01.25.24
It’s a scrap blog! Here’s the beginning of an essay I’ve been working on for several months that just hit the cutting room floor.
***
The morning is rushed and chaotic because I set it up to be. My sizable backpack that probably should be a carry-on but that I pass off as a “personal item” to avoid extra charges from my budget airline sits open and half-packed on the floor. I could finish packing it, but instead I paint my nails, which I meant to do two days ago but didn’t. In between coats, I carefully turn the pages of the memoir I’m nearly done with that I meant to finish yesterday. I’d rather bring one book than two, and I don’t want to leave this one on my bedside table with forty pages left and start another on the plane. I’ve already plucked my next read off the shelf in my living room, some trendy novel that I bought because I saw people talking about it on Twitter. Its cover is reminiscent of a poster of a painting that hung in the bedroom of a man I dated for half a semester in college. He had an impressive vocabulary, which I liked because my boyfriend before him, an artist who was so lovely and kind, was perhaps not the sharpest tool in the shed. The boy with the poster and I danced around saying “I love you” after just a few weeks as the semester waned. He spoke about me tenderly, poetically. His earnestness did not deter me because I was a more open person then — yet unsullied by the forthcoming emotionally abusive relationship with a (YAWN) Brooklyn comedian — and then he moved to Colorado. I never told my family about him, because I knew when we started hanging out that, upon his imminent graduation, he was moving to a Buddhist commune in the mountains (say what you will about the men I’ve dated, but they are certainly not lacking in variety). I figured it easier to keep our temporary-by-design relationship to myself. I will, therefore, not be fielding questions about him this weekend, as my grandparents try to covertly figure out why I am not yet married.
Last Fall, I realized I had accidentally gone an entire year without seeing my Nana and Papa in person. They only spend half the year in upstate New York, where I most often catch them, but I somehow managed to miss them every time I went north to visit my parents. “Nana and Papa came for dinner last weekend,” my mom seemed to say each time I entered her house. They were heading back to Florida again last I saw them, to their house that I hadn’t been to since before the pandemic. I’ve done some air traveling here and there in a post-vaccine world. I could go down for a long weekend, I told them. We settled on the second-to-last weekend of April, when I would least disrupt their usual routine of couples golf and cards. My mom repeated to me several times that they were elated that I was coming down. I am the only grandchild to have visited them in Florida since we all graduated from college, which is, I feel, a big part of why I am the favorite.
When we made these plans, I hadn’t anticipated that I would also have to go on a work trip to Los Angeles at the end of March, for a team offsite. Corporate morale summer camp, I would say to everyone who asked what was bringing me out to LA. What started as an opportunity to escape the tail end of a snowless but still miserable as ever winter in New York, a chance to send emails by the hotel’s rooftop pool with my closest work friend and get some sun mere weeks after my doctor told me my Vitamin D was low, ended in an insatiable desire to quit — change industries, change careers, change my entire life. The shift from hollow discussions about how we can communicate more effectively and improve the “culture” of our “team” to the realization that the ethical compromises I am making by having this job and being on this team run much deeper than I ever understood them to be was stark and jarring. I started applying for other jobs the moment I was back in my apartment, opening my laptop in the middle of the night amid fits of anxiety and insomnia, applying for anything that I think I could convince someone I am qualified for. But the market is terrible right now (it’s challenging for me to remember a time when I’ve been seeking full-time employment and the market hasn’t been terrible). I have no leads, no prospects, no sign of any actual or measurable change on the horizon when I am packing to go to Sebring a month later. I have only a thin resume with excellent experience in one specific thing that I am desperately trying to depart from and freshly painted fingernails, delicately zipping my overstuffed backpack.
I am, for the second time in a month, flying out of Newark. When I was traveling for work, I could put an Uber to the airport on my company card, but I can’t afford to do that on my own dime, so I take the subway to the shuttle bus that runs between Port Authority and the terminals. Once I find my way to the line, a man ahead of me asks in a thick, rich southern accent, “D’ya know what time it’s s’posed to come?”
“I think 9:30,” I tell him. It’s 9:14 right now.
Half-listening to a podcast, I get on the shuttle and ride to Terminal B, which is much more dilapidated than whatever terminal I was departing from a month ago. The flights to Los Angeles must fly out of a more posh, renovated terminal, and this one is reserved for flights to Iowa. I move through a rinky-dink security line and find my gate. I purchase the worst bacon egg and cheese in history and make earnest attempts to sip the hottest coffee that has ever been placed in my hand. I fly to Des Moines, then catch my connecting flight to Punta Gorda, because it ain’t Allegiant Airlines if you’re not needlessly jumping time zones to get to whatever godforsaken airport you’re shooting for.
***
On a Long Weekend in Central Florida will be coming in the Spring, likely without most of the words here.
