Two recent flirtations with members of the opposite sex taught me that I am not good at owning a vagina at my age.

Being single and thirty puts you in the no-man’s-land of inter-gender interactions. Because of psychosocial manifestations of societal expectations, the unidentifiable grey area between your twenties but not solidly into your thirties is quite possibly the most awkward stage of life for a woman next to puberty. What I’m saying is that, at thirty, unseen marriage and babies make talking to men a game of dodgeball in the dark, only played with hand-grenades.

My two crusades in coquetry could not have been more different. One was a twenty-five year old who appeared to have the intellectual capacity of mashed potatoes. His sense of humor could best be described as running a knock-knock joke through Alta Vista Babel Fish from English to German and then back again. His life’s crowning achievements thus far have been playing on a competitive basketball rec league, visiting Las Vegas last year, and owning a ball python. He was very easy on the eyes, but difficult in conversation.

The other target was a thirty-nine year old native New Yorker who told a joke about David Wells that made soda come out of my nose, a swoon-worthy offense. He didn’t look like he spent hours fooling around with kettle-bells, unlike the younger victim, but he came across as the type of guy who would still hold the door for me after devouring two orders of wings and enough beer to intoxicate a bison. I liked him fine, but I didn’t know if it’s simply because he appealed to my inner ‘bro.

From what I could attain from a direct line of questioning, both of these men were single and kidless.

I found myself trying to figure out why the Yankee fan nine years my senior was both single and hadn’t yet spawned. Had he been in jail? What about the military? Was he an ex-gay or perhaps a monk? There had to be some salacious detail to explain why he was still chatting up weird-looking girls with that carnal gleam in his eye. Otherwise what was wrong with him?

The flip-side of this unfair judgment call goes back to the eye-candy with the skull-rigor of a bag of goldfish. He was 25. His social life is still all dance moves, drinks, drugs, and bands named after drinks or drugs. I am sure his weekends are a story-per-minute sort of affair, and that he doesn’t sleep more than his liver requires. I wanted to warn him that one day in five years he won’t be able to get out of bed because a decade or more of late nights will come to collect on his investment. That said, at 25, he looks at me, a single thirty-year-old woman, as a marriage ultimatum with two time-bombs connected to a cunt. While he couldn’t be more wrong, any attempt to correct him would be filed under protesting too much. Who could blame either guy for looking at me and thinking that, under the veneer of independence and awkwardness, there was a ravenous, crazy-making bridesmaid one Nutra-Grain bar shy of screaming, “Babies everywhere!”

Statistics show that, in the United States, men are usually married by 29, women by 27, with the average age for a woman to have her first child being 25.1. This was an uptick over here, but the advancing of maternal age is a worldwide trend, with European moms popping out their first tiny human between 26 and 29. In Spain the mean age to give birth for the first time has even reached 30 years old. It’s as if women’s biological clocks have all fallen back in honor of cervical Daylight Saving Time ending.

Roughly 46% of all women between the ages of 25-29 don’t have kids, and yet, being without a Baby Bjorn isn’t looked at as normal. As a society, we’re pronatalist and pro-marriage…‘cept for the gays, ‘cause that would cause all churches to spontaneously combust and the world to cleave in twain and dogs to marry people and trees to marry one another. Melanie Notkin stated the obvious in her brilliant Psychology Today article on the subject: “Having babies is perceived as natural; it’s what women do.”

The inference being, of course, that not having had an episiotomy by my age means that there’s something inherently wrong with me. Or worse, that by now I want bridal showers and baby bottles to the point of desperation. And, really, I can’t blame anyone for jumping to this conclusion. Society, and Facebook, say that there’s little chance that they’re wrong. My lack of kids or commitment renders me confusing and undesirable, at least by nature alone. (The tattoos that resemble mid-90s Lollapalooza logos on my back don’t help either.)

Following her divorce, my mother became a psychotic hoarder who collected animals and pieces of dirty ribbon. When I would ask her why she didn’t date in her late fifties her response was simple, “I don’t want to. I’m too set in my ways.” I would scoff and this and try to delicately tell her that maybe she wouldn’t be so damn crazy if she got laid. And while the refusal might have been her mental illness or fear of intimacy masquerading as sensibility, I can’t help but share the sentiment in my newfound old age. What I want and what I need are two very different things. I’m not willing to downgrade my life, but if I fall cunt-first into a family dynamic, that’s fine. However, I sure as hell am not going to be signing up for Match.com anytime soon. When talking to single guys, if they’re under the age of thirty, I wind up taking a reflexively defensive stance, as though I don’t want to be written off simply as another woman looking for a husband and a nutsack. But why? Because that will inherently make me seem unattractive, whether I want it to or not. That’s the problem.

What’s more weird is that, in spite of this self-awareness, when talking to men who are single, childless, and older than myself, I can’t help but notice the barely-audible, ne’er-addressed hum of society’s expectations on both of us. It’s an unspoken dance of “I don’t want it, do you want it?” as though we’re strangers hovering around the same last lone hors d’oeuvre at a dinner party. It makes conversation tricky and I’m afraid it makes men have to navigate a kind of gauntlet when approaching women that renders them lobotomized at best and roguish at worst. At the end of the day, they want to stick it in us. Depending on the age of the lady, that can be a very dangerous prospect indeed. What was once the NSA fun-time of a “hookup culture” is now a potential minefield, where sexual dalliances have an assumed meaning on a purely physical level. This act makes babies, women nearing their forties are reminded. Your fertility is dwindling. You haven’t procreated. Someone somewhere in their bedroom seems to be holding up a cue-card reading “You’re doing it wrong!”

To put it in perspective, of course I eventually want a companion with whom I can go out for chocolate bread pudding and take hand-holding walks peeping in people’s windows on warm nights, who will surprise me with a trip to the Mütter Museum and whose idea of romance is watching monster movies and ordering in breakfast so we can eat it in bed. Duh. But obviously I don’t feel the need to wear a white dress and create life simply because society tells me to by the age of thirty-one, and for reasons far more complex and personal than that lame demand alone. If it happens, it happens. I certainly don’t enter conversations with strange men looking to shove them in a tux and force a “It’s a Boy!” cigar in their mouths. Although for me it isn’t only because I don’t want to settle on a partner who is a step down from my fairly idyllic life alone, most straight(ish) women my age have burned through a string of men with a Goldilocks mentality: too fat, too into video games, job’s not good enough, likes cats but not dogs, etc. By the time they’re approaching forty they realize that they may have been waiting too long to snatch up some sperm in the game of musical wombs.

To beat this dead horse with a different stick, there seems to be a collective mentality that settling comes standard with the modern approach to family, and from the first date what a lady is looking for is regarded as more prix-fix than a la carte. Society seems to warn educated, career-driven women that, if you don’t land a decent man in the early-thirties mad-dash, you’re going to pay and be the spouse of a mullet-sporting loser who is perpetually between jobs and has all the personality of wet paper. The pressure must be immense, both on women and on the men who want to be their best, but not so good as to be viewed as potential husbands or dads from the first conversation. So I’m just going to assume that it’s this dyadic power they subconsciously think they wield when they talk to single, childless women who’ve passed the late-twenty hump is what makes them wholly awkward when confronted with tiny, tattooed baby vessels who are busy taking expecting out of expectations.

The double-helix of my DNA must have twisted a little too tight, because I’ve looked and acted differently than the other girls in my all-American family. My two cousins had long, flaxen hair that their mother ironed pin-straight, while I sat with my super-short, mousy-brown curls, itching with envy. While they had stonewashed jean jackets I had a magenta sweatsuit. When they were sneaking out to date boys, I read books and tried out for theater productions. While their medical emergencies resulted in pink casts covered in signatures, mine concluded with an asthma inhaler that the pack of popular girls liked to steal during recess.

My cousins were the closest thing I had to sisters, but they were so different from me that I was transfixed to the point of nearly objectifying them. Between the two, Vicky was the one I looked up to most. Two years older than me, and the baby of my uncle’s family, she was born with naturally blonde hair and a perfect face. Every family get-together was punctuated by my tantrums about the way that genetics wasn’t fair, until my exasperated aunt quietly explained to me that "some get the looks, others get the brains." I would have traded my A- average for Vicky’s social life in a heartbeat, even if she thought that cheese grew on trees and that electricity was an animal. When we both had crushes on Luke Perry on 90210 I lived in fear, because if he ever met Vicky he’d certainly wind up with her.  

When we got older the polarity of us remained. While I learned to play bass guitar alone in my room she started dating a football coach with a Nike "swoosh" tattoo. (No joke.) My first job was as a secretary for a photographer, hers was as a waitress at Hooters. I got health insurance and overtime, while she made nearly $1,200 a shift, and was given gifts that included a diamond bracelet and a watch.

Though my family wasn’t proud, it was safe to say that Vicky had learned to work with what God gave her, capitalizing on her whiplash-causing good looks and attitude. Even if we didn’t understand each other we remained tight, though nearly everything I did she regarded as though it were a joke. ("No, really, I competitively recite poetry. I’m serious.") I was sort of like the family mascot, a little cute, a little silly, and never really capable of much more than entertaining a crowd. All I wanted was for Vicky to respect me, because even if I couldn’t look like her or be as powerful, or powerfully blonde, to gain her acceptance would mean that I had come close. My friends with older same-sex siblings have described a similar sense of wanting to belong when it came to spending time with their seemingly-almighty kin. Even though I’m in my late twenties I still look at Vicky’s approval as that final plateau, that never-to-be-achieved medal of normalcy. Every time she laughed at me and not with me was another piece of evidence that, yup, I really am that weird.

Needless to say, gift shopping for my family has always presented a bit of a challenge. I’m too self-centered to truly be good at getting people gifts that I wouldn’t want. Fortunately this year Vicky suggested a grab-bag, a game that Simon remembered being called "Dirty Santa" when he was in high-school. There were five of us: Vicky, myself, Simon, my other cousin Stephanie, and her husband. The parameters were simple, we couldn’t exceed $25, and we couldn’t tell anyone what we had gotten. While browsing for a pair of earrings online, I impulsively picked up a bunch of crap from Urban Outfitters: meatball bubblegum, Astronaut Ice Cream, a miniature unicorn, a hardcover blank book, and The Incredible Toy Stick. For those of you smart enough to shop in stores that aren’t bastions of irony, The Incredible Toy Stick is one of those gag gifts that UO has become notorious for.  It’s a brown plastic stick in a cardboard box, and it comes with an instruction manual listing its facetious "200 uses.” It was $8, and rounded my grab bag up to a respectable, if heavy-handed, twenty-seven bucks.

 
As a sidenote that begs to be illuminated: Urban Outfitters knows what they’re doing. In their corporate statement they say that they look to provide, "a lifestyle-specific shopping experience" to create "an emotional bond with the 18 to 30 year old target customer we serve." Meaning that they are playing us like a cheap slide-whistle, friends. They’re marketing sentimentality, often to kids who don’t even realize what they’re forking over cash for. If I see one more pimply boy under the age of 18 wearing an Atari tee-shirt I’ll scream. So when I was buying my aunt a pair of purple dangling earrings for Christmas, and decided to purchase a bunch of junk for the grab-bag, it wasn’t ’cause Urban Outfitters had plucked my heartstrings the right way. Nuh-uh. I didn’t fall for it, they were simply an impulse buy. Because I’m not one to be toyed with like that. Even as I sit here in my vintage letter jacket and skinny jeans, I am no lemming. My apathy is sincere.

This tirade aside, I can say with great confidence that Vicky has never shopped at Urban Outfitters. She is usually clad in head-to-toe BEBE, wearing at least one item with the logo bejeweled in rhinestones. She has never owned an ironic tee-shirt or an item of clothing that is not considered "in season." I hate to be redundant but, truly, she is my physical opposite. So when she was duped by her own devices in the game of Dirty Santa and wound up with my gift, I cringed. There was my goddess-like cousin with my cheesy, weirdo gift. At least she could use the box for something, right?
She opened it up and looked at the meatball gum and the tiny, plastic unicorn, puzzled. "This one’s yours, Ains?" I nodded sheepishly. 

She pulled out the ice cream. "Oh my God, Steph, look, it’s the ice cream we used to get at the planetarium," she said to her sister, laughing. Good, I thought. Even blondes can feel nostalgia.

She opened the journal and read the cover out-loud, "The Young Lady & Gentleman’s Guide To Misconduct." Oh no. This was not going to end well. She doesn’t even read books, let alone write in them, I thought. "I could use this," she said to me, in the all-too-obvious tone of trying-not-to-be-rude. I knew that tone well. I had just used it when I’d opened my grab-bag pick, a digital photo keychain.

Then Vicky opened the last trinket, The Incredible Toy Stick.

 
At first she was confused. "It’s a stick?" Then she opened it further, pulling out the list of instructions and, much to my surprise, she started to read. That’s when she started laughing in earnest, the kind of laughter that was silent it was so hard, then growing in volume to a near-shriek. She read the copy out loud.

"Use it to dial telephone numbers from far away! Use it to play golf!" She was hysterical, acting out each of the instructions one by one. I had never seen her so silly. It was good enough to know that she liked my gift, but it was even better to know  why.

Products like that are only as successful as their packaging. It was expertly thought-out and well-written. In short, my line of work is what helped to craft the best gift I’d ever given my hard-to-please cousin. Without the tongue-in-cheek instructions, and the over-the-top and somewhat sarcastic box, she would have only gotten a plastic stick that made little sense and served even less of a purpose. And even though I can’t say it was the true meaning of Christmas, seeing what I do in action was a nice gift. The nature of copy is to sell products in a convincing and compelling manner, just like how Urban Outfitters looks for their company to connect with their customers on an emotional level on a whole. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like that’s slimy, but as I watched my cousin pretend to use her Incredible Toy Stick as a unibrow, I felt good that I write words to make money. And I suddenly felt a familiar pang of jealousy, only this time it was for some unknown copywriter who bought their Christmas gifts with money made from writing about a plastic toy stick.

For the record, Simon pulled the Snuggie on his grab-bag turn. It was pink for breast cancer awareness. My cousins thought the image of him in a Snuggie holding a toy stick was hilarious, while I thought the glorified blanket-with-sleeves smelled really funny when he took it out of the package.

(Simon, Snuggie, and The Incredible Toy Stick)

My parents are awesome, and since I’m opting to go to Simon’s house for Thanksgiving — which means that not only do I miss turkey with at least one half of my chromosomal makeup, but I’m also going to Oklahoma again — I decided to dedicate this post to the two people that made all my fucking up possible: mom and dad.

Working and having a family is hard. Once you hit your mid-to-late twenties your peers start to settle down and nest, which is usually followed somewhat understandably, yet always shockingly, by breeding. Since there seems to be a sort of baby boom in my age group I decided to look up some info and ponder what it‘s like to work and work. I mean work and parent.*

Now, take this from where it comes, I’m a bachlorette whose ovaries are on layaway until Obama’s second term. At least. I’m not opposed to having photographs of my dog in my wallet, and coupons for Fancy Fridge tacked on my fridge in place of macaroni art. I’m not against to the domestic life, per se, I just don’t think I’m ever going to tire of writing all the time, ogling everything that walks by, and just basically not answering to anybody but myself. And occasionally Simon.

One thing that seems pretty sensible for stay-at-home parents to do is not go crazy. One way I would try not to lose my mind when having handfuls of Cheerios tossed at me mid-keystroke would be to network with other parents who are in the same position.

“It can be difficult to stay focused when being a stay-at-home parent is such a demanding job, and the lure of relaxing in front of the TV is strong. Network with other work-at-home parents – internet forums, for example, Storknet, are a great resource for this. Swapping childcare with a friend can be a good solution even for parents of young children and babies,” I read on a popular working parent website.

I’m pretty sure that my version of “networking” would be a hysterical email asking if it was normal for me to feel that watching my child pick his or her nose was far more important than a deadline. I have no idea how stay-at-home parents do it. Scratch that, I have no idea how parents do it. To try to figure it out, I clicked on Storknet. Let me just say, it is badass. Some of the better threads that I read included tidbits like:

“Just because I work out of the house does not mean that I am a stay-at-home mom. I suppose if I was only working part time, and worked when the kids were not around, I would consider myself one, but I work full time, and run a house and manage four children. How many men do that?”

I can understand her frustration, but I actually have more friends who are dads. They balance their work and their kids, they make time to be caregivers as opposed to just looking for childcare. They are tough, enjoy vagina jokes, and yet know how to burp a baby. These men, to me, are superhuman. They also automatically seem ten years older than me, even if we are within three months of age.

Apparently it’s just as hard for the gentlemen. For single fathers, there’s the site SingleFather.org that boasts the same resources and forums, only for fathers who find themselves playing Mr. Mom. They seem to have the same sentiments as the so-called fairer sex. One forum member writes:

“How do you guys keep up with the house work?

I get up at 5:45 am, shower, shave, and otherwise get ready for work. I usually skip breakfast. 6:30 I leave for work. I will usually swap the clothes in the washer over to the dryer. I get home at 6:00 pm. Change out the clothes in the washer, start dinner, while running water into the sink to wash dishes. Check my email while I watch a little TV. Between commercials I wash and rinse the dishes and work on dinner. 7:00 pm we usually eat. Then toss the dishes into the sink and let them soak. 8:00 pm I watch a little TV with my daughter until bath/bed time. 9:00 I hit the sack and start all over.

The only “free” time I have is Saturday and Sunday. Again, most of it is spent cleaning inside and outside. Unless we venture out to the store or off for some weekend trip. Then I end up doing double time during the week. So again, I ask, How do you manage to get everything done? By the time I finish one thing its time to start on the next. I need a solid week of free time to get this place up to par.”

Simon and I are at that age where our friends from high-school find us on Facebook and within one click we see the differences between us and our peers. We have skateboards, they have SUVs. We have roommates, they have mortgages. We have blogs, they have kids. We have two-loads-of-laundry worth of passionate sex, they have…kids. There are trade-offs. But certainly we realize that parenthood is the most demanding job that there is. How human beings balance penurious offspring and professional output is a riddle I cannot begin to fathom.

My mother was a stay at home mom and my dad was a ninja. (Note: my father’s actual occupation requires the same amount of precision, focus, dedication, and a totally rad outfit.) I think that my parents did an okay job balancing what they needed to do to not go insane and to remain on top of their individual games. For my mother it was…making sure I didn’t eat paint chips, preventing complete gender confusion, and taking me to Church. But for my dad it was making sure that we lived comfortably and happily, and that he provided for the both of us. He brought home the bacon, and my interactions with him were generally limited to watching football on Sundays. (So much for avoiding gender confusion.) After my parents split up, it was kind of a free-for-all. My mom worked and I hit puberty. My dad still had his intense job, but now visitation which interrupted his thoroughly enjoyed newfound bachelorhood. These days, I write in my house for a living and I can’t imagine owning a beta fish. How the hell do you people do it?

“Get children involved from as young an age as possible so that everyone in the family helps keep the household running efficiently. Try to clean up soon after mess occurs so as to avoid a build-up of stressful clutter and large cleaning jobs,” are ways of staying glued, according to Christina Katz, in Writer Mama [Writer’s Digest Books, 2007]

Sure. Okay. I get it. All of these websites emphasize the importance of asking for help, prioritizing tasks, and understanding that chaos is the new stability. But I think the thing that I find so perplexing as I stare at my high-school track teammate’s eight month old twins, is the idea of how to balance self and life. Simon and I struggle financially. We want to write for a living, and we also want to become esteemed authors. Our shared goals are what make our wholly dysfunctional relationship fun and – hopefully – invincible. But we both really value our time to ourselves, and the stupid little things that we do to enforce our identity. When you have kids, I think that your alone time is pretty compromised. Again, this is coming from a woman whose body has only been  home to several piercings and a fair amount of tattoo ink. Both of us are only children, the first time I held an infant I was twenty-two. (Totally freaked me out. I kept thinking I would break it.)

Basically the point of this post is to say thank you. An article I read while doing some research said that mom’s aren’t really doling out compliments to one another nowadays. So this is coming from a non-mother to moms and dads alike, I look up to you. Parenting is impressive enough. And when I get tired of the single life, maybe I’ll try it out. But until then I have you to be jealous of.

Drop me a line, AinsleyDrew at the gmail one. Thank you for donating! It makes my parents proud.

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*Some resources for working parents:

• Family Education’s list of things working parents can do to organize their life. And their Working Mom’s portal.

• Time Management Tips for Work-At-Home Parents

• Work-At-Home Moms Magazine, whose design is dreadful, but whose content is valuable. Includes job opportunities and information on work-at-home scams.

• Robyn’s Nest: The Parenting Network
  Includes a broad array of information, including legal specifics such as the Family Medical Leave Act, and information on traveling by plane when you’re pregnant. [Note: I'm from New York, so when I read about anyone named some variant of "Robin," I immediately think of Robin Byrd. NSFW.]

• The MomLogic community is pretty incredible. It seems to be the go-to place for resources and entertainment for the parenting brigade.

I am writing this from my “vacation,” which really means that I’m writing this from a different part of the country than usual. I’m sure the v-word conjures up images of palm trees, tiki torches, or ski lodges, but for me it’s more like my father’s pull-out couch and my mother’s VW. Both of which are awesome because they come with the single most important aspect an item can have to me: I don’t have to pay for them.

I took this little summer voyage in order to see my family, my uncle in particular, who is kicking the shit out of cancer. (He’s in remission. Take that, tumor.) To most people, however, the idea of a vacation serves as a break, a chance to escape the nine-to-five and just lay back on a chaise lounge waiting for the next installment of Girls Gone Wild to unfold at the beach bar before their eyes.

Most definitions of vacation include something like “leisure time away from work, devoted to pleasure,” which, to me, sounds like a different set of words, primarily “masturbation,” or “a full night’s sleep.” For a freelance worker the idea of a “vacation” is a little bit more murky than it is to those poor souls who clock in every day. Read the first sentence of this post again.  I am writing this from vacation. And I will be looking for clients on vacation. And constructing cold-call letters from vacation. And keeping up with correspondence when, seriously, there’s a beach in walking distance. But, instead or playing volleyball or surfing, I will be unable to silence the internal voice who tells me I’m lazy if I’m not working (I like to call this voice “Stanley Kubrick Junior.”) I will be unable to lay down for more than ten minutes at a time (fifteen if another person is involved) before I am roused from any potential reverie by the realization that I will truly starve before Christmas if I don’t dedicate all of my time to the QWERTY grind. I will not be the architect of my own professional demise by sleeping on the job. No rest for the wicked, or whatever that metal saying was.

There’s a less self-involved slant to this predicament, too. Let’s say the average American gets a fair amount of sick leave, and two personal days per year, in order to keep their mental ducks in a completely shootable row. Let’s say they save up, negotiate with their boss, and actually secure a week in Cancun or a few days in the Poconos. That’s their time to relax, their one-shot, scheduled, be-calm-or-it’s-wasted vacation. Good for them. They have a few boxes on their calendar where it is their responsibility to chill the fuck out. You show me when the freelancer can just sit back and sip a Tab in the sun. It’s called when I’m fucking paid to do so.

With this country’s workforce dealing with a staggering unemployment rate, the astronomical cost of basic necessities like food and gas, and a housing market as out of whack as a game of Monopoly played at a coke party, freelancing is becoming the only conceivable way for some people to bounce back from being fired, or worse. Which can be great if, like it is for me, it gives you an opportunity to try your hand at something you’ve always wanted to do to earn your keep. But for many people this means several irrefutable facts:

1. You now probably don’t have health insurance.
2. You now probably don’t have extra money to save for any luxury items.
3. You now probably don’t have sick days.
4. You now definitely can’t take “time away from work, devoted to pleasure,” other than your sessions with the Hitatchi magic wand.

The irony here is somewhat epic. When I worked in offices and placed orders from the Staples catalog, there were always a few special pages devoted to “company wellness.” This included aromatherapy kits or stress balls that could be printed with a company logo. Fantastic. Companies counted money off the fact that potential overtime made me pop Pepto-Bismol like Tic-Tacs. Stress, it seemed, was accepted as being a part of work, or, rather, it seemed that work was a somewhat welcome residual effect of stressing out. Coworkers of mine spoke of long meetings and overtime the way that high-school football players talked about sprained ligaments. There was strength in suffering.

Let me tell you, all of the nights I stayed until eight, or worked on the occasional Saturday, or did so many tasks at once that my entire food consumption for the day was a Diet Coke and half a stale cupcake, that was not anxiety producing. Looking back on it, that was a diorama of worry. A second-grade theater production of unease. Real anxiety comes from the threat of eviction, the fear that you’ve made a grandiose mistake and ruined your life, the trepidation that comes when you recognize that you will likely never be able to afford more than one month’s rent at a time, that you probably can never foot the bill for offspring. Yeah, that’s stress. Put my full name on the thera-squeeze ball, Staples. Don’t forget to dot the “i.”

Among other examples of items that office supply companies think can help the average worker stop worrying about their deadline/mortgage/lack of retirement funds:

• Squeezable foam balls printed with what appears to be the planet Earth
• A “personalized” lavender aromatherapy basket (Guys, any takers?)
• A magnetic sculpture that also serves as a paperweight, featuring golf clubs and metal bits that resemble iron filings
• and, my personal favorite, this:

I can’t imagine a person with a home office, or a freelance writer armed with their laptop and a thermos of cold coffee, deciding to waste $5.50 on an object whose sole purpose  is to be gripped in order to release pent up tension caused by the job being executed in order to make that money to pay for said object. Cyclical? Quite. 

I’m nervous that as the economy plummets and more people are forced to rely on their luck as much as their elbow grease, the idea of taking a time out will be looked at as a fancy accessory to a “good” job. Possibly, over time, much like SUVs, organic groceries, iPhones, and a second child, taking a break from work will simply be considered a somewhat ostentatious display of success instead of a necessary breather. The Worldwide Health Organization has calculated that 72% of Americans are plagued with frequent stress resulting in related physical or mental conditions, and beyond this country the measure of stress is so the extreme that it is now considered a “world wide epidemic.” I’m sure that many yoga studios, meditation retreats, and bars are profiting off this. I’m also sure that changing my own perspective would help me to reduce my contribution to the freak out phenomenon. The trouble is, I don’t have time to think about it, I’m too busy worrying about work.

Write me, I’ll send you a postcard from out here. AinsleyDrew at the gmail one.

Thank you to all of you who donate! You quell the worrying quite a bit.

Better yet, hire us.

Primal scream therapy. 

Also check out Shows I Missed. It’s better than office yoga.

A wise man once said that in every stereotype or cliche there’s a grain of truth. This can be evidenced when walking down the street in New York City and smiling at a stranger, when observing the attendees at an Ani DiFranco concert near a college town, or when trying to speak to a high-school cheerleader about Nietzsche. Often there’s a reason why generalizations exist, and most of the time it’s a valid one. So suffice it to say that when I heard I was visiting Oklahoma, I immediately thought of under-educated, toothless hillbillies who relied on farm animals for food, work, companionship, and intimacy.

I have not seen a single cow tipping thus far, but I’m still holding my breath.

A list of what I did see when driving from the airport to Simon’s childhood home:
trucks
cows
horses
baby cows and horses
trucks
oil contraptions that appear to be a euphemism for oral sex, called “pump jacks”
silos
wind turbines
trucks
a Hooters
bales of hay
the American flag on trucks
and a tractor

So far it’s surpassed my expectations in beauty, intellect, and digestibility. I’ve consumed blackened catfish, a Sno-Cone, fried okra, pinto beans, and a variety of fruits bought from farm-stands. But Norman, Oklahoma isn’t just a bastion of traditional Americana, it’s also where I dined at my first Thai-Italian restaurant. No, not fusion. Half of the menu was Thai food, and the other half was Italian. I ate veggie padthai, Simon had a pepperoni slice. I was kind of astounded by the diversity.

Simon’s parents are hilarious, adorable, generous, and deeply in love. Even if my personal compendium of meet-the-parents scenarios didn’t include a girl’s father calling Mike Piazza of the Mets a “fag” as he shook my hand, a mother telling me point blank that I would never compare to her daughter’s ex-girlfriend because she “just hasn’t realized what she let go of,” and a father walking in on his daughter performing cunnilingus on yours truly, I believe that this introduction, so far, has gone more smoothly than I could have imagined.

One of my favorite things about Simon, that he obviously has received from both his mother and his father, is his approachability, you can speak to the boy about anything. (Case in point, on our flight into Oklahoma City we sat next to a pastor. The topics of conversation included skateboarding, Malcom Gladwell , and the somewhat-predictable Jesus.) His parents are expert conversationalists and have made it very easy for me to let down my guard and be myself, which is saying a lot considering my generally suspicious nature and moronic, tight-assed upbringing where manners were emphasized over personality. Both of them work, and have a lot to share when it comes to the nature of the economy, how to shift business priorities as the parents of an adult, and the way they view the progress of Ministry of Imagery.

Simon’s father made an observation that was haunting, and it rattled around in my brain like a set of keys thrown in a washing machine. The current trend in many fields is for work to be subcontracted. Companies are less inclined to hire an employee to work permanently on-site, or to throw money at insurance policies and other assorted costs of having a “team.” Many companies no longer invest in a human element, because they’re looking to cut costs that aren’t simply reflected in dollars, but in energy and time as well. To hire someone to do a particular job, may it be a single assignment, a set of assignments, or an amount of work over the course of several months, is a lot less of a risk, there’s less inclination for an employer to worry about the return of investment or employee inertia. When you devalue the human element in business, that’s when the freelancer comes in. Which is why Simon and I have been able to start a business. Which is also why I’m perpetually worried about the where the next paycheck is coming from.

I mean, when was the last time you heard about a freelance writer asking for a raise?

The thing that concerns me about the sudden decline of office jobs, and the influx of freelancers on the market (both as writers, as well as in other sectors), is that there may be a glut in the market. Just as rabbits multiply, so do people wanting to work, unshowered, in pajamas. If there is a supposed “need” for freelance employees, suddenly the competition to get hired is less about skills or personality, more about lower rates and what you’re willing to cut out of your lives.

For an all-too-common example: we have no health insurance. If something were to happen — a skateboarding accident that breaks every knuckle in my right hand, if what I swear is Simon’s narcolepsy is actually diagnosed — we would be shit out of luck. The other day I had a kidney infection. I couldn’t look for work because I found it impossible to get my feverish, achy, bloody piss-filled self out of bed. What if it had been something worse? No shit that America’s health care crisis is tainting nearly every individual with prehensile thumbs who lives here. But isn’t the problem only going to get worse before it gets better as the amount of contract employees increases? Is freelancing the new factory work? How does any freelance writer ever make enough to own a home, start a family, and have a savings account, let alone afford antibiotics? Moreover, do freelance writers all wear the same clothes from high school and refuse to have their musical taste progress beyond mid-nineties industrial bands, or is that just me?

Sometimes it seems as though the original approach I took might have been the more stable with regard to longevity. If you can get an office job you have steady income and you still have time to dedicate to your heart’s passionate side project. You have both the paycheck coming in and the pursuit of your art on the side. If what you love is a hobby there’s far less stress and pressure, and you know that you’ll always be able to make ends meet so long as you clock into your “real job” on time. I just wonder for myself, and for Simon, if that would feel like selling ourselves short. After all, it’s too late now, we’re doing it, we’re learning by flailing, it’s terrifying, mortifying, and humbling, and we’re loving every second of it, other than the bickering when we’re hungry. I wouldn’t trade it for the world, although it’s hard sometimes not to wonder if it will never get any easier. I just wish we knew freelance writers in their forties who make a good living, sending their kids off to school, and returning to their computers to write for eight hours the way that, traditionally, parents would go to the office. I wish we had a model to follow, just like we have one to deviate from.

On the flip side of this coin, though it doesn’t answer any of my questions, most of the kids I’ve met out here have full-time jobs. They work at cosmetics counters, at casinos, or in laboratories. All of them seem pretty content. And, in case you were wondering, all of them also have teeth.

Write to me at AinsleyDrew at gmail. And thanks for everybody who contributed “meet the ‘rents” horror stories. Keep ‘em coming, if I get enough of them I’ll compile a post when this trip is over that presents them all anonymously.

The OK 140

Sooner State