Waxing Hubert

June 14, 2026

• Part of my husband's job is to periodically polish and wax a statue of Hubert H. Humphrey. He stands out there with a bucket and a pastry brush, and he makes Hubert shine.

  He doesn't understand why I find this so delightful. But I mean... He's polishing a statue! Of a dead politician! As his job! A scene rife with metaphor!

  You can do so much with the image of him standing out there on the busy sidewalk, reaching up to polish the bronze kneecap of this larger-than-life effigy. I told him I'd at the very least write a poem about it, if I were him. Ode on a Bronze Kneecap. Hubert is truth, truth Hubert.

• Sometimes people (including my husband) think my work sounds whimsical. (See: his amusement at my horse meeting.) But I'm not out there polishing statues. Honestly, I wish I were.

  Mostly, I research random topics. I sit there and try to figure out how to explain, like, thermal energy in 100 words or less.

  The weirdest task I can think of is when I first started my job, I spent a whole day taking screenshots of myself playing Minecraft.

  Oh, I also spent a lot of time shaving down crayons with a butter knife for a couple of days. I can't even remember why.

• Long ago, my job was offline captioning. I watched tons of random stuff. Endless episodes of Dennis Miller Live. The 1974 film Foxy Brown. A movie called Queen of Earth in which Elisabeth Moss's deranged laughter plays for way too long over the closing credits. At least one of the Evil Bong movies.

  That might sound fun, but it mostly sucked. As you watched your program, you typed up all the dialogue, sound effects, and music. Then you timed the captions to exactly the right frame. There was a lot of rewinding and fast-forwarding frame by frame.

  I captioned the movie What About Bob? once. I'd never seen it before, and I never, ever will again. I barely remember the plot, but it was almost impossible to time the captions correctly. It took way longer than expected, and by the end of the night I was up against the clock. Every time I thought the movie would end, it just kept going. I was so mad.

  Any time I hear someone say "Baby steps, Bob," it makes my blood boil. Fuck that movie.