Oink

As a relatively new working stiff with joyful 8-to-5-less freedom still visible in the rearview mirror,  I've found myself in a uniquely objective position to notice the inextricable (and sometimes fraught) connection between work and food.  Lunch breaks are heaven, staff rooms are nothing more than waysides for abandoned baked goods to be sacrificed to the masses, and afternoons standing at a cash register are used to mentally prepare grocery lists or elaborately envision the chopping/stirring/sauteing that will precede that evening's dinner.  Without delving into Maslow or Freud, I don't quite know why this is; it just is.

Case in point.  Long, long ago in the beginning of November, I was at a morning all-staff meeting.  To celebrate teambuilding or success at something-or-other or to use up excess funds, there was cake:  Two massive carrot cakes and a huge platter of delicious chocolate cupcakes with tall swirls of dark chocolate frosting that looked like poo but tasted amazing.  After the meeting when all had had their fill, and the staff was parting for our separate monuments and tasks, many were dishing up a helping of dessert for the road.  Being poor-ish, sweet tooth-ish and on my way back to my house, I figured to take a heaping plate for my housemates and I.  Imagine - me precariously balancing a flimsy paper plate underneath this mountain of frosting, cupcakes and a slice constituting a good 19% of one of the cakes.  Imagine coworkers good-naturedly ribbing me about my appetite and my breakfast choices.  Imagine one of my superiors, a big boss in the region... oinking at me.

For reals?!

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'm a fan of Miss Piggy.* 

This was my favorite lunchbox which used it well into my high school years.  (Actually, my favorite may have been the one with Garfield, just because the matching thermos had a porthole drawn on it that made it look like Garfield was drowning in my chocolate milk.  Morbid, but a good sight gag.)  And I do have a dear wish to see a wild javelina in Arizona (which is actually not a pig but a peccary).  But isn't oinking at someone usually an offensive thing?  Usually a disparaging sound effect in regards to one's weight?  In the sense that being FAT (yep, I said it) is supposed to be... bad?  I stood there, wrist aching under the weight of a pound of sugar on a paper plate, four years of feminist theory and body-positivity welling up inside me.  I didn't know how to even begin to respond.  To an oink.  From my boss.

My transition here has been multipart, as has been explained to death already.  But yet one more aspect of my integration in this place is the loss of my radical culture safety net.  From bicycle-happy Portland with its high school GSAs to the Hampshire student body's flying their Freak Flags high, to Northampton's preaching-to-the-choirboys Pride celebration, I've woven my life with threads snagged from the fringes of culture, and I feel like I've knit myself quite a cozy patchwork existence.  Rimrock, AZ is not the hotbed of political/cultural diversity and debate that I might hope for.  Nearby Flagstaff is a college town, it's true, but the commute seems nearly as conceptual as it is logistical, for close as it is, it's ideas appear far removed from where I am.  Being queer or body positive seem so much farther out on the relative continuum here that I don't know if I have the courage to be on that lonely, elevated side of the scales.

And scales they apparently are.


Last week, though, I found a bastion of Otherness in the quaint, New England-flavored town of Prescott.  There, after wandering through a sleepy, small-town museum all day, I was drawn to a street of houses painted in bright primary colors.  Lo and behold, the Arts District - and not the one that sells slickly crafted wine bottle stoppers and hand-painted pashminas.  This is the street where the thrift store, hair cutters, Eye on the Mountain mystical art gallery and infoshop/lending library/Food Not Bombs hq rub unwashed elbows with one another.  Ah, the weirdos!  Here you are!

Above-mentioned Infoshop has ongoing offerings of community classes called freeskool, which seem like a very entertaining time.  I've been toying with the idea of sticking around this place as my internship ends (more on that soon... so soon) and having some kind of community that I can try to insert myself into would make it that much more enjoyable.

I just don't know, man.  I still have to fall back on, "Let's just wait and see" but I don't have too much longer to wait, now.  Still, hopefully: we'll see.


*Speaking of Miss P and her fuzzy foam brethren, this is an amazing, exhaustive blog which distracted me for hours and made me all starry-eyed for a childhood spent learning in front of a television.  Bliss.