Subjective vs. Estimated
When Vanessa walks out at the end of the day with that styrofoam cup in her hand, I worry. Even subtracting for ice, there are probably 10 ounces of cheap chardonnay in there, and that’s not counting what’s already in her blood stream. Sometimes I think that during the drive home, all the mascara she’s got on will weigh her eyelids down and she won’t have the energy to open them up. Case for public transit.Yesterday, Ellen showed me a graph she’s been working on for the last four months. The x-axis is labeled “Wine consumed (oz., estimated)” and the y-axis, “Mascara excess (subjective rating 1-20).” Most of the little dots fall along a curve: the more mascara, the less wine. I’ve forgotten everything I once knew about trigonometry, so I can’t tell you the proper name for the curve.
However, there is a little indentation about halfway down where Vanessa’s mascara and wine consumption were both between six and eight. If you rotated the whole thing, it would look like a simple drawing of a seagull. A little awkward V that lacks the grace a real seagull has.
Hard to know what Ellen’s chart means. Does Vanessa instinctively know at the beginning of her better days that she can wear her depression rather than imbibe it? Or does she fill her cup a little more to darken days when she didn’t put too much makeup on?
I was about to walk away from Ellen’s desk when she pointed out one dot I’d missed. It’s right on the y-axis, which is why I missed it: mascara 5, wine 0. I looked at Ellen questioningly. “Tuesday the 19th,” she said. The 19th? I couldn’t think what that meant. Ellen said, “The Stelton presentation.”
