The other day, a woman put sandwich bags on my feet, and then put my socks and shoes on for me. I was embarrassed at the state of my socks. It occurred to me that it's been a long time since anyone put my shoes and socks on for me -- perhaps the last time was when I broke my arm, and before that, maybe when I was five. I can remember mornings when I was really young, my parents would dress me for school while I lay in bed, as limp as a corpse. I'm pretty sure I feigned some amount of sleepiness out of laziness, but I don't think I was much of a morning person, even then.
My dad would also clean my ears with Q-tips right before I fell asleep. It was sort of a ritual for us, and I sometimes used it to mark the passing of time. For example, when I was six, I think, I had the privelege of picking out a kitten for our family, but it wasn't quite old enough to leave its mother, so it stayed with the rest of the litter for an extra few weeks. As a way of coping with my impatience, I set out a pair of Q-tips on my nightstand for every day I had to wait for the kitten to age.
So I kept the sandwich bags on my feet throughout Grindhouse, mostly because the theater seemed like an inconvenient place to take them off. By the end of the double feature, my feet were kind of clammy, of course, but my nails looked great! In fact, that's what the woman said just as she finished her bang-up job. "I did great work!" She stood over my feet and gazed down at them with pride. I guess the sandwich bags were her way of framing and protecting her creation. It's kind of a shame that it's been so cold lately that only a precious few (such as the patrons in the movie theater bathroom) have witnessed her work.
Last night Marcus and I were talking about things we simply don't do, in part because those things never occurred to us as individuals. We named examples as we walked past them: we don't go to gyms and work out next to store-front windows, in full view of every pedestrian who passes by; we don't wear Bluetooth headsets. (A few others that I've conjured on my own: painting my face team colors, announcing a toast in a room full of people, dropping my trash on the street, running a marathon, riding in a pedi-taxi, borrowing books from the library instead of buying them at the store, buying a tabloid, cultivating dreadlocks, using a cleaning service, owning a weapon, owning a poodle, ordering a round of shots.)
Until recently, getting pedicures was on that list -- it was something other people did, but it never occurred to me as something I could participate in until a friend suggested it, and even then I was wary, for all sorts of cultural and bourgeois reasons. (I've found that, of the things on my personal list, there are plenty of things I'd never want to adopt, but occasionally something nice sneaks in. I never expected to try or like yoga, for example.)
Since moving to New York, there have been two other services I've discovered, which also came to me through suggestions: getting my laundry done, and getting my taxes done. In order to feel okay about this (the laundry in particular), I've undergone somewhat of a revolution. I still can't drop my laundry off without wondering if the person on the other side of the counter quietly hates me, but I've decided that that's an okay price to pay for not having to spend Sunday afternoons at the laundromat. (And, strangely, drop-off service is virutally the same price as the wasted-Sundays non-service.)
I'm certain there must be other things I don't do because I subconsciously reserve them for other people, but I don't know what they are yet, because they haven't been introduced to me as a viable option.
