Physical Labor

It might sound strange, but I don't really think it's alright to pick flowers and it's not my cup of tea to name things. Sure, you might have seen me at some point with a rose in my cap, a walking contradiction of gender for the unenlightened, and you may have met my cat, Eugene, who is yes, almost the exact same shade of orange as my own hair, but what you don't know is that I don't pick flowers; I don't have names for things.

And I'd be perfectly content cleaning the same room for the rest of my life. I'm not a spiritual person, at all. But I've always found a strange satisfaction at putting order and a shine on wood. Ask my parents. At twelve, they'd come home to find the living room floor had been hand waxed and polished. This is true. You can still watch TV while applying paste wax with an old rag, but you have to do it on your hands an knees. I've always had that sort of energy.

Around that same time, I'd find myself in the basement of our old house for hours, and I think I was probably listening to Sir Mix A Lot, or NPR or both, off an on. Side A, the News, Side B, a program about outer space, repeat. I was refinishing old furniture. I don't think I asked permission, or was asked to do it. I was compelled.

There was that stool, that is still floating around my parent's house, a different house, but still their house. It says, burned into the bottom, 1867. You ruin the value of antiques by refinishing them, but you don't know they're antiques sometimes, until you refinish them. And what's the value of something broken and covered in Spackle and dried paint anyway?

For some reason, I'm not quick to defend myself or define myself when it comes to describing who I am. Sure I have seven or so bicycles, but I remember being in seventh grade and riding to school almost all year. Mostly it was because the bus wasn't very fun. Mostly it was because I got a satisfaction out of being independent. Of being an independent. Not politically of course, personally. But for a time I forgot that I did that. That I biked to school in the cold weather, and that time that the wild turkeys flew over the road and almost hit me, and that I didn't tell anyone, I just tucked that one away because it happened to me, and it was mine forever.

I remember learning that rugged individualism was a term used to describe the conservative philosophies championed by the republican party, and that it had it's roots anchored in pictures of cowboys and soldiers and that sort of thing. It was disappointing. Before I learned that, I remember liking that term; Rugged Individualism. After, it was tainted. I couldn't keep it, now. Thanks Ronald Reagan.