Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Black Eyes and Dead Guys

Back in college, I worked as a temp on the summer breaks. I had some pretty interesting assignments, one of which placed me at a cemetery for most of the summer before my junior year. I learned about the business side of death and burials, and acquired a dark sense of humor about it all. PLEASE STOP READING IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED. Thank you, Mgmt.

My boss was an overweight woman in her 30s who wore long fake fingernails usually painted a garish neon orange. Her hair was caught in scrunchies or hair clips--the kind with a satin bouffant attached. She looked older than her age and her off-the-phone voice was a quick-witted nasal cackle. She smoked cigarettes and drank coffee as though she were an air traffic controller in a past life. She was very kind if you were on her good side; you were at the mercy of her temper if you were not. You would probably dismiss her as poor white trash, and well, you might be half right.

My parents, who know everyone for six counties, knew, or knew of, her family; they were also prominent local business owners. She managed to take up with some guy from the projects, who held her family hostage and kidnapped her (astute readers from "back home" will probably be able to figure out who I'm talking about). This really has nothing to do with anything other than to give you some background color and for me to do some pointless reminiscing about my youth.

So, anyway, my job entailed researching cemetery records...It seems that friends and loved ones would turn up to plant somebody, but there would already be someone taking a dirt nap in that spot, so my job was to go through every contract the cemetery had on record back to the 1920s and determine whether the client was now living in a pine condo in the marble city, if he'd bought any adjacent units for their spouse and progeny, and check whether those folks were resident. And I learned that, in the 20s, death was not the great equalizer. Old cemetery contracts do, in fact, prohibit you from transferring plots to colored folk or members of the Tribe. This is, of course, an unenforceable term of the contract today. I often wondered if there were high-velocity gyrations in the tombs because there were negroes! and Jews! decomposing nearby.

There was this sort of geeky guy who worked in sales at the cemetery. Of course he sold plots--hell, the graveyard practically gave those away--but the real money was in selling caskets and vaults. For instance, they might advertise a buy one-get one free special on plots and perpetual care contracts (yes, I'm being completely serious), but the real goal was to get you in there to pick out the accoutrements of death. One day, I asked about why you had to have a vault. The answer is because bodies drip fluids and you can't have embalming fluid and everything else leeching into the water table. Your skin is actually the first thing to decompose, so your body fluids drain to your underside, out onto that pillow you lay on, down into a drip pan right under that (it's pretty gross...I wouldn't go checking this out at your next wake), and so on.

Now, five paragraphs later, you're probably wondering why I'm telling you all this.

You'll remember that, after my surgery, my eyes were all bruised and puffy. When I came back to the office, a lady I work with told me about how she had jaw surgery and her eyes were bruised as well, and we wondered why it was always the eyes that had bruises.

If you know the answer from what I've told you, congratulations, you're much smarter than I am.

I finally got around to asking Doc about this last week when I was in his office and then I immediately felt stupid. The skin around your eyes is very thin. The blood from an operation has to drain somewhere, so it's going to go where there's the least resistance, so gravity pulls it down from someplace high and slanted, like your nose, and then pools around the relatively empty space around your eyes. The same thing happens when you snuff it--your body fluids, no longer actively pumping around, pool on your underside (which is why dead people are pale).

One last thing about the cemetery before I go: the cemetery would market itself by sending brochures and offers like the buy-one-get-one-free plots to every house on a block where someone had just died with a note saying that if you'd received this notice during a time of grieving, they were deeply sorry for your loss. As a matter of professional courtesy, if you've read this blog post during a time of grieving, I'm very sorry for your loss.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Go Get Yourself Some Cheap Sunglasses

So here's a problem I've never had before.

I wear BIG Jackie/Anna Wintour/Edith Head-type sunglasses. I have since high school. The thing is, I can't find the damned things since the surgery. (BTW, in a little bit of blog continuity, Edith Head designed the costumes for Tippi Hedren in The Birds).

The other day, I was up in town and had some time to kill around lunch, so I ducked into the Filene's Basement to get replacements...I had an idea of what sort of sunglasses I wanted--something different! A complete 180 from what I had before! Although, I secretly want a pair of gigantic Roberto Cavalli's, of the sort favored by WAGs (ask your favorite British person what that means). I guess you could say they're extremely vulgar; I like them a lot.


A $400 pair of sunglasses not in my future, I picked up a frameless style for $9.99, which also had the benefit of being very light on the still-sensitive nose.

Whenever I shopped for sunglasses pre-nose job, I always pondered, "Does my nose look big in these glasses?" much like other people would wonder if their bums looked big in a pair of pants. Hence why I bought enormous sunglasses--to make everything else look smaller. And sunglasses would just sort of rest on my bumpy nose and I never gave it much thought. Freed from the first problem, I never considered the second.

So there I am, at a parking garage at 17th and K, waiting for the valet to bring my car up, leaning against a pillar, reading Pride and Prejudice (if you're not from here, or from a city, and think valet parking must be sort of cool or glamorous...It's not. It takes forever, and then you've got to give the guy a dollar after paying $15 for the privilege of leaving your car in his hands for an hour), trying to look nonchalant--except I'm fiddling with the glasses every 10 seconds. Mr. Collins is SUCH a tool...I wish someone without any manners would tell him to shut up already about Rosings....Oh, there go the sunglasses again, sliding down my nose. Handsome man walks by...sunglasses fly right off my face. He stares at me. Bend the nose-rest things....maybe the sunglasses are crooked now, but there's no mirror handy and I'm right there in front of God and man, fiddling with my wardrobe. Quelle horreur! This is not the soigné ideal I had in mind.

A day later of fiddling, the damned things still won't stay on my face.

Anyhow....these are the daily struggles I go through. Next time, I'm going to write about something that you might actually care about.

Monday, June 9, 2008

A Visit With Doc

One of Doc's nurses stuck me in a surgery room (I think….It had one of those giant lights that fade to dark as someone slowly loses consciousness on a gurney on television) while I waited the half-hour until he could see me for my 3-month appointment. More accurately, it has been 12 weeks since my surgery.

I’m usually in a consultation room where I typically find a copy of New Beauty magazine. Haven’t seen that one at the grocery store checkout? It’s fascinating. The first time I picked it up, I figured it was an ersatz Glamour or Elle—Heidi Klum on the cover, beauty secrets, blah, blah, blah, but this was…something else entirely: a whole magazine dedicated to cosmetic surgery procedures and cosmeceuticals. Botox is written about like other magazines might write about Frederick Fekkai’s latest hair product or summer’s sizzling shades for nails. It’s mesmerizing and horrifying at the same time.

Anyhow, in the surgery room, I had to make do with the June issue of Vogue, which has a stunning spread on fashions inspired by Alfred Hitchcock movies—gloves, people! The model was wearing gloves! I think it’s the only fashion spread I’ve found where I’d wear the outfits. All of them. Joy! My style icon is Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Why wouldn’t she be? I often feel like I’m being pecked to death by crazed birds, and she manages to look elegant throughout.

Doc finally came in, squeezed my nose, and told me to come back in after three months. OK, that’s a gross oversimplification, but my nose is on-schedule. It’s still swollen in the bridge and tip, no surprise there, and the tip will definitely look different when it's all over. I think these visits are scheduled more to placate antsy patients than for any medical reason. If there were anything REALLY wrong, I’d think most people would call. Oh, and I was chided to remember to use sunscreen.

As an aside, do the anti-sun people bug you (No, Jen, we wear sunscreen, eat 5-9 servings of vegetables, and recycle, always)? Well, they bug me, and seems I'm not the only one who thinks they need to lay off. It's one thing if you're out in the baking sun for hours and hours, but I'm thinking of those people who, if you don't have SPF 400 with UVA and UVB blockers in your makeup and moisturizer, slathered on under your clothes while you sit in an office all day, think you're setting yourself up for very localized nuclear annihilation. You know those poor people who were locked up in the basement in Austria for 24 years? They looked older than their ages. And yet, no sun.

As I left Doc's office after my completely routine check up, there was a girl in the waiting room, probably in her late teens, with a splint on her nose. I wanted to go up to her and say, hey, that was me, too, and it’s going to be okay, I promise! You’re through the worst of it! But decided that would be kind of weird and possibly creepy. Who’s this crazy old lady? (Because, face it, when you’re 19, 29 is as old as Methuselah, no matter how much you say 30 is the new 20—and why would you want it to be?) Anyway, I embarrass myself enough with my word vomit even without premeditation, so I decided to keep my rhino-patient empathy to myself.

Oh, I asked Doc about some things about healing that are somewhat interesting--why your eyes get bruised and why your nose is oily after a nose job. Those blogs are on deck.

Friday, June 6, 2008

Only in My Dreams (Thank God)



So I haven't blogged in a while. Sorry...I've had business...and have been feeling kind of down, in general, over the last week or two...Not really anything appropriate to blog about.

I have some creepy dreams. Mostly I have nightmares, but some of them actually send me messages, though I wouldn't really say they're prophetic since it's probably my subconscious trying to get a message through to my obstinate and delusional conscious mind. For example, whether I want to believe it or not, whenever I have a dream about a guy I'm dating, it ALWAYS means that the relationship is over...It may not be technically over at that moment, but for all intents and purposes, it has no future. The dream can be perfectly innocuous and not even a nightmare, he's just a face in a crowd or something, but I wake up and know we're done. I've tried fighting this, so it's not a self-fulfilling prophecy. More like a contrarian indicator.

What's a contrarian indicator, you ask? (This is apropos of nothing, just me blathering about a topic I've been reading about). Well, here's an example, but the idea is that when something becomes a recognized trend, it's already played out.

So it's like that with my dreams.

Anyway, a couple of nights ago, I had this horrible dream (one other thing is that I never know that I'm dreaming...I'm absolutely certain I'm enduring whatever's happening to me). I dreamt that I had swelling in the shape of an Acme anvil between my eyeballs. But it wasn't swelling, it was just a deformity that happened from the surgery and there was nothing to be done about it.

My nose HAS been swollen lately (certainly not in the shape of an anvil, though) and just hasn't looked so great (in my opinion), so hopefully it's my subconscious telling me that, like the boyfriends in my dreams, it just isn't going to work out like that. So, hopefully, my bad nose dreams are just a contrarian indicator, and my nose is simply perfect, or going to be.

Here's a (rather blurry) photo. I have an appointment with Doc on Monday, so I'm hoping I remember to ask him some burning yet rather inconsequential questions that I've been meaning to write about (and get answers to). Stay tuned and have a great weekend!