Juxtaposition, or "I Promised Myself I Wouldn't Make Any Racial Jokes on this Blog"

It has felt to me lately like my life is just one giant juxtaposition. I guess it kind of makes sense, because I’m right around the age where life often begins to transition in big ways, and so maybe a lot of people my age feel similarly. 

But the thing is, things aren’t really changing right now. I’m just stuck in this awkward, in-between gray area that borders the black and the white (and that’s not just because I live in West Philadelphia, if you catch my drift). And I'll be stuck here for a while to come, I think. Hence, juxtaposition.

I work at a job where my co-worker/supervisor/person-who-sits-ten-feet-away-from-me-every-day-and-with-whom-I-have-to-get-along is in her fifties and has two children that are older than me.  For this reason, I can understand why she can’t see me as anything but a child pretending to be an adult. (Things that probably don’t help my case: the fact that everyone in the office knows I love Spongebob Squarepants; my very slight lisp; the fact that I dress kind of like a 12-year-old, only in earth tones instead of sparkles.)

But the fact is, although she is my supervisor, she and I are technically equals in some small ways, such as the fact that we are two thirds of the front office staff, we sit in the same room together all day, every day, and that we both need to chat about trivial things in order to get along and so the otherwise awkward silence doesn’t crush us alive. That’s where the equality ends, really, and we both know it, but sometimes we pretend like that’s not true while we chat. 

Case in point: she likes to talk about her two older-than-me daughters who still live at home. I don't have daughters. I am nowhere near the stage in my life in which I would have daughters. And I certainly don't know what it's like to have two adult daughters who still live at home. I had absolutely nothing to contribute to this conversation that would make us seem like equals. I could have talked about how my cats mooch off of me just as much as her daughters mooch off of her, but I felt like that would've only increased the awkwardness.

The more obvious option, though, was to bring up the one way I could possibly relate to this conversation: the fact that I'm a daughter with a mom, just like her daughters. 

You can’t expect somebody to see you as an equal if you’re comparing yourself to that person’s daughter during a chat. It doesn’t work like that. But that didn’t stop me from trying.

Juxtaposition.

The other day, this same co-worker of mine was telling me about before her daughters moved back home, while they were still in college, they were obviously able to take care of themselves just fine. But now that they’d returned home, they seemed to rely on her for meals, laundry, and everything else for which I have not relied on my mother since I was about 14. She brought up a time when she went to visit one daughter while she was in college, and all that this daughter had in her fridge was one can of beer.

I silently commended myself on the fact that my fridge is much more well-stocked than her daughter’s had been (I’ve learned that saying such things out loud is generally frowned upon in the workplace; it falls under “Bragging About Yourself” on the list of Inappropriate Workplace Topics. This list, by the way, also includes “Potty Talk,” a topic which I learned was taboo the hard way as well). But when I got home that evening, I studied the contents of my fridge, as well as my pantry, and I came to the conclusion that my food supply isn’t as far as I’d thought it was from “one beer” status.

My fridge has a couple of staples: items that have been and will continue to be in there until we move (and maybe even after that). They are:

1.) A filtered water pitcher, the filter of which has never (NEVER) been changed over the course of its 4 year life

2.) Half of an onion in a Ziploc bag that can’t possibly be good anymore, but it doesn’t actually look rotten to me

3.) A container of off-brand Parmesan cheese that we bought once for a combination dinner party/Halloween party during which we served spaghetti (This party went just as badly as you’d imagine it would.)

4.) A bottle of balsamic vinaigrette from the same party (because nothing says “fun” like a salad)

And if you move onto my pantry, you’ll find the same pattern of staples:

1.) A can of mini corns that I bought in Chinatown back when I still lived on Temple's campus (it's moved with me three times. Why?)

2.) Three cans of chicken salad that are still shrink-wrapped together, for obvious reasons (CANNED chicken salad...?)

3.) A box of pasta boobs

Occasionally, Brad and I build around these staples and stock our shelves with food we actually eat, the classiness of which varies. Right now, our building blocks are a case and a half of Miller Lite in our fridge drawer, half a loaf of stale bread, and a carton of eggs and a box of instant pancake mix, both of which we bought last weekend when we had friends staying with us so we’d look like we were people who went grocery shopping the way grown-ups do. I think these additional items put us about a step and a half up from “one beer” status.

On second thought, I’m going to take away that half-step, because a case and a half of Miller Lite is actually less impressive, not more impressive, than just one can of beer.

However, at the same time that we stock our kitchen the way college kids do, Brad and I are engaged and planning a wedding, the way college kids, you know, don’t. We’re signing $10,000 contracts and talking about what we’re going to do with our bank accounts after we’re married and looking into how I go about changing my last name. We are doing all this while there is a box of Pasta Boobs front and center in our pantry. 

Juxtaposition.

I could go, in detail, into the other examples of juxtaposition in my life, such as the fact that I started volunteering at the cat shelter solely so I could play with kitties once a week, but instead, I found myself last Thursday reduced to wiping from the ringworm-ridden fur of a litter of 7-week-old kittens a thick layer of their mother’s shit/vomit compound.  Or the fact that I’ll be paying off the loans I borrowed to pay for my college education until I’m 40 because after college, I could only land the type of job that you don't need a college education to do, and so you don't earn a college-education-worthy salary. Or the fact that, despite all of these enormous pathetic aspects of my life, I’m actually very happy with the way things are, and most of the time, I enjoy every minute of it.

Such is life. I think.