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I had to make phone calls to media outlets in Atlanta today, and the sound of the voices, despite being rushed and mostly disinterested, was enough to give me the slightest twinge of homesickness.
My fellow interns commented on my heightened drawl, and it was true: my voice rang strangely in my ears, sounding like a sugared version of me I didn't completely recognize anymore.
The twinge quickly passed, as I enlisted Mitz and his car to aid in moving Saturday, and started to concoct plans for the weekend. But the drawl has clung into the evening, and I wonder how much longer the softer vowels will roll from my tongue.
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"You know, my day would have a whole lot less meaning if I wasn't your pet."
- Mitz, commenting on my ability to make him accompany me to various office locales (coffee machine, copier, basement) with just an arched eyebrow and a head toss.
"It just doesn't tend to end well with people who are white."
- Jay-ber, explaining why he doesn't date people of his own ethnicity.
"I would expect nothing less from casetheplace and a gay man."
- Out-of-town guest, regarding some long since forgotten anecdote.
"Is it a penis...oh, no, it's a bunny."
- (This one is actually a casetheplace said, when handed an Easter-themed lollipop by the Religion & Faith program intern.)
"I'm working for a big ol' gay organization and I don't know who the biggest homos are."
- Jay-ber, on why he needed to spend time studying Out magazine's Power 50 list.
"Casetheplace is like Google for Georgia - no, the whole South!"
- Jay-ber (again, I know! This kid is full of it - er, I mean, them, full of them), after I once again had to explain some Atlanta-ism or Southern-ism none of the Northerners and Midwesterners understood.
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My internship must be getting to me: I'm starting to act like I did when I took my first woman's studies class nearly ten years ago, getting irritated by gender norms and assumptions at every turn. I'd gotten rather complacent and able to let stuff slide more and more the past few years, but being fully immersed again in a place that lives and breathes sexuality and gender has riled me up something major. I snapped at a (straight) (male) friend on the phone tonight, shouting, "You're buying into the gender binary!" Which was true, but I probably could have been a little nicer about it. Sometimes it's hard for me to remember that not everyone spends their days consumed with GLBT civil rights (or LGBT, if you prefer...oh, the arguments that occur over GLBT v. LGBT v. queer v....if you only knew!!).
So yeah. Gender norms. Any thoughts?
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What I love about Mitz is how damn ridiculously preppy he dresses, but that he's really cool as shit underneath all that J.Crew and Banana. For instance, today I sashayed by his cube and said, "What ya listenin' to?"
"Common."
See what I mean? He's amazing. And I'm not just saying that cause he'll go down to the basement with me at work cause I'm too scared to go into the publications room by myself. (In my defense, that is how people end up having their brains eaten by zombies...) Mitz is amazing cause he's not trying too hard. He just is.
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Fresca Friday
Happy Fresca Friday, y'all! Mitz declared today Fresca Friday because yesterday a bunch of us interns were giving him shit about his drinking Fresca.
"What are you, an old woman?" we all said. "Are you gonna start drinking Tab now too?"
Mitz tried to defend his Fresca drinking as not being old ladyish by reading us a printout of the Wikipedia entry for the drink ("Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote that Fresca was the favorite drink of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had a button installed on the desk in the White House's Oval Office which would summon his military aide to bring the drink. In addition, Fresca was the favorite drink of the expansion teams in the NHL during the 1967 season"...Lyndon B. Johnson, people! And hockey players! They're not old ladies! Oh, and it's been featured in three - three! - episodes of The Simpsons! And The Daily Show!)
, but then Mitz made the mistake of mentioning that he was going on an evening river cruise on the Potomac next week, and all hell broke loose.
"You ARE an old woman! Look, he's even wearing a cardigan!"
Today, Mitz busted into the office with a stack of Dixie cups and a can of Fresca. "Who's ready to break down some beverage stereotypes??" he asked.
He then distributed the cups, and poured us each an inch of Fresca. I hadn't had Fresca in years, and I have to say, it tastes just as bizarre now as it did in the Nineties. (Sorry, Mitz, but I won't be joining you in old lady soft drink land on the regular.)
A lot of other things happened today, most notably my wiping out at 9:10 this morning on K Street. It was quite spectacular, with the coffee flying out of my hand and the sprawled out landing that slightly twisted my left ankle and tore open my right knee. It really knocked the wind out of me, and it took me a moment till I could let LG help me up. Everyone was all concerned about me being hurt, and all I could manage to get out was, "My coffee..." in a rather woeful voice. My skinned knee would heal with time, but the coffee seeping into the uneven cracks of the sidewalk was gone forever.
And here's a great thing one of my friends said today:
"Do squirrels eat worms? Like, in times of scarcity, do they eat worms? I saw one eating a worm today and I was like, Wow, it must be tough for them if they've moved on to worms..."
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