novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- \"my phone number is prime, you know. it's a prime number.\" the only salvagable reason for working on a sunday is how conversational some of my callers are. it's the weekend, they're relaxed, they're slipping in little details about their lives, their body neuroses, their babies crying in the background. today i listened to a woman rant for twenty minutes about how her favorite clothing manufacturer (one of several distributed by the company i work for) changed their sizing, making it smaller. she actually called the manufacturer and informed them that, as a therapist for over three decades, she has seen women of all generations dealing with every possible body issue. she apparently convinced one of the founders of the company to consider changing the sizing back once the fittings start for future seasons. she ends up ordering quite a bit of that particular manufacturer from me today, even though their sizing is still at its newer, smaller bent. i don't say anything. sometimes the only agency people feel they have is conversational. i then spend the next forty-five minutes on the phone with gail, a weight lifting mathematician in minnesota who misses the ocean so much but who has got to admit that the lakes are beautiful even though she's a sea girl at heart and the swimsuit she's ordering is in celebration of her fortieth birthday she's got very large lats will a medium fit across her thirty-eight inch chest? i'm on hold while she measures the circumference of her arms. we discuss lateral rock climbing (boulder scaling) and number sense. she explains how numbers in the greek language actually engage different portions of the brain than numbers in the english language. we then move onto thomas pynchon, hiking and how she can do sets of pull ups for thirty minutes straight. somehow we get on the subject of poodles and she has never heard of canine cross-breeding; i loosely explain the labradoodle and how it is akin to a sphinx; a mix of dogs for the allergy prone who want a big dog. oh she thinks poodles are much too neurotic. she has yet to learn how to surf; she grew up in massachusetts, and the waves on the east coast were choppy and intimidating. but she's very interested in longboarding. oh really my dad's a longboarder. she explains how you have to use your core strength to surf and climb. i imagine the scale of her shoulders and liken her to a muscular crab who incidentally can stand upright. she buys two dresses, both black, because she's really more of a winter than a spring. 1:44 pm - 04.10.05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||