In My Stupid Moment

This week I feel like a circus act, trying to keep my dozen spinning dinner plates up on their sticks while the Clownmobile circles closer and closer so the leering molester-clowns can honk their big fat bike horns right in my ear and pinch me on me bum. Small children in the crowd are throwing popcorn and crying, She stinks! The dinner-plate lady stinks and her bum-bum is big and stinky!

Oh. I see. Those are my children.

Not long after graduating from Grinnell, I was faced with the daunting task of filling out my first HEY GRINNELLIANS! WHATCHA BEEN UP TO? form for the alumni news section of the college magazine. I remember staring at it for a long time, then hunching over the form and writing

JENNIFER MATTERN (’92) is currently employed as a Kick-Me Clown at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois.

I sent it in. It made me feel better. I knew someone out there in the global Grinnell community would enjoy asking coworkers and friends What is a Kick-Me Clown? Did you ever see one at Six Flags? Did you ever kick one? I think I would like to kick one!

I liked college. I loved college. I was feeling pretty melancholy about the whole post-Grinnell Real World (pre-MTV meaning of the term) scenario, and after repeating it a few times out loud, Six Flags Kick-Me Clown started to sound like a not-so-bad gig, better than Administrative Assistant to the Assistant to the Provost at St. Bacitracin’s Pray-4-U-Niversity (the first post-college job offer that came my way).

My boyfriend at the time was exasperated by my Kick-Me Clown routine. Details of our Kick-Me-Clown–related conversations are pretty fuzzy now, but I think for him it was further frustrating evidence of my inability to accept As-Is circumstances without moping about the past, or lunging toward the future like a coked-up stallion.

I am still working on this temperamental trait. Traditionally, As-Is has not been my thing. I like a good hypothetical question. I like the fast-forward and fast-rewind buttons on the remote control that would control the DVD player if the DVD player had not broken last week. I stay out too late with my Past and my Future while my Present waits up at home drinking warm milk and glancing anxiously at my empty side of the bed and wondering when I’ll be back.

I am trying hard to Stay In the Moment. I tried to meditate on my bed the other day while focusing on the lovely blue-green house across the street (Hi Chris! Hedges look great! Good luck with the moss!) but then I started thinking about square footage and hardwood floors and worrying that our neighbor is growing his hedges for the sole purpose of BLOCKING OUR EYESORE OF A HOUSE FROM VIEW, so the meditation thing didn’t really pan out.

I also got invited to go to a yoga class, but then my friend told me that you have to hold your nostrils closed, one at a time, and breathe like that while keeping a straight face and chanting and pretending you don’t have Granny-underpants pantylines like ship rigging that everyone is snorting their one-nostril snorts at. I think it’s important to know your limitations.

I am juggling a lot of work and projects right now, some for money and some for character-building purposes, and that’s forcing me to be In the Moment in some respects. But now I’m having the irritating problem of being so bogged down In My Stupid Moments that I forget there is life beyond my whirling dinner plates and molester-clowns. (Not to be confused with the entirely more approachable Kick-Me Clowns.)

At least a Kick-Me Clown gets to be out in the sunshine all day. That is what I am thinking right now, In This Stupid Moment. And. You. Were. There.

26 comments April 4th, 2006