Marginal

"You're over the hump; you're on your way!" a man once proclaimed to me, unprovoked, in a freight elevator we weren't supposed to be taking. I had never met him before. It was a Monday. I smiled, befuddled, on the way to my office with the half sandwich and salad that had cost me nearly $7.00. Back in my cube, I asked my neighbors what such a declaration could possibly mean on a Monday.

"It's probably because it was lunch time," a coworker shrugged, leaving it at that. I wrote it down because that's what I do, and it encourages me, accidentally, when I flip backwards in the planner Tara gave me for Christmas that is called A Year of Days Worse than Yours. She had written on the first page, "Thought you could use this…" I keep thinking the book will become a conversation piece, but no one has ever asked. I sit at the ready with examples from the book like The Valentine-less Valentine's Day, Bris, and Going Hunting with Dick Cheney, but I've ever had the opportunity to share. It's becoming a test on which I will evaluate the character of strangers. Like if I, as a friend recently has, began carrying my lunch in a Dunder-Mifflin lunch bag. The moment I saw the Dwight K. Shrute bobblehead on her desk, I knew I'd underestimated her.

In my planner each day is filled with tasks, marked pressing or not by their case. "MAIL MOTHER'S DAY CARDS" contrasts with scribbles like, "send photos to Ritz," "crushed tomatoes," and "grilled chicken and veggies," which is crossed out and replaced by "Noche de Mexicana," which is crossed out but not replaced at all, which probably indicates I gave up on making tacos and we went out to dinner. Tasks completed are checked off; circles remind me of what is yet to be done.

I see fragments of the nonsensical in my daily encounters. On April 21 I find, "What does the customer want? Do they really want to go down to the nuts and bolts?" Which is not notable except that it points out how buzz-word laden and ineffective at communication my work culture is. And how clunky subject-verb agreement is as it relates to the word "they" in our language. If I wrote something down today, it would be "interface," and it would be overused and it would be used incorrectly. April 4 takes me back to the inexplicable conversation about the Double-T diner that contained the quote, "the Greeks don't put a lot of sugar in their cakes;" a phrase I'm sure I wrote in an effort to keep a straight face.

Nearly three years ago, preparing to move from the suburban townhouse I shared for two years with two (and eventually three) other girls to a tiny apartment in the city, I went through notebooks, personal and academic, eager to lighten my load. Always they were marked with lines of tiny cursive; songs that were stuck in my head ("Round Here" by the Counting Crows and "Stories in my Pockets" by Sarah Masen were standbys), ideas for stories I usually didn't follow through on, snippets of conversation, lines of prose. Ideas to keep my eyes open and my mind alert while making it seem to anyone watching that I was being studious. I wonder what I might have taken with me had I not been so focused on filling the margins. I wonder what it will mean if I ever stop.

"The stories in my pockets are the best I've ever lived; so what if they don't sell, sell, sell?"