On a stupider note

The Red Dress

I always saw, I always said
If I were grown and free,
I'd have a gown of reddest red
As fine as you could see,

To wear out walking, sleek and slow,
Upon a Summer day,
And there'd be one to see me so
And flip the world away.

And he would be a gallant one,
With stars behind his eyes,
And hair like metal in the sun,
And lips too warm for lies.

I always saw us, gay and good,
High honored in the town.
Now I am grown to womanhood….
I have the silly gown.

--Dorothy Parker

Some little boys dream of machine guns and some little girls dream of tiaras and then for fun, sometimes it's reversed. Fortunately there are other options in between.

I'm not making this up: since I was a kid, I wanted an office. My parents were professors and my dad in particular had an office with lots of interesting-looking books and a bulletin board with pictures and lefty political buttons and a desk drawer full of cup-o-noodleses. We sometimes walked over there from our university-adjacent lab school and waited to be driven home to what you could just barely call the suburbs, and one time Dad was late and in feigned terror/seekrit delight we plotted how we would make it through a harrowing night marooned at an office not far from the mean streets of East Jesus.

There's nothing of clinical or otherwise professional interest to say in conjunction with this, just I have the silly office now* and secretly, when my officemate isn't here and the day is over and I'm not even pretending to get things done anymore, I love the place. I have a bulletin board with pictures and (now rather rueful) buttons from Inauguration '08 and a trillion tchotchkes work friends and I started buying for each other on trips. I sometimes stop in here on a hot day because it's like a tiny pied-a-terre, perhaps an orteil-a-terre, a quiet place to duck out of the city.

There's a shelf whose contents ought to be somehow diagnostic, lots of clinical books I don't touch, a stack of opera CDS, a lint brush, various digestive remedies that don't work, four kinds of tea, and two small empty tequila bottles (Russian more amusingly says "two small bottles out-from-under tequila") that I drained surreptitiously at critical moments. On the wall, my broken Risperdal clock which may be right only twice a day but you'll pry it from my cold dead fingers. My license. A map of the world from Doctors without Borders, because in aforementioned critical moments, I like to pick a place I've never been and pretend I'm there despite my dread of travel.

I've actually spent a few minutes this morning making the place look less, er, symptomatic, because I'm not unconvinced of the perhaps behaviorist notion that the physical gesture of smiling can and sometimes must precede actual happiness so perhaps the office of a functional professional will encourage things like motivation and efficiency, though I have my doubts. I guess the next step is to take the grocery bag full of shirts to the dry cleaner but they exist in the gap between my newfound sartorial aspirations and my income. (Dry cleaning: not cheap.)

(((Very most tangentially, I have stolen twice in my entire life, both times out of spite rather than need. I just looked up at the books on the shelf and realized that I absconded from the Fuckaway Center of entries past with a book called The Adult Psychotherapy Progress notes Planner, which I have not once opened. Also up there: a bunch of analytic writings I wonder if I'd understand anymore, reference materials for a few languages the most interesting of which is a grammar for Haitian Creole that was really hard to find, and a few books that have nothing to do with anything but got exiled from my home for reasons of space. On days when I'm not really present in this job anymore, I think apprehensively about the moving on process and lugging all these books away to my next office.)))

*though not a university office, alas. The world was spared the misguided misprofessorialization of me, the would-be Dr. Smearcase when I dropped out of my PhD program.