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celebration of rejection
Tuesday, November 13 2001
Gretchen and I are more alone-time-demanding than most people, so it hasn't been easy for us living together in a little three-room brownstone co-op. The fact that I no longer commute to work means that I am always hanging around the house, usually at my computer, often with a cat or dog in my lap, CNN on the teevee, or MP3s playing in tight rotation on the stereo. Gretchen is used to having the days to herself, undisturbed by such noise and chaos. Over the past few weeks we've had difficulty arriving at an arrangement that doesn't drive us both crazy. The situation was aggravated recently when Gretchen was laid off from her tutoring gig at Queen's College, meaning she would be home for one additional day each week. Two people, no matter how comfortable they are with one another, will eventually go crazy unless they are allowed to be by themselves. This is why no one will ever walk on Planet Mars.
Today Gretchen tried barricading herself in the bedroom to work on her poetry, but my quietly-playing music (I didn't have any headphones) still managed to disturb her. Tension erupted several times and then finally Gretchen went out to a bar with her poetry friend Debra to "celebrate" her tenth poetry rejection. Celebrating every 10th rejection is a tradition recommended by another poetry friend as a way to avoid taking the rejections personally.
Later on, Gretchen and Debra had been joined by Eulala and they'd come back to watch Smallville, Gretchen's new favorite show. Meanwhile, I continued doing work, the thing for which I am paid.
When I was eating a "stromboli roll" at a pizza place on Seventh Avenue this evening (not the Big Pizza Café, but a garish neon-lit place a few blocks to the south, across from a school), I noticed that the pizza people were distributing their wares in flag-bedecked "United We Stand" pizza boxes. Are we just supposed to throw these away (like an old SUV) when we're done with them?
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