A Day In The Life

When I got into Portland, my media escort asked if I wanted her to drive me around to all the bookstores in the city and perhaps even beyond, so I could check placement of my book and announce to the clerks that I was there to sign stock. 

"Oh my god, authors make you do that?" I asked. 

"Sure.  Some of them want to do that all day.  That's all they want to do." 

"Oh my god, are you serious?" I asked.  I almost said, "What kind of fucking asshole behaves like that?" but she reminded me of my mom, and my mom always chastises me for cussing, and I didn't want to be a fucking asshole for cussing in her car when my intent was to criticize other fucking assholes. 

"I called over to the local Barnes and Noble while you were landing and they have eight copies of your book, so I told them you'd be by to sign them." 

"Wait, what?  We're really going over to Barnes and Noble?  Or are you kidding?"  My favorite part of the book tour has been the hoteling, and knowing that I was staying at the Embassy Suites, I had been eagerly awaiting the moment when I could run from room to room clapping above my head in my underwear.

"Why don't you just try going to this one store and see if you like it, and if you do, we can go to other stores, and if you don't, we'll go straight to the hotel afterward?"  This again reminded me of my mom, particularly when she tries to talk me into attempting a new kind of tampon because that's what they had in Costco, when really, there's only one kind that I'll ever accept.

So I protested and protested and protested like a surly teenager, but the media escort had that mom thing going for her and she was firm in her decision.  We walked into Barnes and Noble and she took me up to the information desk.

"This is Andrea Seigel."

The clerk looked at me like, "Well let me get down on my fucking knees."

And I thought, "Hotel!  Hotel!  Hotel!  Underwear!"

I signed the eight copies and on the way out of the store said, "Yeah, never again."

My media escort said, "Well, at least now you know what it's like," and I could only think, "Soul crushing.  But you have been very nice with only the best intentions."

I went up to my suite and immediately did the half-naked clapping, then did one of my favorite things in the world, which is to put two televisions in two attached rooms on the same channel.   Then I felt hugged by television in something even better than surround-sound. 

This sensation of an almost literal warm fuzziness came to end when I became infuriated by two things that I can't talk about, and was quickly replaced by the pulsing desire to put on a pair of tight pants and sprint upon a treadmill.  I went to the hotel fitness room, outfitted with a wall of glass overlooking the indoor pool.

As I ran pumping my arms with fury, I watched a mom and her son splash around in the water, and since I'd just been reading American Psycho, I began to feel the Patrick Batemany confluence of semi-evilness and a vigorous workout, except minus the cruelty to animals and people.  For whatever reason running makes me temporarily bad to bone, and because recently I'd been contemplating the need for a major change in my life, I had a sudden epiphany that I needed to become more like a machine.  And so while I ran and watched the flopping pair, I thought over and over again, "Andrea, you need to become more like a machine."  The hotel pool had been done in a faux-Tuscan style with faux-terra cotta, some pillars, and lighting that I could tell was supposed to resemble the sun coming up over a vineyard.

"When are you getting off?" someone suddenly yelled.

There was a teenage girl standing directly at my right, bouncing breast and she was staring up at me without any self-consciousness, so I understood right away that she was mentally disabled.

"Give me fifteen minutes."

She gave me two, and then came back to my boob again.

"Are you getting off now?" she asked.

"It hasn't been fifteen minutes," I said.

"Now?" she asked.

I believe that it's condescending to treat people with mental or physical handicaps or ailments any differently than you would were they without these handicaps or ailments.  This is why, even though my mom sometimes tries to pull the cancer card with me-- "Andrea, I cannot argue with you right now.  Not when I'm going through all of this"-- I proceed to argue with her anyway, because if I didn't treat her like I always treat her, what would that say about the power of the cancer?  (Incidentally, her cancer numbers are dramatically lower and I wanted to put up these cancer numbers to illustrate, but my mom bitched me out on the phone yesterday saying that that information was personal, that I should just let everyone know she's doing well, and I argued, "How can those numbers possibly be personal?")  I thought to myself, "This girl seems to be around five-years-old mentally.  And would I get openly annoyed with a five-year-old had she been asking me basically the same thing every two minutes?"  The answer was a firm yes, because I babysit a three-year-old and she likes to ask me series of "Why?" questions, one after the other, because she's finally realized this process gets my goat and finds that very amusing.  (She sometimes can't contain herself and laughs in the middle of a "Why?")  Since, with the three-year-old, I sometimes say, "Oh my god, if I hear one more "Why?" I'm going to have a mental breakdown," I thought it was fair to sigh and roll my eyes at the girl and the gym and say, "I'll alert you.  Don't worry."

The girl got the message and got on the exercise bike next to the treadmill, where she began slapping out a loud rhythm on her knees, making repeated bird calls, and yelling out, "Look at me!"  So after about five minutes of that I pressed the emergency stop button on my machine and said, "Okay, there you go."

Powell's was the first bookstore I've been to with slick flooring (I think it's some sort of glossed concrete), and so dancing became extremely precarious in my heels, and I wished I'd worn my running shoes.  Usually when people watch the dance routine they look bemused or embarrassed, but that night I think most of the people looked very, very nervous, especially when I did my turns.  The sudden-drop-to-the-knees move was much more nerve-wracking.

After the reading, my media escort dropped me back off at the hotel, and I ran to the suite, feeling euphoric from the earlier running (the evil turns into unadulterated joy), and immediately returned to an underweared state.  While catching the back end of Rock Star: Supernova I wrote three pages of the Like The Red Panda television pilot, all the while contemplating room service dessert, but decided against it when I discovered the hotel didn't offer molten chocolate cake.  Which the Seattle Sheraton did offer the next night, and to which I promptly said yes.

 

Comments

[ZachV]

It's the little things that get you threw the day.

[ZachV]

Threw? Fuck it im stickin with it... You litteraly get tossed.

Shit.