Girl Anachronism

I have a tendency to perseverate.



This is my favorite word at the moment: perseverate. My understanding of it is that it means to persevere past the point of health and logic into the realm of obsession. It might mean something different from that. I'm just reading from context. And I'm not really interested in what it really means, anymore. I like my definition better. You see how it all fits together.



At the moment, I am obsessed with: the Dresden Dolls, peanut butter sandwiches, Harp lager, my spikey earrings, my blue belt, writing, the many ways in which I feel myself to be different and special, Netflix, other people's business, and updating my Web site. Some of these things are universal. Many others come and go.



The first thing I can remember getting stuck on was typewriters. My grandfather was an editor at the Boston Globe. He had this old mechanical Remington that was about the same size as me, and twice as heavy, and I used to sit at it before I could write more than twenty words, and type total nonsense at about a hundred miles an hour. My grandparents have a picture of me somewhere, sitting on a high stool in front of the Remington, wearing my play clothes and my grandfather's old fedora with an index card in the brim reading "PRESS", with a pencil stuck behind my ear. I'm looking up at the camera like I'm on deadline and really pissed off to be bothered and I'm about eight years old. I want this picture desperately. It may be the next thing I get hung up on, getting it. You better hope I don't, because I'll probably start carrying it around and demanding that everyone tell me how cute I am.



After that, I was obsessed with the book "Little Black Sambo." This is not a PC thing to admit, anymore, of course. But at the time, I didn't have any idea that it was racist. I just liked the story. Little Black Sambo, in case your parents wouldn't let you read it, was this little boy who outwitted a tiger. The tiger wanted to eat him. The little boy outwitted him by means I don't remember, and turned him into butter, which he then brought home to his parents and put on some pancakes. It's a really good story, and I wish they'd update it so people could read it and not feel like they're oppressing anybody.



After that: Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, the Three Investigators, John Bellairs, Little Women, the Creature Double Feature, the Red Sox (circa 1986, weep), Cheese Balls in the blue aluminum can, Oregon Trail, horses, composition books, colored pens, new pencils, those fat yarn hair-ties, and eventually, tragic crushes.



I haven't changed all that much.



At the moment, I really wish I could play the piano like Amanda Palmer or write like Michael Chabon. But I still like typewriters. I have one of my own now. It's a smaller version of the one my grandfather cranked away at when he worked for the Globe all those years ago, and I guess I could sit at it with one of my press passes and scowl up at an imaginary camera, but really, there's a limit, wouldn't you agree? In theory, anyway.