Viewing posts for the category marco

toilet statues, bunions, disarmed

Thursday, mar. 24, 2005   |   1 comment

I know, all that suspense, “What will happen when Marco meets the parents??? Tune in tomorrow for all the juice!” And then … eight hundred days of silence. What happened? Did her parents forbid the union? Was there a big battle with “how could you“s and aioli stains? Did she find out she was adopted? Epileptic? Allergic to … LOVE?

Sadly, the Meet the Parents evening was utterly tame and void of quotes or any anecdotal qualities what-so-ever. (OH! except in the bathroom of the restaurant there was one of those grotesque, hyper-real statues, about four feet high, that you usually see presenting a menu or a business card out in front of restaurants, but this one was inside the bathroom, and also his pants were around his ankles and he had a toilet plunger stuck on top of his his head (where the roll of toilet paper you were supposed to use was stored) and he had a pair of real glasses and a depressed, interrupted look on his face.) Not that a lack of anything worthwhile to report has ever silenced me here before, but something about the buildup followed by such anticlimactic okay-ness threw me. In any case, lesson learned: never publicly pre-announce pending excitement, it virtually guarantees uneventfulness (which, now that I think about it, may have been genius on my part, because who really wants tainted meat or weeping strippers or whatever to appear at the Meet the Parents dinner?).

Far more exciting are my recently confirmed (by a medical foot doctor wearing a bow-tie) BUNIONS, which catapult me directly past “officially old” and land me on the “depressingly ancient” square in one fell swoop. In any case, I just picked up my orthotics, strange plastic smooth lifts (which look much like the contoured pool chaises my grandparents used to have) that I now have to wear in both shoes. And they feel WEIRD, not painful, but weird, mostly because it’s just not natural to constantly be reminded of the fact of your feet. But still, an altogether much better option than the surgery, which I might have to have eventually if the orthotics don’t halt the growth of the bunions, and which I want to avoid at all possible costs as it involves BREAKING my toe bone, setting a pin in there, and then me not walking for an entire month. What? I thought bunions were something cute and small, like an unwanted callous, not some federal emergency that warrants medieval torture a la splinters under finger nails. Aging is full of surprises.

Also exciting: this past weekend I went to the premiere of Steven‘s movie, Disarmed, a short film about a first date, blooming love, and Body Integrity Identity Disorder (the intense desire to have an unwanted limb removed), and it was truly delightful, funny and well-paced, with none of those blank moments that jar you out of the story and remind you that you’re sitting in a theatre, possibly having to pee. This movie just swept me away for its entire 20-minute span. It was like, I don’t know, if you’ve ever caught a wave (and I’m just talking body surfing here, nothing crazy), for the duration of that wave, you’re there, just enjoying it and thinking of nothing else but the happy feeling of it. That’s what this movie was like! Also! It featured a direct reference to something I said on MY first date with Steven (we are no longer dating, just to clarify), something about how the dock of the bay is impossible to sit on because that’s the water part of things, where the boat goes — really Otis should have sang he was “sitting on the PIER by the bay.” So that’s exciting.

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