiles would freeze. The words came out slowly, deliberately:

“It’s a… baby.”

Not precisely what every parent wants to hear.

As babies grow out of their scrunchiness, they become nonscrunchy children, or tiny configurations of normal-sized people. Starting at age twelve and continuing through my teenage years, I babysat enough children to know all the ins and outs of that group, too. And it’s not that I don’t enjoy children as a whole; my two younger siblings bring a great deal of joy and ruckus to my life. But I’m not one of those people who positively adores children, who dreams of being a teacher or pediatrician or professional kid wrangler. I don’t aspire to have a family of six and a menagerie of pet rabbits, thereby populating a small village in Africa with both livestock and people to eat them.

So it’s ironic, then, that for a few weeks in August I had a new job description: nanny.

Since I’ve been loathe to apply for “real” employment, I’ve been piecemealing jobs together to try and make ends meet. You’d think having a degree would significantly alter things, but to my wonderment I’ve somehow made a spectacular return to the kind of jobs I had in high school: restaurant work, marketing calls, and kid care. The last came about when an acquaintance of my mother mentioned that she desperately needed help—two nannies had just quit in rapid succession. This should have been a red flag, but the $350/wk was enough to tempt me, and voila: I became the nanny to her three children.

First, let me air my feelings about the word “nanny.” Could there be a more unattractive word in the English language? For the extent of my employment I desperately searched for alternatives. “Au pair” is properly French and exotic-sounding, but it’s also inaccurate—you have to be in a foreign country for it to count. “Babysitter” doesn’t have quite the same import as nanny, and it’s equally hideous to the ear. “Childcare provider” is unduly pernicious. “Governess” is archaic…I’m not Jane Eyre. “Wet nurse”? God forbid I’m suckling 12- and 14-year-olds for $350 a week.

It seemed I was stuck with nanny. Just for kicks, I looked up its neighboring influences on dictionary.com. Etymologically speaking, the word has less than dazzling relatives:

“Ninny,” n. A fool or simpleton.

“Nonny,” n. a silly fellow; a ninny.

“Nanny,” n, 1. a woman who is the custodian of children; or
               n, 2. a female goat.

This didn’t exactly bode well for my new job.

But all things considered, and disregarding the knot in my stomach every time I was introduced as “the nanny” (does Fran Drescher get royalties every time someone says that?), my nannying stint wasn’t too bad. With only three children, four pets, and five incidents of poop-on-carpet (all pet-related…I think), it could’ve been much worse.

Although there were, of course, mild inconveniences. For example, I realized the inadequacy of my choice of vehicle. Or rather, I was reminded of it daily. My dusty ’96 Corolla is missing a hubcap and has no CD player. In fact it doesn’t even have a tape deck—it’s jammed. The last nanny had a white Trans Am convertible; she’d just bought it on the day she started. She had a CD player; she had state-of-the-art speakers; she could roll her top down. I heard about the last nanny’s car so much that I began to hate her, inventing farfetched fictions as to the miserable nature of her little life. She needed the convertible as a way to fill the emptiness, a badge of approval, a popularity stamp. Her father had given it to her to make up for years of neglect; her boyfriend had given it to her because he was unfaithful; her brother, always jealous of her good looks and straight teeth, had given it to her wired with explosives and set to detonate at 10,000 miles. The last nanny would get her come-uppance in the end, and I, with my dingy green Toyota, would get the last laugh.

Beyond the psychological torture inflicted by the constant reminder of the last nanny and her cool car, there were logistical problems to contend with. The 12-year-old played double bass in the orchestra, and in his 2-SUV family, this had never been a problem. But on the first day I came to pick him up, naturally toting a full car (8-year-old, 14-year-old, 14-year-old’s 15-year-old boyfriend, and myself), the arrangement required some finesse. We rolled the back window down and set to work. Our final configuration: the bass-player, crunched into a ball on the back floor, the lovebirds elatedly squished up together in the front, and the double base luxuriating on the back seat, a good 18 inches of its neck hanging out my open window. The youngest sister sat in the back with the colossal instrument resting on top of her. When I looked in my rearview mirror, I could just see the top of her head sticking up above the black case.

My car didn’t fit in with the other cars, either. In an upscale neighborhood filled with the privileged elite, my car was old, dirty, and small. It was an embarrassment to the manicured front lawn. In school parking lots, my car was dwarfed by imposing Navigators, Blazers, and Suburbans. Never before have I seen so many large and shiny black cars. These were the soccer moms, and these were their vehicles of choice. I was a fish out of water, and a poor fish at that.

But my car did suffice for one thing: Petsmart runs. The first day we went to Petsmart, we were on a mission: buy cat litter and a new collar. But the children were much more enamored with the variety of pets on display—they looked at hamsters, mice, gerbils, lizards, guinea pigs, and rats. A brief trip turned into a festival, and two hours later, we finally emerged from Petsmart into the stifling afternoon sun.

The next day, we were back. The children had begged me, and since I had nothing else in mind, I relented. This trip was characterized by more fervent admiration of the rodents and slyly concocted plans to somehow sneak one into the house behind their rodent-detesting mother’s back. As any good nanny would do, I squelched the mutiny. But they continued to run around the store, poking and pointing and begging annoyed Petsmart employees to open up cages so they could pet the inhabitants.

By our third trip, I was bored of Petsmart. The people were starting to recognize us. I felt like we should be paying admission, like this was some kind of amusement park and we were cheating the system by getting in free. The children, however, were anything but bored. They were still delighted by the same animals we’d now spent hours with. I brought a book and plopped myself down in an aisle to read. An employee stopped in front of me.

“Are you okay?” she asked suspiciously.

“Just tired,” I said. “I’m nannying.”

She left me alone.

That’s when I saw it. It was sitting on the middle shelf, regal and beautiful, proud and unashamed. It was the thing that made all the nannying worthwhile, the very reason, perhaps, that fate had brought me here. It was my destiny. A thing of inspiration, of brilliance, of sheer artistic beauty; it stood and beckoned. There it was, my own holy grail: Pee Post TM.

you can be trained to be a business at no extra cost

Over the summer I received an email addressed like so:

Dear Bree:

As a former university professor, it gives me special pleasure to congratulate you on graduating as a member of Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College. Your outstanding academic record at one of the nation’s top universities distinguishes you in ways that are of considerable interest to us.

This is typically the point where I stop reading. And it’s not just my short attention span regarding long paragraphs. For one thing, it’s obviously a form letter, probably sent out to every new Phi Beta Kappa member who, imagining all sorts of illustrious opportunities reserved for card-carrying PBK members, eagerly forked over their email address.


The “considerable interest to us” is mildly alarming too, partly because it’s shrouded in corporatespeak, but mostly because “us” is simply one of those scary totalitarian words. I can’t think of many situations in which “us” is innocuous. There’s the mafia us: “We’d like you to come with us—just for a talk;” the interrogation us: “Why don’t you tell us what you were doing the night of the 26th?”; and then, of course, the parental us: “Your behavior really concerns us. We’ve put a call in to Dr. Schliderschluck.” “Us” exploits the power of the We: strength in numbers, the hegemony of a cohesive unit. And Orwellian images spring unbidden to mind.

However, the mysterious email sender did get my alma mater right, which deserved some street cred. And my name was spelled correctly, which might not seem impressive until one considers the amazing assortment of misspellings I’ve borne personal witness to over the years, everything from “Brie” to “Bry” to the inexplicable “Bra.” No, my name was not inspired by my mother’s affinity for her Hanes® TAGLESS® All-Over Comfort Wirefree Wonderbra, thank you very much.

I was also struck by the articulate phrasing of the email that appeared so magically in my inbox. With its excellent word choice and elegant grammar, it stood out from other unsolicited emails boasting titles like “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT: yeah so I am sexy Russian girl” and “you can be trained to be a police at no extra cost.” Can I be trained to be a police? I'm not usually one to demand the presence of a "man," but this might be an exception. What if I want to be trained to be a fire instead? A fore? A handy? Where will it stop?

The email continued:

By way of background, the D. E. Shaw group is a global investment and technology development firm with an international reputation for financial innovation, technological leadership, and an extraordinarily distinguished staff. Today, the D. E. Shaw group encompasses a number of closely related entities with approximately 1100 employees and $35 billion in aggregate capital.

Here is where my English and European Studies degree begins to fail me. My last glance at anything-econ was on the AP Macro Exam in high school. I can fairly say that “global investment and technology development firm” is a semantically empty concept in my world. I understand the individual words of course, but strung together they are senseless. The phrase evokes vague phantasms of some tall building in New York with shiny black marble floors and a glut of business suits wearing the faceless people inside them. What does one do in a global investment and technology development firm? Besides innovate financially, lead technologically, and distinguish oneself extraordinarily?

But here’s the part that really caught my eye:

While we would certainly welcome applications from individuals with a background or interest in mathematics, computer science, or economics, we are equally interested in speaking with brilliant liberal arts graduates, regardless of major, who are open to the possibility of a career they may never have previously considered.

So there it was. The D. E. Shaw group was looking to hire beyond their usual target areas. It’s like they were speaking to me personally, me with my messy tangle of liberal arts interests and degrees. The venerable D. E. Shaw thought I was one of the brilliant liberal arts graduates of whom he spoke! The mystique was intoxicating; the flattery worked. As anyone will agree, it feels good to be pursued… even by way of a form letter.

I stayed up all night tweaking my resume and crafting what I hoped was a brilliant cover letter (the time stamp on my outgoing email reads 4:53 am, so "brilliant" probably isn't the best word for it). Excitedly, I waited.

Two days later, I received a response. It was no longer from D. E. Shaw’s personal email but from some fellow named Strategic Growth (RD). It was addressed “Dear Candidate.” I had already regressed from “Bree” to “Candidate.” Damn.

This particular email thanked me for submitting my resume and politely requested additional details. Attached was an information sheet asking for all sorts of things: awards/accomplishments, prior public speaking experience, GRE scores, SAT scores, and other information that Mr. Growth (RD) deemed "a bit unorthodox."

But even more unorthodox was the request for

a short expository writing sample, ideally 5 to 10 pages in length. The sample should be entirely your own work, unedited by anyone else. However, you should feel free to edit, correct and otherwise improve the piece yourself. We would like to see writing that you are particularly proud of, and not necessarily a sample of an average day's work.

For the next five days, I launched into an extensive search and recovery effort. I opened up all the files on my computer from the last three years, sifting through a plethora of papers to find a piece of expository writing I was particularly proud of. After that I went even farther back, digging out the hard drive to my old laptop and going through those files. I searched through hard copies, too, opening up folder after folder and thumbing through notebooks full of essays. This proved particularly challenging due to my general paperwork strategy for college classes: for the first few weeks of each semester I would keep everything in scrupulous order, but soon I’d start stuffing papers into all sorts of places they didn’t belong, cramming them into notebooks until the corners practically vomited paper phlegm. Organizational prowess is not my strong suit.

My hunt unearthed papers on all sorts of things: literature, cultural theory, symbolism, and even one particularly choice paper entitled “Phallacious Freud.” Over my years at Amherst I strayed from traditional papers and took strange diversions into creative subject matter, writing pieces that questioned my own concept of self. The essays became weird, probing examinations of identity, and all the intellectual crises of my undergraduate career came to light in those bent and folded pages. This odd collection of papers formed the bizarre backbone of a very personal journey through theory and self and the sheer terror of the unknown.

In short, not a bit of it was expository. There was nothing I could send.

I still haven't replied to either D. E. Shaw or Strategic Growth (RD). The information sheet is still sitting partially completed in My Documents. When I first received the email, it seemed the perfect opportunity to try my hand at a “real job,” a career that might actually promise some sort of financial security. So it’s not what I’m interested in, I said to myself. Might as well try it out for six months or a year.

But the problem is, I can’t do that. A global investment and technology development firm just doesn’t excite me, no matter how you look at it; stats like “$35 billion in aggregate capital” don’t get my adrenaline pumping. It’s simply not what I want to do, even for six months or eighteen months or some other arbitrarily set time limit. Maybe this is the point in life when you're supposed to start making sacrifices, but I don't think I can do it. I'm just not sure I have it in me.

The email’s still in my inbox. Sometimes I look at it and I wonder. How would my life be different if the D. E. Shaw Group was everything I wanted? If the concept of “us” delighted me? If I’d played sports in college? If I’d majored in mathematics? What would life be like if my shelves were filled with expository writing samples where each word followed a clearly delineated path to the very end?

I guess it wouldn’t be my life.