Have a Nice Guilt Trip (21 page)

I popped out from the curtain feeling happy, an emotion rarely associated with politics. I was no longer angrily voting only to block the idiot frat boys from office. Instead, I was looking out for my neighbors and my home, like they were looking out for me. I felt more connected to the strangers around me, even—and especially—those who spoke languages I couldn’t recognize on a sign, and I had a greater sense of ownership and belonging in my adopted city.

As I left, a man still in line delivered the ultimate New Yorker’s reason to vote: “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain. And I love to bitch!”

Handygirl

By Lisa

I just put in a hundred perennials, which if you’re not familiar with gardening terms, means that I never have to do this again for the rest of my life.

Because perennials are supposed to be automatic, in that they come back every summer.

Like a yeast infection.

It took me five days to plant a garden, because I made every rookie mistake possible.

First, let me just say that I had no idea that gardening is so much hard physical labor. I toted sod, plants, and big rocks, in ninety-degree heat.

Gardening isn’t a hobby, it’s a chain gang.

My back, legs, and shoulders ache, my leg is swollen from a sting, and I got scratches from rosebushes I bought when I was temporarily insane.

There can be no other explanation for buying a plant that bites.

The problem with gardening is that the very term is a euphemism.

It fools you into thinking that you’ll be swanning around a bunch of flowers.

Wrong.

Remember when you delivered a baby? It was called labor for a reason, so you had fair warning. Because it’s work. There’s pushing and pulling and yanking and profanity.

And that’s just conception.

Sorry.

Anyway, back to my mistakes. Second mistake, I bought plants online because they were cheaper, then I found out that the nursery near me is going out of business and everything there was 40 percent off.

What I had already spent.

The online plants didn’t come when they were supposed to, so I started thinking I’d need more plants anyway, and I could get them cheap at the nursery. I read through my new perennials books, went to the nursery with my To Buy list, and they had none of them.

So I bought whatever perennials they had on sale.

It’s the Going Out of Business Garden.

And for what these plants cost, it’s going to put me out of business.

Anyway, the books said I had to take the grass off and make a bed.

I had no idea. I thought you could just plant flowers in grass. I should have known I’d screw up. I never make my bed.

Third mistake, I thought the garden was a big area, but I’m not good at eyeballing it, as my father always said. Of course I know there are tape measures, but how would you know how many plumbago plants you need to fill a foot of garden? Until yesterday I thought plumbago was a back problem.

Now plumbago is giving me a back problem.

Bottom line, it’s a big garden, so I got a great handyman, Dale, to help me, which is what you do when you’re divorced.

You hire a husband.

Anyway the first thing Dale said was, “there’s a machine that takes off sod.”

Oh.

So we found out the machine was called a sod cutter, and we rented one right away and started cutting the sod, which is the garden equivalent of scalping your grass.

It took all day, cutting and hauling the sod, then raking the bed so no grass seeds were left. Then we started putting in plants, with Dale doing the manly work of digging and me doing the girly work of putting in the potting soil and covering the hole.

I was a cover girl.

Yay!

Next mistake, we used up all the plants I had bought on sale, and still had two-thirds of the garden left. The online plants still weren’t here, so I went back to the garden center and bought more plants.

Hard labor but worth it.

Three times.

I no longer consulted the books.

I bought any perennial that wasn’t nailed down.

I would have planted a file cabinet if they’d let me.

But now I’m finished, and it looks beautiful, and it was worth all the trouble, like a brand-new baby.

Who remembers their labor anyway?

Okay, I do.

Mother Nature Is a Bad Mom

By Lisa

I started gardening to get closer to Mother Nature, but now I hate her.

Perhaps hate is too strong a word.

Let’s just say that we’re frenemies.

Because it turns out that Mother Nature is the ultimate mean girl.

Let me explain.

A few weeks ago, I planted and mulched a large perennial garden, which took five days of hard labor and was worth every minute. I had no idea how much I would love this garden, which was lush, fragrant, and colorful, blooming with purple hyssop, blue plumbago, pink roses, yellow and pink coneflower, black-eyed Susans, lavender, and daises.

You get the idea. It’s pretty.

I watered it with sprinklers, probably too often, and I took tons of photos of it, probably too many.

It was like I had a new baby. I did everything but breast-feed it.

Because of the bees.

Ouchie.

At night, I went out and watched the butterflies flutter to and fro. Bluebirds and wrens visited, and even two baby foxes came and tumbled around, adorably. I even took the time to smell the roses.

Literally.

They smelled great, and because the garden was right in front of my front door, its gentle fragrance wafted through the screen door.

In other words, it was all rainbows and sunshine, like
My Little Pony
but without the Pony.

I emailed one of my friends a garden photo, and she replied, “What about the deer?”

But I wasn’t worried. I figured the deer were too busy eating the apples from my apple tree, so I figured they wouldn’t bother my garden. Also, I always felt as if I had an understanding with the deer, since I like them and don’t allow hunting at all.

I even saved a fawn once, whom I named Fawn Hall.

And I love Bambi.

So you know where this is going.

I woke up one morning, and my garden was green.

But only green.

No more rainbow, no more colors, no more sweetness and light. There were almost no flowers at all. I went outside in disbelief, and the garden consisted of leafy sticks. Deer had eaten most of the flowers.

Okay, I should have known.

But I didn’t. When people complained about deer, I thought they were exaggerating.

And my first impulse was to kill deer, as many as possible.

Just kidding.

Mother Nature 1, Scottoline 0.

I calmed myself down, went to the store, and got a bottle of deer repellant made by a company called I Must Garden. I sprayed it on the stalks not because I Must Garden, but because I Must Win.

Or because I Am Smarter Than Deer.

Or because I Worked Too Hard on This Stupid Garden to Stop Now.

I never knew how deer repellent works and figured it was some mysterious alchemical mixture.

Wrong again, rookie.

I read the label and learned that it was “all natural,” made of: “Putrescent whole egg solids, garlic, clove oil, and white pepper.”

In other words, now I have a garden of green stalks that smells like garbage, topped with Caesar dressing.

No more lovely floral fragrance wafting into the house. I closed the door and dead-bolted it, to keep out the stench.

I may duct-tape the windows.

Mother Nature 2, Scottoline 0.

Enter more Nature, in the form of weeds.

By the way, deer don’t eat weeds.

Thanks, Bambi.

And when I say weeds, I mean weeds, and tons of them. They sprouted everywhere through the mulch allegedly purposed to keep them down.

So now I get to go outside and weed like crazy. I can’t tell the weeds from the plants, except that there are way more weeds than plants, and everything in the garden smells like puke.

Game, set, and match to Mother Nature.

Make It Twerk

By Francesca

The word “twerking” was just added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

Does that mean I have to acknowledge it’s a real thing?

I hate twerking. I hate the word. I hate the motion. I hate the craze.

I’d like to claim, and often do, that this is some sort of feminist stance. But I fear the real reason I hate twerking is more petty:

I can’t do it.

I secretly consider myself a pretty great dancer. That’s a risky thing to put in print, because I have zero training or recognizable dance skills to back it up. I’m sure there are small children on TLC who could put me to shame. My sole qualifications are that I fully commit, have a blast, and I
think
I can throw down. For most dancing scenarios, that’s really all you need.

If you approach a dance move with the attitude, “mm-hm, watch this!” I guarantee you will execute it well enough to delight those around you. Dancing is simply the result of too much positive energy to remain standing, so don’t let anything kill the buzz.

I’ve never been a shrinking violet on the dance floor. In college, I didn’t do a single drug, and I never once blacked out or vomited from alcohol. Instead, I danced on tables with little to no prodding. I could do it completely sober. During my freshman year, if you turned up the music, no elevated surface was safe.

I had somehow missed the slut-shaming memo that this was a “bad” thing to do. To me it seemed perfectly reasonable, even prudent. I could dance and have fun while staying safely out of reach of drunk guys and their grabby hands.

I took playing hard to get literally and made myself hard to reach.

How was I supposed to know this was the international symbol of train-wreck party girls the world over?

Eventually, I succumbed to societal pressure/gravity and put my table-dancing days behind me, but I’m not ashamed.

As Rizzo said, there are worse things I could do.

So I can’t blame my morals for keeping me from twerking. Nor could anyone accuse me of lacking twerk-ethic. Believe me, I’ve spent some time in front of my bedroom mirror trying to get it. But my booty doesn’t achieve that independent, lava-lamp jiggle. Instead, my butt does some sort of mechanical up-down motion, as if Disney’s “It’s a Small World” ride took you through the Red Light district.

Plus, I get tired.

And I’m bummed!

I want to be able to twerk and
then
reject it on principle, not the other way around. Twerking challenges my self-view, so it’s only logical that I hate it.

This isn’t the first time my dance-star illusions have been dispelled. I remember the night my new boyfriend casually mentioned that his ex-girlfriend was a dancer.

Modern dancing, that is, so you can’t even snark it.

Normally I’m a paragon of well adjustment when it comes to my significant others’ ex-flames; the past is past, and I don’t let it get to me. But something about her being a professional dancer brought up more insecurity for me than usual.

My best friend completely understood. “A dancer? Ugh, that’s the worst! I’d rather she was in MENSA.”

I’m fit, but I don’t have a hard body by any definition. And I am comically inflexible; I worked up to touching my toes last year. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me to feel bad about these deficiencies. Sex is best done lying down for a reason, folks.

But if my boyfriend dated a dancer, I feared he might be into freaky, Cirque du Soleil stuff in bed—spins and tumbling and French people in funny hats and … clowns.

Thankfully, we agree on saving the clowns for special occasions.

Right around this time, a girlfriend of mine got me a gift certificate to attend a dance class for my birthday. She said the class was beginner-friendly and the instructor was great. I was excited—I thought it would be a fun workout and a great way to get my groove back. I picked out a
Flashdance
-inspired outfit to wear, and we headed up to the dance studio in Midtown.

Well, guess what?

I sucked.

Like, unbelievably bad. My friend struggled, too, but not like I did. Everything the teacher demonstrated was too fast for me. My feet were not cooperating. I confused my left and my right. I turned around a beat too soon and faced everyone’s back. I was so much worse than I thought. It was humiliating.

Choreographed dancing is nothing like shaking it on the dance floor. It’s all counting and memorization; it felt more like math than like fun. I hated it. And I hated being bad at it.

But I stuck it out, huffing and puffing, trying my best. I had given up on attempting to follow the teacher and was mainly watching a tall brunette behind me in the mirror as she expertly executed every move.

During one of the teacher’s all-too-rare breaks, I turned around to the girl and said, between my heaving breaths, “I just want to apologize that you have to stand near me, because I know I am terrible. It’s super helpful for me to watch you, but I’m probably messing you up. You’re really amazing.”