Employment Opportunities

I just accepted a job selling yoga clothing in a store a good thirty miles away from my home in deep dark suburbia. My salary won't do much to put food on the table, but my deep discount will keep me (and my friends) well-outfitted for a lifetime of downward facing dogs. And the commute might keep me sane.

I view my new employment as a sort of witness protection program. Sure, there are as many judgmental hypocrites in the deep dark suburbia to which I will be commuting as there are in my own, but in this situation the unknown evil certainly trumps the known ones. I always thought the "Harper Valley" of pop music was a figment of some creative yet highly paranoid imagination, yet I find myself living right smack in the middle of a modern day Harper Valley, where every day is judgment day. Not fictional at all; a timeless -- albeit baffling -- reality.

Here in the Harper Valley of the twenty-first century, it's all about alignment and collective scorn and loyalties created by ultimatum. Kind of a warped version of the moral compass, with a dial that resists the forces of nature in favor of the forces of gossip and malice. I always thought the stories my daughter would tell me when she was in high school about boys not talking to friends of a girl who had rejected one of their male comrades (did you follow that?) were amusing anecdotes about immaturity. I had no idea the behavior was part of the human condition -- at least as it exists in Harper Valley.

To be fair, not everybody here is like that. Some folks seem to have missed the community lecture on rushes to judgment and group scorn and just basic sticking your nose into other folks' business. I would be shocked if even my closest friends failed to be cordial to my asshole (sorry, that was a typo) husband, just as I have never experienced anything but pleasantness from his friends -- the people who would be "on his side" simply because they have only heard "his side."

I am lucky -- or maybe I just have good taste. We all love a little gossip, but I've chosen to surround myself with people who, rather than inserting themselves into the messes of others, are simply grateful that it's happening to someone else, not them. That's not to say my friends thrive on the misery of others; they simply thrive on the absence of a particular misery in their own lives, knowing full well that whatever is happening to their neighbor could just as easily happen to them.

In the song, Mrs. Johnson donned her mini skirt and "socked it to" the Harper Valley PTA, outing the divots in the manicured lawns and the chinks in the neat picket fences and the skeletons in the well-organized closets. I don't really have the energy to sock it to anyone. Tomorrow, I'll be signing off on my witness protection program, and I will happily immerse myself in yoga pants and blissful anonymity.