You So Boring!

“Oh, I miss you Margaret Cho!” I scream into my laptop like the lunatic that I am. I have always been a little unhinged, and life in the Arctic Circle has done nothing to rectify this. Nor would I want it to. I consider this to be my finest quality. Well, after my love handles.

There is something about moving up to a land withoutcellphones, or toothpaste, to follow the polar bear of your dreams that throws everything out of orbit. I haven’t yet put my finger on what it is, but it might be the raw caribou meat. Regardless, the -45 degree weather and lack of Thai food has started to get to me.

Plus, there’s the language barrier.

For instance, yesterday I walked into the all-purpose cooperative shop to buy some supplies for my course—I took a job teaching art at the community college to support my albino boyfriend—and was apparently turned down for a date by a man not only smelling of gin but also sporting four black teeth (and no white ones). The conversation went something like this:

“Hello Christopher,” I smiled, more because I noticed fresh limes over his shoulder and I had never seen fresh produce north of the 55 before. “How is your week going?” Then I grabbed the bag of limes before a woman named Fernandez snatched them up.

“My weekend?” he asked, furrowing his brow. Admittedly, I can be all-over-the-map at times and mildly confusing the rest of the time. However, you either understand a question like how is your week going? or you don’t. It’s not a quadratic equation. You don’t get lost along the way.

“No, Christopher,” I chuckled, covering my mouth. I was not trying to play coy here, I do have a polar bear boyfriend, but Christopher had really gotten into the gin that morning and the smell of his breath made me want to vomit. “How is y-o-u-r w-e-e-k s-o f-a-r,” I over-enunciated in that way that is not helpful for anyone and makes the speaker appear as though they have recently survived a stroke.

At this, he looked as startled as I often am. I filled this lull in our thought-provoking conversation by beating off Fernandez, who had realized I was cradling the only limes in the co-op. I would have shared, but Fernandez doesn’t even know what limes are. She just hates me and wanted to take them away from me. I don’t blame her. I syphon her cable.

After a minute or two of me performing Let's Do The Time-Warp Again! in my head, Christopher responded. “No thank you. I work all day and then I will be tired.”

Then he walked off.

That pissed me off too. I wasn't fishing for anything here. I have a boyfriend waiting for me in my igloo thirty feet away—an endangered species, and not just because he’s a polar bear or has decent dental hygene. I was just trying to have a fucking conversation. At least I got the limes though. I may have picked up some of Fernandez’s scabies in the process, too. Not wanting to have won a battle with my nemesis without rubbing it in, especially during this festive season, I threw a lime at the back of her head.

As the green amulet of health and happiness cascaded across the shimmering sky and seemed to dance, momentarily suspended in the Northern Lights, I really hoped I would connect. In spite of the fact that Fernandez is a big old bitch, I think she would be proud of my challenge.

“Sweet!” I hollered with the girth of one of the wild amaruq (wolves) that live outside my igloo when the lime nailed her just above her orbital frontal cortex. "Cha-ching!"

When Fernandez rose up from the tundra, not unlike Sissy Spacek in Stephen King’s Carrie, only without the pigs' blood, she looked over at me with a face that only a mother could love, but the expression that anyone would bet on to win in a fight.

In a moment terse with a bastardizing revelry and fear I make what is only the first invitation to my igloo with the hopes of not coming away with my second rejection. “Hey, Mona Lisa, do you want to come over for supper?”

“What are you making Bitch Face?" Fernandez roared back. "It better not be any of that veggie crap you and the bear eat."

“Sushi,” I screamed. “Vegetarian sushi. With lime zest. You’ll love it!”

“I better,” she snarled, as though she just realized she had only come in second in a pie-eating contest, having to resignedly hand-over her title belt. “I could stop at the community freezer on my way.”

“Don’t stop at the community freezer,” I said, with a dead-pan glaze over my face. “I do not want to come down with scurvy. I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Sounds good,” Fernandez laughed, and ambled off into the tundra to tell her husband, Yeti, that they don’t have to kill a local tonight. If only these people knew the efforts I go to just to save a life.

When I get into the igloo we pay way too much for considering it is colder inside here than outside, I tell Sherman about how he almost lost me. “Yah, first to a French seal who is drunker than Danny DeVito and then to a fictional monster of the tundra,” Sherman laughs. “Go right ahead.”

I suppose the big lug has a right to be comfortable. I did move three thousand miles to a land where I don’t speak the language, eat the food or understand the storied traditions. I did it all for him. He should be comfortable. He should also cook me meals, which he does. And, he will be more than happy to cook a meal for Fernandez and her knatt-encrusted lover.

 “Delightful!” he gushes when I tell him the news. “I love having company over!”

Sherman is a far more gracious host than I am. This is because he has what some would call social skills. So did Monica Lewinsky. That’s all I’m saying. Sometimes it pays-off to be social, but sometimes you just end up on your knees pleasuring an over-zealous southerner who doesn’t even cover the dry-cleaning and goes home to sleep with Hilary Clinton. For better or for worse, this approach to life has won Sherman my hand—for now.

Fernandez and her lover, Craig, waltz in about an hour and a half after I pelted her with a lime. They smell funky. But then, they think the same about me. Who’s right? Probably no one.

After dinner Fernandez suggests that we play a game that requires us to write down the names of celebrities, crumple them up, and then concoct some kind of ghetto-charades with partners to guess whose name is on the paper. “That’s so stupid,” I begin to say, but Sherman elbows me knowingly.

“Best behaviour,” he groans out of the corner of his mouth.

“Right,” I lament. “That sounds really clever Fernandez. You should try and patent it!”

Three hours later we are still playing and have yet to change the names. “You know, we should have all really memorized the names by now,” I suggest in exasperation. “You aren’t exactly a genius because you guessed Sarah Palin again!”

What Fernandez didn’t exactly like was that comment. “Fine, we can play Ass-Hole,” she offers. “I bet you’re good at that game.”

“You have no idea,” I smirk, with a twinkle in my eye.

“Hmm,” she laughs, smacking me on the back with her over-sized paw. “You aren’t so boring after all. A little stupid, but better than advertised for sure.”

Perspective is an interesting thing, because the very fact that we have our own precludes us from ever fully appreciating anyone else’s. We can try. We should try. I think we need to try. However, we need to try with an understanding that success doesn’t mean accomplishing perfection. As much as you believe you love another person; as much as you think you respect them; as much as you think your world rises on their chest and falls on their breath, it’s all subterfuge if you don’t appreciate that the place they come from considers and values things you will never know about. 

The hope that we can reach that, even with one other person, for even a finite amount of time--perhaps no longer than a single moment--inspires me to try new things and explore this world.  

“Thanks stinky!” I holler in reply. “I think we could be great friends.”

“Epic,” she trills, as he voice reverberates into the northern-lit night.