Inferior Monologue

A Lady's Romantic Endeavors Take a Tragic Turn, Act 140

2012-01-30T17:28:00.000-08:00

On Friday I went on a date, which I like saying because it sounds cool. In reality it was not that hot. For one thing, me and this guy went on our first date right around Thanksgiving and we went on our second date Friday night. That doesn't offer a lot of hope for the potential for progress, which by this point is pretty okay with me, although in the long, cold nights that followed date #1 it was decidedly not okay. Date #1 went well in all possible ways, and then my phone remained eerily silent for a week, and I reacted by employing the anticipated behavior of the lead actress in every horrible romantic comedy set in New York, namely lamenting to all my friends individually, at spin classes and over skim mocha lattes, about how we'd had SUCH A GREAT TIME WHY DIDN'T HE CALL.

In honesty I don't go to spin classes. I talk a lot on gchat, which is less frequently featured in romantic comedies because it's not interesting to watch, unless the other person says something really funny right before my boss comes up to my desk.

Eventually, out of exasperation more than anything else, I texted the guy in question, and he responded, and we had a couple aimless conversations over text message that employed liberal use of the letters "lol" even though nothing particularly funny was said, and then finally I bumped into him at a party. And if you think that I did not make an effort in the arenas of exfoliation and hair removal at the prospect of bumping into this guy at some party, you are totally unappreciative of the level at which I'm operating. I also loosened myself up for our reunion by imbibing enough champagne to feel it was appropriate/relevant/interesting to point out that I'd worn shoes that matched my bag but that I secretly wished I'd worn heels. He told me he'd have liked me better if I wore heels and I told him I'd like him better if he were taller and we both had a good, boozy laugh.

The heels comment notwithstanding (because I think it was supposed to be a joke), he seemed thrilled to see me. He seemed, in fact, annoyingly thrilled to see me. He kept telling me how thrilled he was to see me, until finally I said, a bit snappily, "You know, if you'd wanted to see me, you could have called me." And then it got kind of awkward until we started making out.

So a few rounds of text-tag later, we were off on our second date. I did a LOT of exfoliation and hair removal beforehand, and I wore this sick yellow leather miniskirt I bought secondhand, with a a turquoise necklace I got in Morocco, and I met him at a Lower East Side bar and the whole thing was kind of awful. He didn't even mention the skirt. The conversation was stunted, and I am pretty good at making conversation with almost anybody (for reference you can ask any openly insane person riding the Q train) but I felt as though he had once been taught how to have a conversation and had been using that formula with some success for the ensuing thirty years. We talked about travel and he mentioned a recent trip he'd taken to Vegas with his buddies, because they went to Vegas together once a year, and he was getting a bit bored of Vegas. I asked where he would like to go on his next vacation and he said he'd probably go back to Vegas. That is the type of logic I sincerely cannot wrap my head around.

"I think he's maybe just totally flat and boring," I said to Phil the next day. We were on the phone discussing Phil's latest book, which I am copyediting and you should buy.

"He sounds like he has no imagination whatsoever," Phil said.

"I think that maybe he doesn't," I said. "Like, I do stuff. Interesting things happen to me. I have stories and anecdotes and opinions. But I don't get that he has any of those things." You might wonder how I missed this notion while I spent the past two months pining away over this dude, and all I can say is that he is also despicably handsome, which may have colored my initial impressions.

"Well, what did you guys talk about?"

"Nothing, really. He talks about work, and his commute, and bars and stuff... I guess that's it."

"Vegas is a vacation spot for people who have no imagination," Phil opined. "You don't have to think up anything on your own, because everything is laid right out for you. Someone who vacations there year after year, without going anywhere else, is not capable of dreaming up an idea on their own."

"You may be right," I said. "All of our conversations really went nowhere, no matter how hard I tried."

"Do you think he could have Asperger's?"

"It wouldn't really surprise me," I said. "But I diagnose just about every guy I date with Asperger's, which means that either I'm over-diagnosing it, or that is my Type."

"Well," said Phil, "at least you know what you're looking for." I started humming Another One Bites the Dust by Queen, until Phil turned the conversation back to more pressing matters, namely, his underuse of semicolons in Chapter Three. That was a conversation in which both parties contributed, ideas were shared and built upon, and my opinion was encouraged and respected even though I was secretly wearing flats. So at least I have literature to keep me warm.

Dorothy Lives in a Dirty Movie

2011-11-08T17:29:00.000-08:00

Dorothy, like me, has a fondness for solitude. We are social people, but when we are finished socializing we want to shut the door and click the deadbolt. Dorothy lived alone for a few years, and then she decided to go back to school. From scratch. She's currently Billy Madison-ing her way through an undergrad degree in public health, working two jobs and taking six classes at once. She's aiming to complete her studies as quickly and painfully as possible.

On a student budget, one cuts corners where one can. She had to acquire some roommates. For a while she lived in a shared house in Williamsburg, but then she got a lead on a South Brooklyn bedroom. It came with its own bathroom, so she jumped at the offer and moved right in. Rob and I helped her take the old stuff out of her new bedroom; the bare mattress that sagged with the weight of a dead hooker, some book shelves with gum on them and a janky yellow pillow. Then I found a shelving unit on the street and Rob carried it twelve blocks to the subway and I put it in my kitchen. Not that that detail propels the story at all, but Rob is a really nice guy.

Anyway. Dorothy's new apartment is shared with two twenty-one-year-old college girls. They're both petite Polish blondes and they're both named Eva (Is this a law in Poland? I've never been). They are both hot. There is no other way to describe them. You could try pretty or beautiful or sexy or cute but the only legitimate depiction of these girls is pure, sizzling, smoking hot. The Evas are in New York on athletic scholarships (one for tennis, one for swimming) and they do everything together. They share the master bedroom, sleeping side by side in twin beds with matching pink comforters.

Upon meeting the Evas ("Hi, I'm Eva!" "Hi, I'm Eva!") and seeing their sleeping arrangements, one is inclined to believe that this is a ridiculous and contrived backdrop. Some lusty, poorly-acted turn of events is imminent. Somebody's estranged stepbrother is going to saunter into the kitchen and spill oil all over everybody, and then the Evas are going to have a tickle fight. (I could elaborate here but already I've disappointed every Googler who found this page by searching for "hot twin Polish blondes" and I don't want to be a total buzzkill.) Dorothy (who, it bears mentioning, is generally accepted to be something of a stunner) smirks as she describes Friday evening interludes between herself and the Evas, who pad around the apartment clad only in miniskirts and strapless bras as they search for their eyeliner. Dorothy sits at the kitchen table and drinks a beer while they get ready, and she knows that deep in her heart she is a dirty old man.

The Evas spent their summer vacations at home in Poland, and Dorothy looked forward to the emptiness on the blonde side of the apartment. While the rest of the undergraduate universe used the long, hot days to unwind, Dorothy opted to suffer through an intensive accelerated chemistry course. After six-hour stints in the lab, she needed a place where she could retreat, could remove her plastic goggles and sit at her kitchen table and drink her beer without all those boobies in the way. Now when she came home there were no giggling schoolgirls in the kitchen, no fishnet stockings on the floor. There was nothing but zen-like silence. It lasted three days. On the fourth day came a subletter, a friend of the Evas, a brunette American who worked as a Hollister model, standing in front of the Soho store wearing a bathing suit and a big smile. She had no bank account and paid for her share of the rent in small bills, sometimes quarters. And she was (of course she was) a lesbian. Her lady friend came to the apartment bearing a declaration of red roses. Strings of other acquaintances came to stay over the course of the summer, drinking and dancing in the kitchen while Dorothy studied the periodic table.

Finally summer faded. Dorothy passed chemistry and the bikini model put on some pants and moved out. The Evas came back to New York and normalcy returned to their little two-bedroom apartment. They continued to operate as a unit, once calling Dorothy at 4am because they had lost their shared set of keys and couldn't get inside. Life rolled along for the three of them, and for me also, because I'm a part of this story too, if for no other reason than to check my phone. Dorothy texted me today:

This dude has been staying with the Evas for a week and a half. Every time I come home he is shirtless.

And it took my breath away. That is an Adonis of a man, shirtless and wearing Batman underwear AND HIS SOCKS, mopping up the floor after two hot blonde Polish girls. This is a suspension of all disbelief; this is a plot twist of utter unfathomability; this is proof that Dorothy and Eva and Eva and Batman and Hollister and all the other lesbians live not in Brooklyn, but rather in the soft-focus, underwear-optional fantasy land of Dimension XXX. It is a place that many of us did not believe existed. But it is real. It is happening. It is now.

And there is oil all over everyone.

How To Seduce a Genius

2011-11-05T19:03:00.000-07:00

I brought my fancy new phone to the Apple Store Genius Bar and the place was crawling with disappointed fancy phone owners. The wait, I was told, would be twenty minutes. To kill time I messed around with my phone. I was texting with Danny about some abstract inside joke that we'd been expanding on for way longer than normal people would, and finally my genius arrived. His name tag said Devin. I told Devin that my phone was making occasional claims about a lack of SIM card and that sometimes it failed to jingle when I got a text. Devin gave me some technical theories behind the problem and told me he'd have to wipe it clean to start anew. The process would take about seven minutes, he said, and would for some reason be conducted in a back room. I tossed out a few last-minute text messages before handing over my connection to the entire world. I sat there feeling naked for the obligatory seven minutes, hoping that Devin would reconnect me soon.

When Devin returned, my phone was empty. My wallpaper was a stock photo of some water droplets. Devin re-installed my contacts and calendars from iCloud and told me that the SIM would register now. I asked about the text messages. "I was texting before you got here," I said, "and the text came through but the phone didn't make a sound."

"Let's test it," he said. "Can you get somebody to text you?"

I asked Danny. Can you text me please?

The two of us hovered over my clean new phone. The air was heavy with anticipation and satellite frequencies. "What were you doing before, when you were texting and it didn't ring?" he asked.

"I was in an app."

"What app were you in?"

"Um, OKCupid."

"OK, well let's go back into OKCupid and see what happens now."

Great. This was exactly how I pictured my trip to the Apple Store would go, flipping through my online dating profile with the Genius Bar guy and trying to pretend it wasn't weird. By the way I have like three apps on my phone in total; one is that snake game and another is OKCupid. I am seriously committed to my singleness.

So Devin and I were kicking back, you know, cruising for online love interests, when Danny's text came through. You are so sexy. "See!" I said. "It didn't ring."

"Hmm," said Devin. He took the phone and made a couple adjustments. "Try it now. Can you have him text again?"

Can you text again, please? I wrote. We're doing a test at the Apple Store.

I closed the text box and we waited. The response came. You are the most beautiful woman in the world.

"No ring," Devin said. "OK, can I see the contact information for your friend? I want to check something." Dutifully I pulled up Danny's contact information and Devin poked around a bit. "I think I might have fixed it," he said. "Want to have him text you again?"

Can you text again? I asked. Devin and I waited again, but nothing happened. Looking at the blank screen of my phone was about as awkward as checking out my OKCupid matches together. "OK," said Devin. "I'm going to text you from my phone. What's your number; I'll delete it as soon as we're done."

I didn't care about that; my phone number is not information I protect or disseminate with any sort of restraint. I kiss a lot of frogs, as it were. Devin texted me, Test, and my phone jingled. "It worked," he said. He texted again. Test. Jingle. Test. Jingle. Test. Jingle. "So it's not all your contacts. It only happens with some of them."

"Yeah, it's sporadic," I said.

Devin had my phone in his hand at this point, so he opened Danny's text box back up. Text again pls, he wrote. He started explaining that some of my contacts were probably corrupt and might need to be replaced manually. He said it as a sort of apology, as if this wasn't the type of mindless tedium I live for. The phone jingled again and in unison we registered Danny's reply. By the way, you left something pink and lacy at my house when you ran out this morning in such a rush.

I could see Devin choke deeply on a snort. He believed that he was starting to understand the demographic I fell into: single white women in their extremely late twenties who use their phones primarily for ho'ing. I felt the need to clarify. "OK," I said. "He's joking. I wasn't at his house this morning. He's my friend. He's gay." On cue, Danny followed up. It fits me though, so I'm not sure if it's yours or mine.

Devin was a professional. "He's very funny," he said.

"Yes, he is."

Devin went back into my messages and erased his text history, deleting my record of his contact information and protecting himself from my clearly insatiable libido. As he did, he explained again about the storing of contacts and the transfer of corruption. It was broken down fairly simply, but he repeated himself a couple times. Then he handed me back my phone. That should have been the end of our interaction, but we'd been through a lot together in the past thirty minutes. Devin kept explaining the problem with my contacts and I nodded and smiled and thanked him a lot. The goodbye was dragging. He kept talking. I kept nodding. I put on my coat and scarf and then we stood there in silence, shifting from foot to foot.

"Well, have a good night," I said. Unsure of how to end things, Devin stuck out his hand. We shook and I headed out into the evening with my new phone jingling in my pocket.

Um?

2011-11-02T19:28:00.000-07:00

So I babysat tonight and missed a work function in the process but the function was a dinner and I'm not hungry. I got paid to knit in the living room while the little girl slept, and afterward, on my way to the train, I bought a bottle of wine. I was so tired and distracted that I thanked the man when he gave me my change and then I arranged it all nicely in my wallet and hoisted up my tote full of knitting (I am like four hundred years old) and headed on my way. I was halfway to the train before I realized I'd left the wine in the liquor store, and then I had to go back and that took up a ton of time.

When I got home there were two men I didn't recognize sitting on the stairs, but I tried to pretend that it wasn't weird. I opened my mailbox and my Time Out New York was all wrinkled because there was a package jammed in beside it and the mailbox is small.

This surprised me. I order a fair amount of stuff online but I never ship it to my apartment. For one thing, I do not trust the security of my building. Any item too big to fit in my sliver of a mailbox might get left beside my door, or, God forbid, in the lobby, where strange men sometimes congregate to sit on the stairs. For another thing my mailman is wretchedly unforgiving when it comes to erroneous addresses. Every i must be dotted or else the package gets returned to sender, a process which takes weeks longer than one would need to deliver the item on foot. I have missed out on presents this way, and last year at Christmas card time, I was certain I had no friends (turns out, I have two). I always ship to work, and one time I even sent a couch there and that was super funny for the receptionist.

Finding a package was unexpected. To see that it was from Target.com was moreso. That meant that I had ordered something and shipped it to myself at the wrong address and I still had no idea what it was. The holes in my memory were getting more serious. I was leaving wine in rundown liquor stores all over Chelsea, and I was sending myself mystery packages. I opened it as I ascended the stairs, but it was difficult to balance, what with the knitting.

I pulled the last of the shipping tape off as I got indoors. A book. Room, by Emma Donoghue, which I super ohmigosh have wanted to read for a long time, but which I most definitely did not buy. A packing slip fell to the ground, which I grabbed. One item. Sold to: Carrie K. in suburban Ohio. Shipped to: Carrie K. in suburban Ohio. But NOT. Shipped secretly to me.

So this is weird. This is super weird. I don't know Carrie K. (although I looked her up on Facebook and she seems like a nice person; I kind of want to message her unless it turns out she stole my identity and used it to buy a paperback) and she definitely didn't send me a present; she sent herself a present, although why she's buying books from Target is between her and Jesus. And I could be like, OK sure, Target.com just mixed up the shipping labels and somebody's computer grabbed the wrong address on file. Except. I don't have a Target.com account. This is not even like an I-remembered-to-take-the-wine claim; it's legitimate. I swear to you, I swear, that I have never given my address to their website. They won't even send me a sign-in password.

So anybody's theories on this would be appropriate now.

On Halloween Parties, Because I Don't Want to Work on the Peru Thing

2011-10-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

I don't mind being snowed in, but I would prefer it happen on a day when a) it was not October and b) I had any foodstuffs in my house besides basmati rice and peanut butter. I tried to make myself a lunch out of the last item in the freezer (besides ice cubes and that chicken breast I bought in April), a Trader Joe's-brand chimichurri mix that promised to bring "the taste of Peru to your table -- in five minutes or less!" Joe was right about the timeframe, but ultimately I threw the whole mess away after two bites. In retrospect I'm not sure what I was thinking. For one thing, I really don't miss the taste of Peru (or any other aspect of Peru, for that matter--in fact I have, on my coffee table, a 140-page first-draft ode to everything I hated about Peru, waiting patiently for me to edit it like a Victorian-era damsel waits for her lover's return from battle. Okay that metaphor got weird) and for another thing, the packaging clearly dictated the existence of at least two types of onions in the mix, which is an immediate deal-breaker. So I tossed it and tried to smother my hunger with a cup of tea, watching the gray sky through my living room window and dreading the prospect of grocery shopping.

I have to go out anyway, because I need new false eyelashes for tonight's Halloween party. Every year my friends Chris and Paul throw the world's sickest Halloween party and this year's is scheduled for tonight. I'd been planning my costume since roughly last November, but it turned out that my concept for a Chrysler Building getup was a little beyond my crafting abilities. I was elbows-deep in a pile of silver cardboard when I had this realization. A seven-tiered, round-edged pyramid mounted on a bowler hat would be a tall order even for an MFA student, let alone my fine-motor-skill-challenged self. For a reference of the level of crafting skills I am working with, please see the scarf I am currently knitting my niece.

You can see part of my costume in the background. And my lamp, which is less relevant.

Thwarted by the intricacies of art deco, but nevertheless determined to wear aluminum foil on my head, I decided instead to dress as a snowflake. This turned out to be a delightfully timely costume choice and it's significantly simpler to execute. I get to re-imagine the white mannequin dress I wore for New Years Eve and I get to pile on silver accessories, of which I have no shortage. Danny scavenged some pipe cleaners for me from his job at an elementary school, and we met last week for happy hour to collaborate on constructing a snowflake crown. The result was a masterpiece and it required no measuring tape or krazy glue or endless supply runs, which made it instantly and automatically superior to my Chrysler hat concept.

I wore the crown for the first time last night, braving the chill in my first purple winter-coat excursion of the season, with gobs of white and silver eye makeup slopped in circles on my face, making me look like a somewhat deranged sugar plum fairy. Not to mention the fact that nobody else in the world had decided to dress up last night and I had a lot of silver stuff coming off my head. New York is a city that allows for grown-up repurposing of the joys of childhood, i.e. it's OK to wear a costume if you're using it as an excuse to drink. But when you're the only one in costume because the holiday is still three full days away, it's a tall order to call upon your inner strength and pretend not to hear the giggles of your fellow Q train passengers. It's an even taller one to be the first one to the party and have to walk through an entire bar full of men playing poker, pretending you're not wearing silver eyelashes and pipecleaners in your hair. But these are the things we do in the name of festivity.

But after my initial awkward entrance last night, other be-costumed revelers began to trickle in and eventually there were a slew of us dressed as oversized children, barbecuing in the back garden of a Brooklyn Bar and pissing off the neighbors. Tonight I'll do it all over again in my pipe cleaner crown, and as the snowflake spokesperson I'll spend the evening apologizing to partygoers for crashing in a full two months before I'm expected. But Chris just texted me to say she's making hot pomegranate cider, so it already sounds like the best night ever.

Have Your Friends Collect Your Records and Then Change Your Number

2011-10-28T06:50:00.001-07:00

I have mentioned in the past that there was a time when I maintained an extended emotional involvement with a person who made me feel very bad about myself. The relationship was such that at first I was enamored by the highs and lows of our interactions, but then very slowly the highs began to sink and sag until there was nothing but lows. It was a constant stream of lows, but I refused to accept this reality, focusing instead on the increasingly delayed return of the highs. The people who cared about me were exhausted of hearing me complain about the situation and would quietly tap out of the conversation when I tried to bring it up. I was frankly sick of it myself, so toward the end I kept our interactions a secret. Most people thought I had shut things down entirely. Nobody necessarily congratulated me on this decision. I should have made it years earlier.

After the rollercoaster had been closed down and the ticket booth shuttered, my counterpart proved that I was never very important to him at all, by sending me perfunctory instant messages that pretended not to recognize any sort of mutual torrid past. These came about once a week, always during business hours. I refused to respond. He had my email, cell phone, work and home addresses. If he'd cared about me he would have been ringing my doorbell with a bouquet of flowers, but he couldn't muster more energy than it took to type "How's it hanging" when he was bored at work. I ignored his attempts at half-assery. Eventually the messages stopped too.

Yesterday was a slow, rainy Thursday and I decided to use my lunch break to stomp around outdoors for a bit. I needed new socks. Taking off my shoes had become something of an embarrassment, even when I was at home alone. So I was trudging up Broadway with my head halfway inside my umbrella because I am wary of splashback, and I was listening to this song. If you want a more authentic reenactment of my experience, you should play this song while you read this entry. And stand in the shower with the cold water on full blast.

So I was out in the rain with music in my ears and my head in an umbrella and I was thinking about him, actually. I told myself to stop thinking about him because I appear to have the ability to conjure his presence if I give him too much space in my consciousness, but I was thinking about the song, which is a remix, and it takes a little while to build into itself, so that at first listen one might be confronted by a couple echoing drum-bangs and think for a moment that this track is not the masterpiece it actually is. An impatient man sitting in the dark of my living room might say, "Kaitlyn, what the fuck are we listening to? Can I put on my music instead?" That is literally exactly what he would say. I know because he said it the last time he was at my house, listening to a different song, about forty-five minutes before I started screaming and swearing and kicked him out. It was his birthday.

I was reminiscing on this little drama, lost in the building drum beats and the wails of Gotye and the wretched feeling I'd had when I woke up that next morning and tried to remember why he wasn't there. I was wading through lower Manhattan and my instincts picked it up before my senses did. Through the splash of footsteps on concrete there came from the sea of anonymous galoshes a gait imprinted in my mental file, one that I didn't even know I could recognize but that nevertheless remains permanently accessible, the way when I was younger in my second-story bedroom I could tell if it was my brother or sister coming up the stairs based on the creak of the wood. I pulled my head out of the umbrella and met his eyes.

He said, "Hi." I think he did, anyway; I had my headphones in but his mouth moved in a monosyllabic motion and it looked like a greeting. I said, "Hi." I did not smile. I did not break stride. I kept going with a sudden twisting fire in my belly and I swear to God that as I passed him Gotye started bellowing out the chorus like a soundtrack to my lunch break:

But you didn't have to cut me out
Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing
And I don't even need your love
But you treat me like a stranger and that feels so rough

I didn't turn around. I couldn't risk becoming a pillar of salt while it was raining so hard. I was relieved, at least, that I for once looked presentable and didn't fall on my face in front of him like I almost always do. But as I continued up Broadway the belly fire got hotter and even the downpour couldn't quench it; as we parted ways ever further there was no sudden tug on the sleeve of my pink trench, no short-of-breath greeting, no attempt at pursuing a stunted catch-up conversation. He had passed me and he had seen me and he had not cared.

I could think of one person who'd marry me tomorrow and another who's at work building an altar of squirrel bones upon which to sacrifice my still-beating heart. But the one who stood out as the definitive relationship of my adult life could only afford me a cursory nod. This was of course the one I held onto, the one whose total dearth of respect for my being weighed heavily in the balancing act of my personal self-worth.

The choice to cut ties was mine. I could have responded to the instant messages; I could have reached out with a friendly text. I could have acquiesced to spending the occasional lunch break at his apartment sharing sandwiches and talking about his new girlfriend, the one who probably keeps a toothbrush at his house and gets invited to parties and introduced to his friends, rather than just squirreled away like some kind of top-secret side project. I'd told him that if I couldn't be everything then I wouldn't be anything. And after I'd insisted it two hundred times, I finally made good on my promise.

So if I was nobody, if we were not lovers and not friends and not even acquaintances, there was no reason for more than a muted "Hi" between raindrops. After all, I only had an hour for lunch. So I followed through with my sock-shopping plans and allowed myself to retail-therapute with a few bras as well, although in my lingering sense of disquiet I bought the wrong size. And that was it. There was no thundering two-world collision, no epiphanic ray of light shining between the parting clouds. It was just a passing interaction of the shallowest type. I was out at lunchtime and I saw somebody that I used to know.

The Craziest Story I Ever Heard Told In A Crowded Elevator

2011-10-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

I'm in the elevator with a couple of my coworkers, leaving the office for the day. We descend a few floors and the doors open. Three men get on. They're already deep in conversation.

"And what about that woman who pulled the door off the refrigerator?" says one.

"Oh that was awful," another answers.

"That's right, she pulled the whole door off the refrigerator! Right off! And that stuff she was cooking in the microwave, ugh!"

"What did she do?" asked the third.

"She was cooking something in the microwave and it blew the door right off," says the first. "I think that was the most blood I've ever seen in my life." He turns to the second. "What are you laughing at? It's not funny."

"Did they fire her?" says the third.

"They couldn't fire her! She lost an eye!"

The elevator dings and the door opens. Everybody wishes each other a good night.

FIN.

On Coincidence

2011-10-12T19:37:00.000-07:00

Long day. My nonprofit job does not offer overtime pay, but they are willing to comp me time off for working extra hours. To that end, I was in the office till nearly 10p.m. tonight, doing tedious, nitpicky editing chores and planning how late to sleep in on Friday. I got a new book in the mail, another educational tome about how to break out of the world of nonprofit, but it didn't really draw me in. I've been reading The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson, and I was itching to revisit that. I have a long-standing fascination with psychopaths (and I am pretty sure I've dated a handful) so I wanted to learn more about them. I was halfway through the book before I realized it was nonfiction. In hindsight I'm not sure how I missed this.

When I realized the whole thing was true I felt very uncomfortable and began routinely checking the deadbolt on my door. Also I was reading the book in bed last night and this morning it was gone.

Want to hear something weird, I messaged Melanie this morning. We were busy enough at work that I did four hours of unpaid overtime, but I'll be damned if I'm going to last a day at the office without gchat.

What's up, Mel asked. Mel will be damned as well.

I was reading The Psychopath Test last night and this morning it's gone. I looked everywhere. It's not under the covers or the bed, or on the table or the bookshelf. It completely disappeared.

You're giving me the creeps, said Mel. Melanie was the one who told me about the book. The catch was that she told me about it after I was already elbows-deep in the first chapter. She said she'd read it on a plane and didn't put it down till she landed in Florida. Presumably, Mel knew it was nonfiction from the get-go. She's observant like that. More bizarre is the fact that we both procured the same book at the same time without realizing it. I adamantly don't believe in coincidence, so there is meaning behind this notion. Aside from my prospects of getting chopped up by a book-thieving ex with a copy of my door key, I can't speculate as to what that meaning might be.

Since I couldn't find the book, I had to settle for bringing my journal with me on the train. I never write on the train but I get antsy at the prospect of a handbag without distractions. This is me playing with fire, because although this journal is a new one, and they typically take a bit of time to break in, shit has been realer than ever lately and I needed an outlet. Someday some unsuspecting mugger is going to take off with my bag full of secrets, and if he knows how to read he's going to learn more about me than he can ever process. The four bucks in my wallet is not going to cover his therapy bills and the resale value on my Kate Spade bag cannot be more than twenty-five (it has an armpit stain, I swear to God. Who gets an armpit stain on a leather purse?). Ultimately I am a waste of time for muggers unless someone is interested my $7 credit to Beacon's Closet. I've been carrying it around with me for about two years now, so obviously I am not.

So where were we. Oh, right. This is going nowhere. I was at work and there are no coincidences. I ended up with no time to read or write today and then my book came in the mail with a surprisingly gigantic font, like 18-point for every page, and as big as a coloring book. It was not what I expected, and honestly I can't carry it with me on the subway. It's awkward enough having people read over my shoulder, but it's even worse when they're in another train car. Plus it's too big to even fit in my bag so I have to just hold it like a protest sign, HELLO I AM CONSIDERING A CAREER CHANGE, and as far as book-jacket broadcasting goes I am more comfortable letting the world know I like psychopaths.

Tonight when I got to my block it was well past dark and I walked with my new book under my arm, probably sweating right through the cover, and I passed the guy on the corner who is always screaming (he is always on that corner, walking in circles and screaming his face off. It is very rare to witness that level of mental illness in someone so young) and then I got to my own corner where there were three men walking toward me. Two of them were arguing in increasingly accelerated Spanish and as they passed I heard the squeak of sneaker on pavement and a telltale scuffling, and when I looked back they were twisting each other into a double headlock. I walked faster, not wanting anything to do with this particular interaction, and wondered how I should respond. On one hand it seemed callous to let the scene play out; what if somebody got hurt? But on the other hand there wasn't much I could do. Certainly I wouldn't try to step between them so the only option I had, if I wanted to help, was to call 911. It's not as though anybody would be shaking my hand in gratitude over that, and anyway I just called 911 like a week ago and if I called back they would have me on file as a repeater.

The reason I had to call was because of our janky front door. We have a front door with a particularly sensitive lock; the key works to open it but only if you stick it in a specific fraction of the way and jiggle the key up and down while you twist. The gist of it is that it takes forever to get into my building. Last week a man was waiting to get in behind me and I offered that he could try (I always offer to let people try; some of them know how to do it) and he said he didn't have his key with him but he would help me with mine, and from the get-go it was clear that he didn't live in the building. He was cursing and banging and shaking the door back and forth, when everyone knows you have to move the key up and down, and then he started trying my other, unrelated keys, till I grabbed them back and said forget it. Then some girl came out and let me in and he followed so I went home and called the cops and said there was a tresspasser in the building. Then I panicked and thought he might know it was me who ratted him out and he'd come and find me and, I don't know, steal my psychopath book or something, so I called back to try to cancel the 911 call. The operator was very nice and told me she couldn't cancel it, but she assured me that I had done the right thing. Ultimately, I was unwilling to make a third emergency services call in the span of a week. So at tonight's showdown I let the men on the street fight it out and hoped that their friend would break it up. Then I slipped into my building without fanfare, because within twenty-four hours of that creepy guy following me in, the management company decided to fix the lock on the front door. Coincidence?

Also when I moved my bed again I found my psychopaths book. In the same place I looked this morning, with the major difference of it being there this time. I still don't believe in coincidence but I also don't claim to understand the meaning in every little alignment. I just write it down.

On Brokeness and Urban Sociology

2011-10-05T19:21:00.001-07:00

The Occupy Wall Street people are gaining my respect. They're still kind of unwashed and disorganized, but I appreciate that they're keeping things interesting. Now that there have been mass arrests and the weather's gotten balmy, they're beginning to grow. I like to check in on them sometimes at lunch, to pass Zuccotti Park and watch them arguing with newscasters and posing with tourists. I try to remain on the outskirts of the action. I don't like swarms of people or arguing about politics, so I hang back and watch, ducking when a news camera swings my way.* I also have a mortal fear of expressing interest anything under any circumstances** so I try not to linger too long. I just take stock of the clever signs and I'm on my way. Today's best slogan was not on a scrap of grotty cardboard, but on a T-shirt. It said 420 in oversized type, and then underneath, I don't smoke pot. That's my credit score.

Because I don't want the protesters to know I find them interesting, I have to have an ultimate destination on my lunch break, and this destination by default is Century 21. I don't go shoe shopping every day. That would be so ridiculous and anyway I'm on a budget. My paycheck is such a joke that I could join the gang in Zuccotti Park without resistance, so long as they knew the pink cardigan with pearl detailing*** I wore today was a hand-me-down. I have a credit card and a commitment to fiscal responsibility, so what I do is every month I ring up a completely manageable amount of debt and then on the 15th (the non-rent paycheck) I pay the whole thing off and then I ring up the exact same amount the next month. It drives me freaking crazy. Despite the vapid tendencies expressed here in my blog, I'm not actually an outrageous spender. I just fail to accumulate any semblance of savings, and as a result, despite my corporate past life of ugly business casual and bimonthly vacations abroad, I have not left the country in over two years. Which, when you lay it out like that, would make a pretty unconvincing cardboard sign.

So I went toward Century 21 assuring myself (without believing) that if I were to avoid the clothes racks and stay in the basement with the home goods, I could make it back to work without spending. Which is completely inane because my favorite thing to decorate, after my feet, is my apartment. So I got downstairs and it was like WHIZ BANG cranberry curtains, like how in the world did I make it this long without cranberry curtains in my bedroom, like with these things hanging I would not even have a bedroom anymore but a boudoir, gentlemen, like my whole life would change and my heart would be full and the shininess of my hair would improve by 86%. Cranberry curtains. Hot damn.

Nicole and I were talking the other day about whether she should put down her dog. That sounds callous but there is a legitimate reason; he's a rescue dog and an abuse survivor and he's irrationally violent. In the three months that she's had him he's bitten a double-digits load of people, and there's no telling whether she'll be walking him down the street one day and he'll lunge at a baby carriage. Nicole, of course, loves him and wants to heal him and works with a trainer because she hopes he'll get better, whereas I have two houseplants and still sometimes feel burdened. So I can't really empathize. We drank pints and lobbed anecdotes across the table, about badly-behaved New York pets and the amount of cat urine a sofa can absorb before it becomes unusable (my vote: none). "This is the problem with New York!" said Nicole. "It's not good for animals because they get stuck inside and they have nowhere to move or run around. They don't see their owners all day and they never interact with other animals. They can't take it. They go totally crazy." I nodded in agreement. "And people do the same thing," she continued. "Everyone wants to live here, and then once they get here they're miserable."

"Wow," I said. "You're right."

"That's why everyone in this city acts so destructive. Everyone drinks all the time and has sex with people they don't like because they think it will make them feel better. But it doesn't."

"Because the city is against our nature," I said.

"Exactly."

By New York standards my apartment is palatial, but it's still just three rooms and a bathroom. That said, it's my only respite from this totally unnatural setting I love so much, wherein even the straight-lined grids of streets are closed off when too many people congregate holding cardboard signs. Sometimes a stampede oozes like ketchup from a bottle and sometimes I wait thirty minutes underground for a train. Sometimes I go weeks without even stepping into the park and the concrete wears down the soles of my shoes. I could drink all the time or have sex with people I don't like or I could stand in Zuccotti Park and talk to the press about it. I could flee the city again and hope this time was for real, find a ranch somewhere in the hills where I could write and read and knit scarves every day. Or I could come home alone and triple-lock my door, water my houseplants and hang curtains. I could cover my windows in gauzy fabric like cabernet and poetry, revel in my space as a solace from the madness, and settle back into the red.

For now, it will have to do.

* When it comes to tourist cameras, I never bother to duck. One of the upshots of working in such a high-traffic area is being captured in countless international vacation albums. In this way I am sort of famous.

**This is true but I'm not sure why. I don't want to meet people with similar interests? I don't want someone to explain things I don't understand? One time on the subway I was reading the paper over a man's shoulder and when he offered to give it to me, I shook my head vehemently, like it was something to be ashamed of. I let him throw it away.

***Right? Like I'm a cupcake.

Balance

2011-09-30T12:28:00.000-07:00

Pro: Swooshy maxi skirt ooh la la!

Con: Keeps getting caught under the wheels of my desk chair. I am one stray swivel from mooning the office.

Another One About Shoes

2011-09-26T19:47:00.000-07:00

I have never visited the Zappos.com website before because I am huge on brand loyalty and I like DSW. But today was Monday. On Mondays I see my therapist at 2pm and it's in equal parts fantastic and horrific. It's fantastic in the sense that it's a forty-five minute break in the week where I get to discuss all the bleakery that has cropped up since last Monday and exorcise whatever darkness has accumulated in my psyche. But it's also terrible because I see her on my lunch break and I always end up peeking into all kinds of rooms I'd thought were boarded up, and the dust irritates my eyes and then for the rest of the day I have to continuously reapply my eye makeup.

So generally speaking, by Monday afternoon I am totally spent. Today (Monday) after work I went to Union Square. I met Jen there because she offered to teach me how to knit (so far I suck) and afterward we were so close to my Happy Place that I decided to pop in for a breather. My happy place is the Union Square DSW, an entire floor of brand new shoes, each marked with its real price and then, underneath, the price that some other chick paid for it. This is all I really needed on a brutal Monday, after the tip of my lavender glitter eyeliner dulled and I had to do my touch-ups with wood. I wanted to go in to reevaluate shoes I was already thinking about, maybe peruse the racks.

So I did, right; I was in the store for like an hour which is potentially a personal record. Typically what I do is try on every pair of shoes in the store, walk around in half of them, carry new boxes to a pile beside one of the full-length mirrors, a pile that hapless sales girls will attempt to re-stock into the racks, and after three hours and a couple of awkward altercations I leave with one pair of black flats and one of snakeskin booties with flames on the toes.

So today that happened; in a sense I saved myself $100 by falling out of love with the Charles David boots that I was planning to drop my next babysitting check on, and in another I paid $35 for a pair of Steve Madden kitten heels I didn't know I needed. So I went home feeling good about the day; I learned to craft, sort of, assuming Jen is willing to sit beside me for the duration of my niece's scarf and point out every time I'm acting stupid; I gained a pair of shoes that met at the sparsely populated corner of sessy and practical (and that SOME DUMB BITCH paid $70 for) and since DSW is only a few doors down from the Trader Joe's wine store, I got to wash away the rest of my Monday (the parts not concealable with lavender glitter) with a $3.99 bottle of red. So everything was going good.

Until. I got home and my music streaming was choppy (the price one pays of jacking internet in a low-income neighborhood) so I busied myself with the usual shoe-porn sites that keep me ticking until my next trip to DSW. But even my fantasies are budget. I don't browse Louis Vuitton; I browse Modcloth.

Until I though back to a Zappos ad I'd seen earlier that day, in the waiting room before therapy. It was a good ad. It made me think of Zappos when I was home, hours later. It was a site I'd never been on, but it promised free shipping, and although said shipping was almost immediately outweighed by the gigantic prices of the merchandise and the lack of the Zen of the 4-hour DSW experience, it seemed worth a look.

Till I saw these. $300 mauve boots. And I never knew how badly I needed them till tonight. It turns out they own me.

It's Monday afternoon all over again.

On People Who Suck, As Encountered On My Lunch Break

2011-09-21T16:49:00.000-07:00

Of late there has been a lot of to-do about the Occupation of Wall Street by the unemployed masses (or the possibly employed masses, assuming there are some masses who had saved enough vacation days to call out all week). Let me state for the record that I personally work on Wall Street and I did not even know this Occupation was taking place. That doesn't mean this isn't a big deal. I am hardly the person to turn to in search of perspective on national news, a fact that shames me. In fact I never even admit this outside of the internet, and when people do attempt to discuss such matters with me I usually make interested murmuring noises and quietly google on my phone, because it's embarrassing to ask, "Who's Obama?" When it comes to current events, I tend to house my head squarely up my own ass.

So my not knowing about the Occupation does not mean that it doesn't occur. Likewise, my not witnessing brutal police beatings and unsubstantiated arrests is not a litmus test to determine their validity. But the stuff I have seen has been, thus far, fairly low-key. I spend my weekdays at a Wall Street nonprofit, and I have the unique position of sharing space with the suits who have allegedly destroyed America while earning less than their counterparts are collecting on unemployment. The picket lines that I have seen (and they're not always there; sometimes the protesters take a break to eat the $2800 worth of pizza that was donated to them globally) have not booed me or waved their signs in my direction, but today I wore my silver Chucks instead of my red Guccis and that might be why. I find the protest intriguing and my interest is naturally piqued by the prospect of societal upheaval (and people wearing masks) but even when I have gone out searching for action, I've been unable to find much of anything.

Today at lunch I went on a hike toward Century 21, a gigantic downtown department store, and on the way I passed the little park where the protesters have camped out for the past three days. There was a gaggle of them there, holding the cardboard signs I'd seen on news blogs, standing solemn-faced and cross-armed while German tourists snapped their photos. There were TV cameras hoisted on shoulders and some disheveled looking hippies smoking cigarettes. One man was being arrested, his chest against the park sign with his hands behind his back. He was talking over his shoulder to the people behind him. Across the street stood two suits, both middle aged and irredeemably ugly, heckling him. "That's right asshole!" one gloated. "One down, how many more to go?" They high fived, emboldened by the traffic passing between them and their target audience, by the silver bracelets that held his wrists together. Then they presumably took a car service to a restaurant and ordered steak and potatoes garnished with the heads of Labrador puppies, but I can't say for certain because I kept walking.

Century 21, my intended destination, is a perpetual clusterfuck of consumption. It is mobbed by lunch-breaking Wall Streeters running errands, tourists in hot pursuit of a bargain, and almost as many red-aproned employees as the first two groups combined. It's the type of place that makes you exhale upon leaving, in a whoosh of air that starts at the feet and hisses out the face in a slow, full-body deflation, when you didn't even know you were holding your breath. I was in pursuit, if you'd care to know, of a new bra. Century 21 carries a lot of Calvin Klein at prices a person like me, whose net worth is only slightly beneath that of the lady who panhandles on Wall Street (and who I have seen talking on a cell phone), can appreciate. But in order to get into the main department store one must pass the Century 21 shoe store, and passing a shoe store is not something I can do without considerable pain and suffering. So I went in.

Inside were hordes of like-minded women, each wondering desperately which of her children she could sell to pay for the six boxes in her arms. I caught the end of one's conversation, "...But they don't have my size, thank God," she said, and I understood her relief. The walls were lined with specimens and I absorbed them all, caressed them with my fingertips and held them at arms' length, not because I don't need at least twenty new pairs of shoes, but because if I spend any more money on fall footwear before I start on a fall wardrobe, I will have to start going into work naked from the ankles up. So I simply wandered in a wide circle and dodged the masses of shoe-shocked women and contemplated the sick, sick collection of wedges I'm going to amass when I am rich and famous.

As I was passing the stairs, a woman entered the room pulling a large shopping cart and asked, seemingly at random, "Is this the women's shoe section?" The lady standing beside her, examining a pair of silver sandals, did not respond. This might have been because she was a foreign tourist who did not understand the question, or it might have been because the room was crowded and noisy and she did not know she'd been designated the resident expert. It might have even been because the store was lined with pumps and flats and boots covered in sparkles and bows and rhinestones and the question was so incredibly stupid that she'd been struck dumb. Whatever her reason, it pissed the inquirer off. She stomped down the aisle, dragging her cart, shaking her head and muttering, "Learn you some English, lady." And sadly, the irony was lost on both of them.

This is one of those descriptive bits I sometimes do that goes nowhere. I saw a couple assholes on my lunch break and now I've taken up your time to discuss them and ultimately none of this has any real meaning. I only get an hour for lunch and I spent the last half of my break searching downtown for a more dramatic enactment of the protests (I never found one) and picking up my black flats from the cobbler (shoes occupy 80% of my waking thoughts, legit. This is why I don't have time to read the papers). That was it. In the interest of closure I will say that when I walked down Wall Street at the end of the day, the whole street was silent and barricaded and lined with cops. The tourists leaned over the edge of the sidewalk, waiting for the something that was about to happen. A more intrepid reporter might have stuck around to witness the ensuing Occupaton but I wanted to get home before it rained. So I fear I'll have to leave that chapter open until I read the news tomorrow.

But I will disclose that I never bought a bra.

A Love Story

2011-09-15T08:27:00.000-07:00

In retrospect I don't know that I was ever in love with him. From where I sit, it seems impossible. But that's the problem with keeping a journal; you can never deny your old emotions, even if they're embarrassing. You can't run from your own handwriting.

* * *

We met in college, before he moved to Alaska. He worked for six months as a salmon fisherman on one of those cold, miserable boats that never get dry, while I wrote papers and drank beer and graduated. He passed through New York to apply for a visa. I had just moved from Massachusetts and I was unemployed, scared and wretchedly broke. He tried, unsuccessfully, to seduce me. Instead I took him to a Halloween party. He had no costume so he shaved his head in my sink and I pulled a red tapestry off the wall (this was a time wherein I still used tapestries as home decor) and wrapped it around him like a toga. Back then he still wore glasses. For a white guy, he was the world's most believable Dalai Lama.

He left for Asia in search of enlightenment and I still thought of him as the Dalai Lama, even referred to him as such when I talked about him, which admittedly wasn't often. A month after he left I got a package in the mail. It was postmarked from Thailand and there was no return address, no note, just a box full of elephants and jewelry. The elephants were stone, wooden, glass. It took me hours to guess who in Thailand could know about the elephants. When I finally realized I felt dizzy and warm. I emailed him a thank-you note.

That year, on the day after Christmas, a tsunami knocked into Southeast Asia and wiped out parts of Indonesia and Thailand. I emailed him in a panic but I got no response. I registered him as a missing person with the Red Cross. I obsessively checked lists of names I found online. I cried a lot. Finally I called his parents. "He's in China," said his stepfather. "And he changed his email address." I sent a furious email to the new address. A few days later I received a package of Chinese elephants. It was postmarked two weeks beforehand.

As it turned out, the single sexiest thing a guy could do was return from the dead. Suddenly he was the leading man and my role as the femme fatale was to sit back and wait for my next box of elephants. I spoke of him incessantly, journaled him, dreamed him. I squealed at the sporadic emails and the airmailed letters and the package from Nepal. I planned our inevitable reunion, a slow-motion sprint through a field of spring flowers, arms extended, racing into an embrace while the sun shone so bright that our hair glowed. My therapist suggested that perhaps I was getting ahead of myself. I shook my head, lost in the romance of it, ran my fingers over the mantra on my Nepalese bracelet and waited. I was patient as a Corinthian.

And of course, he finally came. I met him at the airport in a blue skirt and I hugged him as hard as I could legally do in public. He was not as handsome as I remembered and I'd forgotten that he limped. On the train ride home he told me giddy stories of Tibet, handed me a jumble of elephants wrapped in a yellow prayer flag. I nodded and clapped and answered my phone every fifteen minutes because everybody in New York wanted to know if he'd arrived yet. I thrilled as I showed him my room, my home, my life in Manhattan and my ticket to Australia. I wanted him to know everything.

Within three days he was gone. I was crying on Denise's bed and she was holding my hand. Within three months I was living in Sydney with my new boyfriend, getting evicted from every apartment in town. Within three years I was back in New York by myself, working at a law firm and saving my overtime checks for a trip to Peru. He called sometimes and left a message, sent the occasional email. Eventually those stopped too.

* * *

Two full years after our last communication, he writes to say he is coming to New York. Would I like a houseguest?

* * *

He makes incredible time, crossing the country in less than three days. He arrives in Brooklyn on a Friday night and I meet him in the street. We hug for the first time in six years. I bring him inside and show him my life. He admires the pictures of Machu Picchu and the green walls of my living room. He likes what I have done with the elephants. By now I have so many elephants that I have to hide some of them. There is one in the medicine cabinet and another in the sugar bowl.

The subways are not running this weekend and the buses are behind schedule. We search in vain for a way out of my neighborhood but we find none. Eventually we settle for some six-packs on the sofa. It takes him about five beers to broach the subject.

"You know about, like, you and me?" he says. "I'm really sorry about that."

I had not wanted to go here. "It's okay," I say. "Honestly. It was six years ago. Don't worry about it."

"No," he says. "I really am sorry."

"Please, it's fine. I get it." I am covering my face. Sometimes I do that. I forget that the other person can still see me.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes." I pull my hand away. "Honestly. It's fine. I understand it. I just invented this idea of you, and I tried to impose it on you, and I threw everything at you all at once. It was way too fast. Really. It's okay."

"No," he says. "You were right."

"No. I wasn't."

He has a lecture planned. This is right, he says. This is who we should be. We are the type of people who are always coming and going. We could meet in the middle sometimes, like this, in between destinations.

"But I'm not like that anymore," I say. "I don't want to go anywhere; I'm staying here. And I'm really not interested in a long-term, long-distance, non-committed relationship. Like, at all."

"But you told me you were smitten with me," he says. "And I have thought about you a lot. I really feel that way about you."

"So are you asking if I feel that way still?" I say.

"Do you?"

"Well, no!" In retrospect I am not sure why I thought he'd find this funny. When he doesn't laugh, I realize that I hadn't really considered my audience. So maybe that's why I let him kiss me. Maybe that's why I grit my teeth and bear the scrape of his Nevada-dusty stubble on my neck. Maybe I think he is trustworthy or important, some piece of myself that merits salvaging. In any event it isn't really worth the effort. I find that out in the harsh light of the bathroom about twenty minutes later, when I glance at myself in the mirror. I scream.

* * *

The next morning we go to Sephora in Union Square. I wear a scarf, gray with fringe and thick silver stripes. I make him wait outside the store. "What am I going to do at the farmer's market?" he asks. "Buy vegetables?"

"I don't care," I say. "I don't want you coming in with me. It's too awkward."

"It wouldn't bother me."

"Well it should."

I slink inside the store. It's early; the floor is nearly empty. I approach the first woman I see in a black shirt. "Excuse me..." I say. "I need some really good concealer? I have... a problem." I tug the scarf down below my ear.

"Oh!" she says. "Come with me." She drags me down an aisle and holds up pots of yellow goo against my face, searching for my skin tone. Finding one that works, she plucks a little paint brush from her apron and daubs some on my neck. I pull my scarf down more, ream by ream, till it finally unwinds and slouches off my shoulders. My neck is a typographical map of one-sided lust, in shades of raspberry and violet and blue. There are deep V's of bruises beneath each ear and an archipelago of strawberries across my throat. I apologize profusely. I'm way too old for hickeys. She tells me her man is the same way. She is under the impression that I had a lot more fun than I really did.

When she's done she leads me to a mirror. I blink in recognition. The person looking back at me is the same one I see every day, and not her strangulation-victim twin. I thank the woman profusely. She's not the first person to whom I've professed love at this store (I literally proposed to the girl who found me the purple glitter eyeliner) but my affection for her is real. I re-wrap my scarf to hide the leftover shadows and I buy the pot of goo.

* * *

The day lasts forever. All plans fall through and the subways are under construction. We end up on a four-hour wander through lower Manhattan and he sulks because I am not talking enough. He is not talking either, but when he points out the fact that I am not talking, all of the ideas whoosh out of my head and suddenly there is nothing to talk about in the world. I get lots of compliments on my scarf. He is not even embarrassed and I feel, I really feel, like he should be embarrassed. I feel like that's the least he could do.

I send him home and I go uptown to babysit. When the baby is asleep I call him to check in; who's picking up the wine, who's picking up the groceries, and everything sounds normal again. I text Nicole and she says we need to confront the situation. We're dancing around it awkwardly and neither of us knows what to say. The elephant in the room.

The parents are late and the trains still aren't running. I get on the wrong bus and end up deep in Brooklyn. It's nearly midnight. A man follows me to a desolate street corner and asks where I'm going. I don't know the neighborhood. I get home three hours late.

"I'll have to re-heat dinner," he says. He turns on the stove. There is chopped onion on the cutting board and in the sink. And in the pan. "Is there anything you don't eat?" he asks.

I say, "I don't eat onions."

The last time I put an onion in my mouth I was twelve years old. It was on a piece of pizza, one of those half-topping pizzas that don't get sliced properly so the toppings sneak onto the cheese side and the onionophobe ends up with a mouthful. My mother would not let me spit it out and I could not swallow. I gagged on it for twenty minutes, a chewed wad of cheese pizza and a slice of onion with a bite mark, sloshing in a soup of flat Coca-Cola that I'd gulped in an attempt to wash it down. Finally my mother gave up and pointed me toward the bathroom. I spat into the toilet and the cheese hung like string from my braces. I could not eat the onion.

But he doesn't know this. He makes too much noise in the kitchen and slams the refrigerator door. The elephants wobble on top of the microwave.

He glowers at dinner. "You're just going to pick out all the stuffing?" he asks.

"I'm picking out the onions."

"I could have made plain chicken in five minutes."

* * *

When I wake up his bags are packed. He's sitting on the sofa reading Gone With the Wind. I tried to tease him about this yesterday but he didn't take the bait. I make a pot of coffee. When I pass the open bathroom door I catch sight of myself in the mirror and I cover my neck. I don't know what to do. I have a strong urge to let the whole thing crumble and another one to build it back up. Shouldn't I fix this? Shouldn't I save this? Isn't it selfish to lose ten years of friendship to one petty argument? Haven't I been in his position before? Didn't it hurt?

"Look," I say. "I'm sorry we fought last night. And I'm sorry I yelled at you. When I say that I'm not the person you knew six years ago, I mean that there is a lot that I'm dealing with right now, and I'm not doing it well. But it's not fair to put that on you. I'm an adult and I should be able to respond appropriately to a situation that makes me uncomfortable. I would really like it if you came to brunch with my friends today. I would hate for your visit to end on such a low note."

He looks up from his book. "Was I making you uncomfortable?"

* * *

Nicole and Leo are at brunch and it's a lot more fun than wandering around Manhattan. Asli and Lauren meet us at the Botanic Gardens. We mug for iPhone photoshoots and dance around the roses. Everyone is wearing black and gray; we are sleek New Yorkers welcoming the onset of fall. The sky is the color of my scarf and so is the pond. Nicole and Leo leave and the rest of us go to a beer garden. We are joyful, giddy. He asks Lauren, "What's your cup size?"

"You can't just say that," I say.

He's belligerent. "Yes I can. I can say whatever I want."

"No. You really can't say that."

He insists that he can, so we freeze him out. We're a three-woman circle of gray, talking shoes and tampons and tropical vacations. He gets bored and goes to the bathroom, for something to do.

* * *

I'm in the living room and he's banging around the kitchen again, although my kitchen is so small that one hardly bangs around it, so much as one bangs back and forth. I am pretending not to hear. Tomorrow he will go. Tomorrow I will see him off, whether he's ready or not. His silent treatment gets steadily louder. "Are you enjoying your cooking lesson, Kaitlyn?" he yells. "Learning to make fettucini alfredo, are ya?" I wonder to myself why he cannot even talk like a normal person.

"Yes," I call. I'm updating my online dating profile.

"It's ready," he says.

I go into the kitchen and make the expected noises about how tasty everything looks. "After we dine," he says, "I have something to say."

"What do you want me to do?" I ask. "Eat really fast? Why don't you just say it now?"

"Forget it," he says. "I won't say it at all."

"Okay."

The conversation at dinner is banal because as of this afternoon, I am no longer in the business of coaxing people to share their feelings. This bothers him greatly. After dinner we sit down to watch Dexter, because it is the least interactive activity I can think of. The credits have not even begun to roll and he asks, "Can I say my thing now?"

I pause the DVD. "Okay," I say. "What is it."

"When I came here I thought we would have a fun, romantic, enjoyable time, like a relationship without all the bullshit. But instead, I'm getting all the bullshit of a relationship without any of the fun. I get scolded for not buying toilet paper. And tonight you said you wanted a cooking lesson, but then you didn't even try."

I say, "When you forgot to get toilet paper I called you a monster. That's pretty melodramatic, so I thought you'd know that I was joking. And when you came in to make dinner you were obviously upset. So I didn't want to cook with you. I didn't think it would be fun."

He looks at me with a sardonic half-smile. His voice is dangerous. "Well done, Kaitlyn," he says. "You have won the argument. And that's the whole point, isn't it."

"Okay," I say. "I don't feel like watching Dexter anymore." I take my computer into my room and shut the door. I can hear him outside, packing.

* * *

It's seven o'clock in the morning and I'm already up. I'm stomping through the living room, flipping light switches and banging pots and pans. At nine-thirty he rises as I'm crossing the room.

"Do you want to talk at all before I leave?" he asks.

"No," I say.

I go into the bathroom and lock the door. My hands are shaking. I brush my teeth and pour a glass of water. When I come back out, he's gone.

Things I Am Afraid Of: A Comprehensive List

2011-09-13T18:50:00.001-07:00

1) everything

On Living Alone

2011-08-30T19:16:00.001-07:00

There are perks to living alone. For one thing, dishes. When you live by yourself, you never have to worry about whose turn it is to do the dishes. Because if you have roommates, no matter how unified a front you put up, you are not going to be able to agree who left that moldy meatloaf in the sink. It will forever be a point of contention, left defiantly to soak up tepid dishwater and rot for weeks, a silent battlecry that launches a siege.

But there are, naturally, drawbacks to solitude. Knowing that the dishes in the sink are undeniably yours does not get them washed any faster. And no matter how diligent, one might even say obsessive, you are about doing the dishes, there will inevitably be a day when you must dash out the door without scrubbing them. Perhaps you'll think that this is not a big deal. Maybe they are just pots you filled with water to prepare for the hurricane, because someone mentioned you might need them to fill the cistern. Perhaps you'll fill four whole pots before realizing you don't actually have a cistern. Then maybe you won't even spend the hurricane at home, but you'll leave the pots there in the bathroom on principle. That way if some kind of aquatic emergency arises at Nicole's place during the storm, you can say, "I know where there is water!" And when you return from your hurricane hideout two days later, the pots will have accumulated a spidery film of dust. You'll dump them into the sink.

Then you'll leave. You'll go out and attend to all your responsibilities and when you arrive home you'll know for certain you can hear a kind of rustling in the kitchen, and you'll pick up one of the pots and bang it down, bracing yourself for the scurrying that's bound to follow. But it won't. Frantically you'll yank open cabinets, wincing in preparation for a rabid mouse to come flying, talons out, at your face. Nothing will happen. The rustling will not cease, and with a sense of dread you will begin to systematically remove every item from the cabinets beneath the sink. You will find enough mouse droppings to make a whole new mouse, and a rather unsettling hole in the woodwork, but there will be no movement. This will be a relief and a cause for concern.

You will have just managed to convince yourself that there is something living in your wall when one dirty pot will move, just the slightest bit. You will see a brown head and you will at first think that it is a raccoon BECAUSE OF ITS SIZE. It is not a raccoon. It is the biggest cockroach that ever lived and it is rustling in your sink. You will scream like a little bitch and now here again you will find the trouble in living alone, because a) nobody will burst forth from a side bedroom to make sure you're okay and b) you will have to deal with this cockroach yourself. You and the cockroach will not break eye contact as you reach for a wad of paper towels, and then with a swift right hook coupled with another girly shriek you will scoop up the bug and run for the bathroom. You will scan the contents of the wad to ensure that you've ensnared your prey, and you will see the cockroach curl its fists and flex its massive quadriceps, kicking and thunderpunching and waving its slimy antennae, hissing your name.

Sometimes when you battle cockroaches you talk trash. "Oh, this is the last day of your life!" you've been known to say, or "Ha! Tell your friends!" as you listened to an entomological death rattle. Once after a particularly lengthy battle, you returned to the kitchen yelling, "Is there anyone else here who would like to be flushed down the toilet?" For this is also a hazard of living alone, the nonsensical babbling to the enemy troops, punctuated by awkward silence once you realize what you're doing. Today your wits will deaden. "Fuck!" you'll say. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!" You'll hurl the monster into the toilet bowl and it will glare at you, cursing slowly through a cigarette like Clint Eastwood, grabbing the toilet seat and counting out a few chin-ups before it swings its body toward freedom. You'll scream again and flush, and the toilet, cistern or no, will swallow the entire bug along with eight paper towels, belching out a clean bowl of water when it's finished. You'll flush three more times for emphasis, then scrub the dusty pots with boiling water and douse the bathroom with bleach. You'll clean the kitchen from top to bottom, in- and outside all cabinets, and walk the trash bags out of the building and out of your life.

The next day you'll come home bearing steel wool and a can of Raid and some glue traps. You'll set to work booby-trapping your house. You'll drop a glue trap onto your thigh and treat yourself to an impromptu waxing in its removal. You'll stuff the hole beneath the sink with steel wool, then you'll pull too hard. Your forefinger will ooze purple, spattering the kitchen like a crime scene. You'll fashion yourself a makeshift bandage that comes down over your knuckle, then spend the ensuing evening with your index finger extended, looking as though you're perpetually on the verge of an epiphany. Once you've stopped the bleeding you will sweep up the shards of steel wool and flop down on the couch with a cup of peppermint tea. You'll exhale.

And when you're done, you'll wash the dishes.

On The Road*

2011-08-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

I collect books, which is a douchey thing to say. One time at a party in college my friend Kerrie had invited this dingbat of a guy, I mean the man was legally a vegetable (not a person in a vegetative state, but like a carrot) who was browsing my bookshelf and he picked up a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends and said, "Where did you get this!" And I said, My mom bought it for me when I was a little kid, and he said, "I collect books! And I've been looking for this all over and I've never been able to find it!"

Which:

1) How hard can you have been looking if you cannot even locate the most standard Shel Silverstein, and

2) Who says that? "I collect books"?

So I'm aware of the fact that making bullshit proclamations such as, "I collect books" drops my IQ by about a billion points till I hover just above the clinical diagnosis of Idaho potato, but in my defense I have been editing for the past several hours and my brain has turned to oatmeal. And also when I say that I collect books I mean to use collect as an action verb, as a form of kinetic energy, as a reference to the activity of picking a book up off the sidewalk (where there are always swarms of them) and taking it to my house.

I do this a lot, the collecting, and as a result my little library is ever expanding, despite the confines of my non-profit salary, and the collection has grown to the point that earlier this week (between the earthquake and the hurricane) I met a guy from Craigslist and gave him twenty-five dollars for a used bookcase from Target. I carried it home and put it in my bedroom to catch the overflow from the first bookcase that was no longer passing muster, and just like that, I became a two-bookcase household. I got to rearrange my elephant bookends and line up all the books just so, and it was a generally lovely evening because when you live alone in a big apartment, this is the type of shit that passes for a party on a Tuesday night.

One such book in my collection (which, actually, I did not find on the sidewalk but paid a dollar for at a charity store in Chelsea) is the book The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I'm sure you're familiar with it. It's a post-apocalyptic masterpiece about a father and son facing the world together after everything has been destroyed and it made me cry at the end. I got it in hardcover, even though I don't like hardcover (because it was a dollar) and when I got it home and opened it up, this is what was handwritten inside:

10-12-06

To My Wonderful, Beautiful, and talented Son, Jack. This is a story about challenges, and we two have them... and the love of a Father and Son, and we certainly have that for each other.

Love,
Daddy

Which:

1) This is a grown-up book and presumably intended for a grown-up son, who, in his manliness, has probably long ago shrugged off baby-talk which makes the use of the name Daddy ring extremely creepy.

2) Jack, you ungrateful prig.

I've already read The Road and I'm in all honesty never going to open it again unless I want to show someone the inscription, but I'm greedy about books the way I'm greedy about music. I don't want to stream. I want to download. So it's all the same to me if people toss out family heirlooms and I get to decorate my house with them; it makes my life a bit richer and my (second!) bookcase a bit fuller. But Jack, I am a little concerned about your priorities. I really think you need to sit back and take stock of what matters. And for God's sake, call your Daddy.

* Get it?

People I Know Who I Have Seen This Summer But Not Said Hi To: A Comprehensive List

2011-08-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

Person: Kara
How I Know Her: We went to high school together.
Why I Didn't Say Hi: I vaguely knew Kara in high school, but I liked her. When we graduated we went to the same conservative Catholic college and lived in the same dorm, so our social circles intersected frequently. We bonded over our hatred for the faculty monks. She transferred after a semester and we never spoke again, because Facebook hadn't been invented. When I saw her it was late afternoon on a sweltering Sunday. She was wearing a blue and white striped maxi dress (everyone in New York is wearing blue and white stripes this summer) and drinking an iced coffee. I was dashing from babysitting to meet Asli and I had stopped off to buy a sheer flowered tank top (everyone in New York is wearing sheer tank tops this summer) to replace my sweaty cotton one. I was already half an hour late. She looked tired.

Person: Michael
How I Know Him: We went to college together.
Why I Didn't Say Hi: I met Michael at the same college I went to with Kara (I eventually transferred out as well). We both did theater. One time we had to practice a kissing scene for class and I suggested that we not kiss. He was at first a freshman pet and sort of a punchline, but he was such a genial guy that he became something of a legend among the theater people. I passed him on my way out of the subway on my way to clean Marcy's house. Marcy is the only house I still clean because she pays me so well that I can't pass it up. When I passed him I was walking at triple speed and he looked at me with wide eyes like probably he knew me but ultimately I didn't want to delay my payout.

Person: Errol
How I Know Him: We met on the internet a year ago and went on three dates.
Why I Didn't Say Hi: I was riding home late on the train and I looked like hell. I'd been dancing and my hair was pulled back and my makeup probably smeary and I was trying to sleep until my stop. When I looked up I realized that Errol was sitting across the aisle about six people away. I don't think he saw me. Our first date was fine; the second was great. On the third date we went to see the Blues Brothers movie in Brooklyn Bridge Park and he spent the whole movie singing songs from previous scenes while new songs played. He tried to put his arm around me but I shrugged it off. He texted me a little bit after that but it never took off. In the interest of journalistic integrity, a few weeks after that I tried to call him on an extremely boring Friday night, but he didn't pick up. When I saw him on the subway I pretended to be asleep.

Person: Carissa
How I Know Her: I met her through a friend a couple years ago.
Why I Didn't Say Hi: Carissa and I are Facebook friends but it has never run deeper than that; I saw her at a few parties and thought she was cool. Carissa has dark hair that's perfectly straight, with bangs and freckles. I have none of these things and I find her very glamorous. I was back at Brooklyn Bridge Park watching another outdoor movie (Breakfast at Tiffany's, thankfully no music) and I had to go to the bathroom, but the crowd was so thick that the edge of every picnic blanket overlapped another six picnic blankets. I had taken off my shoes and I was tiptoeing over people's blankets and sheets and mumbling, "Sorry, 'scuse me, sorry, so sorry," and right before the grass became a gravel path toward salvation I happened on a purple quilt. On the quilt was a laughing girl with dark, perfectly straight hair and freckles. But I really had to pee.

Person: The Mexican Tom Cruise
How I Know Him: I met him last week at PS1. He's a friend of another friend.
Why I Didn't Say Hi: I talked to him for about fifteen seconds at PS1 and after he left my friend James said, "That's the Mexican Tom Cruise." And he really does look like the Mexican Tom Cruise; he has the million dollar smile and the boyish charm and everything. I forget his real name. I saw him immediately after I didn't say hi to Carissa. I was crossing the street and he was crossing the other way, talking to his friend. If I'd stopped him to say hi, one or both of us would have been hit by a car. So I just kept walking.

On More Rain

2011-08-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

It only rained once all day and that was when I decided to leave the house. I got lost a bunch of times on the way to the doctor's office but I finally found it, waded through a curbside puddle, closed my purple umbrella and stomped up the steps of the sagging front porch. The office was as depressing as they come, brown wood-paneled walls installed in the 80's with a length of molding around the edge of the tiled floor that peeled toward the center of the room. The receptionist was an old woman who jabbered in a Slavic language that I couldn't reach; she spoke to me from behind an awkwardly-placed window and handed me my charts. The glass window was obscured with a collage of old photographs cut from magazines--fruit stands, pretty women, mountain town roads crossed by cowboys--and it only went up about twelve inches. To talk to each other the receptionist and I had to duck our heads beneath the glass. Luckily I didn't have much to say.

Twenty minutes later I was out. It was still raining. The doctor had not gotten up from his chair; he sat at his desk and asked me to open my mouth and say ah. He wrote a prescription and I told him I didn't want it. He recommended lozenges and multivitamins and told me to use mouthwash. It was raining impossibly hard, banging on the streets and turning the world to silver. I was grumpy that I'd left the house for the sake of a doctor who would not rise from his chair, and my head hurt and I wanted to go home. I huddled at the busstop with a cluster of other wet commuters and listened to a Russian woman pick a fight with a Caribbean woman over which of them was crazier (for the record, they were both claiming to be the craziest, not accusing the other, and I think the Russian woman was winning). My day had consisted thus far of naps on the sofa interspersed with naps in my bed and I was eager to get back down to business.

Pharyngitis, the doctor said, although his indifference was shining through and he could have been wrong. And how does one get pharyngitis in mid-August? Perhaps one got it at the museum.

PS1 Warm Up is a summer tradition and for those reading this outside of New York, I'll recap: it's an outdoor dance party hosted at an elementary school repurposed as an art museum. Big-name DJ's come to play and the crowds writhe and jump in the sunshine, ducking toward the back of the lot for an overpriced beer (insider tip: bring your own) or indoors for some culture.

This year's dose of culture was, for me, a letdown. The entire second floor was dedicated to Laurel Nakadote, a photographer and performance artist with a super hot bod, who plastered the walls of the school with photographs of herself weeping. The photos, the informative plaque said, were taken every day over the course of a year. They were gigantic and numerous and a huge fucking downer. I fled the museum and escaped to the courtyard with my friend Chris, and we danced out there forever, shaking off the weight of Laurel's tears. Instead the clouds opened and rain spattered over us, cooling the air and making my purple dress hang heavy and low. We didn't care. Nobody cared. We danced in the rain, hours of it, laughing and jumping and spinning and swiveling. There were shirtless men beside us leading obnoxious chants, and one of them had a burlap murse full of necessities. He would take out a cowbell to keep time, or sometimes a fork to scrape along the side of a cheese grater. Neither he nor his friends ever cracked a smile, deadly serious about their ole, ole, oleeees and their percussion section.

When I finally saw a mirror I laughed at my reflection; that I was out in public--and flirting!--with such a mop of damp hair was either a punchline or a sock to the gut; either way it would have been enough to set Laurel off again. I went to Chris's house to watch movies and eat Mexican food and wring out my dress. The next day I babysat and spent all the money I earned before I even got paid, and the day after that I got pharyngitis.

And there is no connecting thread to any of this because I've decided to go back to bed. So goodnight.

On Rain

2011-08-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

When I get off the train there is a crowd. A dozen people stand beneath the awning outside the subway entrance, watching the road and waiting for the storm to pass. The rain falls in silver sheets and I've got no umbrella, but I'm glad. On Monday I went running in the park and the humidity hung on me, every breath a wheeze, but the grass had just been cut and the air was sweet and the trees heavy with the weight of a million cicadas, buzzing like maracas in every corner. Today, I'd told myself, I would go again. But the weather was adverse and my plans were foiled; I could go home to read and write and decompress after a long, gray day, curled on my gold chair with the lights low and the raindrops falling hard on the trees in the courtyard, splashing like a downpour in a real forest, and not just a concrete lot full of overgrown poison sumac.

I push through the crowd because I'll not waste a moment, not wait for the calm; I tiptoe over the brown puddles at the curb and I stay close to the brick face of the buildings, hiding in their shadows. I'm dressed like a cupcake, in a pink cotton dress with blue and yellow flowers, a pale blue cardigan and silver sandals. The dress was a hand-me-down in a size large and the tailor took it in every way he could manage, but the bust still hangs comically loose, saving itself for someone more bosomy than I know how to be. My dress is spattered and my lavender eyeliner runs. A cupcake with melted frosting.

I pass beside the fruit stand and a man speaks to me rapidly in Spanish. I eye the skinny asparagus bundled with purple bands, and breathe in the smell of strawberries that carries in the wet air. The sidewalks are empty and there is no crowd to push through at the corner. I cross again past the pizza place, where the owner always says hello and I retaliate by pretending not to see him, as though it would be such a burden to make a friend, and past the all-night barbershop where my favorite barber pretends not to see me. This corner is usually busy. Yesterday I saw someone get arrested here. But today the block is empty, the usual suspects all running for cover.

The block where I live is always lined with cars, a risk no matter how you slice it because people smash the windows. Today the victim is a shiny blue bug, the glove compartment open and the driver's seat full of broken glass and rainwater. I feel bad for whoever has to deal with this tomorrow morning. My front door key doesn't usually work on the first try, but I make it happen. There's no mail to look over and the light is out in the entryway. But the rain splashes on the leaves and the air cools, dust settles. The gold chair beckons.

Rabbit Hole

2011-08-02T18:55:00.001-07:00

When I wake up I'm in bed, which is good. When I'm too sad or too hot to handle my own bedroom, I sleep on the couch. The air conditioner is in the living room, and the couch is just a crummy brown thing from Overstock.com that I bought a year ago but looks like it's a decade old. There are no absent lovers in the cushions, no sweatstains from nightmares past. There are only crumbs from tortilla chips and the occasional quarter. It's safer than the bed and frequently, it's cooler.

The next good thing is that I remember, right away, to say, "Rabbit rabbit," which is what you're supposed to say on the first day of every month to bring yourself luck. I fixate on this process every thirty-to-thirty-one days, prepare myself, and still I forget it as often as not, this seemingly simple step to ensuring my own success. I'm a superstitious person by nature, and I pepper my life with beliefs and rituals intended to make sense of it. Maybe that means nothing, but one time in Brooklyn a black cat crossed my path and then it turned and ran back, and I told myself that meant the bad luck was erased, but then I moved to Peru and everything fell apart. So I say rabbit rabbit on the first of the month, and I spend a lot of time thinking about fire signs, and I become very wary around the number 13.

Last weekend I took a Greyhound bus to Massachusetts and the stranger sitting beside me told me that his lucky number was 4. He said he set his alarm every day for 4:44. I was sitting in seat 44 and I didn't tell him I felt the same way about 4's, and 3's when 4's are not available, because I thought it would sound contrived. He gave me a cupcake (it was lemon). We talked about hair care and the way the pedestrians looked as they ran through the rain.

Saying rabbit rabbit makes me feel like I've got the whole month on lock, but there is still ample wiggle room. A lot of stuff can happen. In the course of a day, even if I totally make it to work on time (and let's assume, for the sake of argument, that I manage to put together a fantastic outfit, something really close to what one might call business casual but with a slutty, bra-strap-brandishing edge that would never be accepted outside of a nonprofit) and even have money to pay the coffee cart guy. The coffee cart guy is a handsome Israeli who rolls up the cuffs of his Armani Exchange t-shirts to show off his biceps. He charges me between zero and one dollars for a large iced coffee. For this price I get an iced coffee every day on my way into the office, because I like the coffee cart guy and I enjoy his precaffeinated banter, even if he does make the worst iced coffee I have ever tasted. Seriously, it's milk, water and beans; what is he doing wrong?

The stranger beside me quoted someone about house-building, I can't remember who. But the quote had been stolen, I told him, from Jesus. I sang him a song I knew about building your house upon the rock, and I explained that I had gone to Christian camp for many years and I knew every song ever written about Jesus that you could play on an acoustic guitar. He told me he was a lapsed Catholic. We talked about dream analysis and I told him about the recurring one I'd had as a kid, where I was being chased down the street by an angry, scary He-Man. We took turns on our phones searching for pictures of him, and realized that neither He-Man nor any of his crew ever wore pants. I had the window seat and the bus kept spraying that cinnamon public-transport freshener into the air, making it smell like everyone around me was chewing gum. The traffic was stop-and-go. We were a united front against the world. I was going home for a family reunion; he for his girlfriend's birthday.

And then, after one watery iced coffee and a warm cup of strawberry yogurt, it's easy for everything to go haywire. I leave my email open, allowing the opportunity for bad news to seep through like my kukui nut body oil through one of those beaded coasters I use, ripping the finish off the antique bureau and slicking up the coffee table. Sure there might be one email expressing interest in the bullshit I cobble together and call "pieces," and perhaps, they suggest, I could write one more such "piece" and either they'd publish it or they wouldn't but in any event they'd be glad to have heard from me. But I am the type of person who refuses to open all of my emails, no matter how much the bold-faced unread status bothers some of my friends and colleagues (and how could they possibly care, one wonders) and naturally I eventually came to an unread message count of 2213, the last two digits leering at me all morning, daring me to rabbit my way out.

"We've covered a lot of ground in this conversation," he said.

"I know. And we're not even in Connecticut."

Silence. You could've even characterized it as an awkward silence, had we not just finished eating cupcakes on a cinnamon-scented bus.

"Um, what kind of music do you like?" I asked.

He told me. Who remembers. "What kind do you like?" he said.

I rattled off a list of names. Many were beyond him. He disliked listening to music by artists who were not good at being human beings, to which I said that he was limiting himself. I told him my secret. I listened to the same song on repeat every day for my whole commute.

"What song?"

"A Beyonce song."

"The one about ruling the world?"

"No!"

"Which one."

"Um, Best Thing I Never Had."

"Oh." There was a moment. Then a light of recognition. "You're heartbroken!"

"No, I'm not."

"Yes you are. I can tell by the hesitation, and the way you looked out the window."

"Look, there's a huge trash barge."

And 2213 is not a lucky number, even if its columns add up to 44. Eventually someone will email to say Thanks for the opportunity to read your work, we are extremely flattered to being one of your chosen few, even though at this time you are not precisely what we are looking for. And if you read that, even if you delete it, the number of unread emails will remain at 2213, leaving open the gates of hell. And should you receive any unexpected correspondence, say perchance from a huge trash barge, you can be sure that it's only to question the status of any recent submissions, so that you can confirm what you didn't want to accept; that you've been thanked and shown to the door. And should the good luck of your morning ritual come to fruition; say, perhaps, that you win a microwave in a raffle, totally unexpectedly, it is not going to take away the sting of 2213.

The stranger is less of a stranger now. He texts me to ask for the address of my hairdresser; he wants a cut before next Friday. The trash barge still stinks. The best thing I can do is keep falling asleep in my own bed, keep playing my jam on repeat, keep holding out for the dawn of September.

On the Beach

2011-07-24T07:40:00.000-07:00

The sand is so hot that it burns the feet, and there is no walking to the water. Instead we sprint around oversized towels and striped umbrellas, howling in pain, soles smoking. The muddy gray sand at the shoreline is a sucking relief, and then the waves come like blankets of ice to wrap around our ankles and make us gasp. It's high tide and they are curling towers of water, twice as tall as the beachgoers, slapping down atop the swimmers twenty yards from the shore. By the time they reach me they're nothing but a rush of foam, spit-white and muscular and single-minded, tapping out on the dry sand and then sneaking back to sea.

Lauren and Asli are shivering at the shock of the cold, but I was raised in the gray waters of the North Atlantic. Summertime was about swimming till your limbs went numb, ducking the break of the waves. When we were kids, my grandmother would take my sister and brother and me to Cape Cod for weeks at a time. We spent the long car ride counting the exits on the freeway, Nannie smoking out the window while her grandchildren squabbled over whose turn it was next to sing. We subjected her to endless private concerts, of songs we knew from school or friends and songs we made up as we went along. She never turned on the radio to drown us out, the tactic employed by my parents to squelch our attempts at second encores. She let us sing for hours, let us stop for fast food and ice cream, let us frantically wave at the drivers we passed and then pull monkey faces once we had their attention. Nannie had patience for anything.

Once we're in the water, hair slick, eyes stinging, the only way to save ourselves is to time the waves. We dive straight into their bellies, minding the curl. Sometimes if I'm brave I face the shore and square my shoulders to let them clap me on the back. Once I miss and the current somersaults me halfway to shore, my whole body submerged but for my feet. Our conversation is punctuated with awkward pauses as we hold our breaths and hit the floor. Lauren calls it therapy. It's been too hot to eat all week and my bathing suit bottom hangs on my hips, held up by nothing but the force of my own will. I have to pull it up after every waterlogged leap. The water is so cold it clears my head and the swirled soup of emotion and philosophy and interpersonal dramas dissipates, evaporates. There is nothing but the bake of the sun and the squeals of the beachgoers and the bored stares of the bobbing gulls.

Nannie's sister Jane lived by the Cape Cod bay in a gray cottage of sunrooms and beaten shingles. She had a gray terrier and a collection of bells in a glass case. We'd ring the bells at each other in two-note concertoes until we were reprimanded to stop. Aunt Jane was less impressed by our musical prowess than was my grandmother. On her deck we stored buckets of hermit crabs and shells we'd painted with watercolors and glinting bits of sea glass. One time I found a fist-sized snail in a lavender shell, and Aunt Jane offered to boil it to evacuate the creature, but I felt a sinking twist of guilt and set it free in the bay. Aunt Jane and my grandmother took us to the beach and I jumped the waves alone, blue-lipped and shivering, rolling my eyes at my grandmother's perpetual wave from the sand, to signal that I'd swum out too far.

On the shore, under a purple umbrella, we sneak warm white wine in solo cups and take turns sunscreening each other's backs. We gossip and read. I write in my journal. There is fruit and crackers and cheese and sand in everything. The whole beach is beautiful; the green waves and the clusters of umbrellas and even the squat salt-and-pepper lifeguard in a wetsuit. We recline and regroup and then run back into the water, which is somehow even colder than it was before.

My grandmother died ten years ago, long after our Cape trips had come to an end, the beloved cigarettes finally taking from her everything she had. I visited once in the hospital, so ill that she could not speak, a flash of fury in her eyes that her grandchildren should be permitted to see her in such a state. I wrote her a card the week after that, to remind her that I loved her, but it did not arrive in time for her to read. She still sometimes makes her presence known, to fuss over her two great-granddaughters. Aunt Jane followed Nannie a few years later, but I did not go to her funeral. I suppose I was extremely busy. Aunt Jane left her house to another family, and I heard they gutted it and made it over. I haven't gone back.

I sleep in the car on the ride home, incognito behind my sunglasses. When I wake we are back in steamy Brooklyn, searching for a parking spot along the sidewalk. My hair is a nest of yellow straw and my back is sore from the pounding of the waves. My ears are sandy and my shoulders are burned and my summer is made.

On Visitors

2011-07-20T07:30:00.000-07:00

I live in a very old apartment building because I work in a nonprofit and refuse to have roommates. My apartment is in Flatbush, which is an area of Brooklyn with very low rent because a) everybody thinks it is dangerous here and b) there is a serious drainage issue with the sewers on my block and to step outside in the summertime is at times a terrible, terrible mistake. The reason I live here is because I am only moments from Prospect Park and because my apartment is so big that I could clear out the living room and lay down a slip-n-slide if I wanted.

But there are downsides to very old apartment buildings in pseudo-dangerous neighborhoods with poor drainage. For one thing, a lady in my building has attempted to panhandle from me. For another, I always have bugs. In the mornings, it is standard practice for me to draw forth the final breath from upwards of three cockroaches before my shower. In the tub I have spider beetles, which don't bother me as much although I do have to mash them on principle. And twice I have seen a mouse, which ultimately I killed in the most rock and roll way possible, by smashing it with a guitar. This was unintentional; I am not a monster, nor do I play the guitar. But three days after picking up the guitar to chase a roach that had run behind it, I went looking for the source of an unpleasant smell. I peeked inside the soft leather guitar case on my floor and, carnage.

Also one time I left the window open and a squirrel came in and knocked over everything on my dining room table, but it ran out shortly thereafter and I bought screens.

So I am not unused to the Brooklyn wildlife that cohabits my dusty apartment, but I woke up this morning to a totally unexpected visitor.

OK. What the hell is that. The thing was as long as my thumb and was scrabbling up the side of the basin on its millions of legs, not one of which was capable of scaling a length of concave porcelain. Around the drain were extra legs that had apparently fallen off, because it was granted such a surplus of appendages that losing a couple here and there was not even considered a major life change. This is exactly why I don't like bugs; their priorities are twisted.

I disposed of it in the most sinful imaginable way, by drowning it in enough water to slake the thirst of an African child for two or three days, and watched its frantic attempts at the backstroke which ultimately failed. Then I swabbed it in a handful of paper towels and tossed it in the trash, ready to go about my day until its interruption by the next unexpected visitor.

The next visitor turned out to be a strikingly handsome Jehovah's witness, possibly alerted via divine intervention to my wanton disregard for the life of others. But I didn't ask. He had an ordinary leg count and I found him generally more charming than his predecessor, but ultimately my living alone is for a purpose and I was still in pajamas. I shook my head at him and he nodded and retreated, leaving me once again to my self-imposed solitude.

IMPORTANT EDIT TWENTY MINUTES LATER: The monster's death was avenged by a cohort, possibly a twin brother, who, as I lifted the lid of my garbage can to throw something away, leapt from the detritus and onto my leg, which caused me to scream in such a manner that the police are no doubt en route to my apartment now. I have made an executive decision to burn down this building and move to Queens.

All the Negatives

2011-07-11T17:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I'm running in the park, I'll pass people fast enough to hear little snippets of their conversations. The other day I passed a girl who was dealing with some marital strife and reaming out her sullen boyfriend. "Stop saying you don't get me!" she said. "I know you get me. And whenever I see you called my phone, I call you back. I don't never not call you back."

The line stayed with me for the ensuing mile or so, both because of the deft use of a triple negative and because of the message behind it. So the lady had some priorities. She got done what needed getting done. I was impressed by her commitment to the missed call, as I myself am the type of person who might maybe not call you back. And if I don't, it's because I'm not really feeling you.

I went out with J just once, last week, after meeting him at a club on Saturday night and dancing for a while. He seemed okay and didn't give off any skeezy vibes, so I decided to roll with it and meet up with him in the harsh light of day to see if we could click. I could tell from the get go that I wasn't overly interested because I had to really convince myself to take a shower beforehand. And it's July in New York City and after a day in and out of air conditioning and two subway rides with transfers, I was not exactly a daisy.

The date was fine. J was cordial and interesting and well traveled. We had a genuine rapport. Unfortunately for him, he did have to bear the brunt of my disillusionment with the last creepster I hung out with, the one who lied a lot, by listening to me fact-check everything he said. ("Oh, cool, I took that writing class too." "Oh yeah, what was the teacher's name?") J's stories didn't contain any gaping holes and everything seemed to add up. The conversation was fairly easy and mostly comfortable, but for the fact that the way J was looking at me I could tell that the Kissing Part was going to start pretty soon. And even lubed up on cheap sangria, I could not bring myself to get excited about that.

The Kissing Part did eventually rear its ugly head, and I spent the bulk of that Part just waiting for it to be over. Then when J suggested that we go to his place because it was much more comfortable, I bounced. I spent the ensuing subway ride thinking about the Kissing Part and wrinkling my nose. And when I recounted the date to my friends later, I wrinkled it again. "I don't know what it is," I said. "It just didn't feel right to me."

"You're not attracted to him," they said.

This was new. I was not aware that this was a Thing, that you could just let things drop with a perfectly nice human being for no reason other than the lack of a visceral reaction. Usually when I let things drop it's because you were boring at dinner, or you sang along with all the songs in the movie after they were already over, or you lied about your zipper being broken because SERIOUSLY WHO DOES THAT, but I didn't realize that you could just shrug it off. But that's what I was doing, shrugging it off.

I figured J would text me again and I was right; he sent me a perfectly nice message on Friday night saying that he'd had fun and suggesting a book he thought I'd like. I didn't respond, but this was more due to my erroneous belief that I could down three vodka tonics in under two hours than to my personal opinion of J. The upshot was I got a really good night's sleep and the rest of my weekend was amazing. Outdoor dance parties, birthdays, beach days, and on Sunday night Nicole invited me to her house to give me a big bag of clothes.

After Nicole had facilitated my own personal Christmas, the two of us kicked back for a while and talked smack about every man who has ever pursued us, because we are monsters. During this conversation, J texted again, and I told Nicole I wasn't sure of how to handle this. My typical move at this point would be the slow fade-out, wherein I simply stopped responding bit by bit and then entirely, rolling my eyes at every ensuing message J sent into dead air. But it didn't really seem like he deserved that. Also, a friend of mine had recently rocked the internet dating world when she responded to a come-hither message she'd received, simply to say, "I'm sorry, but I'm not interested." The really crazy part was that the jilted guy actually wrote back to thank her for her honesty. "So maybe I should do that," I told Nicole. "Maybe that's actually nicer."

"I doubt it," she said. "Every now and then someone might appreciate that, but I think most guys would get really offended."

At home that night, my closet stuffed and my tub filled with sand, I thought about it more. Maybe it was time to take up a new line of defense. Maybe it was time to never not call J back. The only real risk posed by this method was that it would be a lot more finalized than the fade-out; there could be no late-night meetups if I ever learned to stop at two vodka tonics. I consulted with the cricket on my shoulder about this (I'm not referring to my conscience; I live in a really old building with lackluster pest control) and we decided I should go for it. So I texted J. I told him I was sorry for not answering sooner but I'd been at a friend's house; that I thought he was a really nice person but we were not on the same page, and I wished him all the best. And, send.

What surprised me was that he actually wrote me back. He did seem to take some umbrage at my calling him a "gentleman" (which I didn't do, but I suppose "really nice person" is close enough) and said that I could have no idea what page he was on because we'd never talked about that. But, he said, that's cool. I appreciate that you chose to handle things in a respectful manner. All the best Kaitlyn.

That pop! It was my mind being blown! I could understand his defensiveness (nobody likes to be shut down, especially not with some bullshit rhetoric about what pages we were on) but ultimately it sounded like he was glad I did it. Me and all the crickets danced a little dance of success and then I went to bed. You know, alone. But feeling like decent human being, and not just some jackass.

ADDENDUM 7/12: Anyway I went to a free concert in Fort Greene Park and I was doing a loud impression of someone I don't like for the benefit of my friend Emily and someone said, "Kaitlyn?" and what do you know. Hello J. I guess I'm glad we cleared things up.

All Right Already the Show Goes On

2011-07-07T21:12:00.000-07:00

Once you read, in a book about psychic divination with a chapter on human faces, that people with a mole dropped between their eyes had the Third Eye, the gift of sight, and could use it to see into your soul. Years later, you avoid eye contact with women with this mole. You see them on the subway, searching, seeking, and you look away, stare into the black window, the miles and miles of nothing propped up by steel columns, at your own reflection. The book also said that people whose mouths drew down at the corners were generally unhappy, and you can see in this false mirror the shade of your face, wrinkle-less, emotionless, gray against the whizzing black with eyes like dark holes, and a sad-clown mouth that points toward your shoulders as though to draw attention away.

And perhaps it's true. Once you had a drama teacher (such a layered and storied education was yours) who proved the way to force-cry onstage by crumpling his face into a mask of fear; Don't think about your dog dying, he said, Or your boyfriend leaving you. Create a face that looks as though you're hurt, and your body will respond in kind. He followed this lecture with a sob and a shedding of real tears, and everyone in the drama class sobered up long enough to mutter, What the fuck.

So by the mathematics applied by a person on the train two drinks deep after midnight; perhaps, regardless of the mole theory, perhaps the sad-mouth theory holds some water; perhaps a person with such a mouth is perpetually that much closer to tears than a person with a naturally upward curve of the lips. Perhaps that tiny margin of error plays a legitimate role in the overall human condition of such a person. Perhaps the scummy window of a subway car in the dark is the most honest reflection a person can come by.

Whatever the reason, you're riding home alone, despite numerous enthusiastic invitations to accompany home someone who in all likelihood did not simply want to sit on the sofa and hold hands with you; perhaps you feel you should have gone because this person accepted and enjoyed you even after you slipped up and called your houseplant a "she" and perhaps your own trepidation at the offer is simply a reaction to the fact that the last person you cared about cared so little for you that he never even bothered to lie, and the person after him cared so much that he lied about everything. Perhaps the true key to the human condition is this inherent brokenness that one can only see in a subway window after so much sangria and perhaps you're not ready to show this bit off. Perhaps you had one thing in the world you promised you'd never talk about and then you decided to write a book about it. Perhaps you found a book on the sidewalk (beside a blue dress, it must be noted, that fits you perfectly); a book about writing by Ann Lamott that warned, "If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in." And the more you think about it, the more she's probably right.

Or perhaps none of it means anything. Maybe you're wrong and there is such a thing as coincidence and it's foolhardy to search for meaning in every little wrinkle. Maybe you went home alone because you wanted to listen to that one Lupe Fiasco song on repeat and stare at your reflection, mouthing the words, in the blank space beyond the subway tunnel. And if that's all there is, that's okay too.

Let It Snow

2011-01-11T18:23:00.000-08:00

This time, everyone is prepared. The streets were salted before the first flakes fell; the plows are oiled up and the mayor is watching the skies. I bought galoshes. The best way I know to deal with crummy weather is to spend money on stuff I can't use when the sun is out. This is why I refuse to buy a black umbrella. My umbrella is silver and I look forward to the day I get to march around the financial district like a glimmer of hope in a downpour. Likewise, my coat is purple, my scarf is infinity, my mittens have flip-tops and my galoshes are patterned with little pink polo players. I am the only person in New York looking forward to tomorrow's commute.

Tonight I am reclining, wearing the same red pajama pants I've been wearing all week (these red pajama pants make me look like I've given up on life but my GOD they are like a HUG around my lower half. There is something to be said for buying pjs two sizes too big), and looking at armchairs on Overstock.com. Is this who I am now? I don't want you to know that this is who I am now. I would like to have a sharper edge and a cooler Tuesday night plan. But there is something to be said for stability, for embracing it for the first time in your life and accepting that I am HERE, and I intend to STAY HERE, build and compound on this life and reshuffle and redecorate it instead of dropping it to start something new. There is something to be said for finally putting out the Peruvian sugar bowl and the Moroccan tea set and the jewelry box with my grandmother's signature on the blue lining inside the lid, with the date, "1916." There is something to be said for painting and for 401(k)s and for my name on a lease, and for the absolute delirious pleasure I get from putting my feet on my coffee table and sitting on my sofa while I mentally redecorate my living room.

So I've gone soft, okay, that's fair, but deep down I've always been a rather boring person, a meticulously organized and calculating sort of person and I remember telling a boy, before I went to Peru, that I didn't want to live in Peru so much as I wanted to have lived in Peru and he said I get it. Maybe he did. Yesterday I went to the dentist (who I hate) and he asked what I did for New Years and somehow we got to talking about Palma and he listened rapt attention, peppering me with questions, and me mumbling through my novacaine and cotton wads and so flattered by the attention that I almost don't mind that he made me get a root canal. Sometimes I wonder if I am really back forever, as I promise, or if the rolled-eyed disbelief of the people who ask where I'm going next isn't onto something greater. The longer I stay, the more I accumulate, and I'm going to have a hard time fitting those galoshes into a duffel bag.

On Bizarre (If Somewhat Contrived) Parallels

2011-01-05T20:13:00.000-08:00

2011 was a great success for the first six hours. The dress was exclusive and the heels were overpriced and I had managed to achieve this swoopy silver eyeliner thing I was trying, so my goals for the evening were more or less met. We were making friends and giving toasts, dancing and laughing and chain-smoking out in the snow. Dennis was tossing helium balloons into the air, "I'm setting them free!" he said, and I reprimanded him. "They can't survive in the wild," I said. "You know what happens to helium balloons when they're released from captivity? They get tangled in a branch in my courtyard and they deflate and turn gray and hang there forever. You should keep them indoors." But Dennis didn't listen.

We hopped from place to place, stopping at one point to join a massive snowball fight that was being fought from four corners of an intersection. Warriors were ducking and rolling over cars, ice bombs were everywhere. The exclusive dress was rather short and my aim is bad, so I crouched behind a parked car until someone escorted me into the bar. "What are you drinking?" he asked, and I said vodka and then he got distracted, or confused, or dissolved or something, but then the cops broke up the snowball fight and Rob came in and the vodka was poured. We cheersed, met some French filmmakers, recreated scenes from the battlefield, and then we continued our tour of Williamsburg.

If I were to pinpoint the exact moment this year went wrong for me, I would place it at about 5:45 a.m. on January 1st. I know it was before 6, because the open bar was only from 5-6, and I'd already had at least one free vodka and was going for the second. "We don't have any more vodka," the bartender told me. "Did you want tequila instead?" And God forgive me, I said yes. The next hour passes in snapshots and tableaus; scenes I remember with their connecting sequences eroded to black. The only very clear memory I have of that morning is standing at my front door with Dennis, knowing that a key would open it, wondering where on earth I'd ever find a key? Where were the keys usually? "Where's your purse?" Dennis asked, and the realization drooped my shoulders. Where was my purse.

The buzzer to my apartment building is hooked up to my phone, so when people press it I get a call and I have to press 0 to let them in. This is handy in the event that I lose my keys, because it means I can buzz myself in through the first set of doors. I'd given Dennis a spare key to my own apartment, so he let us in and fell into a drunken slumber on my sofa while I started calling around to cancel my credit cards. I tried to call the cab company, but I fell asleep while it was ringing. I'd taken my sense of responsibility as far as it would go.

A few days later, on Dennis's last night, I pulled out the old I've-been-drinking-for-six-straight-days-and-I-have-work-in-the-morning routine, and went home early. I told him to buzz up when he got to the front door, and I'd let him in the building. When I got home I checked my mailbox, and I was happy to see that my new credit card had arrived. What confused me was the brand on the card. It was a reissued copy of a credit card that had not been lost with the missing purse, of a card that had rung in the new year in my top desk drawer while the other cards went out dancing. I called the credit card company and had a rather long and confusing discussion with the woman in customer service, who told me that the new card had been a standard reissue and had nothing to do with my canceling the old ones. I was not easily convinced of this matter, and I ended up on the phone with customer service for a rather long period of time, long enough to accidentally click off the ringer without noticing it. I remained unaware that it was off until about three o'clock in the morning, when my apartment doorbell rang.

It was Dennis, standing out in the hallway on the third floor. I asked how he'd gotten upstairs, and he told me he'd been ringing the buzzer for twenty minutes, but I hadn't answered. He said he climbed into the courtyard and used the inner door to the first floor. It must be said that the courtyard is an otherwise-inaccessible wasteland of dead helium balloons and takeout containers and pigeon bones, and that the only bit of it that's not walled in is blocked by a ten-foot iron gate with barbed wire at the top. I asked Dennis if he'd gotten cut. "A little," he said. We waited for sirens, police presence questioning the foreign intruder infiltrating the local apartment buildings, but none arrived. We went to sleep.

The next morning Dennis woke up and packed his bags. We hugged on the subway when I got off to transfer, took the train to work and slogged through the piles of papers that had accumulated in my absence. I told my coworkers about the crazy German who braved blizzards and barbed wire on his trip to New York. I took a leisurely lunch and my phone buzzed with a call from an unknown number. "Hello?" I asked.

"Hi," said a man on the other line. "What number is this?"

"Didn't you just dial it?" I asked.

He was thrown. "Well... can you tell me your location?"

"No," I said. "I don't think so."

The man sounded confused. "Are you at the school?"

"No, I'm not," I said. "Who is this?"

"I'm at the school," he said. "Did you know this phone was reported lost?"

Now I was confused. "It's not lost," I said. "It's in my hand."

The man laughed uncomfortably, but I hadn't been making a joke. My phone was the one thing of value that had made it out of my purse alive. How was it that the items that hadn't gone missing were the only things turning up? Had I lost the purse or had the purse lost me?

The man told me he probably had the wrong number and disconnected. I wandered back to work, while my favorite German hung in midair over the Atlantic, and settled back into my weekday.

German Engineering

2010-12-29T16:10:00.000-08:00

Now we're three days out of the blizzard that turned the world's greatest city into the Wet Sock Capital of the Universe, and still there is a puddle of sludge at the end of my street deep enough to swim in. The storm and its clusterfuck of an aftermath have brought the citizens of New York together, as neighbors shovel each other's cars out of snow banks and commiserate over what a hassle it is to get around without the Q train. Everybody's got stories of where they got stuck on the subway or how high the snowbanks were; stories of human transcendence over the elements in the coldest and bleakest of circumstances. Leading the pack for said transcendence is Dennis, my industrious neighbor from my old flat in Palma, who has already become a local legend among my friends. When Dennis arrived in Detroit to discover that his connecting flight was canceled and he'd be spending New Years Eve alone in the airport, he rented a car and drove 600 miles to Brooklyn, greeting me at 6 o'clock the following morning hopped up on caffeine and adrenaline. We did a quick catch-up before I went to work and he went to bed, and then reconvened in the evening for no small amount of wine.

New Years Eve brings with it a sense of pressure to be doing something AWESOME beyond the awesomeness that any of your other friends, enemies, or acquaintances might be experiencing. This goes triple for New York and quintuple when you're hosting a German who just drove through 600 miles of snow to get to the party. My distaste for New Years Eve stems directly from this pressure but I believe I might be rising to the occasion on the planning front, and in any event I will be dressed for it. My amazing friends Danny and Jeff have procured for me an exclusive silver dress that is entirely see-through and heretofore worn only by very expensive display mannequins. I have not yet seen the dress but I am anxious to find out if a) it fits after the weather forced a cancellation of my visit to my grandfather's house and I had to eat the entire batch of cookies I'd made for him, and b) I have any shoes to match. This investigation could force me back into DSW to purchase yet another pair of heels that I can't wear outside without first wrapping them in plastic bags.

Dennis left several hours ago in search of a swimming pool (?) and to leave his rental car at the airport. The buildup to our evening out, this weeklong prelude to a new year, and the thought of braving public transit again has me ready to pull on some pajamas, stress-eat my way through my remaining Christmas cookies, and call it a day. Instead of bending to this desire I plan to call his phone repeatedly, start collecting plastic bags for my footwear, and potentially mix myself a rum and coke to ease into Wednesday night. I am pretty sure that when I do go back outside there will still be two feet of frozen sludge on my sidewalk and pools of icy water lining every curb, but I am holding onto the hope that this has all been a very vivid dream and it's really May. In conclusion, I am over the following things:

Snow
Ice
Slush
2010

And I am not over:

Silver stuff
Exclusive dresses
Christmas cookies
Shoes

And I hope that you have achieved a similar level of personal growth in the past year.

The Worst Thing

2010-12-07T15:49:00.000-08:00

The impetus for my taking on a life of servitude was my accumulation, after a year of living abroad, of a bit of credit card debt. My goal is to get back into the black, but that goal was made less realistic by my other recent accumulation, of shoes. I spent $200 on shoes last month. You're probably thinking that $200 bought me a whole pile of new shoes, but in reality I only bought two pairs. The sale, it must be said, was truly extreme, for these are brand-name shoes whose price tags tend to come with commas. I saved the receipt, which declared in bold lettering that my total savings was almost $700. $700! I'm practically making money off these things.

There was a legitimate reason for my extravagant purchase, and the reason was, naturally, a dude. I had been seeing this dude for a while and things ended. Actually when I told this story to Mallory she had a friend there who didn't know the background, and Mallory clarified, "He wasn't just some dude she was seeing for a while. He is the worst thing that ever happened to her." Mallory was, as ever, correct. I ended it with the worst thing that ever happened to me on the last night that I saw him, by insisting that I didn't want to talk to him ever again. The only way this differed from any of the previous times I'd ended things was that the next morning I dropped off a bag with his doorman that held everything he'd ever given me. My apartment was an emotional minefield and I was sick of opening drawers to find his T-shirts, or reshuffling my bookshelf without touching his novels. I wanted him away from me in all capacities, and I couldn't move forward while I was mired in reminders of the past. Also I had cut every page of his favorite Baudrillard book into little shreds and I wanted him to know it.

After that I disappeared into the anonymity of New York City, safely hidden in the crowd and confident that we'd never cross paths again. Ha! I'm kidding. That's what I would do if this story bore any resemblance to normalcy, but I dropped off the bag with his doorman, remember? Because the worst thing that ever happened to me lives two blocks from my office. TWO BLOCKS. I have to walk past his building to get to my subway. I see him every single day. I see him from afar and my stomach lurches and I blink. He comes closer and his features grow fuzzy until it's evident that it isn't him at all, it's just some dude with the same gait or the same coat or the same haircut. I exhale feeling safe and exposed and I again wonder how I'll react on the day that the features don't fuzz out. Will I walk past him and pretend not to see? Will I throw out my middle finger and sneer? Will I burst into tears and punch him so hard that those pretty white teeth rain down onto the sidewalk? Who can say? All I know is that the drama of potential curls my fists and quickens my breath every time I leave the office, and I'm never safe till I reach the subway.

So life went on this way for a few weeks; the curled fists on the sidewalk, the worst thing lurking slightly off-camera, the red number on my card balance inching closer toward zero. Then one Sunday morning I cleaned Jenny's apartment. Jenny was a lovely, friendly woman who owned the dustiest old brownstone in South Brooklyn, and the scrubbing I gave it took five full hours. At the end Jenny gave me a fifty percent tip, and I wandered through the neighborhood thrilling at my newfound wealth. I was aiming to get home for a shower, but I meandered a bit. I bought a bagel and ate it on the sidewalk. I wandered through a clothing store. I got lost, naturally. All of these details felt mundane at the time, but their net worth was the doings of the whims of fate or my karmic debt, and so when I turned an eventual corner, unprepared emotionally, physically, or sartorially, the worst thing happened. And when I blinked his details didn't turn fuzzy and fade away; they came clearer. And now I knew how I'd react when I saw him. I would stomp straight up to him and wave. I would smell of Pinesol and shake dust from my hair. I would stand directly in his path, in jeans two sizes too big with bleach on the knees, and I would say hello. And he would try to blink my features out of focus and he would fail. He would take his headphones out of his ears and say, "Hey."

So it had happened. Greetings were exchanged. Weak attempts at small talk. A long, awkward silence while we each examined the depths of our pockets with our fingers, scratching and scraping for something to talk about. "I got your bag," he said finally. "I've been enjoying your edits to Baudrillard." I smirked. "It's really entertaining. Like a choose-your-own-adventure philosophy book."

"I thought you'd like that," I said, pushing cobwebs out of my face.

"Why didn't you give back my bridge photo?" he asked. "You gave me everything else, but not that. I was looking for it."

"The nail holes behind it were too depressing. I just left the photo up."

"Ah." Another uneasy pause. "So what was up with the gynecological thing?"

"The what?"

"The receipt from your gynecologist. For the ten-dollar copay. What was that about? I couldn't figure it out."

Whattheohmygod. "The what?" I said.

"The receipt. It freaked me out."

"That wasn't supposed to--I didn't mean--" I was stammering. Instinctively I put my hand over my face.

"That was so weird, Kaitlyn, " he said. "I couldn't figure out what it meant. I thought maybe you got an abortion and you were trying to tell me."

"A ten-dollar abortion?" I said. "Really?"

"I didn't know what to think. That receipt really freaked me out. That was the only thing that made me think you were really crazy. I mean the Baudrillard was funny..."

"I didn't put the receipt in there on purpose," I said. "I don't even know how it got in there. Jesus, I'm sorry."

"It's okay," he said. "I just wasn't sure."

I couldn't move my hand. "Sorry," I said. "Really."

He exhaled. "Well... you look good."

"No I don't. If I'd known I was going to bump into you I would have worn boots or something."

"I think about you a lot. I hope you're okay."

"Yeah I'm fine." The silence between us was flooding my mouth. I still couldn't get my hand off my face. He'd bought me these gloves, shit, shit. I stuffed them in my pocket.

"Well," he said finally. "I'm already kind of late."

"Yeah me too," I said. "Okay, then. Goodbye." He nodded and we continued in our opposite directions.

The next day I bought $200 worth of shoes. So fucking sue me.

On Breadwinning and the Principles Thereof

2010-12-06T20:58:00.001-08:00

So I've been working as a cleaning lady. We might as well get that out of the way. It's not a particularly glamorous situation but it does help a lot in the meeting of ends that is not otherwise attainable on my current salary at a nonprofit. I'm not going to try to convince you that cleaning apartments is my dream job, but I will say that getting a handful of bills after wasting four hours that I would have otherwise wasted for free is actually a pretty nice feeling.

Last weekend I cleaned for my first hoarder. She was extremely nice and her apartment was spacious and sunny. It wasn't dirty at all but it was quite full. I couldn't claim to understand it, but ultimately if having four can openers and twenty winter coats makes you feel more happy in your own skin, then I think you should do it. I pulled a scuzzy move and upped the price at the last minute, and not only did she pay me the extra ten bucks but she also gave me a tip. "Have you been cleaning for very long?" she asked me.

"Not that long," I said. "A couple of months." (This is an exaggeration by roughly a couple of months.)

"Have people mostly been cool?" she asked. I assured her that yes, for the most part people were fantastically cool. Then I gathered my coat, hopped on a train, and went to Tim's.

Not having worked in the service industry very long, I was sadly short on horror stories. Aside from one particularly aggressive housecat (whose Achilles heel was eventually determined to be the brandishing of a standard vacuum cleaner) I had never felt threatened or uncomfortable. People were generally friendly and most seemed relatively normal, even after the exposure revealed in their housekeeping habits. When I got to Tim's apartment, a tiny fourth-floor Manhattan one-bedroom, he offered a smile and a firm handshake, and I saw no immediate reason to get my guard up. Tim was youngish and rather handsome, a suity-looking guy in a dark apartment, watching TV and waiting for the help to arrive. My first, naive thought upon arriving at Tim's place was that he certainly utilized every inch of space. He showed me to the kitchen, a cluttered room about three steps away from the living room with dirty dishes piled on the counter, stovetop, and floor. The sink was full of more dishes and a heap of eggshells. "You only need to do the kitchen and the bathroom," said Tim. "The cleaning supplies are right here." He pointed to some spray bottles and a withered brown sponge.

"Have you got any other sponges?" I asked.

"No."

Tim retired to his chair in the living room and I set to work in the bathroom with the help of the used sponge. The quality of Tim's cleaning products turned out not to matter anyway, since his bathroom was decades beyond repair. The grout was spotted with green and black mold and the tub was blue with soap scum. That Tim would use this room to clean his person was a shock, but even moreso were the bottles of fancy conditioner and pink razors--indicators of a woman's presence. A woman would shower here? Would enter this room willingly? My mind was blown, because I was using bleach on Tim's toilet seat and I still held it for three hours rather than expose myself to any surface in his apartment. The man lived in squalor. His hoarding put my earlier client's to shame. At least eight used toothbrushes decorated the sink, and piles of bottles--shampoo, shaving cream, tanning oil, nail polish remover, body lotion, toothpaste, sunscreen, bubble bath--lined the floor along the walls. The bottles were fused together with a thick paste of soap scum and dust. I lifted one pile to find another used sponge, and underneath that, a pile of mouse droppings. I decided then that I wasn't being paid enough to organize Tim's bottle collection, and I left the remaining hundred where they lay.

While I scrubbed (with scalding water, through latex gloves) I could hear Tim in the other room, making occasional outbursts at the TV. He was watching some game while I worked and I figured he'd be sheepish at my reemergence, hoping I hadn't been able to hear his passion for athletics. But when I came back into the kitchen, picking eggshells out of the sink and scrubbing dishes with the same moldy sponge I'd just used to wipe down his toilet, Tim completely ignored me. Not only that, but he maintained a conversation with the television (a rather angry one) while I stood less than ten feet away. Suddenly he rose and announced that he was going out. He asked if I needed anything.

"I need a mop," I said.

"A mop," he said. "A mmmmop. We have a broom but where is a mmmmop." He stumbled as he turned in circles, slurring badly. It was suddenly apparent that Tim was extremely drunk. I had not noticed his intoxication when I arrived at the apartment, which meant that either I'd given him the benefit of the doubt for being sober alone at 5pm on a Sunday, or else he'd gotten completely hammered in the hour that I'd been in the bathroom. Tim found the mop, a ratty yellow thing stuffed behind the refrigerator, and left the apartment, leaving the television on. I allowed myself a moment to take in the details of the apartment. Dark piles of mystery objects lined the cave of a living room, with a hollowed-out space for Tim's chair. A dozen clocks hung on walls and propped on shelves, all set to the proper time. Wobbly tables lined the walls of the kitchen, stacked with towers of cookware that was in turn lined with dead cockroaches. A dry cleaning receipt was stuck to the fridge, with Bill's address and a woman's name. I wondered who she was and why she would live like this. I started to contemplate making a run for it. I would take a hit for having spent any time at all in that filthy bathroom, but at least I'd be gone before drunk, dirty Tim arrived back. I was shaking, spraying bleach onto the stovetop and wiping it off in smears.

Tim returned without fanfare or salutations. He sat back in his chair with some Chinese takeout. "What the fuck are we watching," he grumbled, and flipped channels, pausing to argue with the people on TV. I washed the rest of the dishes and threw them, still dripping, into murky kitchen cabinets. To mop the kitchen I needed Tim's help in moving the tables into his living room. He rose and grabbed each bulky piece of mildewing wood. "We'll move this... right THERRRRRE," he announced, dropping one table. "And this... right THERRRRE..." His voice rose to high pitches and low growls in an attempt to cover his slurry inebriation, but Tim was a carnival funhouse low on batteries. The swooping octaves only exacerbated my growing nerviness. He slumped back down in his chair and I slid the mop over the kitchen tiles and then stood by the door, watching him watch television, while I dressed for the cold. He didn't turn.

"Well," I said finally. "I'm done." Tim's head swiveled and his eyes locked on me, blank and dewey. We faced each other for an extended, uncomfortable moment while he tried to register what I had said. Then he rose. "I don't know how you're going to get back into your kitchen," I said.

"Why do you say that." It wasn't a question. Tim's gaze was unblinking as he reached into his pocket.

I grabbed the doorknob. "Because all your furniture is blocking your path."

"Let's hope not." He held out a hand full of bills.

"Thankyougoodnight," I said, and ran out. My heart shuddered in my chest and the cold burned my lungs. I left Tim there behind a fortress of moldy furniture without looking back.

On Interpretation

2010-11-30T20:25:00.000-08:00

My mother:

"You know, I always had mine with milk but Weight Watchers says that's two points. So you know what I did, I just didn't count them. But then I felt guilty. So I started taking it black, and you know what, it's true what they say. You really don't go back."

Training

2010-10-20T18:50:00.000-07:00

Lately my pursuits have been rather low-key. Last weekend I mulled cider and bought a coffee table. Today I mopped. My bar tabs are slimmer and my clothes are from the thrift store, and who's to say whether that's because I'm concientious or because I'm broke? Maybe I'm just gearing toward a major life overhaul by tiptoeing through piles of pre-owned jeans and cinnamon sticks. The creeping self-doubt that catches my tongue and wrinkles my nose is counteracted by the applause of people who support my storied misadventures and laud my bravery. I guess by now I know I'm intercontinental. But what I'm not is happy. I thought I'd find it by casting off everything and running away, but instead I got homesick and heartsick and I decided to turn around. So what I'm doing now is more grown-up stuff; fretting over the electric bill and picking out curtains. And perhaps in this is where salvation lies.

One aspect of this new chapter of my life, this chapter that places value on long-term goals and 401(k)s and flirtations with the idea of higher education, is that I'm training for a half-marathon. Technically I suppose I'm training for five of them, alongside a handful of my coworkers and a fearless leader who writes us motivational emails and charts our progress on a Google spreadsheet. He tsks at me when I tell him I missed yesterday's run, and shakes his head at my excuse that I don't like being in the park at night. "Girl, you're fine," he says. "There are so many people running in that park and the track is really well-lit." I put on my game face but I remember that there was a shooting there last summer.

This is how you get to the park from my house: Take a left out the front door and walk three blocks. Then take another left, walk one block, turn right and walk another block. Stop when you hit the trees. There is that one-block crossover but the route is, for all intents and purposes, a line. I've been in my apartment for three months now, and in this neighborhood for four, so I've walked to the park roughly thirty million times. But last week, when I left my building in my sneakers and workout pants, rushing to beat the sinking sun, I managed to miss it. I was so focused on my pace and destination (I don't street run, mind you. I don't like having to jog in place at stoplights and make eye contact with shopkeepers and loiterers. But I definitely walk like I've got somewhere to be) that not only did I manage to miss the park entirely, but I actually somehow doubled back. Instead of walking in a straight line, I walked in a circle, and I did not realize it until I was nearly back at my house. At that point I gave up, and all five half-marathons inched a little further out of my grasp.

The only thing notable about my inability to walk in a straight line is the fact that it is in no way notable. Some people would be surprised to realize that they could not locate the (gigantic, world-famous, landmark) park five blocks from their own homes, but I am not one of those people. I experience a small swell of pride when I can find my subway station on the first try. It does not surprise me when I misplace my own house. What blows me away is the fact that other people can always find theirs--consistently! And with almost no effort! My dearth of directional sense gets me rolled eyes from cab drivers and undoubtedly loses me a lot of respect. The cause of it is unknown. My only theory is that perhaps during my formative years my parents kept me in a Skinner box and I never learned to experience the world. But whatever the reason, this issue leaves me with a lot of missed runs and no shortage of angry cabbies.

On Monday, in what will at first seem to you, the reader, to be a totally unrelated event but will momentarily reveal its cyclical importance, I went with Dorothy to watch a talk about paranormal activity. The speaker, Dom, was a fascinating guy who spoke of his own out-of-body experiences as a child and his interaction with his grandfather after he'd passed. (My grandmother shows up in my dreams occasionally as well, usually to give me dating advice.) Dom is a real ghost hunter who brought along audio and visual evidence from some of the calls he and his team have been on. (His site is at www.paranormal-nyc.com.) Dom's stories were fascinating, particularly so because he was happy and ready to debunk any possible paranormal phenomena that had a logical explanation. He was very knowledgeable about his field and happy to answer questions at the end of the talk. One girl raised her hand and asked why he thought some people stayed around as spirits after they died. "Well some of them have unfinished business," Dom answered. "And others I think are just lost."

There is no hope. If I can't find my own front door there is no way I'm going to know how to get to the afterlife. If I die before I finish all my half-marathons, please bury me with a compass.

We Now Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

2010-06-21T18:01:00.000-07:00

While I was staying at Danny's apartment, I decided to go running in Central Park. I don't know the topography very well, so when I found a loop full of sweaty sneakered joggers, I jumped in. What happened was, I found myself awash in the middle of a road race. Somehow I'd fallen right into the thick of it, and people handed me water and a woman with a bullhorn barked out my speed and I was actively perspired on by at least two different men. I went around the loop three times, while the racers ostensibly followed a designated path, me making maudlin circles on the concrete while the crowd around me frantically elbowed its way toward the finish line.

This is basically a microcosm of my return to New York.

The best thing about moving to New York for the third time is a) the fact that I managed to score a job before I got here (a phenomenon that I can only chalk up to the fact that the FIVE people who interviewed me really liked talking on Skype) and b) the fact that I have a bunch of friends willing to put me up till I find an apartment. For a week I lived in the city with Danny and his two roommates, and then I moved with Emily to a more spacious Brooklyn sublet. We stay in her friend Piper's place, a furnished one-bedroom lined with books and potted plants. I apartment-hunt when I'm not working, which is seldom, and I shake my head at every option that sounds too expensive. My move from corporate law to nonprofit comes with the benefit of enjoying my job, but it also comes with a major salary cut. Luckily I got used to earning less than peanuts in Spain.

I'm easily the palest person in my new neighborhood, and everyone stares at me when I ask the clerk in the beauty supply store for the special sunscreen (which they keep behind the counter, presumably just to humiliate me, since I'm obviously the only person in town rocking SPF 85) but people are pretty friendly. Also I live right beside Prospect Park, a park with whose running path I am more familiar, and I've yet to interrupt any road races.

My commute is relatively short, since I live off an express train, but I've already fallen back onto my old habits. Said habits being (this is super awkward so apologies in advance) that I cry on public transportation. I don't know why, but I've done it for my entire adult life. Something about the jarring mesh of public and private spheres gets me overemoting behind my giant sunglasses, every time. That and the thought of a year abroad scripted to end with a joyful embrace amid a field of daffodils while the credits rolled, a year that instead wound up with me holding my still-beating heart in a swath of wax paper like a fresh hunk of deli meat while the dude in question backed away, feigning vegetarianism. Internet, don't do what I did. Don't saddle a long-distance friendship, even if the word friendship is in giant, seventy-two-point-font quotes, with an expectation of some kind of real human adult connection once the two of you are in the same time zone. Multiple times I have erred in this manner, and multiple times I have wept on the Q train while the passengers around me shrank into their headphones. Learn from my mistakes. Then again, you probably shouldn't take advice from me; I'm the one who left snot on the subway pole.

My crumpled dreams aside, New York is bang-on. I have a new job that I dig and everyone speaks English. I have a lead on a dream apartment that I'm going to go ahead and assume is already mine. And I have a lot of friends running around town, mired in their old lives, slightly off-course from the places I'd left them, inviting me to join in whatever mayhem awaits. So I'm inching out of this road race, looking for my turn.

Curtain

2010-06-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

When Mikaele got home on Friday afternoon he found me sitting at the window, chain-smoking and crying. The awkward part was that he had two strange men with him. "Oh no!" he said. "What happened?" His voice dropped to a whisper. "Don't, honestly; there are people, there are people." I snuffled a bit and said that it was nothing, but that it had been my last day of class and I already missed my kids. I nodded hello to the boys behind him, who began setting up lights and cameras to film a cooking show in Mikaele's kitchen, and I went off to check my emails before my last tutoring session with my private clients.

The kids had been adorable, of course, making me cards and peppering me with questions about my life in New York. They told me I must be very rich to take two planes home, kissed me on the cheeks and fought to group-hug me. Some of them cried and I had to sit with them and stroke their hair, but there was nothing I could say. It sucks to be a trusted adult removed from the life of a child you care about, and this sad reality can sometimes lead to weepy cigarette breaks that preempt Catalan cooking shows. I pulled it together for the internet cafe, sent a list of references to a job that I'd been interviewing for (on Skype, at internet cafes, a comedy of errors rife with technological snafus) and then went off to tutoring, where I was greeted with a giant chocolate cake in my honor, prepared by my clients' mom. We spoke in English, over our cake, of their upcoming exams and my flights home, and then I hugged everyone goodbye and went back to Mikaele's to prepare for the party.

The way I ended up living with Mikaele was, my old roommate went crazy. The guy had more than his share of issues (I once saw him throw a cat off a four-story rooftop, into a swimming pool) but we were able to maintain a six-month cohabitation based on mutually-kept distance, until he tried to screw me out of some rent money in my final two weeks. He'd figured I'd be stuck with nowhere to go, but he hadn't forseen the hospitality of Mikaele, who lived down the street, or the upstandingness of my other friends, who helped me haul all 1200 kilograms of clothes, shoes, and souvenirs up three flights of stairs into Mikaele's little white bachelor pad. For the next two weeks Mikaele fed me, watered me, and kept me entertained with the personal dramas of everyone in Palma. Mikaele has a habit of announcing, whenever he enters a room, "You will not BELIEVE what just happened to me," and usually he's right. Everybody knows him and wants to involve him in their personal lives. One day he went out to buy an ice cream cone and ended up helping some lady move apartments.

So the party was sort of a going-away party, although Jen and JJ had already left for Ibiza the day before, and they were an integral part of our little in-crowd, so it was not the party it should have been, though it was still a good one. All the American language teachers showed up, and so did Felix and his friend Jamie (a new Jamie, because Felix only rolls with Jamie sidekicks) and of course Kelly and Jacques and my hot neighbor, who reached into his personality closet (hot neighbor : personalities :: Kaitlyn : shoes) and inexplicably chose to go as Meathead for the evening. I was busy, though. We were all giving each other manicures and drinking blancos de verano (one part white wine, two parts gaseosa, lemon rind, a squirt of lemon juice) and arguing over the music. After the party the majority dispersed, but Mikaele, Jamie, Felix and I walked to the bars and danced and drank well past dawn, stumbling outside into a pink and white sunrise, silent and smoky and nearly abandoned.

My last day in town I spent packing and panicking, the combination of which took up so much time and energy that I wasn't actually able to squeeze in any one-last beach visits or one-last climb up to the terrace. At nine o'clock Mikale, Jacques and I traipsed to Kelly's house for a fancy homemade dinner and more blancos de verano (you cannot understand about the blancos de verano till you've had one) and then we sat around trying to talk through our hangovers and the weight of a brilliant time that's coming to a close. Eventually we gave up and hugged goodbye, and at home Mikaele went to sleep while I lay staring at the ceiling, thinking about things that might go wrong.

The next day I flew to Barcelona, running on fumes and airline fees, and while I waited for my hostel bed I checked my email to find that I'd been hired for the job in New York. I called Kelly and Mikaele with the news and sleep-walked around the city for most of the day, snapping photos and thinking about home. My hot neighbor called me, having donned for the day his Genuine and Attentive personality, to wish me good luck and to tell me he'd miss me, and then Jen and JJ called to say the same. When my feet finally refused to take me any further I took myself out for a Lebanese dinner, ate some mediocre chicken and pita, and put myself to bed.

The next day at the airport, the security guard asked me questions to clear me for takeoff. She noted that I'd been in Spain a long time, and asked what I'd been doing. I told her I'd been teaching English, but now I was done. "Why are you going home?" she asked.

"I miss my mom," I answered, and she smirked.

"Do you have an NIE card?" she asked. I nodded and produced my national identification. "I'm surprised you aren't going to stay," she said. "I thought you might stay, because you have an NIE card." And at that moment, I really, really wanted to.

Sunset

2010-05-10T04:09:00.000-07:00

Winding down. Palma days are drawing to a close and I'm toeing my triumphant return to New York City. Palma is wonderful, of course, but this extended vacation has got to end somewhere. The way I've described it before (and will again, since once I sink my teeth into a metaphor I like I tend not to let go) is that Palma is like a resort where you've stayed so long that now you know all the hotel staff by name. You're making the bed because you don't want to trouble Rosario; you're behind the bar mixing mojitos when Raul is too busy. Weekends are lush and extended; they're wine and gossip on the terrace and endless games of Spades that the girls always win even if the boys cheat. Weekends dump cruise liners full of tourists into the city center and we watch them sail off at night from Jacque's balcony, giant strings of white lights that disappear into the mist until they're just floating hunks of stars. Weekends here start around Tuesday afternoon.

Teaching continues to school me. The kids still make me feel like a celebrity; applause and group hugs when I come into the room, whispered anticipation when I read Eric Carle stories about overindulgent caterpillars. One day in my fifth grade class I broke my own heart when I told the students to get into groups for the next activity. I watched as the friends jumped into fast clusters of three, leaving a handful of students looking lost at their desks. I remember fifth grade, and the twisting feeling I got in my stomach whenever we had to choose partners; the way I'd sit idly doodling in my notebook till someone else with no friends wordlessly sat down beside me. I hated imposing that feeling onto anybody else. I didn't do it on purpose. I just didn't want to admit that I didn't know all the students' names.

Home life is just as complicated. The revolving door of roommates leaves ample space for drama and the personal business of expats in Palma gets tossed out in party conversation and text messages. There are no secrets here. I like that I can bump into my hot neighbor every third time I leave my building, but I yearn for a day when I can dash out to the grocery store without makeup. My window terrace is a sightseeing spot, regardless of the fact that it faces an alleyway. People yell up from the ground floor to save their phone credit, and we accumulate passersby till there are six of us chatting between levels. The other day my solo bolognese foray turned into a four-man dinner party this way, and I got so nervous about my spaghetti skills (the hot neighbor was in attendance) that I made Mikaele cook it. Lucky for everyone he knew what he was doing.

Spring washes over Mallorca and the beaches are full of tourists and locals. You can tell them apart based on who's got their boobs out. One day I drooled quite vocally over a tanned, beefy local boy who'd been playing soccer (football) in the surf with his younger brothers, and Jen bet me five euro I wouldn't go over and talk to him. "What makes you think I won't do it?" I asked. "The fact that he's standing next to his mom and I can see her breasts? Is there any more awkward way to introduce yourself?" Jen got to keep the fiver.

My niece and nephew have grown; my family is expanding; my mom is way too far away. I have a bag full of gifts I bought in Morocco that the airline will doubtless charge me extra to carry on, but I can't come home without some way of saying, "I thought about you every day." I'm on skype and gchat and facebook and phone calls, but I'm still a continent away and six hours ahead. I ache for New York and I count the days (21) till I can start aching for Spain.

On Metaphor

2010-03-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

It's a wet, gray morning and the first grade class is starting to unravel. Usually they eat their lunches outside on the patio, but today they'll have to eat at their desks, to avoid the snapping rain that darkens the pavement. The buzz of anticipation intensifies as the clock inches toward lunchtime, and sitting still becomes even more difficult for a five-year-old. Everybody is up to sharpen pencils or erase the board or use the bathroom.

One little girl comes into the room to say that it's raining in the bathroom. The teacher and I nod at each other and smile and continue what we're doing. I'm dealing with Juan, who is sucking so intently on the sleeve of his sweatshirt that he looks likely to swallow his whole arm, while the teacher mediates an argument over a gold crayon. Little kids talk a lot and you can't pay attention to every word.

A few minutes later another little girl returns from the hallway to announce that it's raining in the bathroom. "Can you go look?" the teacher asks me, so I poke my head inside the gloomy girls' restroom. There's a hole in the ceiling above one toilet, and a steady shower has puddled the ground and spread across the tiles. I run down three flights of stairs to the office, to inform the director of the problem. He speaks no English, so I search my brain for my file of Spanish words, but I have no entry for "hole," "puddle," "leak," or "ceiling." I don't know how to explain what's going on.

"What's the matter, Kaitlyn?" the director asks me.

I answer, "It's, uh, raining in the bathroom."

Silver is My Favorite Color

2010-03-02T05:30:00.000-08:00

Two years ago I took a picture of a goat. The goat had sideways pupils, like Kermit the Frog, and I found them intriguing and worth capturing on film. I put the picture on the internet and nobody ever paid much attention to it, but nowadays when you google my name, the first thing that pops up is a picture of a goat. After that there is a roster from my high school graduating class, the roster from some other Kaitlyn's high school graduating class, and a bunch of stuff about an Italian softball player. There's also one quick blurb about a trip I took to Panama.

I hope to one day replace all these search results with stories about my boobs.

On Blind Dates

2010-02-14T01:47:00.000-08:00

One thing about being a young English speaker in a nest of Catalan-clucking mother hens is that everyone tries to hook me up with their sons. I'm getting used to the broad smiles of well-meaning Spanish women who approach me in the hallways to tell me about their handsome boys. It's difficult at first to work out their motives; if I'm to befriend these dudes, or date them, or meet them once a week for private lessons. Usually I just smile and nod and let the encounter take its own course.

The first Spanish boy I met for coffee was my coworker's son Quique (pronounce it like Kee-kay), a 26-year-old computer programmer. The date was set by his rather insistent mother for a Saturday afternoon before Christmas. I spent the day intensely choreographing a Mariah Carey dance with my roommates, a dance that quickly became an all day affair featuring costumes and dramatic lighting. I was not particularly excited by the prospect of meeting Quique (I am a woman who owns three pairs of pants and two of them have holes in the crotch, but I still judge men whose social lives are dictated by their mothers) so when rehearsal went long I texted him to say I couldn't make it. As luck would have it he never got the message, so when he called to say he'd been waiting for me for twenty minutes, I was wracked with guilt. I threw on a clean-ish top and some holey jeans and raced toward the Plaza Espana to meet him, sweaty and humming Mariah Carey and feeling like a complete jerk.

The pleasant surprise was that Quique was adorable. He was well dressed and charming and sweet-smelling, and he assured me that he hadn't at all minded waiting forty minutes for my arrival. Rather than explain about the dance rehearsal, I made up a story about my friend's birthday party that I'd helped to prepare for, preparations that dragged on longer than expected due to my friend's exacting nature. In reality Dennis was having a birthday party that night, but I'd interrupted his preparations to insist that he videotape the rest of us performing the dance. Quique accepted my story and we made easy conversation for the remainder of our date, perhaps talking about software a little more than I'd have liked but in any event having a perfectly enjoyable cup of coffee. When we parted ways I apologized once more for being late, and he kissed me on each cheek and said, "Don't worry, next time I will be late." Quique never called me again.

After that came Lluis and Julio, sixteen-year-olds whose plummetting English grades drew concern from their parents. Luckily this particular meeting was a paid one, and so now on Friday afternoons I meet with two high schoolers to talk about verb tenses for an hour, and when I leave I get fifteen Euro.

This brings us to my most recent mama's boy, Alberto. Alberto's mom took my number at school and instructed him to call me, and I agreed to meet him in the Plaza Espana at 6 o'clock on Friday.

When I got to the Plaza there was a short, somewhat goofy guy in a red scarf trying to catch my eye. I gave him a half-smile and kept walking past. I was uninterested in talking to strangers but at the same time I didn't want to alienate the spawn of any coworkers. I stood a few feet away and sent out some idle text messages for the sake of something to do. Finally I texted Alberto, "I'm here. I'm wearing a red coat." Then I walked back over to the red-scarf guy. He smiled when he saw me approach. "Eres Alberto?" I asked, and he nodded, "Si, si," and I shook his hand introduced myself. He kissed me on both cheeks and we started out on a brisk walk down the main street.

Alberto was considerably less attractive than Quique, and he was not much of a conversationalist. We'd talked on the phone only one time, but in that two minutes he'd had a much stronger command of the English language than he evidenced now. He said he'd studied German in school but I had not, so we spoke in Spanish; easy, open-ended questions that the other person answered and let fall to the floor, the awkward silence trailing behind us as we strode through the streets of Palma. I asked where we were going, and Alberto said we'd find a nice place to have a drink.

In short, Alberto made me uncomfortable. He was hesitant and confused and he seemed to have no idea of what his mother expected of him as my coffee date. More damningly, while we were walking he somehow text messaged me (in English) to say that he would be five minutes late. Now I was concerned, because despite my cell phone's penchant for holding back my texts (see: Quique), Alberto had definitely been waiting at the fountain before I got there. I showed him my phone. "Is this from you?" I asked.

"Si," he answered. "Soy Alberto."

"You sent me this text?"

"Si."

I was stuck. Either this bescarfed man was my intended date or else he wasn't; either I had shoddy phone service and he had faltering English skills or else he had been waiting for someone else entirely or else he was luring me to a wooded cabin decorated with human bones. Either I could bolt now and risk severely offending the entire family of a woman I had to see on a daily basis or else I could stay and risk literally everything else.

I decided to stick it out. My instincts screamed that this whole situation was wrong, so I treaded carefully. When I asked again where we were going, Alberto said he would take me to his car, to which I answered no; this seemed to throw off his plans so without explanation or fanfare we continued our brisk walk, the pace of which had accelerated to a steady trot, turning corners till we'd made a giant circle back to the Plaza Espana where we sat outdoors in the raw evening air about ten yards from our initial meeting place. Alberto ordered us each a coffee and I attempted to turn the conversation to travel. He spoke of the countries he'd visited in stammering Spanish, but he used the present verb tense, explaining, "I am in Holland and then I am in Belgium," which seemed even more bizarre than the real-time text messaging, a native speaker who didn't know how to say "I was."

It was around this time that my cell phone rang, and with relief I saw that the caller was Alberto, and when I picked up I heard the deep voice of a teenage boy telling me in English that he was waiting for me at the fountain, and I said I'd be right there. I stood and told the stranger across the table that I had to leave immediately and that he was not Alberto, to which he replied that yes, yes he was Alberto, and for a moment I tried to argue the point, waving my cell phone in his face and asking then who just called me, as if a logical deconstruction of his argument might convince him of anything. The waiter arrived just then with the coffees, and I jostled past him, avoiding eye contact with not-Alberto, who looked legitimately devastated by my rejection.

At the fountain there was a taller, handsomer Alberto, embracing a woman dressed as a clown. Alberto's English was top-notch, but he didn't know the meaning of the word "coat" so when he was approached by a woman in a red wig he thought it must be me and greeted her with a double-kiss and a hug. The woman was only trying to hand out promotional flyers and was taken aback by this display, and then he had to apologize. Alberto explained all of this to me over drinks in a nearby bar, as I retold the story of my own misadventure to him and his two adorable friends, both named Maria. The three of them were perfectly lovely, but they were all seventeen years old. Put it this way, I have seven brothers and sisters and the youngest one of them is still way too old to be rolling with seventeen-year-olds. The seventeen-year-olds thought I was cool for having left my oxygen tank behind at the old folks' home, and I thought that they were cute and idealistic and I particularly appreciated their insistence on paying for my drinks. After an hour or so I thanked them and departed for dinner, heading for home one last time past the fountain.

Updates

2010-02-08T09:49:00.000-08:00

Right so. The new power cord is still floating somewhere in the dead space between intercontinental post offices but my roommate is out getting his hair cut so I'm borrowing his. A lot is happening, although most of it is circular in direction, Palma being a very small island and the dramatic current events tending to repeat themselves from day to day. Case in point, I am riding out my fourth deadly cold in two short months, my compromised immune system battered by the snot-caked hands of sixty sniffling first graders, whose disgustingness as a group is trumped only by their adorability. This morning in art class they mixed tempera paints to create new colors, and then they got to give their new colors a special name. The fine motor skills of your average six-year-old do not lend themselves to the daubing of multiple colors onto a single canvas, and so the fruits of my students' labors were twenty-four thickly-caked spatters in varying shades of gray. For some reason, they all wanted to name their new color "red." When I explained that "red" had already been taken, they got creative. The hallway walls are now adorned with blobs of colorado, oranjin, and superdracula.

Last week one of my students, a little girl named Maria, was getting in my face all afternoon to show me the progress she was making in her coloring project. One of the other students alerted me to the fact that a boy named Jose was crying (first-graders have no concept of the difference between "my business" and "your business." Everything is "our business") and while I was tending to his issues Maria began furiously tapping me on the shoulder. I told her to sit down while I spoke to Jose, who is a sweet and gentle child with no grasp on the English language whatsoever, undoubtedly the fault of his crappy English teacher. Maria's seat happened to be directly in front of the area where I was standing, and so she sat down two feet away and waved her hand in my face for five incessant minutes in case I ever forgot that she wanted to talk. With David finally consoled, I turned to Maria and asked her what she needed. With a big smile on her face, Maria announced to me (in Spanish), "I CAN SEE YOUR BRA! IT'S WHITE!" And then she bounced around the class holding her chest to prove that she knew where a bra should go. Fucking kids, man.

I leave work with paint on my hands and glue in my hair, waving goodbye to hoardes of little people who think I'm a superhero, and then I go home to the dizzy community of travelers that makes up my social circle. We have a new roommate in Boogie's old bed, a French girl named Gladys who cooks white chocolate pies and cheesy risottos. Gladys rounds our group of roommates out to four, along with me, Ryan and Rob, though Kelly's still got keys and our neighbor Dennis is here all the time. Dennis' bathroom is about ten feet away from our terrace, so we interrupt his most private moments at least once a day by throwing ice cubes at his window. We host dinner parties and movie nights for the neighborhood yachties, and on the weekends there are Filipino basketball league championships and fiber optic flower shows.

Weekday nights have assigned properties as well, the most important being Tuesday Night Trivia, not only for the joy one experiences in exercising one's accumulation of seemingly-useless general knowledge, but also because one's quote-unquote teaching salary is less than one's monthly shoe consumption in a former life, and Trivia Night winners earn money. I have befriended an Irish musician, a man named Lorcan, whose fiscal reality is as bleak as my own and whose command of useless trivia is twice as impressive. Lorcan knows what NATO stands for, but I can name Avril Lavigne's ex-husband, so together we take Tuesday nights by storm, skulling pints and scribbling answers. Hours later we walk home with jangling pockets of silver euros and a black bar t-shirt which I inevitably forget somewhere. In this way I am slowly alienating every other regular player at Trivia Night, but I can finally afford to eat.

I'm halfway through my teaching contract and I'm a month away from summer. New York pulls me like an absent lover and my friends and family tell me they miss me. It rains here in winter and there are moments of darkness so bleak that I've more than once considered skipping out on Maria and Jose and their finger-painting comrades, boarding a flight bound for JFK and never looking back. But in truth it's kind of fantastic, and I'm glad I chose to stay.

Stuff is Still Happening

2010-01-28T02:20:00.000-08:00

But I can't tell you about it because my computer died. I don't like to update from the internet cafe because all the keyboards have broken spacebars. Why is the spacebar the first to go? I ordered a replacement power cord which is sort of like taking an asprin for a ruptured appendix but it's the best I can do at the moment. In the interim I am living pen to paper, just like the pilgrims. Joyous, exclamation-point-laden updates to follow, if/when my power cord arrives in the mail.

Resolutions

2010-01-01T10:04:00.000-08:00

Today is New Year's Day, I don't know if you heard. Last night for New Years we went to a masquerade party at a very fancy club that sold very expensive drinks. We were the only people there. Well, there were bartenders and the deejay, but the club itself had basically a 1:1 ratio of staff to patrons. This allowed us a very wide berth on which to get our groove, and we were able to perform lots of elaborate and complicated dance moves. Everybody was drinking, of course, because it was New Years Eve and that's the done thing, and it occurred to me that every time I drink I think, This is going to be the funnest thing ever, and then after a couple hours it occurs to me that This is actually the opposite of fun, and then I go home. The same thing happened last night, although luckily I managed to save my antithesis-of-fun moment until after midnight (the deejay made a big deal about how we were going to celebrate New Year's once for Spain and once for England. I said what about New York and he said New York was on its own) so I didn't miss much.

I sort of realized that this is a pattern, and that even the nights that don't end in my thinking This is the opposite of fun do carry some sort of dramatic pricetag, be it a drug dealer following me home (we have dealers on our corner whose presence is generally non-threatening, but as the night stretches on their posse accumulates more and more strung-out creepers and one of them followed me to my door the other night, his cell phone ringing in a distinct three-note chirp, and the next night at midnight when I walked past my open window I heard the same chirp go off again) or else an ill-advised attempt at online communications with people who are six hours behind me in their own drinking schedules, and who don't necessarily want to hear me spouting gibberish. So I'm thinking about giving up drinking. Probably not forever, but for a bit at least. This new leaf is unconvincing even to myself, since even as I make these claims I have a bottle of vodka hiding in my wardrobe. (This makes me rather like The O.C.'s Kirsten, does it not? On that episode where Peter Gallagher gets all, "I found this in your purse," and holds up the handle of Stoli, and she's like "That's just in case," all teary, and at that exact same moment her oddly sexy old father is having martinis by the pool with his unbearably hot young wife and she decides at the last minute not to poison his drink but then he has a heart attack and drowns in unison? And the hot wife calls Peter Gallagher and he breaks the news and Kirsten grabs the just-in-case-bottle and walks out of the room while that Coldplay song swells in the background? God, that was the best episode ever.) I'm sorry, I forgot what I was talking about. Oh, right, vodka. Teetotaling. Blah blah blah.

Tomorrow Kelly and I are going to Berlin, and this is exciting except that I made a huge mistake. I opened a bank account to deposit my pay, and they gave me a temporary card to use until my real card is provided next week. However! This card, it turns out, cannot be used in ATMs, and there are no branches of my bank in Germany. So somehow I have to find a way to make the five euro in my wallet last me four full days in Berlin. I guess it's a good thing I stopped drinking.

I Told You It Was a Small Town

2009-12-28T04:33:00.000-08:00

So it was Christmas Eve and I invited Y over, being as how Ryan and Kelly and I had all this shisha and rum balls and salmon pate and there was no one to share it with. Charles came as well and we listened to our music too loud which the neighbors really hate (the alley beside our apartment is an acoustical anomaly, in that the noise from inside bounces against the walls and actually sounds louder outside. Sucks for the people trying to tuck their kids in for Papa Noel, I'd imagine). So we were eating and drinking and dancing and telling dirty jokes when Y asked if he could invite his friends J and G over, to which I responded of course, it's Christmas, and then ten minutes later he introduced me to his friend G and I said, "Yes, we've met," and G squinched up his pug face till it wrinkled all the way into his bald head and said, "We have?"

I had promised myself that I would not let his assholery go unchecked. I had promised that he was going to know my wrath. But damn, it was Christmas. What could I do. So I just smiled and said, "Yes, we met one time at Shamrock," and G shook his head like I was the crazy one, and then Y whispered could he offer his friends a drink. Of course he could, I said, and I went into the kitchen with him to crack open my bottle of vodka and pour some out for the rudest man alive.

In the kitchen Y put his arm around me. "Hey," he whispered. "Are you uncomfortable with J being here? He's really embarrassed."

"Why?" I asked.

"He said the last time he came to your house he went on an anti-American rant and you got angry at him."

"Did he?"

"You don't remember?"

It suddenly occurred to me that I was feigning a blackout that didn't even happen, to protect the feelings of a near-stranger who had come into my house and started railing against my country, unprovoked. WHICH IRONICALLY IS JUST THE SORT OF ENTITLED BEHAVIOR PEOPLE CLAIM TO HATE IN AMERICANS, BUT WHY BRING THAT UP. "Yeah," I conceded. "I remember."

"He feels really bad about it," said Y.

"I know," I said. "No big deal."

"You're not still mad?"

"To be honest," I said, "Your other friend was way nastier to me."

"G?"

"Yes."

"Look," he said. "If it's weird for you, and you don't want to come to Christmas dinner, I understand."

"Oh, are they going to be there?"

"Yes."

"Both of them?"

"Yes."

This dampened my mood. My options were unenticing: Christmas dinner with my two mortal enemies, or sitting alone in my apartment all day. So I sucked it up. "It's fine," I said. "Come on, let's mix the drinks." I poured them extra strong to prove that there were no hard feelings, and I tiptoed back into the mine field of the living room, marveling at how someone so supposedly non-confrontational had managed to amass such an opposition in two short months in Palma. If only Boogie had been there, I thought, the circle would have been completed.

The next morning I got up early to greet the Christmas sun, showered and did my hair twice (the first attempt was a failure), and then packed up my biscuits and some fancy wine to bring to Y's. Y's whole yacht crew lived together and his captain was a brilliant cook, who stretched eight delectable courses out over four hours. The captain was also something of a wine expert, and brought out five bottles over the course of the meal for us to taste, explaining the subtle differences and the reasons therefore, based on the grapes and the cask and the cork and what-have-you. There was also a fair amount of fancy bubbly poured among the guests, over which we chatted before dinner and got to know one another. I introduced myself to a woman named Lou, who replied, "Yes, we've met," and I am never quick enough on my feet in these instances to go, "Oh of course, I remember! How have you been?" So instead I said, "Where?" and she said "Agua Bar," and I did not know how, in such a swanky situation, to explain that I do not remember anything that happens at Agua Bar or anybody I meet there, or that the doorway to that place serves as a magnet to wipe clean my knowledge of a shared history with anyone inside, the sole exception to this rule being Matthew, for whom my heart still burns despite his steadfast refusal to confirm that he possesses any sort of personality. Rather than getting into all this, since I had only entered the room about five minutes prior, and Y had already made it clear to me the night before that he was afraid I might be too much of a boozehound to handle myself around his adult coworkers, I simply apologized to Lou, who turned out to be perfectly lovely and to have excellent taste in music.

Speaking of boozehounds unable to handle themselves, they sat me next to the single angriest blackout drunk in Palma, who passed me plates of potatoes and clinked glasses with me at the toast and continued his life blissfully unaware that he's a total monster. J, for his part, sat at the other end of the table and did all he could to pretend I didn't exist, either because he thinks he's the first person to ever trash America or because he pure-straight-hates-me from the bottom of his soul, I didn't ask. I personally handled myself with aplomb, which was particularly impressive considering the fact that I'd consumed my weight in Dom Perignon before the dinner even started. I left with the impression that nobody hated Y for letting me crash their party and that even G probably felt that I was a nice enough person, but that's only because he's got no idea how much shit I talk on the internet.

Christmas Eve

2009-12-24T07:11:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is Christmas and I don't have any plans. I bought cheese spread and salmon pate and chocolate biscuits and vodka just in case I end up going to dinner at Y's or Mikaele's tomorrow. I texted Yabby to ask if dinner was still on but he hasn't written back yet, and I'm afraid to text Mikaele because we don't really communicate electronically. We just bump into each other on the street sometimes. Ryan has to work on the boat and Kelly has a mandatory Christmas party at her captain's house (who makes a Christmas party mandatory? People with low self-esteem, that's who). Dennis has a German Christmas party to go to and Rob is in Malaga and Felix is in England. So it's entirely possible that I'll spend Christmas dipping chocolate biscuits in Smirnoff and doing laundry. We'll see.

This afternoon Kelly's coming over and we're going to drink wine and smoke shisha and exchange presents. Today I went shopping out in the rain for groceries and phone credit and Christmas gifts, only two this year which is the good part about holidays away from home. I got Kelly a blanket because it's cold on her boat and Ryan a candle because he always thinks our apartment smells. I don't think the apartment smells but I have had a cold for the past twelve thousand years. I talk like Marge Simpson and I blow my nose every three minutes. The only thing I can smell is Brazilian Nut, because I bought myself a Christmas gift of Brazilian Nut lotion. I smell so amazing now that I keep continually sniffing my forearms, which is sexy. I got to hold it down for all my paramours.

I'm updating this in real time because I don't care to edit. Kelly is in the kitchen now making rum balls, and Ryan is playing deejay (although he just skipped over a Rihanna/Ne-Yo compilation which basically destroyed me) and Y did call and give me directions to his place. I asked what I should bring and he said just bring wine, or whatever you like to drink, and I said oh I like to drink everything and he said "Yes, I noticed that." To which I was like, whoops. Kelly came bearing gifts of four kinds of nuts and two kinds of red wine and one time I told Kelly that I yearn for an overstocked spice rack and she bought me a spice rack, at which I got so excited that I can no longer deny the fact that I am an old lady. But a spice rack means that you are home. And now I know I'm home.

On Faces in the Crowd

2009-12-19T03:38:00.000-08:00

When I finally walked home it was 6am; I know because I kept checking my phone thinking, "No way is it almost 6am" but the clock was not backing down. Felix was chattering in British to the girls we'd amassed along the way and Jamie was sleeping into his hand. Ryan had gone home hours before and C had stomped off in the rain after a couple violent outbursts. The outbursts surprised me, and on our walk to the second bar I asked him if he was all right, to which he outbursted more, angrily spitting that I didn't know who he was or what he was like, and then he stepped out of my peripheral vision as if to part ways. I held my coat over my head (the coat I left in the Scottish boys' flat two nights back, the coat that C came with me to hunt for, yelling up at balconies, "Hello! Strangers! Have any Americans left articles of clothing in your homes this week?" until one of the Scots let us up) and I was walking through the downpour in search of the second bar, the other boys blocks and blocks ahead of me, probably wrists-deep in their second pints by now. I stumbled in the vague direction of the main road, turning when it felt like I should turn, and when I went left instead of right I'd hear a shout, "Hey!" and I'd turn my head and a C-shaped silhouette would point across the street. In this way I eventually ended up in Shamrock instead of, say, Ibiza, but C was still angry and he gave me a very begrudging hug goodbye.

Y was at Shamrock and he bought me a beer and listened to me blather about C. "It's weird," I said, "He's never like this," and Y asked how long I had known him and I thought about it, "Two weeks, I guess." The point was raised that two weeks was not a fair amount of time to claim understanding of another person, but I felt sad because C was my best friend in Palma. Every day for the past two weeks, when the evening reached a certain point and it became clear that no more productivity was to be squeezed from my day, I would go to his dark apartment to drink screwdrivers and watch stand-up comedy. I really liked C and now it turned out that he was some sort of bar-fight dude. Yabby patted my back and said that these things happen, and would I like to come to Christmas dinner, and I said I certainly would. I had Christmas dinner plans, technically, with a guy from Brooklyn who I'd met on the street two nights prior, who I'd only spoken to because he'd heard my accent and then it turned out we're neighbors in both America and Spain and within ten minutes we'd exchanged life stories and phone numbers and he'd invited me to Christmas. His name was Mikaele. I had accepted the invitation, but aside from our curbside bonding experience Mikaele and I had never spent any time together so I was a little unsure of how solid my Christmas plans were. I saw Mikaele out that night, incidentally, our paths crossing in the rain as our groups swam between bars, and I stepped on his foot and gave him a hug, but that didn't necessarily guarantee a place to hang my Santa hat. Y assured me that I was welcome at his own Christmas dinner, and for New Years as well, and any old Saturday really, just another Palma yachtie falling out of the sky and opening a door to me, a phenomenon that is so friendly and wonderful and altogether commonplace that I've almost gotten used to it.

Truth be told I was feeling phenomenally popular, playing Never-Have-I-Ever with the boys at Havanna's and engaging in happy, disposable pub chatter with strings of strangers. People I'd never seen before were teasing me for forgetting their names (one ginger man in the bathroom line asked, rather provocatively, "So you found your red coat, then?" before ducking back into the dark) and strange men were leaning in close and nodding at my beer-soaked proclamations. One such leaner-inner was a bald, pug-faced gentleman who spoke of yachting like they all spoke of yachting, and the canine features of his face were not something that I'd ever have mentioned aloud were it not for the events that transpired. I care little for yachting talk but my friends all suffer through ESL classroom stories so it's only fair that I listen and nod and pretend I know port from starboard. The pug-faced man and I talked for a bit, I don't remember what about, and he stood rather within my circle of personal space so that I was backed up against the bar and nodding at whatever he had to say, and all I know is that at some point he told me that he'd visited every continent except for Australia. I didn't care about this fact any more than I cared about anything else he'd said, but I was game and I said, "Well then you should take a weekend trip, shouldn't you? Just fly to Australia for Christmas so you can say you've been to every continent." And he answered, "You know, maybe this is why you don't have any friends here," and walked away. It was such a cold line, and so randomly abusive, that I just stood at the bar sort of gulping for air and trying to piece together what had occurred, and once it had registered I still had no concept of where it had come from or how to respond, beyond smacking Felix on the arm to say, "Dude, guess what just happened."

There was one night at Agua Bar when I'd had a bit too much Cava and I met this boy named Matthew, a Brit with long eyelashes and dark curls who was just shamefully handsome, and rather quiet and sullen, and we had a quick chat wherein he revealed that he was a musician and he was here for open mic night. I was so smitten with Matthew that I lost all ability to function in polite society, and for the rest of the evening I threw myself at him, asking him over and over again when he was going to "get up there" and perform on stage, and bumming his rolled cigarettes. He never quite got around to obtaining a restraining order, which I took to mean that he was equally as fluttery over me, nevermind the fact that anyone who asks for more than two cigarettes in a row is a blatant, raspy-voiced asshole. On the off chance that he had misunderstood my intentions, I put my hand on his shoulder as I was leaving and assured him that I thought he was "lovely." I woke up the next morning with a terrible cough, wincing at my own creepiness. My only consolation was the promise I made to myself that I would never have to see Matthew again. That was Monday. On Tuesday we went to Trivia Night at Chupito's and there was a team in the back of the bar that got nine points out of ten on every round. During the halftime break I got to talking to one member of the winning team, and then he introduced me to his trivia partner, a curly-haired Brit smoking a rolled cigarette, and I had to sort of swallow my embarrassment and say that yes, we'd met before, hello Matthew.

I share this story not to highlight my own flirtatious ineptitude, nor to provide a platform for the announcement that I have really, truly, for serious this time, quit smoking. I am not even trying to examine the fact that Matthew is British, a musician, and a trivia god, and therefore my soul mate, and I have irreparably stuffed up our courtship. My point in all this is, Palma is a small town. You simply cannot be a shithead to anyone in this city and hope to hide from them for any length of time. So it is with great pleasure that I anticipate my next meeting with the oddly hateful pug-faced man. Because, pug-faced man, we are going to bump into one another and you are going to be drunk and you are, don't deny it, going to hit on me again. And I am going to call you on your asshattery and your male-pattern baldness, and you are going to walk away with a much clearer picture of why I don't have any friends. And then someone else is going to buy me a drink, just to prove you wrong.

Boogie Nights

2009-12-14T12:51:00.001-08:00

We went from sleeping seven people in a 3-bedroom apartment to just me and Ryan occupying opposite ends of the house. Kelly and Christian moved onto their boats. Leila got a job at a chalet in the French Alps. And George responded well to the suggestion that he get off our couch and find a hostel. The only one who posed a problem, really, was Boogie.

Boogie was a friend of Kelly's, a Hungarian girl who'd lived in Mallorca for the past three years when suddenly she developed a problem with her landlord. Kelly, ever the Samaritan, offered our home to Boogie, who assured us she only needed a place to crash for a few days. Boogie's arrival in our apartment reeked of the fact that she would be staying longer than that. She showed up two days late, wordlessly stacking suitcases in our dining room and hanging her robe beside the shower. She made me uncomfortable because she was vaguely slimy and her name was Boogie, but I didn't say anything. I'd been in dire straits myself, relying on the kindness of strangers, so I shut my mouth and made space in my bed.

It became quickly apparent that there was something amiss with Boogie. One thing I found frustrating was the fact that she never actually got out of my bed. I'd come home from work and there she'd be, sprawled out and clicking at her laptop, in the same position I'd left her in that morning. With George taking up residence on the sofa and the other bedrooms full to bursting, this left very little space for me in the apartment. I was annoyed, but I swallowed it.

At first Boogie didn't seem to have a job. After three or four days without leaving the apartment, I watched her get ready one night for her job at a "hospital." She was vague about what her job entailed, playing up the language barrier when we asked her about it. But her shifts were always at night, and she dressed for work in knee-high boots and booty skirts, locked herself in the bathroom to tend to her hair and makeup. Boogie took longer to get ready than anyone I'd ever met. She meandered back and forth between rooms, zipping bags and jiggling door handles. Water would run and heels would click and she would walk out the door looking exactly the same as she had that afternoon in bed. At 6 a.m. I'd wake to a tug on my comforter as she crawled into bed beside me to sleep through the morning.

"I think Boogie's a stripper," I told Kelly.

"She's not," said Kelly. "She works at a hospital. And I think sometimes she dances."

"Yeah, on a pole," I said. "Have you seen what she wears to the hospital?"

But Kelly hadn't, because she'd been on watch at her boat, spending the night onboard to make sure nothing sank before dawn. Leila moved out and I took her spot in Kelly's room, making Boogie the only member of the household with her own bed, in addition to being the only person who didn't pay rent.

"So when exactly is she moving out?" Ryan asked. "It's been two weeks."

"I don't know," said Kelly. "She won't give me a straight answer. She's not very good at communicating."

She wasn't. She stayed in her bed in the hallway, breezing past us like a bleached Hungarian ghost. She dropped dishes in the sink or laundry in the wash when she thought no one was looking, sometimes offered a tight-lipped smile if she accidentally made eye contact. She spoke only to answer a direct question, or to ask for something. My discomfort with her was evolving into loathing.

One Friday night we had a party. "Boogie," said Ryan. "Come into the living room and hang out with us."

"No," said Boogie. "I have to stay in here. I'm getting ready to go out."

"When are you moving out?" he asked her.

"I think tomorrow night," she said. "I think my new room will be ready by then."

"When are you going to pay us the two weeks' rent?"

"I will talk to Kelly about that."

The next morning Boogie wasn't there. Her clothes and luggage were still piled in the dining room, her laptop was under her bed. But she was gone. She didn't come back that night or the next. We were perplexed. Why would she leave in the middle of the night without taking any of her things? Why wouldn't she call to say she wasn't coming back? If she was in such a terrible financial position, why didn't she at least try to woo us with a sob story?

Five days later she showed up with a sheepish smile as though nothing had happened. It was six o'clock in the morning. I never miss an opportunity to back down from a fight, but in this situation I was precaffeinated and anxious about the security of my home. "I need your keys," I told her, and she handed them to me. A few minutes later she came into the living room with her computer, to casually surf the net while the two of us watched the sun come up.

"Boogie," I said. "You can't stay here."

"But where will I go?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said, "But it's not fair for you to just disappear for five days and then act like you live here."

"I didn't want to disturb anyone."

"If that's the case," I said, "then you went about things the wrong way. Look, you've got to go."

She rose and returned to the dining room, and I heard the slow-motion zipping and unzipping of bags, the subtle click of heels on tile, the rustling of clothes being folded and rearranged. This went on for about an hour before she slipped out as I showered. I counted the laptops and cameras, even looked under the beds in case she was hiding there. I had no idea what Boogie's angle was but I was far beyond the desire to figure it out.

That night she showed up one last time, to collect her bags. We watched her haul them down the stairs into her boyfriend's car, listened to her argue on the phone with her new landlord. Without a goodbye, she closed the door behind her. Suddenly it was just me and Ryan in the whole apartment, with no opponents. We shrugged at each other and retreated to our opposite ends.

On Career

2009-12-12T06:06:00.001-08:00

I woke up at 6am on my sofa. I was still dressed and the lights were all on and there was half a conversation on my laptop screen. I stumbled into bed and slept another hour and half, till the alarm clock started making concerned, persistent little chirps to protest my love affair with the snooze button. So I bleared through the shower and the two cups of coffee and the bus ride and got to work, where I found myself in the distinctly awkward position of standing in a spinning room surrounded by a herd of chattering second-graders. This was not the plan. There was no plan, actually. The head teacher was out and nobody could remember what I was supposed to do, so they gave me a little smile and a shrug and tossed me into the classroom.

I had some Christmas vocabulary cards with pictures on them, so I knew I could wring a good five minutes out of teaching the items on one of the cards (drum, bow, heart, star, ornament -- I tried to teach the word "angel" but when I drew one on the board the kids all yelled out, "Monstro!"). I reached into the supply closet and pulled out the first thing I could find, some green paper, and announced with authority that today we were going to cut out Christmas trees. The kids set to work drawing lopsided little pines and I grabbed some red paper and folded it in half. We'd made Christmas cards the week prior, but these were desperate times, and we hadn't used red paper before. As the children came up to me one by one to show me their Christmas tree cut-outs, I handed them a red paper and a glue stick, inventing elaborate instructions as I went along.

I let the directions draw out for as long as possible; I needed the extra time it took for each kid to walk back up to my desk and wait in line behind twelve others scrambling for my attention. They pawed at me and waved papers in my face and the whole thing became very zen after a while, like being surrounded by a swarm of bees and nodding off to the drone of their humming. "Beautiful! Do you want gold stars or silver stars? Very nice! Would you like red circles as well? Great! Now write 'Merry Christmas.'" So on and so forth, the sea of children around me never ebbing, the cries of "Cat-a-lee! Cat-a-lee!" punctuating my name with upside-down exclamation points, the wretched little trees cut jagged and glued to the wrong side of the paper, the Christmas cards sparkling from the liberal application of gold star stickers.

The ones who finished early got assigned increasingly bullshit projects. Draw a picture from the words on the board. Good now color it. Good now write the word. Good now cut it out. Good now glue it to a piece of paper. Jesus, are you done already? Fine, draw another picture. Anything. One little boy got hip to my tricks and rolled his eyes, "No quiero dibujar mas!" I shrugged my shoulders, there were only five minutes left of class anyway. Then he changed his mind and took a piece of paper; as the bell rang he handed me what appeared to be a gray turtle with a club foot, wearing a brown cape-sash. He told me it was a present for me.

Eventually, days later, the bell rang. The kids went outside to eat their lunches and I exhaled. Their teacher, who'd been grading papers at the back of the room, was impressed. "You are a very good teacher," she said. "I will buy you a coffee." What I really wanted was a glass of water but I thanked her and slurped down my vending machine cappuccino. When we parted ways I locked myself in the bathroom to drink from the questionably-potable sink until my throat reopened and the pounding in my head stilled. I closed my eyes and slumped against the wall, readying myself for my next class.

Cultural Differences

2009-12-01T06:05:00.000-08:00

So I've embarked on a new career path, what with the teaching-English thing, and I guess I like it. It's a little early to tell if want to make a lifetime commitment of molding young minds, but it's certainly more stimulating than secretarying, so for now I'll take it. I've got about sixty students between two schools, and as I only see most of them once a week, the getting-to-know-you phase has been rather drawn out. But we're starting to get used to each other. The kids have started coming to me to tattle on one another, or to ask to use the bathroom, or to show me their loose teeth. Little by little I am learning names and pairing them with personalities. My favorite student is a little blonde boy with three-inch eyelashes who does absolutely nothing in class. This child's ability to do nothing just gobsmacks me; he'll literally cease all productivity until I hover over his desk and ask to see his paper. Then he'll move his pencil in very slow circles, reposition his fingers a couple times, and barely touch it to the worksheet in the hopes that if he drags out his fake-preparation long enough I will grow bored and leave him alone. Then he bats the eyelashes that he does not yet know he has, and I melt into a puddle of English grammar and ooze across the floor.

My least favorite student is a lanky sixth grader who deigns to bring so much as a pen into class with him, who ignores my practice worksheets to talk to the girl next to him, and who, when I ask him why he hasn't started, shrugs his shoulders and says, "I don't speak English." The bass-ackwards logic of this statement makes my eyelid twitch as I explain to him the answer to question number one and then move on with my life, at which point he returns to talking to the girl next to him. He's now used the "I don't speak English" excuse on me three times, and probably even if he asked to TA for the rest of the year I'd still never forgive him.

The no-ingles boy is a member of one of my more difficult classes, which is the first half of sixth grade. I teach half the sixth grade on Tuesdays and half of them on Wednesdays, and somehow the classes ended up lopsided. The Wednesday sixth-graders are excited to learn and love to participate; the Tuesday sixth-graders mope through the morning and roll their eyes when I ask them questions. I've had to resort to the dramatic arm gestures and frantic jumping-jacks of every Spanish teacher I've ever had, because teaching a language class in the students' third language requires a fully-rehearsed hour of pantomime. I'm supposed to use strictly English in the classroom, a rule to which I say fuck it; I drive myself crazy listening to my own English explanations over and over again, and I understand every word I'm saying. Sometimes dropping in a Spanish word or two is enough to make a student sigh with relief or grin with sudden understanding, and to me that is worth it. So I cheat by using English. I also cheat by pretending not to notice the fact that four kids skipped my class this morning. They don't pay me enough to patrol the halls. In fact they don't even pay me enough to bother showing up, but I do because if I didn't they would pay me even less.

This morning, after sixth grade, I had two periods of art with the little kids. Art classes can be taught in a foreign language because the gist of the class can be totally missed with very little detriment to the student's academic development, which is not a statement that applies to, say, math. So I teach a lot of Spanish art classes, which differ from American art classes in all ways. In Spain the children are taught exactly how to produce the desired outcome, and chastised heartily for failing to follow all steps in order, so that the finished product will hang in a chain of twenty-eight identical green Christmas trees, or gold stars, or whatever, along the walls. If a child takes the liberty of, say, drawing red balls on her Christmas tree, the teacher will reprimand her, "No! Very bad!" in front of everyone in class, and she will live with the shame of being the only person who dared decorate her paper Christmas tree. The logic behind this school of thought is beyond me, especially coming from Spain, the country that produced both Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali, both pioneers in the field of Making Shit Look Weird. Surely they both failed elementary-school art.

So I had my last art class of the day with a teacher who showed up ten minutes late and then asked, "What should we do today?" It was then discovered that the required audiovisual equipment was missing, so we were about twenty good minutes into a class free-for-all when it was suggested that I teach the children a song. I taught them Jingle Bells, which is what they would have learned anyway, if the DVD player worked, which is an odd choice by virtue of the fact that its lyrics make very little sense to me as a native speaker and are frankly useless to a group of hyperactive six year olds. (Google the lyrics to Jingle Bells and read the second verse, then please come back and explain to me who became upsot and why.)

After Jingle Bells it was decided that the children would make twenty identical Christmas cards by cutting out a gold star and a silver star and gluing them onto a piece of white cardboard. I had been helping a girl named Ana and her seatmate Paula, because Ana couldn't glue and Paula couldn't cut. After affixing Ana's stars to her card, I instructed her to return to her desk and press them very tightly till the glue dried. I turned my attention to Paula and the warped little curls she had hacked into her silver paper, and I was showing her how to hold the scissors when suddenly the other teacher launched into an othertongue tirade in a bellow loud and threatening enough to elicit utter silence from every child in the room. "Ana!" she screamed. "Ven aqui!" Then she launched into a string of abuses, using a tone that suggested she'd just caught Ana setting fire to her desk and rubbing someone else's face in it. Ana's crime, it was soon revealed, was that the idiot child had deigned to write her name on her card, thereby ruining Christmas not just for the recipient but apparently for everyone else in the room as well. "Don't cry! Don't cry!" she shrieked in Spanish, as Ana snuffled into her sleeve, crumpling the bastardized card behind her back. After five minutes of this demonic reprimand, the teacher directed the children to continue their own Christmas cards and they all got back to work, whispering and tiptoeing between the desks.

Paula had been burrowing into my shoulder as this lecture was delivered, and I stayed a couple minutes past my scheduled time, not wanting the poor girl to have to reveal to the furious teacher that she did not know how to cut. I felt awful leaving any of them in her clutches, but ultimately there was nothing I could do. There was another teacher in the classroom as well, and as she did nothing to intervene, but rather crossed her arms and nodded her head at Ana's disgraceful behavior, I had to chalk it up to a cultural conflict. In Spain, I guessed, these sorts of lectures were warranted. I said goodbye to the other teacher, and our language barrier left her with nothing to do but shrug and smile in a way that said, "I can't believe I'm stuck with these disgusting children for the rest of the day while you get to leave," and I responded with a smile that said, "I just witnessed you drown a bag of kittens with your bare hands," and then I stomped outside to catch a bus home and write lesson plans for tomorrow's sixth-graders.

Pizza Night

2009-11-21T02:37:00.000-08:00

It's Friday night and we're dance-partying around the livingroom, garnering glares from passing Spaniards at the volume of our merrymaking. The Spaniards would be much angrier if they could understand our dirty Mickey Avalon lyrics. Christian has come home from work toting three bottles of champagne, one of which he emptied directly into Kelly's hair. Christian is strong and silent as Norwegian wood but he will cut a bitch who deigns to change the music to anything but deep house. I've danced so hard I've had to shower again to get ready. I'm meeting a woman at 9:30 in the plaza because she wants me to come have pizza and meet her cousins.

I hate to leave the group on a Friday night but I've promised to come for dinner. She's an English teacher and very outgoing; she waves at me from across the plaza and leads me to her car. I don't want to show up empty-handed so I've tucked a bottle of 2-euro wine into my purse. Emilia, my host, embarrasses me by gushing at the gift and insisting that it's fancy and decadent. Her cousins show up, one by one, six of them out of a total of twenty, she tells me. "We're like the Mafia. You hurt one of us and all of us will hurt you." She sets out a table of Spanish appetizers, some sort of pork and some sort of sausage, little toothpicks strung with spicy pickles, red peppers and pearl onions. There are dishes of green olives and a big bowl of potato chips. Everything is salty and I wash it down with cheap red wine, my head aching after so much champagne.

The cousins speak to me in English and in Spanish. They all apologize for their English but I understand every word. Emilia apologizes for the size of her apartment, the crowding of the table, the behavior of the cousins. She does so with a grin and a flurry of her hands, and it takes me a while to understand that it's a cultural thing when I'm so used to bragging. I make jokes in Spanish and garner some laughs. I make mistakes in Spanish and receive gentle corrections, which I intend to file away in the language part of my brain and then immediately forget.

"Ah, New York!" say the cousins. They tell me about an uncle in New York, a writer receiving an award from Columbia University. I find myself name-dropping countries, a behavior I abhor, in an attempt to keep up with the worldliness of Europeans. They tell me of an airline promotion for one-euro flights around the continent, a promotion that ended only an hour ago. They speak to me in Spanish and try to teach me some Catalan, and the words fall out of my head and bounce across the floor like a green olive from the tabletop. The pizza is ordered at midnight and I find space for it in my stomach between pork products.

After dinner I'm stuffed and sleepy. Suddenly Spanish is as unreachable as Japanese and I make everyone repeat themselves. I'm terrified I'll fall asleep on the couch so when Emilia offers me a cappuccino at 2am, I thank her. She spoons hazelnut ice cream on top and I slurp it down like Christmas. The cousins begin to yawn and we hug and kiss goodbye. One drives me home and my key gets stuck only once in the lock when I stumble in. The apartment is empty; my roommates will be out until dawn so I could ride the caffeine rush and go find them, but sometimes there is magic in solitude. I unlock the window and slip out on the terrace for a cigarette. Those things will kill you unless something else does. I wheeze through the last drag and put out the lights, crawl into someone else's t-shirt and fall face-first into bed, dreaming in smoke and salt and Spanish.

Home Life

2009-11-16T09:05:00.000-08:00

I can't count how many homes I've had since I graduated college. I have a short attention span and can perpetually envision greener grass. Palma has little in the way of grass but our apartment has mosaic tiles on the floor that reach halfway up the wall. It's a three-bedroom and that's a stretch; my bed is in plopped in an ample hallway and I have to share it with a British boy named Max. This arrangement is awkward enough to make me giggle and him crash on our friend Bindi's sofa most nights, but after tonight he's going away on a boat to the Canary Islands and I'll have my own room. Hallway.

I liked our hostel a lot, despite and because of the fact that it was haunted. Our hostel was haunted as hell. There was knocking at all hours, ceaseless and pointless knocking against the kitchen wall, which in itself was not so strange but for the fact that the kitchen wall was concrete and it was pressed up against another concrete wall. And the doors were always blowing closed, which, fine, you could blame on the wind, except that one time Freddie's door was closed and it blew open, without any wind to prompt it. One night a bottle of wine leapt off the kitchen counter and smashed on the floor into absolute smithereens, the likes of which I have never witnessed, and fair enough, everyone said, there was ice in the same bag and the ice melted and the weight shifted, fair enough. But the only way to explain the shard of glass in Freddie's bed the next morning was the presence of a ghost.

I don't mind ghosts but there are none in this apartment. Which is good, I guess, because I don't know where we would put it. The place is packed already, a constant blur of movement and a steady stream of talk about boats. Everyone but me here is a yachtie. Palma is crawling with yachties, a fact that might have surprised me less had I ever opened a travel guide before moving here. But everyone works on boats or wants to work on boats, everyone is gasping for work now that it's low season and everyone can point out the biggest boats in the harbor and recite their names. I am glad not to be part of that world; I don't want to be involved in the crush of jobseekers and the sweat of dockwalking.

My own job is underpaid as well as underintensive but the students are so adorable that it makes up for all that. In class I point to my eyes and say, "Eyes," and they say "Eyes." I point to my nose and say "Nose," and they say "Nose." I point to my ears and say "Ears," and they say "Ears." Then I nod and say, "Very good," and they say "Bar-ree good," and I wince at their adorability and melt into the floor. I work few enough hours that I spend the majority of my work day eyeing the clock and the majority of my time off telling myself I'll start advertising for private clients once I'm not too scared to try. I've only been in Spain for a week and a half and I've only been in this apartment for 4 days. At nights we flop down with DVDs and 2-euro bottles of wine and Ryan cooks everyone dinner and Leila talks about the Italian sugardaddy who's wooing her and Kelly is smart and practical and Christian is Norweigian and Max has good hair. I take notes on everything and I finish the wine and I chase it with coffee and I take the stolen purses out of the street and prance around town with them. Counting pennies and sneaking smokes and hanging over the terrace in awe of the whole island, and it's all just as it should be.

Habitacion-Hunting

2009-11-14T02:04:00.000-08:00

I live in Spain now, in Palma de Mallorca, a fabulous and swanky city on an island in the Mediterranean. After six weeks of sitting on my hands waiting for a visa, the Spanish consulate finally granted me the liberty to get on a plane. Because I got here so late, my first week was spent stomping in a series of frantic circles as I attempted to find my schools, my boss, the immigration office, and a place to live.

I looked into moving in with two smoky Spanish girls near the center of the city, but the room had no windows and was prohibitively expensive. I got a tip on a room in the Old Town that overlooked the Cathedral, but I went to go see it I got lost and found myself alone on a strange street, the only other occupant of which was a man in a soccer uniform defecating in a doorway and groaning rather dramatically. This seemed like reason enough to get the hell out of there, so I went back to the hostel to commiserate with my friend Kejenne, a spectacularly cool South African girl who bunked beneath me and whose housing woes were similarly dramatic. The next day I was greeted by a series of increasingly desperate emails from the owner of the flat, begging me to please come experience the magic of her historic neighborhood, if not to live at least to have a cup of tea with her, if not to have a cup of tea then to accompany her to the seaside next weekend, if not to accompany her to the seaside then at least to write back because she was very worried and cared about me very much and desperately wanted to see me. Our one phone conversation had taken place in the span of two minutes and consisted almost solely of me asking "Que?" while she gave directions in Spanish, but apparently I had made quite an impression.

The next day Kejenne came home to say she'd found a place. The owner's lease was ending in December, and to fill the rooms he'd cut her a bargain of 90€ for three weeks. There was still an empty bedroom, she said, so I went with her to deposit her bags and he quoted me the preposterous price of 90€ per week. When Kejenne called him out on this discrepancy, he became perturbed and said that no, he'd been absolutely clear on the price, and that this was not Toyland but that if we wanted to make him an offer that was not in Toyland prices he'd be willing to consider it. Kejenne and I went downstairs to a diner to stress over burgers and beers and look for Toyland on the map, it being famous for its low rent, and while we were there he texted her to offer each room for a considerably lower rate. We went back upstairs to mull it over, but after reading the long, overwrought list of house rules taped to the kitchen wall ("Early morning exits: use of a key will facilitate smoother and quieter excision of the door, thus diminishing resentment of fellow housemates," etc.) we opted against it.

I had a minor breakdown that evening about my transient status in Spain, and Kejenne suggested that I just take the guy up on his offer. It wouldn't be unbearable, she said, and at least I'd have a place to live short-term. I called him from a pay phone outside and he was friendly and happy to hear from me. He dropped the price another 10€ and then waxed philosophical about the apartment until my coins all ran out and we were disconnected. He was a wordy guy, for sure, but he was also an English teacher, and I was looking forward to having a few discussions with him about how to do it.

So I showed with my bags up the next day and he met me downstairs on his way out. He said he had a class to teach, but that he'd be back at 9:30 to talk to me about house rules and the security deposit. "You didn't say anything about a security deposit," I said, and he again became perturbed and said of course he had, we'd discussed it in depth, and in any event that was just the way of the world, security deposits being as ubiquitous as pigeons here in Spain, and that every apartment in every country in every circumstance required payment of a security deposit. Frankly I would not have been averse to a security deposit had I a) been staying longer than three weeks, b) not been asked for a good-faith donation of more than half my total rent, and c) not been arguing with a man who, on both occasions that I'd met him, insisted that he'd been overwhelmingly clear when he obviously had not. So I argued, but politely, as I still did really want a place to stay, no matter whose head was up whose own ass. He told me he was sick of dealing with people, that before Kejenne he'd had two girls bail on him when they found out about the security deposit, a fact which to me suggested that he was not, as a rule, as clear as he perceived himself to be, evidence of which could be found in his two-page, single-spaced, 9-point font list of house rules typed up in both English and Spanish, and that perhaps if he shut the fuck up once in a while he'd become a more effective communicator.

I did not say this. What I did instead was allow my voice to crack just a bit when I told him I'd only been in Spain for five days and did not know the regulations of apartment-hunting here. This was for dramatic effect, but it was a mistake, because this subtle allowance signaled to my tear ducts that the time is now, and the floodgates opened.

Arguing with a weeping girl perturbed him even more, and he started saying that this was bad because we'd gotten off on the wrong foot and I insisted that all was fixable because I was so super laid-back, honest, and he said he didn't want to hear any hard-luck stories and then I got angry. "I'm not giving you any hard-luck stories," I said.

"Well, is there a reason that you can't pay a security deposit?" he asked.

"I don't get paid until the end of the month."

"You see, this is what I mean about a hard-luck story."

He said he'd have to go, and that he was furious with everyone, and that we'd talk when he got back from class, but in the meantime I could look for other places and think of a really good reason why I couldn't pay security. This was a ridiculous solution, because there was no way I could bide my time until 9:30 at night to find out if I was still homeless. By this point I was a mess and had become entirely desperate, and he finally told me flat that the arrangement wouldn't work ("tears or no," he said) so I should just go home, and then we turned in opposite directions, unified, and sped off dramatically down the street. It was really well-choreographed; we even had to cross paths.

I moped back to the hostel and asked Jenny at the front desk if I could stay another night. "I thought you were moving out," she said, and I said, "No, the man tried to scam me," and started crying again. A guy standing next to me asked what happened, and I pulled down my sunglasses to hide my eyes and said some jackoff just tried to up the price on me and now I'd be staying indefinitely in this hostel. He said, "Do you want to come live with us? Five of us just found a great apartment and we're moving tomorrow," and then he introduced himself as Ryan.

Places That Are Adorable: Boston Edition

2009-10-27T07:56:00.000-07:00

Mel invited me to come visit her in Boston last week, so I did. The glorious thing about unemployment is the ability it gives a person just up and go to Boston for a few days. I rode in with her brother and his girlfriend on Tuesday night and the four of us went to a fancy orange restaurant for Cambodian food and wine. The Cambodian restaurant had elephants on the wall which is always a good omen.

The next day was one of those spectacular fall days in New England that people get all excited over, so after a museum trip to the Harvard Arts Museum to gawp at Van Goghs and Picassos, I bid adieu to the others and started an aimless shuffle around Cambridge. Cambridge is charming, all giant old houses settling and crumpling at odd angles, all brick sidewalks rippling and buckling underfoot. Around me swarmed dozens of young up-and-comers in Harvard T-shirts who I assumed were pricks. I also passed, on my walk, a group of caregivers out for a stroll with their disabled charges, and noted that one profoundly retarded girl with a killer fashion sense was wearing the same hoodie as me. Twinsies!

I stopped in to an Au Bon Pain for some coffee (an unnecessary detour for certain, as I had already consumed, in the course of the morning, a cup at Mel's house, a quart of Dunkin Donuts pumpkin spice, and a pumpkin latte at another coffee shop). I sat down by the window with my cream-no-sugar and watched a Ben Affleck movie being filmed outside, awed at the camera extending from a giant crane and rolled my eyes at the police officer yelling at the crowd that snapped photos of a grumpy Affleck beside a dashing Jon Hamm. I drained the coffee and continued to meander through Cambridge, stopping again at a Starbucks for more pumpkin-flavored caffeine, and by the time I met Mel at her office all the coffee had lifted my head up off my neck and sent it bobbing above my shoulders, like that "medicine head" cartoon woman in the old commercials who carries hers around on a balloon string. I dragged my floating head home to Mel's house and met her roommate Kara, who forever endeared herself to me by asking if I had any need for a brand-new J. Crew blazer.

The next day I met Kerrie in the North End, the first I'd seen her since I tumbled back into the States and she'd graciously showed up at midnight on a Tuesday to gather me from the airport. Kerrie greeted me on her lunch break, her office clearly more casual than my old job had been since she was wearing knee-high boots and sweatpants (and still looked annoyingly fantastic). The floating-head trick of the previous day not forgotten, I was monitoring my coffee intake, so instead we got beers. We bumped into Ben Affleck again (at which I was like "Enough already, Affleck") and hashed out the same stories we've been hashing out for years about the same ridiculous boys, because Kerrie is one of those friends who likes to repeat herself and likes to hear me repeat myself. So we sipped our pints of Stella asking each other "Remember when? Remember when?" and snorting like maniacs. Then Kerrie went back to work and I wandered through the bitterly cold North End for a while and listened to cheesy R&B songs on repeat before heading back to Mel's.

It was Friday night and so the apartment was filled with the slow, purposeful motion of a group of girls getting ready, with alternated bathroom hijackings and several rounds of does-this-match. Kerrie met us at Mel's place and escorted us to a couple Cambridge bars, a pub crawl that culminated with my own personal Day of Reckoning.

In a girl's romantic life, there are several major firsts to be chronicled. First kiss, first date, first restraining order, are all magical moments to be recreated over 11am beers in the North End to a cackling friend forever after. And that night, unbeknowst to him (though beknownst to me and a definitive factor in the amount of lip gloss I'd applied) was to be my first time seeing my major ex's best friend. I dated the same guy for almost four years in college, and I got close with his hetero life partner, an unreasonably attractive guy named C. Kerrie, who had known C. at the same time I did, recently began frequenting a bar where he worked the door, and conveyed, over a series of drunken text messages, that he was still despicably sexy and that he would be working that night. So it wasn't a happenstance meeting but it was fantastic to see his eyes shoot up and hear him mutter "Oh shit..." before grabbing me in a bear hug. We exchanged how-are-you-doings and brief autobiographies and I happily skipped the part in my personal history about living with my mother. He texted my ex and we offered each other salutations via middleman, which was pleasant, as I really had little desire to speak with this guy from my past to whom I wish no ill will but nevertheless hope has not banged as many foreigners as me.

When we rolled out of the bar at last call (2 a.m., in an homage to Boston's founding by the Puritans) C. and I exchanged more drunken hugs as well as phone numbers, under the guise that we are ever going to call each other, and I asked him his last name six times and then still saved his number under my own name (this is after I'd spent the bulk of my evening using my phone to text "Woooooooooooooooooooooo!" to Phil over and over again, so why anybody allows me to use a cell phone after 11p.m. is one of the great mysteries of my life) and then of course I thought I ought to share with him that I'd saved him as "Kaitlyn," at which point he told me to give him a call next time I tried to talk to myself, and then almost certainly texted my ex again to confirm that yes, your girl is still something of a trainwreck, and then we found ourselves a cab and rolled home, gasping for air after such a long sentence. The only other notable event of the evening was that I made myself a vodka tonic at Mel's house and passed out after maybe half a sip, and when I woke in the middle of the night feeling parched and hungover I reached for a glass of what I thought was water and instead got a big cold gulp of vodka. And then I cried myself to sleep.

And then that was it. The next day Boston summoned some rainclouds to play me out and I rode with my back to the sinking, lopsided mansions of the colonial city, facing ahead toward the sprawling lawns and right angles of the suburbs.

Text Message Breakup - A Play in One Act, Based on a True Story

2009-10-26T07:28:00.000-07:00

THE CURTAIN OPENS ON OUR HEROINE, A BLONDE WOMAN TALKING ON A VERY FANCY PHONE.

KG: Heyyyyy AT&T, how have you been? I'm sorry I missed your birthday and everything, it's just been CRAZY around here lately...

AT&T: Let me guess. You want something.

KG: Heh, okay. Um, I have a problem? With my text messaging bill? It looks like I got a little carried away and this bill is kind of massive... any way we could, say, turn that "8" into a "2"?

AT&T: (DRAMATIC SIGH) Let me see what I can do. Can I place you on hold?

KG: Go ahead. I'm busy gchatting with four different people and trying to convince myself that this makes me a "freelance writer," so I've got all kinds of time.

BRIEF PAUSE. THE FRANTIC CLICKING OF A SQUEAKY KEYBOARD CAN BE HEARD.

AT&T: Jesus, lady. It says here you owe for 590 text messages. What are you, fifteen?

KG: (UNCOMFORTABLE LAUGH) Yeah, I mean, no, I guess I'm not quite sure what happened.

AT&T: Our records show a twenty-message conversation with your brother, whose GPS places him in the same house as you.

KG: Well, he was putting the kids to bed and I wanted to make sure he didn't fall asleep because I needed a ride to the bar...

AT&T: And there are three days' worth of messages between you and Danny where the two of you just quote lines from a Jay-Z and Rihanna song.

KG: Actually, we mostly quote the Kanye parts.

AT&T: Has it ever occurred to you to just pick up the phone and call?

KG: Call Danny and quote him Kanye lines? That's ridiculous. Have you even listened to that song? Kanye's part is total nonsense.

AT&T: Why would you pay $150 a month for a cell phone plan if you don't even want to talk on the phone?

KG: Why would you give me a QWERTY keyboard if I'm not supposed to text?

AT&T: And some of these conversations are really inappropriate for the text message medium. Like Vanessa's pregnancy scare or Jamie's size comparison of the two guys she hooked up with last weekend.

KG: Yeah, I'm SO SURE I'm going to ignore Jamie's dirty play-by-plays.

AT&T: Well why don't you keep them verbal? Your texting is chronicling everybody's personal gossip. In the biz we call this a "trail of skank".

KG: No you don't! That's a phrase Melanie made up on the internet today. Are you reading my gchats, too?

AT&T: You know, you can take those off the record.

KG: But it makes me feel creepy.

AT&T: Fine, then. Own the skank trail.

KG: Are you going to judge me or are you going to give me some money?

AT&T: I just don't know if I can give you a $60 refund for your own mistake.

KG: Why not? Everybody else cleans up after my mistakes.

AT&T: What do you need the money for?

KG: Well... I went on a impromptu trip to Boston last week... I did a little bit of shopping. Only essentials!

AT&T: Essentials like?

KG: Well I needed a new bag. And a skirt and a couple tops. I bought about half a gallon of coffee from Dunkin Donuts; have you tried their pumpkin spice? And I stopped at Victoria's Secret.

AT&T: Victoria's Secret? Why do you need more underwear?

KG: Because all of mine look like they've been washed on high heat in a Peruvian laundromat?

AT&T: Who are you trying to impress with all these underwear?

KG: They were five for $25! With lace and sparkles!

AT&T: Have you considered getting a job?

KG: I have a job! It's just in another country that I'm not allowed to enter.

AT&T: And so what are you doing until they let you in? Babysitting? Painting your mom's guest room? Freelance writing via text message?

KG: Technically you could look at my text message history as a $60 gig.

AT&T: (ANOTHER DRAMATIC SIGH) Okay. Let me see what I can do. I'm going to place you on another hold to build some tension.

KG: Fair enough, I'll have a fourth cup of coffee and play the Jeopardy theme song in my head.

AT&T: Thanks for that.

ANOTHER SILENCE.

AT&T: Okay, Kaitlyn. I have retroactively adjusted your text message settings and refunded $60 to your account.

KG: Wait, what?

AT&T: I paid you back. I hooked you up.

KG: Oh my God, really?

AT&T: I thought that's what you wanted.

KG: Well it was, but I didn't expect you to give it to me... I mean this was entirely my fault. And Jamie's. And Kanye's.

AT&T: Never say I don't take care of you.

KG: AT&T... this is amazing. I don't know how to thank you. I feel like I want to show you my sparkly underwear.

AT&T: No, that's all right.

KG: Are you sure? They have lace too...

AT&T: Glad I could be of service. I guess I'll be going.

KG: I JUST WANT YOU TO HOLD ME.

AT&T: Thank you for calling AT&T. Have a pleasant day.

FIN.

In Which I Get All Romantical

2009-10-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

This weekend I was a bridesmaid in the wedding of my oldest friend. Rebecca and I didn't grow up side by side so much as on top of one another; we spent middle and high school in each other's bedrooms and kitchens or tying up each other's phone lines. I let her read my diary when she slept over, mostly fervent diatribes regarding my unending love for her boyfriend (even at age twelve I was a chronic oversharer). We sneaked cigarettes in the woods and exchanged hairspray tips for styling our mall bangs. We brewed coffee in the afternoons and invited boys over for makeout parties. Becca went to private school and always let me wear her school uniforms. She brought me to parties and introduced me to private school friends who thought I was cool and funny and gave me the hope that there was a world beyond the paper-doll cliques of my suburban high school. She was my best friend.

So it was an amazing experience to don a strapless dress and board a boat down the Connecticut River with her. To build a wall around the bride in a traditional preservation of good luck when her groom had to step in through the cabin. To wiggle my eyebrows in giddy expectation and to nervously steal sips of Danny's cocktail as we approached the shore. To disembark at a clearing of trees that glowed in the afternoon sun.

It was a gorgeous and touching ceremony (I said multiple times, over multiple gin and tonics, that it was the first wedding I'd ever been to in which even the photographer cried) and then it was a fun and festive reception. People cheered and snapped pictures, groomsmen danced with flower girls, and everybody laughed and toasted and said Wasn't that the loveliest wedding? Aren't they just so happy? I slow danced with three gay men and a bridesmaid because the straight males at the party were all taken or elderly or the caterer. And everyone basked in the blissful glow that radiated from the new couple.

After the wedding I attended the afterparty in the bridal suite, though by that time I was too wasted to interact with anyone. Instead I departed early with Danny to consume an entire pepperoni pizza in my room. Their glamour standards maxed out for one evening, the bride and groom had changed into t-shirts and flip flops and were passing out beers from their overstocked cooler. After everybody left they opened presents and donned the creepy Peruvian masks I'd tucked into their new cake pan. Then they sneaked into a sleeping groomsman's room and pounced on top of him wearing knitted horns and mustaches, undoubtedly leaving a messy surprise for the laundry staff.

This is what true love looks like.

The next morning I went home with a belly full of coffee and yammered at my mother about how gorgeous the whole day had been and how very very happy I was to see Becca and Matt so very very happy. My mother, intrigued by my sudden interest in traditional nuptuals, asked, "So do you think you'll ever want to get pregnant? ...Sorry, I mean, married?" She had misspoken, but what my mother doesn't know is that my new secret obsession is the idea of getting knocked up with an extremely well-behaved bastard child (this desire is both foreign and bizarre to me, probably a result of my long-neglected biological clock suddenly unjamming its snooze button) but I can't tell her that because my mom was an actual single mother and would undoubtedly be a downer about the whole fantasy. So I just shrugged and told her that maybe one day I would get married, which is what she wanted to hear. I don't see future me in a white dress but if I ever take a chance on dating a man who isn't absolutely disgusting, who knows, maybe I'll dive in for the tax break. That, of course, would entail me ever being attracted to a man who wasn't absolutely disgusting. Which, by law of averages, is due to happen any minute now.

I was pondering these tenets of adulthood this morning over even more coffee (remember when I gave up coffee? That was stupid), while my nephew put his shoes on in preparation for daycare. My nephew is three years old and thus wears clothes so small and adorable that they must be seen to be believed, and his shoes feature the Spiderman logo and the toes light up when he takes a step and I cannot fit four fingers inside of one. Children think in non-sequitors and as he shoved his heels into the sneakers he made an announcement. "Katie," he said, "we found you a guy."

"Well I didn't realize you were looking," I answered, because I like to converse with my nephew as though he is a rational adult instead of a three-year-old with the attention span of a goldfish and a tendency to repeat.

"Yeah, we found you a guy."

"Where'd you find this guy?"

"On the porch."

I went to the door and peered through the glass at the dark porch. And sitting quietly, patiently, and dare I say evocatively, there on a swinging bench was my guy.

He still dresses better than my ex-boyfriend.

Talk about a fairy tale ending.

We Pause for Station Identification

2009-10-02T08:23:00.001-07:00

The thing about my mom's house is that it is absolutely freezing. My stepfather makes the same joke every time he comes home from work, which is along the lines of, "Open the doors and let some heat in!"* The cold at night rivals nighttime in my apartment in Peru, which was extreme enough to warrant hats and gloves and covers over the face, but which was always followed by a prolonged period of intense sunlight that streamed in from all sides and slowly baked the contents of the entire room. This was followed by a period of my opening several windows to let some air in, which was in turn followed by a period of my chasing flies around the apartment and killing them with my bare hands, which was in turn followed by sunset and an intensely cold evening which the surviving flies and I would counter by bundling up and huddling together for warmth. But I digress.

This house has been cold since we moved in twenty years ago, and in all likelihood it was built cold. The other members of the household don't seem to mind the cold, largely because they never stop moving. Everyone's always got somewhere to be. In the mornings while the others bustle purposefully around the house, stomping into their high heels and rolling their wind-up trucks across the kitchen floor, I hover in the doorway in my sweatshirt, sipping green tea and plotting my day. My day is unstructured and wide open, less so today because nobody left me wheels. There is nothing within walking distance of my house except for other houses, so I made another cup of green tea and committed myself to the situation.

Sitting jobless in a cold house by oneself offers the opportunity to relax one's beauty standards a bit. By way of example, today I am wearing rainbow striped fleece socks. I'm also wearing a large brown sweater (which is ugly and unflattering but that hardly counts, as for the past two seasons I believed it to be adorable) over a long-sleeved t-shirt with no bra. Since there is no one here to judge my ensemble, I could go so far as to slum it in sweatpants, and nobody would be the wiser. But I don't. Sweatpants tell the universe you've given up, even moreso than fleece socks.

My situation is not hopeless. I don't want you to think I've crawled back from Peru, disgraced, to live in the suburbs indefinitely, drinking too much tea and rocking unflattering footwear. What I'm doing right now is waiting. I've received a job offer, quite out of the blue and late to the party and other such hyperbole, and now I'm biding my time in my mother's living room while my criminal background check is processed and filed, and then my visa is stamped and sent to me, and all the while the Spanish consulate has my passport and I'm like please don't lose it, please don't lose it, because if you lose it I'm going to have to go back to being a legal secretary. And that's if I'm lucky. It's my understanding that the economy is currently down.

So this is my current limbo, waiting to wait to wait some more and in the interim piling on as many layers of unattractive fabric as can fit on my person. I miss having an income and a place to be every day but overall things are not bad. Except that this morning when my mom bustled out the door she called over her shoulder, "Be thinking of where you'd like to go out to eat tonight," and that was a bit rough. Knowing that my Friday night plans revolve around my parents is somewhat hard to swallow, after getting so used to my old life, which included nights out past 9pm and people my own age.

But being taken out to dinner is still nice. And I can't beat the rent. So I'm back to my roots till Spain sees fit to let me in.

*My parents' relationship rests its weight upon three sturdy pillars, the first being God, the second Family, and the third Making the Same Joke Over and Over Again for an Interminable Amount of Time, and Then Laughing at It.

Real Housewives of Western Massachusetts

2009-09-20T04:46:00.000-07:00

I've been home now for almost a week. I've adopted the rather shameful role of re-nested baby bird, albeit a baby with all its adult feathers and some strong ideas about how to best use its personal time. (My mom recently made some comment about "my 28-year-old daughter" to which I said how would you like it if I called you my 60-year-old mother and she was like I'm four years away from 60 and you're three months away from 28; there's a difference; my mother having three kids and three stepkids and six grandchildren and roughly thirty first-graders to mind she can't always be right about everyone's age and birthday but as I creep toward my thirtieth year without a job or home or life goal I find myself becoming rather sensitive to these numbers.) I am not entirely directionless as I have a job offer in the works (A job! With salary! Money being put INto my bank account, righteous) but I am waiting on some paperwork to arrive in the mail and as it has not yet arrived I am currently chilling.

Chilling in Western Massachusetts is way different from chilling in Peru. For one thing, my parents have, in their personal home, several full-length mirrors and one elliptical training machine. Frustratingly, despite the total removal of alcohol from my diet for the past month, I have not yet lost an ounce of beer belly. I blame this on white bread because I have to blame somebody. So with my spare time in the mornings I've been going on low-impact, high-energy runs to nowhere in my mom's basement, in the hopes that my Peruvian breadbasket will diminish and I can wear a tube top on my first day of work. My diligence has been the envy of my mother and sister, who both work regular jobs and don't have time to run in place. To which I say, priorities.

Another bitchin' thing about living in Massachusetts is the car. My parents have been extremely generous in lending me their vehicles, and while the rest of the world goes to work or school I tool around the suburbs watching the leaves change and maniacally switching radio stations. Being totally removed from American culture for two months left me at a loss as to the lyrics of the latest Top 40 songs, but after a week home I find myself absently humming, "She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts," over and over till I want to punch myself in the face. It's a particularly nice time of year to drive through Massachusetts, as the sun is out (but thankfully not with the intensity of equatorial Cusco) and the leaves are just starting to change. As a person who gets lost on the regular, I have enjoyed several impromptu countryside drives that allowed me to admire the foliage, made all the more pleasant by the fact that once I grow bored of driving in circles I can pull over and whip out my iPhone to mapquest myself back home.

Even after living in a country where the people eat guinea pigs, I am beginning to understand that there is nowhere as calculatedly weird as American suburbia. The overarching, purposeful sense of sameness that years ago used to bore me now leaves me speechless. The high school football, the mileage on the car, the high-waisted jeans and coupon clipping and lawn service and the kids at the mall (by the way, how awesome is the mall?) and the fancy coffeeshops and the way some streets have American flags hanging off every telephone pole like they're recreating an Americana that technically never was, it's so much crazier and more beautiful than I ever gave it credit for. I'm really enjoying my reentry to this atmosphere, as I am continually blown away by the weird shit that I for years took for granted.

Anyway I have nowhere to go with this post. This is my life as a lady of leisure, spent running in place and driving in circles and spending cash I don't have on things I desperately need (thank you, America, for the invention of overpriced, fancy hair care products. Once I cash my security deposit I will thank you also for makeup). I like the return to what I know and the fact that I can communicate in English all the time, and eventually, when the time is right and the iron is hot, I think it might be nice to even get a job.

Yellow Lighter

2009-06-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

Dawn has my umbrella, a fact I remembered when I woke at 4am to a howling monsoon. This morning the skies are sunny and heavy with humidity, a promise of more wet weather. She texts me to say she'll bring it by and I wait for her on the corner with the day's first cigarette. I have taken the time to roll it properly, uniform and shapely and with no loose flaps of paper curling out. I never enjoy a cigarette break as much as I enjoy the idea of a cigarette break, and to be honest there is nothing to break from yet today; it's 8 o'clock in the morning and I haven't so much as begun my commute.

I'm standing on the sunny sidewalk, trying to blow smoke away from the passersby, and a woman approaches me. She's middle-aged with lush, shapely lips and wavy brown hair cut in a mom-style, dragging a little blonde boy along beside her. "Excuse me," she says. "Do you want this?" She digs into her pocket a moment and produces a yellow lighter.

I don't need a lighter; I have two in my bag already but they're the clear plastic kind with the notched clickers and this is the hard plastic kind with the smooth clickers. It's a superior lighter. "Oh okay," I say. "I guess."

"I took it from my brother."

"Okay," I repeat. "Thanks."

She looks at me for a moment, trying to decide something. There's an awkward pause and the little boy squirms and she continues. "And the reason that I took it is because I work in cardiology and that's all I do all day. Try to save people who smoked twenty years ago."

"Oh..."

"You're young enough," she says. "There's hope for you."

"Okay," I say. "Thanks."

"I'm serious."

"I know."

"I'm really serious."

"I know," I say again.

"Okay, well have a nice day," she says, and she's off across the street with the little blonde boy while I slink behind a tree to finish my cigarette, peeling the label off the yellow lighter. A breeze shakes the water from the leaves above and I'm caught in the sudden shower, a rainstorm on a sunny morning directly overhead, just for me. I toss the butt and then Dawn comes with my umbrella, and I thank her and head toward the train.

I'm early today by almost half an hour. I ride in a car full of unfamiliar faces, on a different wave of commuters. Two stops before my office I pull out my tobacco to roll another cigarette, since I've got the time and the lung capacity to kill. I disembark and light up but the bumping of the subway ride has inhibited my rolling abilities and the final product is loose and papery. After a few puffs I toss it on the ground. I really like the idea of a cigarette break better than I like a cigarette break, anyway. Then I fish through my bag and find the pack of tobacco, and I throw that into a silver garbage can. I follow it with the two clear lighters with the jaggedy clickers and walk into my office building, fingering my new yellow lighter.

Beautiful

2009-05-31T10:04:00.000-07:00

It's a spectacular sunny Sunday and I'm doing my laundry. It's a sin to waste a Sunday like this at the laundromat but it's a violation of office dress code to show up tomorrow in pajama bottoms and a bathing suit top. So I'm hiking down the block with my entire wardrobe balled into a smelly laundry bag, bent double under the weight of it and marveling, once again, at my capacity to possess such a shocking quantity of clothing and never have anything to wear. I have friends that simply drop their laundry off and spend the day doing productive and exciting things, but I hate the thought of my delicates whirling and baking in an industrial sized dryer. So I do my own, spend the day skipping back and forth to the laundromat in between rinse cycles and cups of iced coffee.

The bag is broken; it broke a long time ago and I'm waiting for the day when it splits in half and sends my sheets and towels blowing down the street. The amassed laundry is so heavy that I've got to stop every few feet and switch arms lest I lose blood flow to my fingertips. There is a man up ahead standing in his front yard, standing right up close to the fence and watching me and I'm gaining on him and I know what's coming. I swing the bag over my shoulder and hunch, eyes to the ground, and when I pass him he leans over the fence and whispers, so close that I can feel his breath on my face, "Beautiful."

Gentlemen of New York and, Indeed, the World at Large. How do you do it? How do you take a word that should be a compliment and turn it into an insult? I can think of a short list of people I'd like to hear call me beautiful, right off the top of my head, including, but not limited to, the cute skinny guy on my commute, Ne-Yo, that one guy at the bar last night in the douchey white button down (but not the other guy at the bar last night in the douchey white button-down), Tim Gunn, my mom. Random Neighbor Standing In His Front Yard would simply not make the cut.

But this streetside holleration is not a new phenomenon. I've lived it, my friends have lived it, sometimes it's clever and sometimes it's gross but it's always weird. No one is shocked by it. What perplexes me more is the man's choice of time frame. I have my moments in the sun, but this morning is certainly not one of them. I am unshowered and unkempt, my hair a knot of split ends atop my head, my skin greasy with sunscreen and lack of sleep. I smell like cigarettes and Corona and the desperation of a dozen drunk dudes who work in finance. I did not even bother to put on deodorant. I did not even bother to put on underwear. And I'm shuffling down the street in the shape of a number seven with a stinking bag of laundry on my back. By no one's beauty standards am I making a splash.

I do not answer the neighbor in his front yard, and he is surely glad for that, lest his wife come outside and find him entrenched in conversation with some unwashed floozy. I simply keep on toward the laundromat and hold off until I'm out of earshot to stop and readjust my bag. And he stands in his front yard waiting for the next woman to pass so that he can hiss pseudo-compliments at her and pray she won't respond. The whole interaction is clearly for the benefit of him and not the passersby. If he wanted to make my day, he should have offered to carry my laundry bag.

Long Weekend

2009-05-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

The weekend was extended and suspended and everything the long weekend is promised to be. I picnicked and barbecued and waived at sailors. On Friday night I gave some men a personality test which is my best party trick; I give you ten questions and you give me ten answers and then I tell you what you really mean. And the one guy had a really low sex drive, said the test, but he worked for the Mets and in retribution gave us four tickets behind home plate for Memorial Day. Which was pretty nice of him, low sex drive or no.

Then I went to a picnic in Central Park and a karaoke barbecue in Brooklyn. I played and lost at croquet and I smoked a thousand cigarettes outside in the dark and tried to use the bathroom of the downstairs neighbors. I was denied by the grumpy girl who lives there because 1) she is relentlessly, exhaustingly grumpy and 2) I was drunk, uninvited, and standing in her kitchen yelling "Hellooooooo" at nine o'clock at night. So, tie. I went upstairs to use the bathroom there and sang "Wind Beneath My Wings" (on karaoke, not like I just freestyle Streisand on any old average Saturday) and then fell into a stubborn drunken sleep from which I would not be roused. Never ever.

Sunday was a rooftop barbecue, and we watched the clouds change color behind the Brooklyn buildings as the lightning storm advanced and retreated. The air was thick with electricity and everyone's hair stood on end, waving in the sky like antennae. We ate hot dogs and got into a debate about popular music wherein I argued that Ne-Yo is the single greatest musician of our generation and everyone else at the party argued that Nuh-uh. Then later I got into a debate about gun control as well but that was a little less expected. I was feeling feisty, apparently, particularly when bandits STOLE MY PHONE and I retaliated with a significant amount of foot-stomping and name-calling. The phone was recovered and I kept it on my person for the remainder of the evening, an act which proved fatal in two regards. The first thing I did was accidentally call my sister from my bra and force her to bear witness to a boozy argument between me and M as to the inappropriateness of phone theft as a weapon of war, and my sister lives a grown-up life with grown-up problems and goes to bed at nine o'clock at night and as such she did not find this amusing. She admonished me to "be safe" and I assured her that I was locked in Rob's bathroom and was thus well out of harm's way. The sting of the theft remained, though, and led to the second fatal thing. I attempted to text Meagan regarding the evening's dramas while walking down a spiral staircase in wet flip-flops. The reward for my multitasking was a wham and a bruise and two broken toes.

The following morning there was evidence of a late night strewn about the kitchen, including half-empty bottles, pita scraps and crumby plates, and a three-quarters-dead cockroach whose final wish was to find eternal peace in the middle of our linoleum floor. He seemed to have come from nowhere, since he certainly hadn't been around ten minutes earlier, while I danced around the kitchen barefoot. I ate some vodka chocolates while M prepared his burial at sea, and I winced at her even-keeled handling of such a large, twitchy bug, and she winced at my consumption of vodka chocolates before noontime.

I rode my too-small bike to another picnic and ate cucumber sandwiches on a pink quilt in the shade. The park spread out in front of me like a wide-screen TV with a hundred channels playing at once; we watched the little kids throw frisbees and the women swish their skirts along the path. The sun was out and the world was perfect. Then we left to go to the Mets game which was a Mets game; I think the third Mets game I have ever been to and I am pretty sure we won. But I don't pay a lot of attention to those sorts of things, because my mind is still dancing on the roof and skipping around the croquet sets and napping in the park.

Edit Edit

2009-05-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

I'm submitting an essay to class tomorrow, letting everyone peek inside my head and discuss their findings. My essays tend toward the hedonistic because I like to write about sin. Then once I've got ten pages of odes to my bad decisions I take out all the sexy parts and the bits about shoplifting because I don't want my class to know too much about me. There are some things a lady just doesn't discuss. Two weeks ago I submitted my story about peeing in Belize and then for twenty minutes everyone had to talk about my boobs. This essay keeps them covered but there is implied R-rated material and I think that the more I submit these things the more uncomfortable my class is going to become. Someday I'll pull a Bukowski or a Nin and get real explicit with the saucy bits but for now my style remains watered-down hedonism chased with guilt.

My guilt was not assuaged by the package I received today from my mother, a self-help book entitled Get Out of That Rut! with a card inside that promised she was praying for me. This nearly made me cry at work, and it certainly shamed me for the bout of destructive decisions I've been making recently. I'm coming off a self-imposed two-week sober spell and my jump back off the wagon has been sloppy at best. For a person who marinates in worries about her overall health, I do not take particular pains to maintain mine. Last night for dinner I had crackers and beer, courtesy of my roommates, who left a six-pack in the fridge when they left for their beachy vacation (a vacation which G is presumably spending entirely naked, thanks to M and me) and I drank in bed while I edited my essay. I know that as a Woman of a Certain Age I am supposed to relish my solitude in my own home, but without my roommates my apartment is really lonely and at least three times as haunted.

The extensive editing has been overdone for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the entire point of submitting it to the class is to receive notes for edits. At this point I have read my own words so many times that I could recite full paragraphs from memory, which means that the wording is solidifying in my mind as The Only Way It Can Be. But I don't want to send in a half-finished piece with, say, a weak ending only to receive ten copies from my classmates marked "Weak ending." I'd rather submit something thinking it's perfect and have my pride knocked down.

My pride is also a major factor in this decision to edit compulsively. Last week our teacher gave us fifteen minutes to create a scene in a drugstore and when I read my scene aloud he proclaimed it a "triumph." I had been generally weepy and chain-smoky all week and this was easily the day's highlight. I don't want to submit a non-triumph; I've got a captive audience and I'll be damned if they won't get to see the best I've got. If this means continual questionable decisions, a little more cleavage, or a sixteenth read-through of the same ten pages then so be it. Last class one woman wrote a note on my essay saying that it made her uncomfortable, and to me this is far more triumphant than benign with a weak ending.

What Not To Wear

2009-05-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

Procrastination breeds bags and bags of old clothes. At least in my house. Sometime last autumn, M started piling bags of her old clothes in the living room closet. Soon G and I followed suit. Closet space in New York is at a premium and we needed room for fancy new clothes. We could not keep the threads we'd been rocking since college. There's a store in Brooklyn called Beacon's Closet that sells funky secondhand clothes, and we figured that the past incarnations of ourselves would look fantastic in the shop windows. "Now Buying For Winter," claimed the sign outside, always ahead of season. As the weather chilled we piled our old skirts and sandals into big, square shopping bags and stuffed them in the closet. Soon we would drag them all into town and then roll around in the ensuing pile of $20s.

Winter came in while we were still collecting. The hall closet became overstuffed and spilled into the living room. The bags that burst at the bottom were squeezed inside newer, bigger bags. We threw in our autumn leftovers and the winter clothes we couldn't bear to look at again. Occasionally we'd rifle through the bags when our own closets failed us, in search of an appropriate castoff. I'd try to fill out M's old sweaters or she'd squeeze into G's shoes. Homeless men and women froze to death on the sidewalks of New York while wool coats lay in piles on our living room floor. Beacon's Closet changed its sign, "Now Buying For Spring."

The bags lined the walls, stacked like building blocks in a makeshift fort of used clothes. The living room closet was rendered entirely unusable and none of us dared open the door. Still we filled the bags, shrugging our shoulders and discarding old favorites, slightly stained or shrunk in the wash. Spring came late and we shivered, dipped into the bags for wool socks or an old cardigan that we weren't quite ready to abandon. One Saturday the sun came out and the Brooklyn girls slipped into their tank tops and Beacon's Closet changed its sign, "Now Buying For Summer."

"I think we should take the bags today," said M.

I was a little surprised. I'd gotten used to the bags, had forgotten that there were people who used their living rooms to entertain or to relax in, rather than as storage facilities. I'd sort of lost sight of the fact that there was ever a plan to move the bags out of the apartment. They had become relics, part of the building, like the mouse traps in the corner or the holes I'd burned in the floor.

"I thought G was going to drive them downtown," I said.

"G's gone for the weekend and we never think to take them when she's here. We're thinking of it now. It's a nice day to go into Park Slope and she'll probably be really glad to see the floor in the living room again."

"Especially when we show her how much money we make," I agreed.

Transporting the bags was no small feat. We tried to consolidate and were greeted with a rush of memories upon revisiting the clothes we used to love. Lips were bitten and teeth gritted as we tried to gauge whether we were really prepared to part with that purple shirt or those green sneakers. "Look at these shorts G's getting rid of!" M said. "They are cute!"

"Ew, look what's in this one," I replied. "It's a pashmina I found on the street and half a bag of pretzels."

Between the two of us we managed a teetering eight or nine bags, roughly half of our collective total. We dragged them onto the subway, a bus, and along for five-block hike, skittering down the sidewalk faster than the handles of the bags could tear apart. By the time we got to Beacon's Closet we were sweaty and giddy, proudly presenting our unwanted castoffs to a disinterested hipster in horn-rimmed glasses.

The hipster explained the rules and regulations of our donations. They'd accept our clothes out of season, but they wouldn't pay for them. If we gave them an item they decided to resell, we'd receive a percentage. If we gave them something they didn't want, we could take it back home or else donate it to a women's shelter. "Keep it all," we told the hipster. "Take your time sorting through it; we'll be at brunch."

Brunch was at a nearby Mexican restaurant with unlimited sangria. Hours later, stumbly and purple tongued, we returned to Beacon's Closet for our payoff. The hipster rolled her eyes at our unrestrained giggling and rewarded our efforts with a check--for ten dollars. "Can we at least find out what you took?" we asked, but she assured us that it was far too late to delve back into the piles. I tucked the check in my wallet and we stopped at a couple more bars, lolled outside in the sunshine and prepared for G's delight at receiving her share of the booty.

G returned the next day. She smiled politely and rolled her eyes at our story, though she did seem to enjoy walking through the living room uninhibited by towers of hand-me-downs. It wasn't until today, while she was packing for a trip to the beach, that she expressed concerns at our sorting methods. While the closet is still full to bursting with the remaining shopping bags, the absent ones pose more of a problem. It seems that we are missing one bag, one large white plastic bag, nondescript and not particularly notable, save for one thing.

It contained all of G's summer clothes.

What's done is done now; there is no retrieving the items or even hoping to find them in the store or the women's shelter. They are gone for good. G is being a good sport about it, but I feel really terrible, and I'm shocked at my own ineptitude. In my quest to be a helpful and efficient member of my household, I sold my roommate's entire summer wardrobe.

For ten dollars.

Dry

2009-05-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

It's been raining all morning so I am on my fourth cup of tea. Same number of hours I slept. New York grumbles about the rain but I love it because I'm from New England and I thrive on bad weather. Some day if providence shines down on me I will live in Old England and revel in the rain every day. A girl I barely know on the internet posted a crummy little gray picture of a crummy little gray garden in London and I ached for it, it looked so right. I forget sometimes that I've never even been to England, save the five minutes I spent outside of Heathrow Airport while I was waiting for my Glasgow transfer. And it was sunny that day. England draws me because it's a haven for so much of what I hold dear: soggy weather, destructive men, dry humour, cups of tea. That's really enough to get by on.

Sunshine would be wildly inappropriate today, since Meagan is moving to Pennsylvania. I don't think I could handle squinting through a balmy spring day after a night of goodbyes. We went to dinner, cheesy risotto and garlicky olives and a guitarist in a newsboy cap singing Patsy Cline and winking. Then to the bar where the world's most ornery DJ insisted on Super 70's Slow Jamz Disco Favorites no matter how many times we asked for early nineties hip-hop. Dan taught Lissy and me how to eyefuck and Dorothy waltzed with Rob. Meagan booty-shaked and kissed everybody and there were lots of photos of people making happy faces like this wasn't the end of something, like the guest of honor wasn't whisking off to med school. We had to be happy despite the terrible undanceable music. It's inappropriate to cry at a goodbye party until the very end.

I had to leave early because I live a hundred miles away, on account of the low rent. I hugged everyone and got into a bizarre headed-toward-the-door conversation with Dan about the Old Testament and everyone promised themselves to weekly we-miss-Meagan meetings and then I left. And then she came out after me and we had to hug for a long time on the sidewalk because hell, dude. Hell. That is my girl and she's gone. I rode home and Ne-Yo sang to me for an hour and a half about his women troubles and how good he is at sexing. I texted Rob to say I was home safe and he wrote me back that I was missing the girl-on-girl motorboating. At least Meagan got a proper send-off. Between the boobs and the rain.

Desperately, Desperately

2009-05-11T19:23:00.000-07:00

Things are continuing in the same vein, which is to say they are stagnant and crummy. I've been listening to Ne-Yo lately because it occurred to me that the only thing on my iPod is indie rock bands and I've been grappling with the distinct possibility that I actually hate indie rock. So I've switched to R&B which I always swore I did hate and you know what? Not so bad. My favorite song is "Lie to Me" which is a terribly cheesy song about Ne-Yo's girlfriend cheating on him but there is one part right in the middle where he goes, "Because I need/ desperately/ desperately/ to believe you" and on the second "desperately" his whole body just cracks and falls to pieces on the floor. It absolutely knocks me out. So I listen to the whole song on my commute and I bob my head very quietly till he gets to the second "desperately" and then I sometimes make faces and shake my fists. Ne-Yo knows what he's talking about, man. In real life his girlfriend had a baby and they named it after him, and then it turned out not to be his at all. How horrible is that, to think you had a baby and then poof, nope you didn't, I mean how do you pick yourself up after that. Next time I think I have problems I'll try to remember Ne-Yo.

Today on my ride home I was listening to the same song, and I don't just put it on repeat, that's cheating; I like to convince myself I won't listen to it over and over and then at the end I say, "Oh just once more," and click the rewind button, and remember when we used to have to manually rewind cassette tapes by holding the button down, and then we had to check over and over to see if we stopped at the right place? And sometimes the rewind button would break and we had to spin the whole cassette around on our fingers? And then sometimes we'd put the tape back in the cassette player and realize we had rewound the whole thing backwards? How bad did that suck, right? Anyway I was listening to the same song on my commute and then when Ne-Yo got to the "desperately" part I actually cried a little, totally without warning. And despite my saying it was totally without warning I have to admit that part of me must have seen it coming, because I had put on my big sunglasses for a ride underground, which was lucky because they saved me from looking like a basket-case in front of the other commuters. It might have been awkward trying to explain how bad I feel for Ne-Yo and not-his baby. Despite the glasses, the whole event was still a bit jarring so for the sake of some endorphins I went for a run in the park. Ne-Yo makes an appearance on my workout playlist, but "Lie to Me" does not, because then I'd never get anywhere; I'd just stop and do dramatic fist-shakes and faces-making when it came on and that would be of no endorphinal value whatsoever. It was a good run, an amazing one if you want the truth, and I passed absolutely everybody and tore the whole track up and then went home and smoked hookah to give the competition a better chance tomorrow. Which is not to say I'm going to run tomorrow; I'm not, because I have writing class.

I'm still working on my essay, along with two others, and once I finish it I'm pretty sure it will be the best thing I've ever written but as yet it's got a lot of awkward wording and brackets indicating spaces where jawdropping metaphors and mindblowing descriptions will eventually go. I never used to use brackets when I wrote but working in an office environment has taught me the value of the proper proofreading marks, and sometimes when I'm at my desk I edit my own essays with all the fancy curlicues and squiggly lines that we use on boring briefs and that way I become, in an extremely technical sense of the term, a paid writer. So that's cool. Also if you are my boss please note that I am totally joking and would never use office hours to do anything beyond sharpening pencils and the occasional reorganization of the file cabinets.

Goodnight; I'm going to bed.

Hello and Smelcome

2009-05-08T19:13:00.000-07:00

So the way I roll on Friday nights is to go to the market down the street and try to pull the Saltines off the top shelf. I am too lazy to cook for myself, so my general meal preparation consists mainly of Saltines and a hundred-gallon vat of Sabra hummus. The hummus is on an accessible shelf in the store but the Saltines are way up high, and to access them I have to do this little one-foot hopping dance and wiggle my fingers till somewhere between zero and three boxes fall on my head. Today two dropped out at once, and I caught the first box in one hand and used it to deflect the second, which bounced into my other hand. Two points! I did a little victory dance in the direction of the gentleman next to me who had not offered to help. Nobody at that market has ever helped me with my Saltines, not once.

I had to stay home tonight despite it being a beautiful springtime Friday night because I've been ill and I've taken pills that I'm not supposed to mix with alcohol. And then my roommates asked me to pick up some beer at the store and I thought Oh my wouldn't a beer really hit the spot just about now, and then my sicker and more responsible side stepped in and said Hey there wind your neck in. So I scanned the shelves to see what kind of non-beer drinks they had on offer and thought for the first time in my life about the possible benefits of non-alcoholic beer. And if I purchased and imbibed non-alcoholic beer on a Friday night in lieu of regular beer would that mean I have a serious problem or that just like the taste? But then I saw some Kombucha tea, that fabulous bitter fizzy stuff with the grimy live cultures squiggling around the bottom of the bottle, and I bought that instead. Healthy choices! I washed it down with some hookah to maintain the natural order of things.

I'm trying to write despite not really trying to write because I'm gossiping with my roommates and watching Friday night TV but I've been feeling sort of stomped on lately, if you want the truth, and I am writing a new essay that I have got to get out of me for therapeutic reasons. I'm taking another class and I've joined a writing group so I've got lots of people critiquing and editing my pieces; lots of deadlines to meet. I've got another essay on the burner that's maybe three-quarters done, but I've got to get this thing written so I can move forward, feel better, be a person again. It hurts coming out, almost physically, and so far it's ugly. But I know there's something beautiful under there and I'm determined to find it. It's 11:30pm on a Friday and I guess it's time to start searching again.

Clarity

2009-03-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

I think the thing I hate most about These Economic Times is the way everyone goes around reminding you of them. Like you'd forget. This is not a good time to take a sick day, this is not a good time to ask for a new desk chair. Massive layoffs are rippling through my field, as they are everywhere else, and everyone in my office sits extremely still and tries not to sneeze too loudly. They whisper to each other about the latest rumors, and reiterate that "these days" a person can never be too careful, a person can never get too comfortable. I hate hearing the same message from all angles, from a thousand armchair economists who are all so exhausted from stocking up their bomb shelters.

Yesterday I had an hour to kill in the Village so I attempted to go shoe shopping. It was an unusually depressing experience. I walked along a once-packed street of shuttered windows and empty storefronts, dipping into the shops that remained. Nobody has any money left besides me; I just got my overtime pay so I am ready to spend on some new black flats. The shopkeepers eyed me with desperate, twitchy smiles; they steered me away from the empty back walls and pointed me to the clearance sections, where black flats are marked down to $89.99. My last pair of black flats cost $8.00 and this is why I shop at giant chain stores, and this is why the little shops were empty but the DSW is packed. Fruitless and shoeless, I shuffled down the street to the yoga studio.

Kira introduced me to Bikram yoga, a ninety-minute session of stretching poses conducted in a hundred-degree room. It's an hour and a half of flexing and straining, inhaling feet and wet carpet while sweat slides off the elbows of the people beside you. It's brutal. First-timers get a free week's membership to the studio with purchase, and they're encouraged to use it. Kira and her friends have been Bikram yoga aficionados for years, and they talk about the classes like my mom talks about Bible study. "You have to go every day for your first week," they advised me. "Go every day and you won't believe what happens."

After Minute 10 of Day 1 this prospect seemed unlikely. The warmup breathing exercises were as intense as my three-mile run. Sweat splashed on the yoga mats beside me and my shoulders ached while the instructor chirped, "Reach back go back way back feel the stretch CHANGE," faster than I could think but not fast enough to relieve the pain.

The hour and a half slogged by and at the end we were released, dizzy and dazed, and directed toward the showers. The world was luminous and confusing. We went to brunch afterward and when Kira reached over and picked up my menu, my immediate thought was, "Oh weird, my menu is floating." This didn't even seem so strange or implausible, nor did it occur to me that the menu might be attached to someone's hand. "You've got yoga-head," said Kira. "Go back tomorrow, you'll see how much it helps."

So I went back, me and the other borgeousie who can still secure overtime, and I sweated through another ninety minutes' worth of poses. This class flew for the first hour; it shocked me, but the final thirty minutes were hell. "Don't check out," warned the instructer. "Commit yourself to the full class; your body will do what you tell it to." But my body didn't want to and my mind concurred. When the class finally ended the group of us sat around in the lobby, slack-jawed, trying desperately not to throw up. I tried to walk to the shower but the whole room buzzed and turned black. I sat down hard directly in the small doorway, in the paths of a dozen toweled girls trying to get to their bags. "I'm sorry," I slurred. "I'm a little out of it." Eventually the room regained its color. I took an icy shower and slipped on my $8 black flats, walked out into the Village with wet hair, blissfully peaceful.

Today the world is remarkably clear through the fog. I'm drinking bottles and bottles of water to prevent another fainting spell. I didn't even eat last night because I felt so pure. "This is a good way to get out of yourself," said the instructor. "We spend so much time inside ourselves that we need to get out once in a while." This is exactly what my mom told me after her last Bible study, so I know there must be truth to it. I'm still wearing my bracelet, Om Mani Pedme Hum. My insides are threatening to spin out again, out of boredom or habit, but something deeper refuses to let them. Everything is out of me. It's the strangest feeling of my life.

Sometimes I Rant

2009-03-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

The problem with maintaining your positive outlook is that it only takes one little besmirch to wipe the grin off your face. And then you're glowering, cowering, openly and quietly seething and daring someone to ask you why. The house of cards I have built can topple, over something as nothing as a stray soy sauce packet, and here I am overthinking my use of Japanese condiments like that might somehow save my life. For a person without focus I certainly know how to focus, how to radiate one element and hold it above my head and watch it glow, how to examine it from three hundred sixty degrees one at a time in rapid succession like a broken carousel. Every time you think you've gotten to the point where you can stand it, someone comes in and swipes one of your cards.

I am in an awfully dour mood for someone whose class is practically over, for someone whose life is practically beginning, for someone who just bought three round-trip tickets to Belize for April. I bought a new bathing suit to cover up my tattoo, because the laser center says that if the sun hits your tattoo it will darken the ink, it will burn those leaves right into you forever-ever, so the new bathing suit is practically a turtleneck just to be on the safe side. There are people who will insist that you cannot postpone your future indefinitely just because you accidentally got something ugly sewn into your lower back, but they are all wrong. You just take a deep breath and take a vacation and quietly close your eyes and wait for spring. Because the truth is everything I hold onto is made of sand, the tighter I grip it the faster it slips, and I do love the beach but I burn.

I have fourteen dollars left in my checking account, and I believe I will spend it on some fancy cigarettes.

I, Phone

2009-03-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

Danny once told me a story about his coworker whose dog ate her cell phone. The last text message she sent, before the phone became puppy chow, was an invitation to her friend to come over on New Years Eve and eat hot dogs. The utter randomness of a New Years party revolving around hot dogs makes me wonder if this wasn't some sort of euphamism, but that's not the point. The point is that her dog's digestive tract scrambled something in the phone and the hot dog text was sent, repeatedly and for weeks on end, to everybody in her contact list.

Since hearing this story I've been able to induce little nervous breakdowns just by thinking about my recent text messages and how I'd feel if they were sent repeatedly to every person in my phone. I compulsively overshare, so my outbox is full of embarrassingly intimate details. I can just imagine my future.

"Hey, whatever happened to Kaitlyn?"
"Oh, you mean the girl with the gas?"
"Yeah, she used to text me every day to say she couldn't come over because she had gas."
"She used to text me that too. It was so weird because I never invited her over at all, but she was always declining anyway."
"What a strange girl. I haven't seen her in a while."
"Yeah, I think she changed her name and moved to Malaysia."

This fear, which I never would have considered until I heard about this lady's magic dog, was gripping to begin with. But now it is exacerbated, because last week I bought an iPhone. This was a rash and impulsive decision based on a series of arguments I've had with the Sprint people over the past two years. My contract with Sprint came with a free phone, but due to some glitch in the system they have instead issued me a series of door stops. The door stops fizzle and die and are subsequently replaced by refurbished door stops that have died on their previous owners. My disapproval with this method of doing business was continually met with the suggestion that I sign another two-year contract and receive a slightly upgraded door stop, to which I would argue that I would sooner donate a kidney to a Hilton than give two more years of my life to Sprint.

Sprint and I went around and around in this manner for years, and they replaced my door stop no fewer than seven times. Finally one night, Danny sent me a text message with a restaurant address that I did not receive for a full two hours. What if Danny was a straight man? This was the impetus I needed. I harnessed the directionless frenzy I'd already been marinating in, and my abusive relationship with the phone company culminated in a battle of wits between me and some overworked call center manager.

"You know that this is a ruse," I told her. "You know that Sprint gives out free phones that don't work because they want me to sign another contract for a better phone."

"We cannot take responsibility for the quality of the free phones," the woman said.

"All I want is a phone that makes and receives calls! How can you not take responsibility for that?"

"Well if you're having trouble with your phone, you can always take it down to a local service center and they'll be happy to help you."

"Look," I said, "Stop reading off your script. You and I both know the people in those centers are useless." This was not me being nasty; those people are, in fact, useless. They gaze dead-eyed at the walls behind you while you talk, and they don't know how to form lines so they just grab at random from the clumps of disgruntled customers huddled around the door. The last time I went into the Sprint service center I was escorted to the manager who: 1) took my phone in his hand, 2) sneezed hard into his elbow, and 3) spit on the floor of the Sprint store, all without breaking his stride. The manager spit on the floor of the Sprint store. And nobody even blinked. So no, I will not go back to the service center.

The poor call center lady spent another ten minutes trying to convince me to sign up for two more years of managerial saliva, and I spent another ten minutes assuring her that I would prefer to communicate via carrier pigeon. We finally parted ways and I wished her a good day, a sincere gesture on my part since I wouldn't want to spend my work day arguing with people like me, and then instead of researching low-priced phones that simply make and receive calls, I marched over to AT&T and dropped a wad of cash on an iPhone.

It goes without saying that I love it, although I still haven't figured out how to organize my music or download any applications. What I can do is text message Kerrie all day long, without the 160-character limit or the T9 word retrieval imposed by my crummy old phone, and I can read the entire conversation back later, rehashing all the most intimate and scandalous details of my life. And then I can sieze with panic at the thought that there exists some button that pings some satellite that can send every single text message to my mom, my boss and my gynecologist, ad nauseam until my life is in shambles and I have to move to Malaysia. Thank God I don't have a dog.

On Monsters

2009-02-24T07:36:00.000-08:00

It is cold today. It is ass-chappingly, snot-freezingly, hypothermiatingly cold. It's in the thirties, which is tropical compared to the tens and zeroes we've suffered, but by now I have exhausted my interest in winter weather and I have no stomach for Depression-era temperatures. It's been windy, which, from my third-floor bedroom in my hundred-year-old building, is spooky as hell. I fall asleep to the sweet sounds of a slasher film each night, with gremlins and goblins and Brooklyn banshees howling me a lullaby. My radiator is broken and my room is chilly but the closet is absolutely frigid. If that closet is not haunted then it's a portal to Narnia. I open the door in search of a suitable shoe and icy air oozes out at me and fills the room. The clothes inside are cold as a ghost.

Dressing is a hassle, because it's the end of a season and I can't look at anything in my wardrobe without dry heaving. Today I tried to mix things up a bit with a black camisole, only to find that the deoderant fairy had been climbing through my dresser smearing chalky white stains across all my undershirts. This threw my creative license into a turmoil and suddenly I realized that not only was everything in my closet caked with deoderant (even the shoes, what the fuck) but it was all irredeemably ugly. So I was forced to resort to my fanciest work clothes, too fancy for a Tuesday but luckily I have always had an affinity for Tuesdays. I'll dress for one. Somehow even my red skirt is compromised, covered in fuzzy black mystery pills clustered at the seams. Probably goblin droppings.

What I need are some new clothes, unworn and unhaunted. But I can't buy any because my checking account is overdrawn thanks to the very expensive haircut I got last week. The cut was a worthy investment, I guess, because when I told my hairdresser that I wanted exactly what I already had but longer, she actually gave it to me. My hair looks more like my hair than it ever has before. I spend my mornings aggressively styling it and then I stuff it up into my hat, not because I care to be warm--I would frostbite a few pieces of ear for a good hair day, whatever--but because the ghost wind tears up my curls. The hat keeps them together but perpetually mashed. There are no monsters in the hat but there is a wide stripe of pressed powder where it hits my forehead.

Later this week it will be in the fifties, and we can celebrate by wearing high heels and aprons and making baked goods for our alcoholic husbands. I don't like the cold but I'm okay with the monsters. I prefer them to the mice.

A Minor Concern

2009-02-21T13:41:00.000-08:00

There is, as I have mentioned, a boy in my class to whom I am attracted. He is definitively cute but moreover he has a spectacular British accent and so everything he says drips with sex appeal and crumpets. We have exchanged a few lines of conversation, and he comes off as confident and charming, but since he's never tried to rob me or insult my mother I doubt this will evolve into a full-on crush. In any event we have no plans, at present, to go out or make out or pop out for a quickie in the public bathrooms.

One element of his persona that perplexes me, though, is that in the six weeks that I've known him I've never seen him without his scarf. I find this boggling. It's always the same scarf, tied in the same loop, and he's never so much as loosened it or gotten crazy with a double knot. And it's starting to make me wonder. If he removes it, will his head fall off?

On Rules

2009-02-19T12:32:00.000-08:00

In my life I have burned through a lot of hobbies. Of all the creative endeavors that have gone the way of jazz dance and trapeze and yoga and voice training and theater and photography and collage, the one art form to which I've been faithful is the journal. I have kept a journal for nearly twenty years now, since I was eight years old. In my closet sits a tupperware box stacked with volumes of my stream of consciousness, from my eight-year-old self recounting my Christmas presents ("I got a diary and Aunt Jane gave me a neat silver set") to my wordier adult neuroses from just yesterday. I'm a fastidious person, and I've managed to chronicle a large part of my life this way.

Journaling has shaped who I am. I'm cripplingly introspective, obsessed with detail and honesty, and I have handwriting so uniform and stylized that it looks like a font. Typing out my thoughts into a blog is healthy, because it allows me to write for an audience (albeit an audience of, like, twelve), but it does not feed the need for thought organization that the journal does. When I become overwhelmed with whatever is spinning in my head, my instinct is to get it out, and into the journal. I used to carry mine with me and just whip it out whenever, but by now it's nearly full. A new journal is more benign, a little bit more delicate, because whatever I write on page one is going to stare back at me for the next six months. But an old journal is more dangerous because over time it gets really twisty in there. It fills with ideas I'm not proud of, with secret desires and clandestine activities. With thoughts that flickered only long enough to get a moment's worth of indelible ink, that I can't and won't defend. An old journal is a live grenade and there comes a time when a girl just can't risk carrying it in her purse. So occasionally, when my thoughts pile on top of each other and spin and bounce around, the only way to straighten them is to grab some paper scraps and scribble out the words pounding in my head. Then I take them home and paste them into the journal. This is more therapeutic than massage. This gets me higher than crack. This method of blue felt tip on empty white paper is my release and I will never, ever stop.

It's always blue felt tip, that's a rule. If there is absolutely no blue felt tip to be found I can slum it with black, but if you think I'm going to use ball point you have got the wrong fucking number. There are other rules as well, that kick in when the journal is old enough to hit live-grenade status and it's time to start shopping for a replacement. This is when things get interesting, when a literal new chapter begins and the old one is hidden in the bursting tupperware container. But new journals are not so easy to come by. Because of the rules.

The rules I make myself, to maximize my own experience, and as such they are all breakable. There have been rules since the very beginning, and they've evolved as the journaling evolved, so it's always okay to toss them. But they're still important. Rule Number One is the journal can't say "Journal" on the front cover. That has always bothered me. I am going to remember the purpose of this little book, and I don't need reminders from the cover as to what I should be doing with it. Additionally, there should be no lines. Lines are confining and they interrupt the little drawings a person might want to make on the page, the fancy borders a person might sketch while she's on a particularly boring train ride. The new journal must be big enough to paste in emergency entries on scrap paper, or ticket stubs or pictures from magazines, but it must be small enough to fit into a standard handbag. A new journal must be pretty but it can't be twee, and it can't resemble any of its predecessors.

It's been surprisingly difficult to find a blank book to meet these requirements, and for a while I thought I might have to resort to writing on lines. But today it hit me to try Etsy.com, and right away I found the sweetest blue journal, covered in swirls and orange koi fish, sixty blank unlined pages beckoning me to come hither and braindump all over them in blue felt tip. It was so mine.

(Posting this doesn't violate anything, does it? Because I mean it's mine; I bought it. In any event the artist's name on Etsy is artkitten and you should go buy a journal from her because her stuff is beautiful and maybe it will help you subdue your crazy thoughts. But you can't have a koi journal, because there was only one and now there's none.)

I closed the transaction feeling relieved that I can finish out my latest live-grenade chapter without resorting to scribbling on napkins or the back of my hand. Instead I've got this magnificent new grenade with the pin still in and the koi swimming peacefully, totally unaware. I am happy that I could sort this out by supporting an artist. But really the world should just be thankful to artkitten for giving me sixty more pages to keep myself occupied, and to keep my thoughts in order.

This February

2009-02-10T13:32:00.000-08:00

In Mexico there was a studio, windowed and lit from within, up a spiral staircase. It glowed above the rows of dim cafes full of saronged tourists in matching suntans. Melanie and I stumbled upstairs and found the artist at work, shirtless and tan with a graying beard, surrounded by Mayans. The Mayans gazed at us from under eagle headdresses and behind scarves and in the corners of caves, smoldering fires in their eyes. The Mayans were furious, painted with furious strokes, bold and deliberate in various shades of brown. In cream, in toast, in burnt sienna. In cocoa and maple and taupe. The artist welcomed us without smiling, and his eyes smoldered like the eyes of his paintings.

We asked if we could look around. He and the Mayans watched us as we gripped each other's elbows and tiptoed between stacks of canvases. I had fallen face first into a mirror in a jewelry store an hour before, and the artist would not find this amusing. He was humorless and driven. He asked me if I painted and I giggled, nervously and drunkenly, said I'd painted as a child but that I had stopped. "Why," he asked flatly. I had no answer. He knew his brown paintings were too pricey for us to purchase; he knew we were never coming back to see the tarot cards that he'd finish tomorrow. He gave us each a cloth bookmark with an angry warrior printed on it; beneath that, a flourish of a signature. His signature was flowing and unreadable and I have already forgotten his name.

Last February the weather was whippy and biting and I finally snapped and went to Mexico. I laid on a beach chair and let men bring me Dos Equis, gossipped with Mel behind our sunglasses and plotted where to go for dinner. I practiced my Spanish. I climbed Mayan ruins in the blistering sun, crawled all the way to the top of a fourteen-story temple and then tried not to die on the way back down. I met a glaring man painting glaring men and I watched him make every brush stroke count.

This February is uncharacteristically balmy; it's rain instead of snow and it's a quick run to the store without your coat. This February I lie facedown on a vinyl table and the ephedrin they shoot into my back makes my heart race. They give me cotton pads to put over my eyes and they cover them with goggles. The lights go down and the laser comes up, pop-pop-pop-pop across each unwanted leaf, and blood and ink ooze out of my lower back onto the technician's latex gloves. I'm supposed to be numb, but it feels like someone sparking a lighter too close behind me, like an unwanted ember smoking in the leaves. "Do you want to wait a minute for the anesthesia to set in?" the doctor asks me, and I shake my head no. Let's just get this over with.

Now that it's coming off, the tattoo is garnering all kinds of compliments. The friends who shrugged indifferently are bemoaning my burned flesh. Strangers approach me in bars to ask me to lift my shirt. Handsome men run their fingers across the withering leaves. The linework deteriorates, it's a connect-the-dots game that's slowly spacing out; one day it will be just an empty canvas. I could go to Mexico once a month for what I pay to lie in the vinyl chair, but I can't afford to do both and anyway I can't expose my back to the sun.

The laser is precise but it's science and not art. The leaves were drawn with careful unflinching strokes, and the pulsing beams don't always know where to attack or how to destroy. The next time I go to Mexico I'll be white and smooth as a Venus in marble. And I'll feel beautiful but poor. And nobody will approach me in a bar unless they see the fires behind my eyes.

Teaching

2009-02-04T08:00:00.001-08:00

I walk out of work into a snow globe. Stinging flakes whip across the gray dusky buildings, not yet sundown; I'm a couple minutes early. My battered boots are warm but not waterproof, and my stockings absorb the mucky slush piled on the sidewalks. That boy is ahead of me, the lanky one with the glasses and the newsboy cap, a tall drink of water with a skinny drawn face like a straw. He is so, so cute. I see him on my commute sometimes, lips puckered as he scans whatever deep, layered text he's absorbing that morning, pale and dreamy under his newsboy cap. I sigh into my scarf. One day I noticed that he got off at the same stop as me, and a few weeks later I realized that we were passing through the revolving doors together. He works in my building.

I should say something, I should tell him hi. I should casually flirt without mention of the fact that I know where he lives. He carries a battered little man-bag, and I could say, "I like your murse." No. That is not flirty, it's a little insulting. "I like your bag." Yes, I could say I like your bag, that would be ideal, that would be ultimate, why don't I just say I like your bag. I have about fifteen seconds to well up the courage to do it, and ultimately I decide to watch him go. I back up against some brickwork to roll a cigarette while he crosses the street. My dress is too ugly to flirt with anyone today. If it wasn't for the dress I would do it.

Snowflakes swirl around my head as I pinch the tobacco into a paper. I am going to quit really soon. I have to go teach a forty-minute English class to pre-intermediate speakers, and a cigarette will leave me wheezing, sweating like a pig. But if I don't have a cigarette now I will be thinking about having a cigarette for the next three hours. I need some focus. I pop in a filter and light up, ducking my head as I step back into the open air. Snow soaks my hat and coat but it doesn't put out my light. I suck down the toxins and I'm finished before I even reach the subway, and now I'm thinking about another cigarette. I am going to quit really, really soon.

My class of pre-intermediate learners meets twice a week. I teach them with four other people, lessons about vocabulary and regular verbs. On Saturday mornings we have teachers' meetings at ten a.m., where we meet with twenty other teachers and pretend not to be hung over during our six-hour grammar lectures. I get the very real feeling that a lot of people there actually aren't hung over, despite it being Saturday morning at ten a.m. I come in half an hour late after three hours' sleep with vodka seeping out of my pores, and am thus an asset to every small group activity. There is an extremely cute boy at the teachers' meetings as well, also with a small head. We have never exchanged so much as a glance.

Tonight the snow has thankfully kept about half the class at bay, which gives me a smaller audience for my forty minutes. I've prepared a twelve-step lesson plan with backup activities in case I can't fill the time, but I get nervous and skip parts of it and rush through the others. I finish twenty minutes early while the head teacher clucks at me, a good-natured British girl with a spectacular rack that she keeps wrapped under layers of wool. One handsome Taiwanese boy has a question about grammar rules that I was not anticipating and cannot answer, but I burn through another ten minutes trying to make something up. I am dripping cigarette sweat, gasping for a smoke.

After class my teacher gathers us to review our classroom performances. She stresses the importance of using all the time allotted, of having advance knowledge of grammar rules. We nod and take notes. I try not to look at her boobs. I don't have to teach again for a full week, so I have plenty of time to figure how to fill forty minutes. After the wrap session I grab my bag, spilling winter accessories and school supplies all over the floor as I go. I'm reaching for my tobacco when one of my students comes around the corner. "Hello!" she says, in a shy, thick accent. "I like you dress! It very good."

I brighten. "Thank you," I say, as she smiles and slips down the hall. I wait for the elevator, tapping my foot while I finger the bag of tobacco. Maybe this dress is not so bad. I slip out the front door and spark up a newly-rolled cigarette. Smoke mingles with my frozen breath as I exhale into the last sparkling remnants of the snowfall. I shrug my shoulders deep into my coat and begin the trudge toward the subway.

Bloop

2009-01-27T07:15:00.000-08:00

Oh hi. Did you think I had forgotten about you? I haven't at all; I've been thinking about you all the time, but I've been at work. Suddenly I work sixty hours a week, and I also take a class, the combination of which leaves me spending a crazy amount of time sitting at a desk. I sit at my work desk for hours and then I sit at my class desk, and when I'm not doing that I'm busy drinking or sleeping. Unfortunately there is not time to do both, so you can imagine which one I've had to forgo. If this post is a blithering mass of consonants and misplaced commas and run-on sentences, you can blame the seven or so beers I had last night, that I chased down with a whopping forty-five minutes of sleep because my apartment was so ungodly hot that I couldn't breathe. I have six more hours of work to get through, which I'll follow with three hours of in-class desk-sitting, and how I'm going to stay awake till my train pulls in to my block at 10pm is anybody's guess. I can't even tell what fucking day it is.

And PS it's supposed to snow.

The thing about my sleep deprivation is, nobody is impressed by it. I work in an office where all-nighters are a way of life, a gold standard. One night I worked till eleven when, faded, I finally dragged myself into my boss' office to beg to be let home. The other assistant stayed on, and when I asked him the next morning what time he left last night, he blinked his bloodshot eyes and said "I didn't."

Anyway nobody wants to hear about work, and I don't even want to especially talk about work, but I've got to because if I don't keep typing I will fall asleep. My second wind is off blowing across a sidewalk somewhere and it has not yet hit me. I want you to know that I have been writing this post for well over an hour now, and it shows, doesn't it? I'm dead to the world. Incidentally, this is an almost exact replica of the state I was in when I went to my first class, which lasted a whopping six hours. At least this one is only three. I'd thank someone for small favors but I'm beginning to feel a bit guilty at my own self-imposed inability to retain in-class information in my sloshy, sleepy brain.

I have tried to make this post into something but I just can't. It's been sitting here all day and going nowhere, and it's to the point that I have got to just put it out on the internet and move forward. I'm sorry this is such a lackluster reentry. I'll try again tomorrow and tonight I promise to sleep.

Random Acts

2009-01-07T10:20:00.000-08:00

So I'm walking down around St. Mark's Place, that grimy slice of the Lower East Side that used to be my favorite piece of New York City, back when the Cube was still there, back before the Dojo restaurant got shut down by the Board of Health (but after I had eaten there at least twenty times), and it's raining and I can't remember for the life of me why I used to love this place so much. I'm on the phone recounting the day's dramas, and across the street a man falls over and he doesn't get up. "I gotta go, I gotta go," I say, and I hang up. The man is lying on the sidewalk beside a little outdoor stand; he fell on a rack of hats and there are hats everywhere, spattered across the concrete, rolling off the curb into the gutter. Everyone is stopped and staring and the shopkeeper is reaching down to help him up. Maybe I should pick up the hats, I think; it's my first instinct because it's helpful but nonconfrontational. But the shopkeeper is struggling so I step up and grab an arm.

The man is dead weight, he is making no effort to stand; the shopkeeper and I are pulling at awkward angles, straining to righten his two-hundred-pound frame. I am strong and the shopkeeper is stronger but we are having difficulty moving him and in a flash I feel angry that no one else stops to help. Finally we twist him into a standing position and he staggers and blinks at us. "Are you okay?" I ask, and he doesn't answer. "Are you okay?" I repeat. "Anything twisted?" I motion to his ankles and wrists.

"Well my ribs are sore," he answers.

"Maybe you should find some place to sit down." The man looks past me and blinks some more. They are the slow, slurred blinks of a three-day bender, of two extra whiskey shots for the road. His eyes cross, trying to focus, and the shopkeeper starts to talk to him. I retreat to pick up the hats. The pedestrians are still gawping at us, or else they are bored of the show and retreating, or else they fail to notice us at all.

When my arms are full I pour the hats into the shopkeeper's hands. The man has gotten his second wind. "I fell!" he is yelling at the passers-by. "And these nice people" -- he swings his arms around -- "helped me up!" Nobody answers him. "Excuse me! Miss!" he yells. "Excuse me!"

I turn from the corner; I had a walk sign and my intent was to take it. He is lumbering toward me, half-smiling. He wants to stand dangerously close. "Are you okay?" I ask again.

"Can I ask you something?" he says. He is waiting for an answer. I take another step back.

"Okay."

He steps forward again. His hair is stringy and there are dents in his face, in his head. He can't stop the slow, deliberate blinking. "Why do you care?"

I'm stuck, I'm uncomfortable, I don't want to star in this movie moment that he's directing in his head. "I saw you fall," I say. "I just wanted to make sure you were okay." He reaches his hand out to shake mine and I reluctantly give it to him. The pedestrians are watching once again. "I think maybe you should find a place to sit down. Maybe you'll feel better. Please don't kiss my hand." He is moving it toward his gray lips and he stops and hovers over it. I use the pause to snatch it back, to stuff both hands deep in my pockets.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I fell. I'm very embarrassed." He is still trying to make sweeping gestures but he cannot even stand upright.

"It's okay. It happens to everyone sometimes."

"I am intoxicated."

"I know," I say. "That happens to everyone too. Maybe you should find a place to sit."

He is moving toward me still; I'm edging off the sidewalk. "I have to go, goodbye," I say. He tries to speak and I rebut. "No I have to go meet my friend, goodbye!" I dart across the street.

I tool down five or six blocks before I realize I'm heading in the wrong direction. I am going to have to turn back. I stop by a juice stand and roll a cigarette. A smoke will be a welcome respite, a fitting punctuation to whatever it is I'm feeling. I turn around, making my way back toward the spilled hat rack on the corner. I pass a beautiful Asian girl walking a tiny dog in a Burberry coat. "Pick that baby up!" some men call after her. "He's tired! Don't make him walk home!" I pass a bar where a bored smoker stands by the window, watching the man with the dented head. The man's back is to me. He's reenacting his fall for the audience, spins and shouts and fake breakdance moves while he makes exploding motions with his hands. The smoker flicks his cigarette away and walks inside, uninterested in this stranger's drama. I keep my head down and pass behind him undetected.

The Year of the Lesbian

2009-01-06T07:26:00.000-08:00

Before anybody's panties get in any twists, I should specify that the Year of the Lesbian is simply a theme and not an admission of any sapphic experiences. Four of us thought we might kick off the Year by straightening our hair (irony!) and hitting up a girly bar. The purpose, ostensibly, being to pick up girls. The problem with our plan was that none of us (save S who is a real live lesbian and not one of us tag-along fakers) knows how to pick up a girl. We barely know how to pick up a guy and we've been doing that since we were thirteen. So we stood in the corner and giggled and talked to no one but each other. We recounted the nitwit men that swarmed our New Years Eve, discussed our respective (male) crushes, and told ghost stories. In retrospect, I am probably not a lesbian.

When the toilet overflowed and we needed some air, Meagan and I went out to smoke on the sidewalk. I've continued with the smoking despite it being a ridiculous and useless habit to pick up in one's mid-to-late twenties, and Meagan has started recently because she's christened 2009 the Year of Bad Decisions. The chilly sidewalks were sparsely populated, with shivering addicts and douchebags like us, sucking down toxins we don't even need. I was bemoaning the cancellation of my trip with Kerrie, which fell through due to unexpected financial difficulties (Public Service Announcement: if, upon entering a tattoo studio, you feel any amount of trepidation, nausea, or overwhelming dread, do yourself a favor and just leave. They are a lot tougher to take off than to put on) and trying to plan the rest of the weekend. And so when, in the spirit of Bad Decisions, but probably not of The Lesbian, Meagan invited me to come to Atlantic City for a night, I said what the hell, okay. And we both laughed maniacal bad-decision laughs that deteriorated into coughing fits.

I am not a gambler, and the reasons are thus. As a wide-eyed twenty-one-year-old, I attended the wedding of my older brother in Louisiana. In Louisiana many hotels have attached casinos, and so one night my younger brother and sister and I decided to sneak in and try our hands at the slot machines. The sneaking was necessary because my brother and sister were both underage. My brother got in and my sister did not, and as such she never ever ever forgave us for what happened next. Because what happened next was ridiculous. My brother hit a jackpot and won a whopping nine hundred dollars. And while the coins were still pinging into his two oversized buckets, I hit an even larger jackpot. For eighteen hundred.

The chances of this occurrence, on one's very first trip to one's very first casino, are absolutely nil. There is no way, in any universe, that two siblings would win a combined total of almost three thousand dollars on adjoining slot machines. I knew this, and I also knew, once my social security number had been recorded and my driver's license had been scanned for tax purposes, that my underage brother was going to be arrested if we didn't take our money and run. So we did, and for years afterward I harbored a soft spot for the twinkling lights of the slots. At any opportunity I would throw my money into the blinking machines and wait and hope for the next big jackpot, without ever seeing any returns. This went on until I secured a job as a cocktail waitress in a casino in Cairns. After one weekend of emptying stinking ashtrays and delivering rum and cokes to the dead-eyed slot jockeys with player's club tags tied their wrists, I was cured of my gambling streak. I quit after my second shift, claiming to be changed, vowing never to touch another slot machine or another cigarette. I kept half my promise.

So one wonders what I had in mind when agreeing to a casino trip in a city removed from any and all non-casino related culture. I suppose I didn't think it through. Meagan and I boarded a bus with our gamble-loving guy friends and sipped bourbon from a Pepsi bottle as the rolling Jersey plains gave way to the sparkling skyline of Atlantic City.

And that is when shit got real. Even for a year dedicated to Bad Decisions, the conscious choice to spend a night in a casino was a doozy. Surrounded by the carnival music of the gaming machines, the warm-up session of a too-loud live band, and the desperate pickup tactics of turtlenecked thirtysomethings, we couldn't remember what enticed us in the first place. The guys shot off to the craps tables while we sullenly tried to digest our buffet dinners in the smoky lounge. Our spirits were lifted when we discovered coupons for two free drinks apiece, and we busied ourselves with bouncing between bars on either end of the casino, sucking back watery gin and tonics and hovering over the ashtrays. All around us the mulleted, rascal-riding casino populace drained their savings accounts and 401(k)s, chain-smoking Parliaments and holding out for the next big win.

After a few drinks and my retelling of my own big-win story to Meagan, we were sufficiently enticed to hit the slot machines. The quarter slots ate my twenty dollars rather quickly, while Meagan lingered on the penny slots, smacking black and red at intermittent intervals till her pennies ran out. Out of cash and drink tickets, we checked in with the guys to see how much they'd lost (after a detour stop at the Asian Gaming Pavilion, the blatant racism of which made us giggle uncontrollably) and then sat down with some taller, if not stronger, gin and tonics to watch a bored-looking go-go dancer in a sparkly bikini. The second-hand smoke was thick and wretched enough that I was inspired to throw my tobacco into the trash, and it took a full forty-eight hours for me to buy another pack. When we finished our drinks Meagan was up for another round, but I was done with the casino so I auf wiedersehen-ed and retreated to the room. I conked out in a king-sized bed so spacious that I had no awareness of the fact that, hours later, Meagan crawled in to sleep beside me.

Year of the Lesbian, indeed.

Holidays

2008-12-30T12:11:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve an old lady approached my nephew in the supermarket, because he is two years old and cute and that is how old ladies deal with such situations. "Do you know who's coming tonight?" she asked him.

"Aunt Kate!" he answered. Take that, fat man.

I'm back home in New York after five days of being back home in Massachusetts, five long days of monitored drinking and Lincoln Logs. It was pretty great.

I was supposed to go to Danny's house on Christmas Eve for a party, but I missed it because my parents were doing a drive-by. The way my parents do a drive-by is this: they fill two big laundry baskets with food and dish soap and laundry detergent, then they drop it next to somebody's front door, ring the bell and drive away. It's not just a random doorstep; they pre-screen for people they know who are in trouble, and send in people like me to make sure the gift is anonymous. We've done it for the past couple Christmases. One year a lady answered the door and she asked me if I knew who was behind all the gifts, and I shrugged and said I wasn't sure. She was a little shocked but very thankful.

On Christmas night after the presents were opened and the wine was poured and my parents had gone to bed, I sneaked out for a cigarette. I felt guilty; my nephew and stepfather are both athsmatics with severe colds who spent the holiday struggling for breath, and here I was squandering mine. But I wanted the cigarette more than I wanted redemption so I walked to the edge of the driveway and smoked under the flickering street lamp. My stepdad's giant inflatable Frosty the Snowman stood on the roof, illuminated from the torso up, and the lights across the front porch gleamed. A waste of energy, maybe, but such a pretty one. I exhaled and stubbed out my cigarette and that was the end of Christmas. If you don't count the time I spent afterward trying to scrub the smell of smoke off my hands.

It was not until day 4.5, during my niece's first birthday party, one of those Western Massachusetts extravaganzas full of extended family and snowman birthday cake and photo ops, that I started to feel homesick for the rough edges and grimy sidewalks of New York. My family wanted to know what I was doing, what I was planning, and I didn't know quite how to say I was enjoying stagnance. I wore a long shirt that wouldn't ride up in back so that I wouldn't have to explain the nuances of pot leaf patterns versus Japanese maple. The paper moon and the drinking and the now-perhaps-defunct road trip all seemed a little inappropriate for familial conversation, so I tried to just listen.

The next morning I had to leave early so I could be on time for my first root canal. Everyone told me that a root canal would be the end of me, that it was the worst experience of a person's life to get a root canal and that I had better just shut my eyes and pray for death. It wasn't so bad. The dentist was a strange Israeli man who introduced himself by telling me I was his last root canal of the year. "So what are you drinking?" he joked.

I wasn't sure how to respond. "Um, something to put me to sleep."

"You want laughing gas?" He pronounced it lyeffing guess.

I had laughing gas when I got my wisdom teeth out and it ended in my making very belabored and dizzy threats of violence, so I declined. The dentist explained to me that I would not be able to chew on one side for the rest of the day. "Can I smoke?" I asked, because this is my lifestyle now, these are the things to consider.

"You like to smoke?" he said. "I like ecstasy."

Doctors are always trying to chat me up about drugs for some reason; I once got a shakedown from my opthalmologist about where to buy pot in the Financial District (I told him and I'm telling you: I don't know). So I sort of laughed off the weird denist, till he started asking me about dropping acid. I told him it was not in anyone's best interest for me to drop acid before a root canal, and he responded by shoving a rubber glove in my mouth and banging around on my teeth.

An hour later I was less a couple nerve endings and a few hundred dollars, and I went home determined to play the guitar. My dad gave my old guitar a major overhaul and my roommates are both on vacation, so it's a good time to practice. The train ride home whacked the whole thing out of tune again, though, so I got to tweaking the strings and forgot that the high string is an E, not a G (I am not a very advanced guitarist) and with a ping the string snapped and left a little dot of blood on my thumb. So instead I cleaned my room and took down the Christmas decorations.

Today I'm at work again, for just a blip before I head off for New Years Eve and then either we ride Kerrie's shot brakes around the country or else we fly somewhere cheap and fancy or else we just cut our losses and come into work. Whatever happens is okay by me. Today another person teased me about being on acid, which has got to be some sort of weird personal record. Maybe it's because I'm in such a great mood.

The People In My Neighborhood

2008-12-22T19:21:00.001-08:00

I went outside to smoke a cigarette, because yes, I've succumbed to the temptation and the stress and I think it will be nice to have something to freak out over in twenty years when they diagnose me with lung cancer and I go all, "OH I MAKE THE WORST LIFE CHOICES HOW COULD I DO THIS TO MY BODY OH IF ONLY I HAD A TIME MACHINE." There was no one outside except me and some poor fucker on crutches who wanted to bum a light, and this one girl who was dressed in a long coat and hat and scarf, running up and down the icy sidewalk around the block. I smoked my fill and bid adieu to the crutches man and then came back inside to tell my roommate about the girl.

"Just running around on the sidewalk!" I said. "How weird is that?"

"That," she said. She didn't ask me to state my own business out on the sidewalk. "And you look really adorable right now."

"Oh, ha ha," I said. "In my sweatpants and coat, right?" FISHING, FISHING.

"Just with your hat and everything," she said. "You just look really cute and put together."

So! The day was not a total shit show. I am a great looking emphysema patient.

I will not obsess. I will not obsess. I will not obsess.

2008-12-22T15:34:00.001-08:00

I guess there is only so much a person can say about a tattoo. I got it, I didn't like it. To many this would be the end of the story but for me it's the whole narrative. It's the beginning and middle too, with all the dialogue and the moral and the dog-eared pages. I'm consumed by the tattoo.

I try to make my life into the construction of elaborate sandcastles. With love I mold the towers and scoop the moats, apply the seashell adornments to the windows. And when the last turret has been shaped I step away and smile at my creation for just a moment, before smashing it down. The smash is the thing, it's the reason for construction. I love the smash. It lets me walk away, free from sandy constraints, to build another castle on another plumb curve of the shore. But this tattoo is an unexpected wave, it's leveled the masterpiece I've been working on, the tallest and prettiest castle yet. Now I don't know whether to walk away from the wreckage, to shrug like I never cared for it to begin with, or to get back down in the mud and rebuild. I'm torn and I'm consumed with it.

And I can't stop looking at my own ass.

I got it one week ago today, last Monday. Every day away from Monday is another day in the wrong direction. What I need is a way to go back to Monday morning, to call and cancel my appointment, to laugh and say keep the deposit, it's no big deal. On Monday night this seemed plausible, that maybe I'd find a wrinkle in the space-time continuum and just hop back a couple hours, no one the wiser. As time barrels forward the likeliness of this happening becomes slimmer. It occurred to me a few days ago that perhaps I was dreaming all this, that maybe I could wake myself up and have no tattoo and my life would continue as normal. For a split second I felt that shock of hope you get when you try to control a bad dream, that with a little concentration this would all end in a flurry of light and a shortness of breath. I'd wake up and reach behind me and there'd be no scabby Japanese maple, just a benign little trinity knot, an adorable homage to the follies of my nineteen-year-old aesthetic. The relief was fleeting, though, because I knew this was as fanciful as my time machine idea. I was awake. I still am.

It's back there, radiating every bad decision I've ever made. It will be there forever and there's nothing I can do. The sandcastle slouches, its ornaments scattered across the sand like ordinary pebbles. That was one killer wave.

Unwrapped

2008-12-19T06:46:00.000-08:00

I'm not the greatest gift-wrapper. One year my church youth group worked on a charity drive at the mall, wherein shoppers gave a dollar to a soup kitchen and in return a grubby teenager would wrap their gifts. I spent the bulk of the afternoon wandering around the shops with my friends, buying Orange Juliuses and jingle-bell earrings. This was acceptable because our group leaders were open-minded Episcopalians, and because they had seen my gift-wrapping skills that were not worth a charity dollar. The Catholic youth group we worked with was pissed that we got away with it, but that was their own fault for picking a fire-and-brimstone God who smote the hands of the idle. And also for showcasing their abilities to wrap.

My lack of giftwrap expertise is exacerbated by the fact that every year I buy the cheap foil paper that doesn't properly crease. Every year. So all my lopsided presents have extra corners and jagged edges, and piles and piles of twisted foil accumulate in the corners of my room.

This year was no different. I bought the foil wrap and forgot all the bows, as usual, but this year I started wrapping while drinking before dinner, quietly panicked. The panic got louder and eventually I had to deal with it, so I called my mom. I began the conversation under the guise of telling her about wrapping presents, but I am not much of a faker. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"I did something stupid," I choked.

Admittedly this was a vindictive tactic, because I wanted her to think for a minute that I was pregnant. One of the wonders of womanhood, that the be-penised among us may not understand, is that from age fifteen onward, every big announcement one makes to one's parents must be prefaced with the promise that one is not, in fact, pregnant. My friend Meagan is going into medical school, and when she called her father to tell him she had big news, he responded, "You're pregnant?" It's constant.

My mother bit. "What did you do?" she asked. She sounded wary.

Floodgates. "I got a tattoo!"

"Oh." Her voice was like a shrug. "Well where is it?" My mother may have once held an aversion to tattoos, but my little brother has a tree that stretches the length of his spine. She's over it.

"It's covering my old one."

"What was your old one? I don't remember."

"It was a little red trinity knot."

"Oh," she said. "On your ass, right?"

"It's not on my ass. It's on my lower back."

"And what's wrong with the new tattoo?"

"It's too big!" I was wailing again. "I want it lasered off but it takes a long time and it costs a lot of money and I don't even know if it would work. I have an appointment in a week to see about it but I don't know. I hate it, Mom, I hate it."

"Well don't do anything before I see it," she said. "God, I'm dying to see this thing. How big is it?"

"Like seven or eight inches."

"Well," she said. "That's not so big. When did you get it?"

"Monday."

"And you never liked it?"

"Not really. I was trying to speed up the decision making process and I just agreed to it and I regretted it right away."

"That's not even like you. Well, let this be a lesson to you. Don't let yourself get pressured into these things."

"I know, I know." My mom is a teacher; she loves lessons.

"And stop freaking yourself out! You have an appointment in a week and there is nothing you can do about it before then. So let that go. Put it in a balloon and let it go." I don't know if this is a line from Bible study or from a motivational speaker.

"Okay."

"I really can't wait to see this thing. I might make you pull down your pants right in the train station when I pick you up next week."

"It's not on my ass, mom."

"Look, you didn't lose your job, you didn't lose your house, you're not starving to death, you're not sick. This is not the end of the world, okay? Just remember that this is not the end of the world."

I sniffled. "Okay."

"I have to go eat dinner, honey. Can I call you afterwards? I want to hear about your Christmas presents."

We got off the phone and I continued to drink, but I put some broccoli cheese puffs in the oven for nutritional balance. Danny came over and I abandoned my giftwrap for some drunken living room choreography. When my mom called back she asked what I was doing and I said I couldn't talk long, since we were practicing our dance for the weekend's Christmas party.

"Oh good!" she said, and I laughed.

"I'm glad you think it's good that your oldest daughter, who's pushing thirty, still makes everyone in the room sit quietly on the couch and watch while she does a dance. I've been doing this at Christmas parties since I was eight."

But my mom was supportive and I appreciated it. When extending one's adolescence, I suppose it's better to do so in dance form than in body art. Let this be a lesson to me.

For Life

2008-12-18T04:53:00.000-08:00

It's well-documented that I am afraid of commitment. If you are a person who refuses to get a cat, sign a lease, date anyone in the same hemisphere; if you are twenty-seven years old and live on hand-me-down furniture and a mattress on the floor because you don't want to pull your bedroom set out of your mom's basement; if you return 80% of the items you buy because you change your mind before you get out of the store, then you should never get a fucking tattoo.

I got a fucking tattoo.

I got one when I was nineteen, in a bout of whimsy. It was fairly cheesy but innocuous enough, a lopsided trinity knot the size of a fifty-cent piece, on my lower back. For years afterwards I've been ogling other people's tattoos, giant back pieces and full-color sleeves, and wishing I had the guts to pull off something so dramatic. So I went in to see my roommate's tattoo artist, and with minimal consultation and almost none of the nitpicky back-and-forth argument that characterizes my every indecision, wham, I had a new tattoo.

She covered the little tramp stamp with three leaves, three big leaves falling down my back like autumn in Massachusetts, and the placement is lopsided because there was a fourth as well, one that stretched up another four inches and I decided against after the needle was already in my skin, and it burned and it ached and now, now I have this tattoo.

I hate this fucking tattoo.

It doesn't help that I apparently have lots of really honest friends, and I've been getting a lot of "It's not that bad"s in response to my frantic pleas for reassurance. I emailed Christina a picture from work and she asked if the Japanese maple was supposed to be a pot leaf. My boss happened by my desk in the middle of this conversation, while I was dealing with my concern in a highly professional way, namely, hyperventilating and smearing my eye makeup all over my face. To cheer me up he gave me a book about Chuck Norris. It didn't really help.

The worst part is that it is not finished. There's no color and I can't even leave it unfinished because the tramp stamp shines through the second leaf in a disastrously ugly manner. I won't get the giant fourth leaf, of course, and I can talk to the artist about my options for changing it, but it's my understanding that one thing tattoo artists cannot do is make a thing smaller. I am making an appointment with my dermatologist to ask about tattoo removal, but I already know the answer. You've got to be dark-skinned with a tattoo ten years or older, you've got to have a couple thousand dollars to throw around and several months to a year of free time. I don't want to spend a year lasering my back, nor do I want to go into debt over this one stupid decision. In an argument last week with the Chuck Norris boss, because he was throwing away paper instead of recycling it (get it, I got falling leaves? Because I'm an environmentalist? Kill me) he insisted that time was the only non-renewable resource. A LIE. The skin of one's lower back is also non-recyclable.

People make mistakes. They end up with babies, with bankruptcy, with jail sentences, missing limbs. And I feel for them, I do. But goddammit. I can't believe I have this fucking tattoo.

Breakfast of Champions

2008-12-14T18:15:00.000-08:00

The problem with living in Brooklyn is the difficulty you have in finding an egg and cheese on a roll. In Manhattan the egg and cheese on a roll is ubiquitous; you cannot ever be more than two feet from a man preparing one. But in Brooklyn you have to time things more carefully; you've got to be out of the house before noon anyway, because at noon the eggs just dry up and nobody wants to dirty the griddle for the sake of your two dollars. This is nearly impossible if you got in at five a.m. because you got off the train in the West Village to find a bathroom and then spent an hour wandering in the snow, arguing with yourself over whether to buy cigarettes. You didn't buy cigarettes but you spent a while feeling down, feeling impotent and frustrated and getting snow all over your lovely suede boots.

If you roll out in search of breakfast at two in the afternoon, you'll head to the bagel place across the street, that place with the high ceilings lined with empty shelves. The little man behind the counter will tell you they're closed even though the door was open. The Polish bakery next door will have only pastries, and Polish pastries are not a balanced breakfast, or lunch if that's what this is, and you'll leave. In addition to Polish pastries and Greek diners, your street is peppered with Thai takeout, Indian restaurants, Mexican joints run by Chinese people. The Chinese make amazing guacamole. There's a Carvel if you want a milkshake, and of course there's a pizza place.

Finally you can find a little gray deli, one of those little gray delis that dot Manhattan like a creeping rash, and inside will be the same metal shelving units of every gray deli, the same dusty boxes of Cheerios and baking soda, the same bins of fresh bagels at the back. These people want your two dollars more than they want a clean griddle. They'll give you your egg and cheese on a roll in a little paper sack with five napkins. You'll take it down into the subway, eating across the platform from the garbage train, your love for Brooklyn still intact.

Shopping

2008-12-09T09:12:00.000-08:00

There is some cluttered store where I've been before, someplace dingy gray with dusty racks of sale items and two brown people behind the counter. Above them hangs a child's drawing, and it wasn't there the first time I went in and it was there the second time, hanging indefinitely, waiting for time to tatter and fray and fade it and for the child to grow and mutter why is that thing still tacked up. I remember this place. The whole tableau fades to white at the edges but I remember the drawing hanging there; I remember the surprise of that drawing. I was there yesterday or the day before but when I retrace my steps to find the store, to recall its name, to revisit my reason for going in, did I even buy anything, nothing lines up. I know I was there. If it was a dream it has stuck with me, needled its way into my conscious, the two people and the drawing and the dusty racks and I don't know the significance.

Bag Ladies

2008-12-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

I'm planning a vacation with my friend Kerrie. Kerrie is my old college roommate and go-to travel buddy, and we're both antsy and looking to get out. The original plan was along the lines of London and Paris, but once we came to terms with the fact that those places cost money, we rethought our tack. Now we're thinking road trip.

A road trip with me is bad news for Kerrie, because I can't drive a stick. This means that she'll have to drive us everywhere for a full week, unless she wants to give me lessons. Which she doesn't, I asked. Your average person might be swayed at the idea of a road trip that entailed driving Miss Daisy all over tarnation, but Kerrie is fairly unflappable.

We met in college when she answered a roommate wanted ad; we spent our first year together as two ships passing in the night. There was a three-month period where I didn't think she even know my name, since she only ever called me "dude." I'd leave post-it notes to say electricity was due; I'd come home after class to find a check stuck to the fridge. I bought all the toilet paper and decorated the place with tapestries I bought half-price at the hippie store. She left every weekend and spent summers at her parents' house. We barely interacted until the night I broke up with my long-term boyfriend. It was a Friday and Kerrie canceled all her plans without saying a word, and drove me to the video store to rent Office Space. She sat with me and cracked lame jokes while I chain-smoked through the movie, weeping at the kissing scenes. A month later we went to Mardi Gras. I spent Fat Tuesday shooting tequila with a depressed magician and Kerrie stood in a dark corner in her trench coat, slowly downing an entire bottle of vodka. A twisted partnership had been forged.

Kerrie and I get along great as travel buddies, despite our differences. She has her faults (laissez-faire planner, rambunctious drunk, will interrupt your conversation to text message with the guy she met last weekend) and I have mine (generally uptight, rambunctious drunk, useless with directions to the point that I often overshoot my own house) but we level each other out nicely. When we travel together we meet and greet with the grimy underbelly of every upstanding community, fending off advances from the creepiest of men. Kerrie likes douchebags and I like scumbags. Everyone gets a sack; it's how you fill it that defines you. A douchebag wears a backwards baseball cap and an Abercrombie shirt, he travels in packs, he'll hit on you by talking about the Giants and try to roofie your drink. A scumbag goes to the bar alone, he wears the same jeans he slept in, he'll hit on you by asking to borrow some money and then he'll try to steal your car. We've never fought over a man, although we've spent a fair amount of time in the witness protection program.

A road trip in January requires snow tires, antifreeze, and a degree of desperation. But a vacation with Kerrie is giddy and goofy and we can regale each other with the same stories over and over that get funnier with each telling. We can get silly and sloppy and lost beyond all hope. See the world's biggest ball of twine and eat in roadside diners. Scrape frost off the windshield and hold the map upside down. And the best part is, I don't even have to drive.

Tuesday Night

2008-12-04T08:47:00.000-08:00

My infatuation with mornings is not hampered by hangovers. I don't know whether that makes me a trooper or a high-functioning alcoholic. I am not bothered by getting up after three hours of sleep, peeing tequila and washing the smoke out of my hair before going to work. I find it invigorating, and I annoy my roommates with cheery conversation and I dance around my room while I do my hair. I'm a morning person. The headache, I know, will be exacerbated by the subway ride and subsequent breakfast, by the myriad things that can collapse on a person's day. But the morning is always nice.

After class we went to Diablo, where we can't go with the professor because he likes the guacamole at Mercadito, down the street. But when it's all just giddy students we can splash out, we can mix things up. We don't have to have guacamole and white wine, it's okay to have salsa and beer. To slum it. Diablo has a drink made of three parts lager and one part frozen margarita, which should not work but it does. I had two. Nobody wanted to stay out late, it being Tuesday and the majority of us having jobs and hangovers to attend to in the morning. But Lily hadn't finished her beer so I offered to stay.

We were walking back to the subway and she said, "Oh! Look at that place! I wonder what it is."

"It looks like a paperie," I said. It was a pretty paperie, with shiny Santas and white garlands in the window, but it hardly warranted exclamation points.

"Oh, I wonder if we can go in," she said.

"I think it's closed, Lily." The lights were off and the door was shuttered. But Lily marched up to it and I followed, unsure of what exactly we were after. To my relief she walked past the row of paper Santas to a little black door between the buildings, guarded by a beefy bouncer.

"Can we come in?" she asked.

The man shrugged. "Sure, OK. It's a private party but I don't mind."

I hadn't seen the door and I didn't anticipate the maze of stairs and skinny hallways we'd fall into. We walked deeper and deeper under the city till finally the hall opened up into a dark little bar. They had Peronis so we grabbed two and sat on a zebra striped bench in the corner. The bench felt like real animal hair but the stripes had been painted on in swirls. Around us were people wearing vests, smoking cigarettes. Little red pinpricks hung in the gloom before being flicked to the floor, to fizzle out underfoot. Indoor smoking was a novelty and the people couldn't get enough of it.

The ambience was weak but the DJ was divine. We bobbed our heads and mouthed the words between our halting conversations about the people around us. Pale flesh and dark pants, straggly hair. Eyeliner. The scene was nouveau goth of some persuasion, black and white, and reds that melted to gray in the low light.

Two girls wearing white slips and black heels bounced in and took positions on a corner sofa. By eavesdropping we gathered that it was their birthday party. "Twenty-one," I heard someone say. One of the slip girls let me cut in line for the bathroom. I came out and surveyed the walls, glass shelves of display jars and pill bottles, like an old apothecary. A red crab, shellacked with gloss, sat on a shelf beside a sea urchin. I reached in to touch it and banged my hand against the protective glass.

"More vests," Lily murmured. "Look, that girl's is hooked to her pants in back. Why so many vests?"

"Maybe they're all caterers," I said, and she snorted. We watched one skinny man in skinny jeans dancing in a circle. His stringy blond hair flew out around him as he spun, his white scarf flapping. His eyes peeked out under his black fedora. We called him Poe. We'd been there an hour and no one had said hello to us. Lily wanted to talk to Poe so we confronted him and his angry mulleted friend. Poe smiled and bared his crooked black teeth, took us both in a clammy handshake.

Lily's curiosity thus satisfied, we stumbled out to the train. I dozed on the ride home and fell into bed, sleeping off the evening before it was time to get up and dance.

Pretty

2008-11-29T20:02:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving night and I'm still eating. I've consumed an American-sized portion of turkey and potatoes, along with an unnecessary appetizer of crackers and cheese. Now it's late and I'm in my pajamas, snacking on popcorn and granola bars in front of the TV with my parents. The phone rings and it's Rebecca, wanting to know if I'm coming out tonight. "All my pants are in the washing machine," I tell her. "Let me see if I can borrow something of my mom's."

I am cursed with a skinny mother. You wouldn't call me fat unless we were in a fight and you were being a total bitch, but I am very rarely invited to pose for swimsuit calendars. I'm a normal sized girl. My mom's nickname in high school was Mosquito. Thirty years and three kids have passed since then, but she is still a twig, so I pessimistically climb the stairs to her room to rifle through her closet.

I'm feeling proud that I was able to pour myself into a pair of jeans, till my mom walks into her room and starts laughing at me, a vindictive skinny cackle. The jeans are too tight and the extra flesh pours over the top like head on a poorly-drawn pint, but my friends are coming in five minutes and all my pants are sopping wet. The situation is exacerbated by my inability to fit into any of my own sweaters; the Thanksgiving gorgefest has left me bloated and fleshy. "I saw Kaitlyn at the bar," people from high school will tell each other tomorrow. "She is still drinking even though she looks about four months pregnant!" These belly shirts will not do. I find an empire waist top of my mother's and throw it on as my friends pull into the drive, and I run out the door apologizing for being dressed all wrong.

The next morning my nephew wants to watch me do my makeup. He's two years old and enthusiastic about everything. "What's that?" he wants to know. "Oo! What's that?"

"That's eyeliner," I tell him. "That's powder; that's hair gel."

"Oo!" he says. "I smell it!"

I let him sniff the glob of gel I just poured in my hands. Then he watches, enraptured, as I run it through my wet hair.

"I like hair gel!" he tells me. He likes everything.

"Do you?"

"Yeah!" He yells downstairs. "Grandma! Grandma! Katie is pretty!"

Redemption.

Also Starring

2008-11-24T08:50:00.000-08:00

One of the major problems I've been having in my travel writing class is the notion of how to relate my experiences. I'm not well-traveled, but I'm moderately traveled, and most of the trips I've taken have been in recent years. Because of this, an issue that's been resonating in my past few essays is the problem of my ex-boyfriend.

I don't talk to my ex anymore (it always sort of boggles me when people ask if we've been in touch lately; no, we haven't, if I wanted to be in touch I would be his girlfriend) and I don't talk about him all that often. Most of the anecdotes I have about him are unfit for public consumption. He himself is unfit for public consumption. He's uncouth, unwashed, unthinking, unblinking. He's also remarkably charming and if you met him, you would love him. He'd make you feel like the funniest, smartest, most interesting person in the place and he would most assuredly buy you a beer.

He was the impetus for my extended stay in Australia, the reason for two jaunts to Ireland. The deterioration of our union spurred my trip to Scotland. In many, many, many of my travel stories, he is there. And I can't just write him out. Without him the story is half as funny, it's got a quarter of the personality. Without him there is no devil on my shoulder excusing my own bad behavior. That time I stole eight dollars out of Martin's shorts, that was all him. Those mornings I woke up and poured Baileys into my coffee before breakfast, that was him. Three evictions in two months? Him. I was an innocent bystander.

The problem is, now that I am attempting to compile and share these stories, I'm stuck also explaining who this crazy Irishman is and why I let him borrow so much money. And it's hard. It's hard to do justice to a person that I maintain a bitterness toward, it's hard to explain the fun of it all without waxing nostalgic. At first I tried to distill him down to a ghost of a presence, but when I met with Lily over my essay, she pointed out that as a reader she had no connection to his character. For the second essay I wrote that he co-starred, I made a concerted effort to include him more. Unfortunately I only really included his negative aspects, and he came out rather flat. I could start a brand new blog and call it "Shitty Things My Ex-Boyfriend Did" and update every day for a year, but "Was Boring" would never be a title. He was just not flat.

In fact, he was something of a blast to write, back in those halcyon days. He was lots of fun and full of entertaining dialogue; he cooked up trouble that I could take credit for simply by virtue of the fact that I recorded it. He also had a pretty intense dark side that took over with some regularity, and that added a lot of depth to the stories he dominated, the reader always knowing that things could get uglier before they got pretty. As a character he was a type found more often in fiction than in real life. But as a person who has known him in real life, I can assert that my own is better without him.

Lily thinks that I should relish my control over his character, should have the final say in how things went down by writing him however I want. The problem is, I don't want to write him at all. The essays I'm writing about our time in Australia are essentially love stories, and who wants to tell a love story about their ex boyfriend? The dashing prince has been kissed back into a frog, and even writing about his warts means he's still playing the hero. I'd prefer he just be erased.

Filing System

2008-11-23T17:32:00.000-08:00

About four years ago I bought a black shirt. It cost twenty dollars. The shirt fit nicely and it had a v-neck; it quickly became a going-out shirt, a hanging-out shirt, a work shirt. I was at a point in my life characterized by deep denial that I worked in an office, and as such I refused to spend any money on new work clothes. Because of this self-imposed budget I wore the shirt a minimum of twice a week. I took the thing to Australia with me, and it maintained despite its balled-up carriage in my backpack every time I got evicted. Few articles of clothing survived the beating that shared living and minimal washing bestowed while I was abroad, but the shirt was one of the proud items that made it back to the states.

It's a cheap shirt, an anomaly. Its intended shelf life was only a season, but the thing has persevered. Black don't crack, and the stains and tatters that force me to give up my other favorite items have not been an issue. Nowadays it sags off the shoulders a bit and there's a tiny hole in the armpit, but ultimately it was twenty well-spent dollars.

Tonight I decided to deal with the hole. I've got limited sewing skills, enough to reposition buttons or tighten seams, but I don't have any thread. I went to M's room to ask for some, and she nodded and got up, thankful from the respite from her twenty-page paper. M's room is a testament to the use of surface area. Her skinny closet keeps its shape thanks to a vicious case of bulimia; it daily vomits clothes all over the carpet and across the bed. M's thought process for choosing an outfit in the morning is readable based on the spatter position of each dropped skirt or blouse. Aside from clothes is the proliferation of stuff that pervades apartment living; when you've got two dozen framed pictures and only one room, they all sit on top of one another at odd angles across the dresser. Coffee cups are stacked on law texts on newspapers on one missing earring. The mess is comforting and constant, and will not be attended to until next month's finals. Around finals time my two law-student roommates develop a deep desire to scrub floors.

M was up by the window, rifling through her plastic cupboards. "I know I have it here," she said. "I just can't remember if I put it with the condoms or with the pregnancy tests." Finally from among the birth control she produced a Ziplock baggie full of colored thread. Thus supplied, I went upstairs to my own clean bedroom and set to work reviving my best black shirt.

Everybody Blogs About Procrastinating

2008-11-15T19:58:00.000-08:00

The extent to which I am able to put off writing is not short of amazing. Lily's article has been patiently waiting in my green notebook, paperclipped to the back cover, a quiet reminder that I owe her my own. I've had a week, and I've put together nothing of merit, compiled a skeletal draft that can't even qualify as a first of a story I told years ago. I don't know what to do with it but moreover I'm not even trying. I'm checking websites I don't care about, I'm emailing people I don't need to talk to, I'm organizing my iTunes. I have the most organized iTunes in the known world; I've created an elaborate and unnecessary filing system for my music that is so uselessly informative that sometimes I spend time actually undoing my organization, just to make it a little more off-the-cuff. This is what you call fastidious. It's why I excel in the field of administrative assistance.

I spent the night in because I wanted to work on my article, though I've done little more than change a handful of words in the paragraphs that are already written. It's a good night to stay in, despite its being Saturday, because it's raining and I went out last night and spent too much money. I woke up fiercely hungover on account of the two rolled cigarettes I procured from unsuspecting and unhappy benefactors, and with a wallet so light I've begun to suspect I tipped in twenties. Today I spent money at the hardware store, and then I bought fifty dollars worth of hair care products. When a person has hair like I have hair, fifty dollars on product is a mere drop in the bucket. Hair care is possibly my single greatest expenditure after food and alcohol. Someday I imagine I'll wave the white flag and let the curls do whatever they want, but for the moment I've been getting really into fishnet stockings and dreadlocks are not going to be an acceptable topoff to the look.

Tomorrow after I buy more fishnets I have to go to Williamsburg so that we can construct a paper moon. Hence the hardware store trip. The moon is actually going to be made of cardboard, but it's called a paper moon because the attempt is to recreate the old-timey photography sets where people had their portraits taken sitting in the moon's crescent and grabbing its nose, before color was invented and the world was still in shades of gray. Once we've constructed the moon, which should take an afternoon or so, we'll have a photo shoot posed on and around it. The idea is to float through a vaudevillian outer space full of paper stars and cardboard moons. It will take another evening to preen and pose, and that's two more nights that I will not have any time to write.