I’ve Got My Gorilla By My Side
A few months ago, I got a call from Kailee. “What do you want to do with the toys that were in storage?”
I shrugged. “We’ll donate them. If I haven’t missed them yet, I don’t think sticking them in a different storage is going to change that.”
“Atta girl.” Kailee was silent for a moment. “Even Ooh Aah?”
It was like some shiny sunbeam smacked my face. “You have Ooh Aah?”
And so it came to be that I picked up Ooh Aah, a stuffed gorilla, from Kailee’s house at a Halloween party while I was dressed like a star (complete with headband). I’ve since kept Ooh Aah on my bookcase next to my desk. He is the silent watcher of the books.
When I was a child, I was obsessed with a pillow that I named Homer. Homer had a panda on him. No one knows what became of Homer, only that one day he was gone and I was verklempt. Kailee and I had so many toys that we played with. A family of dogs. Barbies. A giraffe. Ooh Aah. As much as I cherish those memories, I was happy to see Kailee take the toys (which I didn't know our mother had kept in her storage unit) to children who needed them, including my dimpled baby doll that inspired a character in my novel (“Big Baby”). The point is that I treasure these moments with toys because I shared them with Kailee and friends growing up. And the first time I met Lanie, I gave her a different stuffed gorilla (Yes, I had two). The memories we make are a comfort to us.
Now Ooh Aah has been tasked with a new mission: Ground control for my project to overhaul my life between now and starting graduate school. Doing what I do best — making lists — I have devised a set of skills that I am hoping to sharpen in the next two months.
Achieve B1 proficiency in Spanish. I’m quite close.
Review and surpass my initial level of comfort with Java and Python.
Read my textbooks on usage-based grammar; typology and universals; mental spaces; and language and gender.
Draft Project Guernica.
Draft Project Platelet and adapt The Novel That Will Forever Be Queried into a television miniseries (rough draft only).
Review statistics and geometry.
Get a job.
I need someone to keep me focused these next few weeks. Ooh Aah’s plastic eyes are adept at following me as I sit at my desk, clacking away on the keyboard. They seem to read the list, which I printed out and put on my cork board. It’s a little like having a stern roommate. It’s a long road to get from who I am to who I ever aspire to be, but I’ve still got my gorilla by my side.
For the Halloween party at Kailee’s house, I thought of dressing up as Jane Goodall and incorporating Ooh Aah into the costume, but he is a gorilla, not a chimpanzee, and in good faith I couldn’t take advantage of the fact that no one cared because it was a party, for God’s sake. I ended up buying a star crown for five dollars on Amazon and used my freckles as little constellations. Ooh Aah was waiting for me on the table in the front entrance of Kailee and Jared’s house. I picked him up. I kept him with me while I had social anxiety and hid outside for some of the party. You know, Jane Goodall has a stuffed chimpanzee that she keeps with her.
Now Ooh Aah has a throne made of my copies of World Literature Today. As mission control for my getting my life in order, I have to dust him off every now and then. He watched faithfully while I had my nose in Usage-Based Models of Language, while I paused my reading to Google “What are low-level schemas,” while I finally emailed my professor because I still don’t know what a low-level schema is and why Chomsky apparently ignored them. "I dig it,” I said to Ooh Aah. Ooh Aah said nothing, only looked at me with that frank stare. His eyes are permanently shifted to the right, so it looks like he is judging you.
This is all psychological, I think. I once read a study that people tend to do the right thing if they think they are being watched. For example, if you have to pay for parking, if there is a picture of someone watching the parking lot, people are more compelled to actually pay. I try to apply this philosophy to Ooh Aah’s presence. He is a toy, and I am a grown woman, even though one who has a tiny mascot sitting on her bookcase. Whatever we need to keep ourselves on task.
A daunting task lays ahead of me: Can I be the person I want to be? If I complete these tasks, if I figure out how to say I want to reverse engineer the brain in Spanish, these little rituals, will I be closer to shaking off the fetters of anxiety? I don’t know, but I am always keen to try something new. Somebody’s watching me.
