beacon street, just before six a.m.

This morning, very early, I drove through my old neighborhood. Brownstones and wrought iron fences. Plowed-in cars cocooned until spring. Graveyards of the revolution, uneven streets barely wide enough for a city bus. My first life in Boston. It has been followed by other lives, all part of one story but, also, distinctly separate. College student, girlfriend, runner, fiancée, mistress, grad student, teacher, friend, activist. Sometimes I can’t find a string to grip that runs through all of those people, even though they are all me. Other days I think my eight year old self and my current self are too similar for comfort. There are times I am blindsided by shock in a world I thought I had a handle on; other days I lose hope that I will ever feel anything new. Then there are these paradoxical moments – both constant and new, permanently. Driving through Beacon Hill this morning I was struck by the way the public garden looks after a snowfall, before anyone is up. I’ve seen it a million times. White lights on white snow. Bent, arthritic tree branches, snow laden, poking toward the sky. The black of the branches and the white of the snow frozen in stark contrast, neither in rows nor appearing chaotic or wild. It will always be both new and old to me. The roll of emotion is part nostalgia, making me ache for one of those old lives. I remember long, cold walks, pauses under lightly falling snow, gloved hands soft on my face. The breathless shock of loving someone. I long for the sense of newcomerness in my city, being awed by it, scared of it, lost in it. This all seems so completely part of the past, out of reach. On the exact same roll of emotion is the surprise at how much I love to look at trees covered in snow. It has been falling every winter now for as long as I’ve been alive. I know what it will look like. But the magic of that snowy hush, the noiselessness of an untouched city park just after dawn, will never be old to me. I could turn that corner onto Beacon Street every day for eternity. And if the snow had stopped falling but the walkway wasn’t cleared yet, the white lights were shining in a haze through bright white snow on wet black branches, and the city’s morning hadn’t started, I would stop. As if for the first time, I would leave my car illegally parked, breath caught in my throat for reasons quite unclear to me, and let my ungloved hands freeze to the fence, leaning there feeling full and new, staring at the snow.

Snow Days: 1988 vs. 2007

Snow Day 1988:

I woke up most winter mornings in the eighties already wearing many layers of clothing. On a normal day, the thirty seconds between the hot shower and taking off all those pajama layers was horrific. On a potential snow day, the pajamas stayed on, and we headed downstairs in bed gear.

First of all, going down our stairs in feet-on-pjs was dangerous. I imagine the guy who built our house, at some point in the late 19th century, understood the basic idea of stairs. But I understand the basic idea of converting matter into energy, yet I’m definitely not qualified to put that into practice. Pretty much, with the thin-plastic-covered feet, little tufts of pj material sticking out between the cracks, pajama clad children rushing down those narrow, a thousand times painted over, death trap stairs was a mini-chernobyl waiting to happen every snowy morning.

The kitchen housed an electric stove. This is important. In the spirit of progress, the mid 1980s found my house abandoning the ancient wood stove system in the basement and adopting oil heat. The little thermostat thinger on the wall that I had seen at friends’ houses appeared on our living room wall. No more waiting for the dank basement’s wood piles to dry enough to burn! No more smoky eyes! Control over how warm it was in the house! Not so much. If you EVER even entertained the idea that you might think about potentially in the distant future possibly touching that thing, my mother would sense it and say, “If that thing is above fifty-five…” And this was all we needed in the way of a threat. We had no other rules. We could come home tattooed, pregnant, smoking cigarettes in a stolen car and she’d just sigh and ask us to do the dishes. But you did not fuck with the thermostat.

I digress. The eight-floor-tile-wide space in front of the kitchen stove was the only place in the house that ever went above tundra temperatures. Between November and March that spot was the nexus of the house. So we would wedge ourselves into the hallway between the wall and the stove, our plastic feet pressed against the grate. We’d use our toes to scrape remnants of dinners past, blackening on the once white stove side. The morning news went on in the living room, the TV just visible from our spot by the stove. We’d watch that scrolling cancellation ticker, inhaling the somehow comforting smell of singed plastic. Mother standing behind the stove with coffee, both hands around her cup. Her glasses get steamed, so she periodically raises her head, then lowers it again, all very slowly, so she looks like a turtle. It seemed we always just missed our school in the rotation, so we’d wait through the whole alphabet, squirming. Then there it was. Granville. Closed.

My sister and I are jubilant. Our mother’s eyes roll.

Leaving the stove front was a challenge. But eventually we braved the Alaskan living room. The couch was covered with a perpetual layer of laundry waiting to be folded and extra blankets. We burrow into a knot of blanket and mismatched socks, pulling the dog onto the couch for warmth. We burrowed for only a moment, because no amount of cold air could keep us from The Greatest Luxury of my Childhood for very long. Figuring prominently in every snow day was that fiercely addictive 8 bits of pure joy, the Nintendo. Stacked on top of the television, which was stacked on a broken television, that little gray box brought way more delight to our childhood than could be considered healthy. Even the ritual of banging on it just right, blowing in the game cartridge, blowing in the console, taking it out, doing it again, screaming with fury when the screen went blue mid-game – all a labor of love, people!

Eventually, though, one must go outside and play in the snow. Snow is great for kids who have an acute and absurd resistance to potential physical harm. To qualify this, I was great at BEING hurt. Once I got hurt, I was super tough guy. But if I wasn’t yet hurt, I would avoid getting hurt so carefully that my caution often impeded certain instances of fun. The snow meant invincibility! All my best uninhibited feats of derring-do occurred in the snow. And, of course, there was the temptation to tie the sled to the dog and yell “mush!” Then watch her look around. Lick a paw. Lie down. Roll around.

…in the interest of retaining the attention of my three dedicated readers, fast forward through:

Mittens, hats, socks, snow pants, drying in rows over the heating vent. Hot cocoa powder from the giant box of brown paper packets. The little balls of ice stuck between the pads of doggie feet. All reporting back, by dark, to the warm part of the kitchen.


Snow Day 2007:

This is me reporting live from an adult snow day, December Fourteenth Two Thousand and Seven, the year of our lord. I am at my desk. There is no Nintendo here. Or back to back episodes of The Price is Right. What I wouldn’t give for even one glimpse of that tiiiiny little microphone…

This particular snow day started yesterday. A snow two-day. A couplet of bliss! In its usual staunch resistance to common sense, Boston Public Schools ignored the doings of EVERY OTHER school district in the area and kept students in school all day. At the last minute, we got a call that buses were leaving the bus yard thirty minutes early. (Again, a classic BPS move, which is a good old fashioned “oh shit.”) After a few Sisyphean attempts, the bus opted to wait at the bottom of the ridiculous hill our school sits atop. It was only twenty minutes late at this point. So we tell our students, who are cooperative angels and accept unexpected schedule changes with grace and patience, to bundle up – we’re walking down the hill. You would think we told them we were going to tie our wrists together, form a line, and swim the English Channel dressed in giant lizard outfits. Eventually, one teacher (ahem, me) and all of our students waddle out the door. The boys are fine, sliding to the beat of whatever’s on their iPods. The girls are pregnant and walking very very very slowly. We make it to the bus. They get on, I wave through the blizzard at them.

My car is a cocoon of danger, parked at the bottom of the hill so as to avoid (another) sliding accident. I turn it on, and whatever radio station I had on that morning blasts John Mellencamp’s (sans Cougar) “Hurt so Good.” Bad omen? Perhaps.

I’m still cheerful. I got to leave work a few hours early. It’s almost Friday. Singing along, I wipe the blizzard from my little car. The snow is light and fluffy and flies into the air with flourish! Within minutes, the heat is working and the windshield is becoming less and less opaque. Things are progressing. I will make it home.

The snow is really coming down. Every window I clean is covered by the time I clean the next one. It becomes clear that my insistence upon ONE HUNDRED PERCENT visibility is going to have to be compromised. I feel a little bit of the nervies coming on.

I drive at about four miles per hour out of my parking spot and into the street. I. Am. Going. Very. Slowly. It. Is. Tedious. But. Also. Frightening.

The cars behind me are more concerned with the tedious part and less moved by the frightening. Honking happens. Who the fuck honks in a blizzard?! Then, out of nowhere, traffic stops. It just stops. We aren’t moving. No one is moving.

From the same Boston drivers who brought you honking I give to you “The Impatient Ass Hole Gridlock.” This is a phenomenon found only among the most impatient and inconsiderate cultures of the world. It occurs when people REFUSE to sit still on a green light and drive into the center of an intersection, thus blocking traffic moving in all directions, and leaving everyone else waiting through several lights. So we all end up in this white-washed clusterfuck of biblical proportions. I call some people. I eat a banana. I listen to five or six cds. I listen to NPR tell me important stuff. I get out of the car and pretend to do something to the windshield wipers, just to get some air. I get back in. I feel the need for air.

Hal the Hyundai was so named for alliterative purposes but also for Space Odyssey jokes. After the first forty-five minutes on the Eliot Bridge I started feeling trapped. Akin, I’m sure, to being stuck in a pod. In space. Dark, indifferent, cold, scary...space. I considered abandoning Hal. Hal says, “Without your snow helmet, Kelly, you’re going to find that very difficult.”

This portion of my commute is directed by Stanley Kubrick. In short, I start to FREAK OUT. All those stories of the storm of ’78 come back to me. People freezing to death on the highway. Pipes bursting, pools of water up to the waist. Abandoned cars stolen after the melt. (Rationality check in: I am, at this point, about ¼ mile from my house and in exactly 0% real danger.)

Hal says, “It’s cold, Kelly.”

I try to engage the driver trapped beside me in non-verbal communication. She’s on the phone. I feel a rush of hatred for her.

Hal says, “I’m almost out of gas, Kelly.”

This time, Hal wasn’t fucking with me. He really was below “E.” My face looks like one of the twins at the Overlook Hotel. I start mixing up my Kubrick movie references. Things are getting wacky. Snow is covering signs. The world looks unrecognizable.

Time check: 1.5 hours in the car.

Miles traveled: .8

Just when I start to resign myself to getting stranded on Memorial Drive, we start to move. The next turn is a slight incline. I have been less than impressed with Hal’s snow ability thus far, and figure I can only make it if I get a little bit of a head start to propel him up the slope. This means I have to allow the car in front of me to advance without following directly on his bumper. This is something so insufferable to other drivers that I fear for my safety. I turn up my music and block out the horns. Finally, I have enough space. Hal fishtails his way up the incline and onto Mt. Auburn without incident. I’d like to say this all happened without me rolling down a window and informing the other drivers near me how they could use certain parts of their bodies to do certain things to other parts of their bodies. I would like to say that very much.

Time check: 2.7 hours in the car.

Miles traveled: 1.3

The evening consists of red wine, sweaters, early retreats to bedrooms. (Not before shoveling the sidewalk.) I change my alarm so I’ll have extra time in the morning to dig myself out, and go to sleep.

By morning all evidence of the night’s shoveling is gone. Unless you count the ache in my lower back as evidence. I start negotiating what I think is a good balance between “warming Hal up enough” and “not running out of gas.” I am sweeping the snow off the top of the car when a neighbor walks by toward the hospital. He’s wearing scrubs.

He says, “Woah. You got a long way to go.”

I smile a smile that I hope conveys the message “No shit ass hole” with plenty of sweetness and grace.

I did have a long way to go. And when I thought I was done, and tried to back out of the driveway, Hal the Hyundai informed me that no, I in fact was not done. By the time the little guy got his wheels onto the street that young man in scrubs had already read three charts, given advice for somebody to ignore, and flirted with like six nurses. Traveling at about six miles per hour, my little four door accident box swished its way to the nearest gas station, a chorus of unsafe drivers honking in a union of impatience alllll the way. When I got there I realized that the gas tank was covered by a protective shield made of ice. Chipping away with my key, a fellow driver felt that I was not using my time at the pump wisely and said so. With his horn. So I killed him.

Noooo. I didn’t. In real life. In my mind, however, mister “long way to go” in the scrubs wept over how totally impossible it was to extract my keys, complete with the thingy that gets me sale prices at Shaw’s and a Kentucky Derby 2006 Collectible Key-Ring Jersey, from his unbelievably tight little bottom.

When I get to school I realize that I had left out one very important part of the potential snow day ritual. I had forgotten to CHECK TO MAKE SURE SCHOOL WAS NOT CANCELED. Since many BPS students had suffered 4-8 hour commutes home the night before, the district had decided to give them the day off. Thus the following Extreme Rarity in my life:: 1988 beats 2007 (in this one, ultra specific category.) Needless to say, I spent the day in my classroom, alone, writing blogs and spinning in my spinny office chair. No stoves. No couch. No Nintendo. Bollocks!

geography

One of my students skipped a class and wandered into my room earlier this year. I should’ve sent him back to “career exploration” but I didn’t. They were searching for jobs on monster.com and I got the wonderful sense that you get with some students that he knew, as much as I knew, that the whole class was a bunch of bullshit. I folded my glasses, put them down, and asked what I could do for him. He said, “Teach me something.” (I imagine this creates a feeling similar to the one a comedian gets when asked to ‘say something funny.’)

In this situation, I am comforted by maps. I happen to have a set of fantastic pull-down full color shiny brand new maps that are the jewel of my classroom. So I pull down the map of the world. The whole globe in pinks blues and oranges is pressed flat right in front of us. His hat is pulled down to his eyelids and little braids poke out toward his face and covering it all is this gigantic hood with that gold faux-Louis Vuitton print. But he can see the map.

I say, “So what’s going on out there?”

He looks at it.

He points to the Middle East and says, “Well this is all fucked up.”

And I say, “Okay…why?”

And so begins an impromptu lesson that meanders between American foreign policy, destruction of the rainforest, Israel vs. Palestine, the Holocaust, Shiites, Sunnis, evolution, the Prophet Mohammed, war, and, everyone’s favorite, the value of a human life. For everything I say he has another question. He exhausts my knowledge of Islamic culture, which doesn’t take long. He wants to know exact dates that I don't remember. He jumps from country to country, wanting to know how each one is involved with the next now and in ancient history, know each country’s stake in the current war, know how each one picks its leaders, treats its women, worships its god. Had I tried, I could never have created such a lesson. It was disjointed and at points, I’m sure, less than perfectly accurate. There were a thousand stumblings and much struggling to remember names and ideas. It was entirely driven by this kid’s whim, his finger, shaking from nicotine withdrawal and too much coffee, bouncing all over the world.

Then it shifts.

“You ever been anywhere?”

I say that I have. And he asks where. I point to Portugal. I point to Spain. I point to the Netherlands, which draws a bit of needling and forces me to remind him that, ahem, Amsterdam has more museums per capita than anywhere else in the world. I point to Ireland, Mexico, France.

I say, “Where would you like to go most, if you could go anywhere?”

And we start randomly pointing at the map. Taking turns. I’d like to see South Africa. He’d like to see London. I’d like to see Moscow. He’d like to see Egypt. What would this be like. What’s this place like. What’s this place. What’s here. Over and over. The image of these two pointer fingers, one black, one white, poking whimsical destination points all over the globe is one that will stick with me my entire life. The realization is crystal: I have about one four-thousandth of the knowledge I’d need to be the teacher he deserves. Or the teacher that could totally satisfy that curiosity, which emerged and then buried itself again by third period. Or the teacher that has even the slightest clue what it is like to be this kid.

eastern standard time

Some cold morning very, very early after a whole three days of sunless rain the neighborhood stuck with post it note leaves which are just that, small yellow adhesive reminders plastered to the sidewalk and windshield peeking in at wrists bent over the steering wheel looking pale and bony just waiting for the glass to warm up enough to see the sun, freezing but getting up anyway because the river sends it up to catch some piece of partnerless silver jewelry barely winking through the tarnish up from the back seat nestled safe in unsharpened pencils and unposted photocopied flyers for things cared about so deeply they were never posted near the tapes abandoned for the radio is too loud for this time of day when blinkers clicking jog chilled reflexes just in time to take lefts all the way to the river who is paying the sun back fourfold for the favor and split in half by a single kayaker no doubt she sees her breath and, maybe, marvels that somewhere inside she is warmer than this air while cutting in half a river that will just keep on being one river like it has since way before her first ever breath all of it silent and uninterrupted but still offered punctuation by traffic horns and ten thousand clicking blinkers and sips of coffee and international news updates reporting live from the kitchen where the trash waits in vain for the Thursday evening somebody remembers to take it to the sidewalk with all the yellow post it leaves all full of letters addressed to a person who looks so different, just right this second, you are shocked. Shocked to look at her.

The Power of Horses

You might think this is a blog about my girlhood obsession with collecting model horses. Breyer horses. The finest model horses in the world. You’re expecting, perhaps, a long whimsical recreation of the hours I spent dusting Secretariat’s perfectly miniaturized face with a Q-tip.

Or maybe you’re geared up for a discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s work. The American west, aching lonesome souls in a world of disorder and disappearing civilizations, the mysterious, untamed, violent beauty of a horse. Blah blah blah.

Lest we forget the possibility that I feel like talking about Robert Redford and his uncanny ability, circa 1998, to really pick up what a horse is putting down.

But no! I am talking about the power of several horses encased in one fine piece of machinery! Yes, horsepower. Or, in the case of my recently purchased Hyundai Accent, the power of a small donkey with Leukemia. But this donkey beats the hell out of the T. AND it’s good for increasing the chances that we’ll all be under water in, say, 50 years. And there are plenty of poor people in Kansas who could use a good bit of beachfront property. Just doing my part, people.

Here are just a few of the spectacular perks I’ve recently discovered as the proud owner of a motor vehicle:

A place to put stuff. There is a drawer in the kitchen filled with the manuals for appliances I can’t find, batteries that don’t work, the glove that matches a glove somewhere so I can’t throw it out. That drawer is full. So now I get to put stuff in the TRUNK! It’s a traveling misc. drawer. That way if I’m ever trapped on the highway with a VCR, I can program it correctly while waiting for AAA.

Sing-a-longs. The only thing better than singing along with Disney Classics Volume One is singing along with Disney Classics Volume One at a red light and watching people’s reactions. Don’t judge me. Elton John and Time Rice get together and that shit is pure magic my friends.

A quick getaway after glaring at pedestrians. When you’re five feet two inches tall with a foot that tends to break, you don’t walk very fast. Or at least not fast enough to get a comfortable distance from people immediately after you leer at them. Not any more! I can now stare down those stuffy-ass popped collar brats crossing JFK in a hurry to get to a squash game, make eye contact, and then speed away. Sometimes I stick out my tongue. Because I am mature.

Bumper stickers. I am always looking for new ways to make people angry. And as if my sub-par driving skills and tendency to stare at boys running along the Charles instead of driving through the green lights on Memorial Drive weren’t annoying enough, now I get to piss people off with my IDEAS! I’m going to cover the whole damn car! Besides the requisite “Got Democracy?” and “Think, it’s not illegal yet” type stickers I’m thinking of getting some of my own design. Like, “This abortion is really sucking the life out of me.”

Oh man that was wrong.

Kelly vs. Mt. Washington

Kelly: 1
Mt. Washington: Zero


I am tired. But, before bed, this favorite moment: I'm on my way down and I pass a guy headed up. He stares up the ravine I am about to descend. It's steep and requires hands. He's carrying poles and has to hook them onto his bag and start the all-fours climb. He leans against a tree and sighs, "You have got to be kidding me."

This makes me happy. Because that's basically what I was thinking on the way up. I'm glad someone else was willing to actually sigh at the mountain and question its decision to stack these damn rocks in such a challenging manner.

after hiking in the rain

There is a singular, lonely feeling that comes with speaking words that have some value to you, out loud, to a person who, as it turns out, wasn’t listening. They turn and smile and say, innocently, “What?” And you’re there, trying to recover from the realization that you can’t identify what another person’s attention looks like. I woke up that way this morning. Feeling like I had to muster up the courage to repeat something. Or not say something at all, even though I had intended to say it. I was up early enough to warrant headlights. And my tank was full of gas.

Speeding over highway while the sun rises, the city shrinking in the rearview, I am singing my loudest to a song I would never admit liking had I a passenger. The windows are down and my hair is crazy crazy crazy.

The lanes get fewer and narrower. I chase the sun through windy roads; it ducks behind pine trees that are impossibly tall. When I get out, my legs take their time remembering how to walk. I just stare at the trees. A little girl in my memory had a yard dotted with birch trees. She tore scrolls from the trunks and wrote crayon stories. She put the scrolls back around the trees afterwards, letting them hang there, or sent them floating like boats down a stream. In the time between those birches and womanhood, she had come to place value only on words heard by others. Asking, always, “Listen. Listen. Hear me.” How to exhume a person who thinks trees and streams a fine audience?

I’m staring at the trail map, turning it and turning it. I can never establish which way I’m facing. I start walking without destination. When faced with a fork, I consult the map and head, I think, toward water. My breath and footfalls sound foreign, I feel like a secret guest. The mountain tops are both close and distant, indifferent to me. If they had faces they’d always look away. I stop, periodically, to appreciate my smallness.

That’s it, then. It’s the being wrong that hurts. When a little girl sends a story woven from some now untouchable imagination off to the stream, she expects no answer. She is giving her story away, and that intention protects the words’ value. When we mutter our thoughts to the woods it is so that we can hear them, unobstructed by sirens and televisions and all the metronomic ticking and clicking of city life. We so rarely get to listen to ourselves. But when we give words to someone else it is risky. Stuttering mumbling under the breath shy attempts at talking, all defenses against speaking to someone who doesn’t hear. Someone who looks you right in the eye for the duration of a sentence and then has to say, “What?”

The lake arrives, spreads herself out for me, completely silent and beachless. A patch of sand large enough for my feet sends me into the water. I float, and the water swallows me. My ears take it in and the trees’ susurrations are replaced with the muffled underwater silence that is not quiet but not loud. The sky is white, and rains a little. I stare at my things piled on the bank. Plastic and nylon and leather. It’s funny how one day can continually redefine the word necessary. I kick myself in circles, a small white naked little boat. I am the object of zero attention. The rain and the trees and the patch of sand cannot listen or speak, and cannot know that I am lost. And I can’t tell the difference between raindrops and tears, but I am crying.

A Clandestine Affair with the Alphabet

The vowels were having a cocktail party in a New York City loft. U was smoking a cigar on the balcony, staring into a well-lit apartment across the street. He leaned on the railing and let his hands flop over the edge, ash falling onto Central Park West. By the time it reached the street, it was just part of the air.
“Y is here,” said A, walking toward him in the way only A could walk.
“Showed up, did he?”
U turned, resting his elbows on the railing, and faced her. He crossed his legs easily in front of him. His shoes caught the light of the red Chinese lanterns that framed the balcony.
He reached inside his jacket, extracted a slim silver case. He popped it open, held it at arms length.
A’s long fingers plucked a slim cigarette from the case and put it between her lips. She waited while U replaced the case and put flame before her. She raised an eyebrow at him, took the first drag slow. She crossed an arm over her narrow waist, jutted a hip to the left, and smiled at him through smoke.
“Jealous?”
“Really, darling. We both know A and U make gold,” he let the lighter fall into the pocket of his jacket.
She didn’t laugh but let out a smiling, “Mmmhmmm.” U had been making that joke for longer than A cared to remember.
O poked his head between the French doors, which A had left slightly ajar. “Are your glasses full out here?”
“Everything’s grand, just grand, O,” U rolled the ice around in his glass.
“Lovely, O, thank you,” A spoke in her low voice.
“Join us by the piano later, A?”
“Sooner rather than later, darling,” she winked and moved her eyes to U.
“Coming inside, dear?”
“In a moment,” said U, and he nodded his head in the direction of the piano, “go on in.”
She watched his face in the warm light, and turned.
Inside the party was gay. O was at the piano, banging out raucous harmonies. The whole room seemed to vibrate. While A walked to the piano, all fell to hush.
“Sing something for us, will ya,” called I, raising his glass to her.
“Yes, do,” echoed E.
She smiled at no one in particular, and put her hand on O’s shoulder. He looked up and back at her, eyebrows poised.
She nodded at him and sipped her drink.
Her husky voice filled the room. U stood halfway in from the balcony, barely visible behind the door. Y stood parallel to U, at the entrance to the apartment. They looked at one another briefly, but then watched only A.
She didn’t look at anyone’s face when she sang, yet every man assumed she was singing to him.
Later, on the balcony, U raised a hand and pushed the wave of hair obscuring A’s right eye back from her face. She let him look at her for a long moment, and then put the cigarette back to her lips. U stepped back to the railing and looked down at a line of limousines. The drivers leaned on doors, talked, and smoked.
U spoke with his back to her, “You’re glad Y is here?”
A finished her cigarette before she spoke. Her hands dropped to her sides and hung there. She took a long breath, went to U, reached to touch the shoulder of his jacket, and let her arm drop again.
She said, “Sometimes.”

the ants are my friends; they're blowing in the wind

That misheard Dylan lyric gets repeated over and over in Lorrie Moore's novel Anagrams via the protagonist's imaginary daughter. Like all of Moore's work, the book is funny and sad, and has forever etched this whimsical line onto my brain, leaving me picturing ants every time I hear the song and thinking about the song every time I see an ant.

This is all background information to help me explain what is happening RIGHT NOW in real time at my desk. I am sitting at my desk because zero students showed up for school today. Zero! For years on Monday evenings as a waitress, I would lean on empty tables in an empty bar, just wanting to escape the whole thing, and wonder, "Will absolutely zero people come in tonight?" Inevitably, people would trickle in. There is something horribly wrong when people will always always ALWAYS show up at a bar, but there are days when zero students show up to school.

So my chin is heavy in my hand and I'm prepping for Fantasy Football 2007 when I notice this little ant climbing the wall directly to the right of my desk. The radio in my head immediately starts humming, "The answer my friends, is blowin in the wind." I watch him walk up the wall in the determined manner of a good little ant. And he falls. I've never seen this before. He gets back up. Walks halfway up the wall, toward the corkboard, and falls again. He just keeps doing it. Either the wall is slippery at that spot or his sticky ant feet aren't sticky enough for my concrete wall. Again, up from the desk, past the light switch, and he falls. The same exact path, halfway up, and falls.

And so I just sit there, humming that song, without any students, and start to cry, getting my list of top ten running backs all wet.

On my recent trip to DC I was quite surprised to note that before he even leaves office they have erected a statue in George Bush's honor.

Fireworks

Gee, thank Christ we got out from underneath the UK’s tyrannical rule, otherwise we might all have health care.

Here I am in Cambridge, land of the free range eggs, where the neighbors’ litter of blond haired private school kids are waving sprinklers in celebration of their avoidance of the public school system that fucks over every child who can’t afford such escape. They trot past me in Harvard Square and they say, “Happy Independence Day.”

You know what, oh handsome family of four, you can say that when we are independent from foreign oil. You can say that when all schools are created equal and our highest courts don’t disable the only mechanism in place to correct the injustices perpetrated by a racist system designed by and for white people. You can tell me to enjoy my independence when my vote counts. You can tell me to celebrate independence day when this country stops acting as if it is independent of the planet on which we all live and joins the rest of the civilized world in doing something about human’s rape of the earth. Oh, dear family whose car runs on soy, you are totally saving the world in between tennis matches, and I WILL have a jaunt around the Charles with you. Yes, I will celebrate a victory for Democracy when Democratic nations stop behaving like tyrants under the guise of peacekeeping. I will look fondly upon big explosions in the sky when they don’t immediately remind me of friends coming home in boxes. I will enjoy a brewsky on the lawn when I am independent of NSA wire taps. I will lather a chicken leg with BBQ sauce when those rights our creator endowed us with are offered to somebody other than your average white male.

That’s right, I’m not freaking celebrating independence day because I am not, as a member of these united states, independent from anything except morality. And I’m damn grouchy about it, too.

With all these bombs bursting in air I thought for a second I was in Iraq. Thank God, and it’s all about God, that I am here, able to enjoy a wine spritzer and a government of by and for the people.

For fun, let’s just revisit a few of the ole colonies’ issues with the Brits:

He {that would be George III, for those of you who went to public school and your history class was replaced by test prep}has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

…it would seem that George was holding secret meetings and making decisions without consulting the appropriate information. Sounds like another George I know.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

…Boy that must have sucked. Good thing our court today transcends current political climates and adheres only to the principles of Justice. And they stay out of elections and stuff, because that’s important.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

…So it was possible for the military to engage in actions unsupported by the public? Thank Christ we escaped these wackos!

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury.

…That’s madness. We, these independent united states, would never, ever, consent to depriving a human being of a trial. We would never, say, suspend someone’s right to a trial by jury because we thought they were involved in some kind of…I don’t know…terrorism?

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments…He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us…He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

…Man, we must have really learned from this experience because now we would NEVER do this kind of thing to somebody else’s country.

Screw you guys. I’m drinking tea tonight.

There's nary an animal alive that can outrun a greased Scotsman

“Rapid motion through space elates one.”

Well that’s according to James Joyce. After running the annual “James Joyce Ramble” (a 10K) this morning, I can assure you that even leisurely dawdling through space elates one when one receives free beer all afternoon. My second year running the race, I managed to beat my time from last year by just a hair. And, due to colder weather, it seems the more serious runners were hell bent on stretching for longer periods afterwards, so I wasn’t last in the beer line either.

The race takes place in Dedham, Mass. Since getting all that hate mail from angry Worcester residents regarding a recent blog, I won’t go into a lengthy description of Dedham. Let me just say that getting to Dedham via public transportation is impossible. That is, if you ask the MBTA. (Out-of-town readers unable to discern meaning through context, that would be the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, which I believe may be operated by FEMA.) The MBTA website has a handy little trip-planner device into which you type two locations and it offers viable bus/subway/rail combinations along with timetables and estimated walking distance. Kiss my grits, how convenient. So at five forty five (5:45) am (in the fucking morning) I type in my home address and my destination and the MBTA, the AUTHORITY on the subject literally tells me, “You can’t get there from here.” I was in my slippers drinking mint tea and reading a book at 9:30 on a Saturday night because I was going to wake up early and go run a race the next day and now I can’t get there?! Okay that’s pretty much what I do every Saturday. But STILL.

Fortunately, the folks organizing the race anticipated car-phobics like myself and provided directions on their website. I leave my door at quarter to seven and arrive in Dedham promptly at 9:13. Maybe the MBTA knew it would take that long and was embarrassed to even put in on the trip planner.

Dedham Square contains several quaint little buildings and businesses, my personal favorite is the Greek restaurant. They actually named it “It’s all Greek to Me.” I’m not sure when they opened, but I’m sure that name stopped being funny about two days after whenever that was.

I walk the half mile to Endicott Estate where Subaru is inflating a blimp. Hood and Dunkin’ Donuts offer all comers the classic pre-race favorites: coolattas and chocolate milk.

I am immediately reminded of why I love races. It is not just the love of running. Running and races are two different animals, and loving one does not guarantee enjoyment of the other. Running, like writing, is a solitary activity. There aren’t any plays to make, balls to catch, etc. No team. There is an I in running. So it’s conceivable that someone who loved the solitude of running might hate races. But as any city-dweller knows, it is completely possible to be amid thousands of people and be pretty much alone. There is something immensely comforting in surrounding oneself with strangers who, simply by virtue of being in a given space, share a great passion. Now combine the passion for running with a love of literature and free beer and I’ve pretty much got a cozy crowd to hang in.

Besides, runners are weird. Most summer evenings for several years Bostonians watched Nomar Garciaparra do that weird pre-batting thing with his gloves and his hands flip flapped all over, you either know what I’m saying or you don’t. But it was weird. All runners of the world, however, found this totally normal. Before every race, about fifteen minutes before we start to line up, you can scan the crowd and it’s as if you are in the waiting room at McLean. Hopping on one foot. Rubbing hands together rapidly for one minute then placing them on the calf muscle. Pressing one another’s legs back and to the side. Taking off, shaking out, and putting back on socks. Walking around in gaits formerly reserved for Monty Python sketches. Push ups. Murmuring “one foot then the other” “put em down” “go go go” “win” or whatever.

Every single day I pop in my headphones and wish for the freedom to just sing along. But I don’t. I don’t want to be judged, I admit it. EXCEPT on race day. I walk around, hopping and skipping whenever I feel the need, and sing my heart out. NO ONE THINKS ANYTHING OF IT. Right before the gun fires I am running in place Flashdance style, singing Billy Joel’s Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. Next to me is an AARP-aged runner who is swinging his hands around himself and clapping them once in front, once in back, and swinging them faster and faster. I think of Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold about to jump in the pool with Christie Brinkley. Christie Brinkley was married to Billy Joel. That’s so WEIRD. With that totally stupid thought process fresh on my synapses the gun fires and we’re off.

The race itself is a different experience for each entrant, another interesting element of this sport. For me, it’s a combination of many emotions that exist in my mind as a conglomerate and are probably akin to what others have referred to as runner’s high. During this race, it’s heightened by the fact that people in costume line the course and shout lines of Joyce toward the road.

During the last two miles of the race it becomes clear that I am going to beat last year’s time. Yet another reason to love running. I’m sure for some runners, it is about beating the guy on your tail. We average runners are in competition with only ourselves. It’s incredibly convenient for those of us whose competitiveness is second only to our athletic ineptitude. When I see, upon crossing the finish line, that my AARP starting line mate already has a beer in his hand, I try to remind myself of this. I switch my iPod to the “cool down” playlist, take my complimentary bottled water, and head for the beer line.

A rare foray into the world of poetry...no title

She says, strength that can’t lift things is called grace
and knows that it takes balls to just admit
when even your taste buds are full of shit
for the price, dessert is bland in this place.

Tea lights in glass houses cheaply attempt
ambiance, flickering epileptically
while she’s snickering condescendingly
at some small grammatical misprint

in a letter I wrote. Eyes at half mast
she says, at last, it’s good, almost great
substantive pause, looks at her plate
while I provide lame conversational ballast.

In the manner brilliant Boston sunshine
guilt trips those indoors, her complimentary
commentary woos by sheer rarity,
things scarce become delicacies, in time

I do find her barricades disarming,
the old “because it’s there” mentality
moths me to the light of her brutality,
her soft, female cruelty, rather charming.

We find recourse - political discourse
obviates her admitting inability
to write loving letters for anybody
since impulse lost its original source,

now she only changes the addressee.
Despite her swift, careless unkindnesses
Her voice holds not a trace of mindlessness
and her hands, her hands know some secret me.

By midnight, our mouths are red with wine
cannibals both, we fuck with the rhyme,
throwing the form from before on the ground,
swearing like a sailor, lighting her incense
her ocean is cold, but I like to be drowned
we find rhythm in rhythm’s absence.

Adventures in Day Jobbing

My continuing adventures into the day jobbing world have yielded yet another new, exciting experience. Yesterday I got to explore the previously mysterious and vaguely attractive (dramatic pause) all day conference. For those of you who, like me, thought a day off from the grind might be both useful and kinda fun, enjoy the following peek into the conference experience.

I don’t drive, so my boss offered to give me a ride to Worcester for the event. The day before it began, however, he said that he “realized where Worcester was located” and couldn’t pass up the convenient route from his place to the conference. This route, of course, came nowhere near my house or our place of business.

The MBTA website is actually pretty user friendly, I will admit that. The commuter rail runs between Boston and Worcester at times that are convenient for the people operating the commuter rail. Anyone else has to either arrive absurdly early or slightly late. Given my boss’s willingness to totally dick me over on the ride, I dicked over the conference and showed up 1.5 hours late. The conference waits for no man. Workshops happened. People networked. I awkwardly sipped coffee in South Station amongst suited people waiting for the trains they take every day, nursing feelings of guilt and anxiety about my lateness…

So I arrive in Worcester. A place, as far as I can tell, notable only for its complete lack of an aesthetically pleasing view in any direction at any time of day. There are probably many crappy events happening at any one time in Worcester that few people really want to attend but attend out of a lack of other things to do. Normally this would be confusing, all of these events happening at various places across the city. Luckily every crappy event in Worcester is conveniently held at the DCU center. This conference is no exception.

I am welcomed by a piece of 8.5x11 paper with something else printed on the back of it which is itself taped to a sign that looks like it should say “Please wait to be seated.” The arrow points up an escalator at the top of which a replica of the first welcome implores me to go up another escalator. At the top of this there is a long folded table draped with the conference’s hosting organization’s logo and mission statement. Several dot org types mill about in business suits and hiking shoes. Everyone has crazy earrings.

I find my name in the A-H collection of laminated nametag lanyards. A smiling woman checks my name off of two lists, highlights something, and points to a stack of folders filled with helpful information and a survey. I am asked to please take the survey before leaving that afternoon. Instinctively, I find the coffee. I pace around, looking for a bathroom that I don’t need to use.

The first round of workshops lets out and my boss appears behind me like a Ninja. I have no idea how long he has been there when he says, “May I join you for coffee, ma’am?” We put stale croissants on delicate tea saucers. A powerhouse of a woman approaches us and looks at our lanyards before addressing us by name. She spits a piece of croissant at me in the middle of some emphatic statement about the previous workshop and doesn’t even pause while I wipe it off. I can’t hear a word she’s saying because I can’t stop thinking about how I would lose sleep for days if I spit croissant at someone I just met at a conference in the middle of a sentence. She and my boss exchange cards and I mentally note how networking works, minus the spitting. She asks for my card and I glare at my boss, who whispers a promise to order them.

Let me tell you that it is damn hard to shake someone’s hand while holding a cup full of coffee balanced on a saucer. So practice that now, if you have a conference coming up.

The next set of workshops starts and I am the last one in. I take a seat in the front row, my back toward the presenter, facing a table of people I don’t know. I turn my chair and sit in that kind of casual entirely uncomfortable “turn the chair half way around and crane your neck” position, the one where you grip the back of the chair for leverage and keep saying to yourself, “just turn the chair all the way around” but never do. A man two tables over is looking at my cleavage, which is showing because a button has come undone. This pleases me immeasurably.

The presenter is a regional manager for a wholesale grocery company. The workshop is about CORI’s from the employer’s perspective. As practitioners, we are meant to glean best practices in securing employment for convicted offenders. As an educator of court-involved youth, this indirectly involves me. What the regional manager seems to think we are there to learn about is the history, practices, and importance of regional managers of wholesale grocery companies. He hands out candy and explains that candy is just one of the hundreds of food items that have to go through him before hitting the grocery stores we shop at “each and every day.” The subsequent three minute oration consists only of food items, and rivals the Forest Gump litany of shrimp recipes both in length and in the cognitive wherewithal of the speaker. But while Bubba dies before the end of the movie, the regional manager is the protagonist and lasts the whole fucking time.

I now know how to get my ex-offenders employed at a grocery warehouse. Which is, it would seem, the highest degree of success for which they ought to hope if this workshop has anything to say about it.

Being mature and patient, I sat with my chin on my hand and doodled on my legal pad. I tried to engage one of my table partners in a non-verbal griping session but she wouldn’t bite. So I just rolled my eyes to no one and waited for lunch.

Finding my coworkers disappeared by 12:30 I sit with strangers at lunch. The two women who know each other at the table make no effort to stop talking or engage any one else in their conversation. A woman across from me stares at her food and seems to be mumbling to herself and is, in my expert opinion, batshit. Flanked by the self-sequestered chatters and batshit lady is Earl. I can’t call him by any other name, though I ought to change it, because he is so perfectly Earl. Funny that Earl – a name associated with nobility, elites of monarchies, and really nice tea – calls to my mind a middle aged American guy whose Saturdays consist of yard work and bad food in a kitchen with peeling linoleum that no one ever fixes…

I digress. Earl and I strike up a conversation and I immediately get the sense that I am being sold a car. Unluckily for Earl, I don’t drive. So he goes on about his great program that moves “these kids” toward “success” (see grocery manager paragraph). Earl does not take kindly to questions and gentle inquiries as to the point of assigning work if nobody provides feedback and tries to engage batshit lady in a conversation. Batshit lady watches her food while Earl expounds on the merits of his program which has, and I quote, “everything you could want*.” I begin, as usual, to relate only to the waitstaff, who are so grateful to be noticed and thanked I get more coffee than anyone else.

*Everything you want = new carpet, high speed internet, and big, new windows. No mention of, say, high quality teachers or engaging, challenging curriculum. No mention, ever, of the students.

The keynote speaker is mildly inspiring and moderately interesting and I mean it when I clap. This is nice. In the questions from the audience segment batshit lady approaches the microphone, which is placed terrifyingly close to my seat, and talks for nearly three minutes. Since she asked no discernable question and maybe made a great point somewhere in her own wacky thought process a few scattered hands start clapping and the keynote speaker deftly chooses a line from her monologue on which to comment and directs us back to our desserts.

I begin to recognize that I’ve had too much coffee. The chatting ladies are watching me drum my fingers crazily on the table top. Earl leaves, offering me his card. I take it while intently balancing a bite of apple crisp on my fork.

The third and final workshop of the afternoon begins. Again, I am at the first table in the room but this time by choice. I feel participation in my future; I feel ready, caffeinated. The powerpoint’s title is Integrated Curriculum.

One and one half hours, three small group discussions, and one long explanation of “homogenous vs. heterogeneous” (for real, like what the words mean) later I have an “annoyed & superior” attitude that is neither flattering nor helpful. I begin making a list of movies I’d like to see in the margins of the powerpoint hand out. I have an epiphany in the last three minutes, and vow to never, ever bore my students this terribly. (Of course, if they’re “successful” they’ll be bagging groceries soon so I guess boredom is something I should make familiar.)

I begin to feel a deep sense of longing for my classroom and a hatred for everything outside of it. I feel like Dorothy. I don’t want to see the wizard, I don’t like Emerald City, I just want to go home. Plus I want to crush Earl with a house. Riding into a pink-orange sky, the sun throwing a sunset onto construction sites and concrete buildings without any windows, I settle into my commuter rail bench and fall asleep, the laminated nametag lanyard letting fellow passengers know who I am.

Unchecked PMS

I’ll grant you, under normal circumstances I am not exactly a pillar of level-headed rationality. However, I manage to function and maintain a relatively stable existence (this being relative to my relatives.) However, every month I am blindsided by a sweeping storm of madness that, despite its recurrence for the past 17 years, perennially takes me by surprise. For the first time ever, this month I have been entirely alone – roommateless, boyfriendless, parental/familial companyless – to inflict upon myself the torturous insanity I usually reserve for my loved ones.

It starts with a desire to disinfect every inch of the house (which is different from cleaning the house). This seemingly benign impulse starts off productively enough. It is nine pm on Saturday – a totally normal time to begin cleaning the house. So I’m sweeping the stairs. I am sending clouds of dust and animal dander into the air with great flourish. At the bottom of the stairs I start experiencing that weird post-sweep satisfaction when you’ve got a really giant pile of gathered together crap to eliminate. But you can never REALLY get all of that pile into the dust pan. There is always a line of very fine dust left after the last swipe. Normally, I would throw a rug over it or something. But yesterday at nine pm I was a long distance from normal.

Out comes the vacuum cleaner. But even with that you can’t REALLY be sure that every last particle of dust has been eliminated. Thus, 10:15 pm finds me, a sponge, and warm soapy water all getting intimate with every surface in the house. And said intimacy follows no logical route. I walk from the kitchen to the living room and pounce at random. The finger print smudged light switch, door knobs, one floorboard but then not the next, then, mid-floor board, I remember the stove has a spot on it that had been bugging me earlier…all at great speed and with unnatural intensity.

At about quarter to eleven I decide I must know if my favorite jeans still fit like they used to. I must know right that very second. But I can’t just leave the soapy water sitting there. CAN’T have it both ways. And both things are (clearly) of earth shattering importance. War in Iraq, AIDS in Africa, Autism – you name it, it comes second, at this moment, to whether or not those jeans still fit and how clean I can get the house. I am standing in the center of a room having trouble deciding what to do first – get rid of the soapy water or try on the jeans. The stress of this decision making process frustrates me. Like the kind of frustration that makes me want to bite off my own fingers at the first knuckle and gnaw on them until my jaw breaks or I bleed to death, whatever comes first.

The jeans are a little snug. This begins the weep-fest that lasts until 4:27 on Sunday.

Okay, jeans are snug. So what do I do? I go to Walgreens for ice cream (a bit complicated but essentially I accepted the inevitability of my own pre-destined obesity and decided to sink into its clutches without further protest. Also there’s the chocolate thing, which is very real.)

But Walgreens does not have Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie. I cannot allow the ingestion of 1200 calories in one sitting for anything less than Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie. This is a catastrophe. Nightmarish. So I leave and decide to go home. On the way there I pass Cold Stone Creamery and think, “What are we if we aren’t willing to try new things?” But Cold Stone Creamery is PACKED and while waiting in line I revert back to my original decision that it’s BJ’s CFB or nothing.

I am standing on the corner of Highland and Baxter, without ice cream, still sniffling, meandering through an extremely insane and impossible to recreate thought process regarding ice cream, blue jeans, womanhood, etc. all of which morphs into a cold dagger shaped anger toward men/society/American Eagle Outfitters/planet earth. It is past eleven and the tail end of some festival has clotted the street to my left with drunken revelry. I am in no shape for human interaction and, had I any sense, would go buy my second or third choice ice cream flavor and go home to watch When Harry Met Sally. But no. I walk into the remains of the festival where stores are still open, their sidewalk sale racks poised for browsing.

It is a fabulous jacket. I have to have it. I will expire right here on the Bud Light cup littered sidewalk one block from home if I don’t have it and wouldn’t that be a tragedy. I’m there in the street wedged between clusters of drunk people trying on the jacket when some unsuspecting male person tells me that jacket looks great with those jeans. Very flattering. Etc.

I ask you to remind yourself of Linda Blair’s interactions with the priest. I think I turned to face him, but my head might have just wound backwards on its own, hard to say. I asked him in a sort of demonic hiss, “Don’t you have some fucking Nascar you should be watching or something?” He put his hands up in the “I don’t have any weapons” gesture. I literally shoved him out of my way and walked to the register to purchase the jacket (after all it looked good with my favorite jeans).

I end up back home without ice cream but with a great jacket, which provides some fleeting sense of satiety. Not three minutes later, hanging up my new jacket, I just start bawling. For absolutely zero reason. Instead of embracing a good cry I start doing the dumbest thing anyone can do during an irrational reasonless weep session which is FIND reasons to which the crying might be attributed. I am not sure if I can adequately explain this because I have since re-entered the world of moderately rational human beings but here goes. I don’t attribute the crying to actual reasons. Heck no. I don’t choose reasons that currently exist but reasons why, if those reasons applied, I WOULD cry. This means that in rapid succession horribly depressing POTENTIAL reasons to cry weave in and out of my little bloated brain. What if the dog got hit by a car. That would be terrible. I’d have to explain how I let it happen and the driver would feel badly and that would be bad too the driver feeling bad and what if I hit a dog well I don’t drive but what if I did and I killed a dog which would be worse Tizrah getting hit by a car or me hitting someone else’s dog oh that is terrible how could I even think that but I did I thought it I must be terrible and what if it wasn’t a dog what if like my sister got hit by car or who let’s see who would I pick if I had to pick somebody to get hit by a car who would I pick well that is even worse why am I even thinking about this I deserve to be crying that’s right I deserve it weep fatso weep devil woman.

Eventually I fall asleep and it is Sunday. There exists one reason to get out of bed. The Patriots are playing football today and there is no crying during the first football game of the season.

But I am in Kentucky. And no such game is playing on any channel. The remote is getting all wet because I’m crying all over it wondering “what could possibly be wrong what am I so UPSET about” still not really cognizant of the impetus for such insanity. I am flipping the channels, bravely coming to terms with the no Patriots game thing. There are a few films that a person in this state simply should not watch. Number one USED to be Philadelphia, then later Hotel Rwanda.

I couldn’t have stopped on TBS for cute little Melanie Griffith outsmarting Sigourney Weaver. Couldn’t watch Annette Benning fall in love with the president. Couldn’t even watch Harrison Ford prove what all of us knew already which is that every lawyer would benefit from a bullet to the head. Certainly not. I watch the one thing that could surpass Philadelphia and Hotel Rwanda combined. Spike Lee, levees, shattering indifference on the part of our beloved compassionately conservative administration….

So after watching Barbara Bush walk around and label American citizens “refugees” and profess that it was somehow fortuitous for such a disadvantaged population to be granted food and shelter I decide I ought to go for a nice long run but not before calling the white house and (still weeping, mind you) blubber unintelligibly long after some staffer in the 202 hung up.

After watching mothers mourn their drowned children another person might have been rendered unable to feel sorry for herself for, say, fifteen minutes. But when, not yet done with mile one, my right calf muscle cramps badly enough to stop my run midstride, the poor-kelly-meter’s needle is pushing eleven.

I get home at quarter past four, fifteen minutes past the hour Rose – the most evil cat on the planet – expects to be fed. I am now over my calf muscle and back to weeping about Katrina and this cat is meowing and whining and rubbing my leg, a thing she only does when she wants something. And I am thinking how Rose the cat princess assumes my world revolves around her and god forbid she wait fifteen minutes to have her dinner I mean she’s lucky to even BE fed for the love of all that’s holy she is so damned SELFISH I mean how ANNOYING is it to be in presence of something that believes the universe revolves not around the sun but around…

And that’s pretty much the minute I have the epiphany, stop crying, and feed the damn cat.


(The irony that I proceeded to post a three page single spaced blog about myself was noted and then subsequently ignored.)

Bostonblog

Feeling slightly homesick…thus the following mildly sentimental Bostonblog.


I spent the last eight years running on the path that flanks Boston and Cambridge’s respective banks of the Charles River. As I gradually moved from apartment to apartment, from one side of the river to the other, my loop widened and my starting point shifted. Every place came with its own unique living situation, its livability dictated by neighborhood, the building’s degree of disrepair, and, above all, the other people inhabiting the space. In the tumultuous life of a renter, that run along the Charles, mile-marked by bridges from Science Museum and back, was a welcome constant in a world of variables.
My first route started at the Boston University Bridge. It was a quick walk from the front door of a five bedroom Allston house with shag carpet whose residential time line was decipherable via the gum collection, dotting the floors in varying degrees of decay. Due to an impulsive decision backed by exactly zero hours of research, I ended up in the basement room with the weight lifting equipment belonging to my four Skinhead/from Jersey/Yankee fan roommates. As a neophyte athlete those “runs” were characterized by a lot of walking. I would breathlessly perch over the banks of the river, hands at my knees. It was impossible to know that I would later be able to tell what season and time of day it is by the color of the water. By the time my internet-discovered roommates blew up and chained to the living room wall an inflatable blonde, I had mastered the BU-Science Museum-BU four and a half mile course and secured an apartment in another part of town.
The Lakeside Apartment complex provided shelter in another basement, but this time with a nice young man. Living in a small carpeted carbon copy of its neighbors we sank into a happy sunless permanent dusk, spending long mornings and evenings dream talking, thinking we might get married. So I ran less, taking the train downtown in my shorts and running the seven and a half back to my nice young man in a basement.
We moved closer to town, taking a place with bright gleaming surfaces and French doors. Closest to the Massachusetts Avenue bridge, whose span of the Charles offers two views. One of the clustered bump and gold dome that is Beacon Hill and, alternately, the river’s winding retreat toward Watertown and less polluted, tree lined shores dotted once with the neon splotch of Fenway and Kenmore Square. My runs got long again, always beginning or ending with the trip over Mass Ave, where I’d stop, stretch, and stare out over the city I was coming to know so well. Despite the sunlight in that new apartment, things between my nice young man and I began to fall apart. I started spending sunsets on the bridge, timing my runs so I could watch the sky go pink and attribute my post-run tears to how just incredibly beautiful that sky could be. For months I returned to a dark apartment, surface-gleam reduced to the gray-blue of moonglow or flickering blue of tv light.
After five years of running and three years of that nice young man, I paired up with a friend of mine, signing a lease for a closet-sized apartment some realtor had the gall to list as a two bedroom. In Beacon Hill, prestige trumps size. Though I cursed the apartment every time I had to shimmy by my bed to get to the “desk” (slab of wood), the only other piece of furniture wedged into my “room,” on the night I accidentally ashed my cigarette onto a man in a very nice suit who, turning around, revealed the long regal face of John Kerry I had to hand it to my Beacon Hill-enthusiast of a roommate, it was a cool place to be.
The best thing about the place was its proximity to the river and my runs picked up in frequency. It was following one such run that I found my door chained from the inside but no answer from my roommate, supine on the couch. An avid drinker, this scenario was not unfamiliar - her substantial belly rolling to one side, her mouth hanging open, unresponsive to all manner of noises, calls, things thrown. It wasn’t until I had assailed her motionless figure with balled up socks, one shoe, and a tank top that I simultaneously noticed the brimming mouthful of vomit and the overturned clear amber bottle whose shape and color is singular to prescription drugs.
Breaking into one’s own apartment is a difficult experience, because of the damage inflicted upon one’s own space as well as the realization that a human being no stronger than oneself is capable of overriding whatever security measures are in place. That said, shouldering my way through the chain lock in the name of emergency was not without a certain twinge of self satisfaction. Also, at this point relations in the closet “two bedroom” had degenerated into a venerable battleground situation. I know what you’re thinking. But it wasn’t just that she was a chain smoking Yankee fan Republican with no concept of personal space. Nobody ever wants to admit having inhumane thought processes, but I will let you in on the fact that I saved her life based on the sole reason that if she died I would never get back the money I had loaned her.
If the apartment felt small with the suicidal non payer back of large loans, it felt microscopic when, during her tenure at McLean, her mother invaded our prestigious Beacon Hill address. With her daughter strapped to the finest psych ward bed money can buy, I should have excused her constant reminders of how I ought to maintain an orderly and germ free apartment. Her stay ended abruptly with a curt note regarding her relocation to the Holiday Inn across Cambridge Street approximately two yards northeast. It is no coincidence that during this time I ran three 10Ks, two half marathons, and every 5K jog around town I could find.
Three months later, she came in like she always came in – loudly, and dangling a Marlboro from her bottom lip, looking only slightly paler than normal. I hadn’t taken out the trash in weeks. In a third floor apartment, late August, the evidence of such a lapse is immediately obvious. She took her cigarette from her lip and pointed its red end to the garbage bags piled in our “kitchen,” and said, “All of my personalities are pissed at you.”
Whatever stage of recovery she was at, it didn’t mesh with a life in the city, and she moved soon after to what the doctors had called Mclean – “someplace quiet.” Thus began a new roommate and apartment search, Beacon Hill’s prestige no longer trumping its size or its price.
Enter Brookline. Between Boston University and Boston College, a quiet predominantly Jewish neighborhood with great schools and no overnight parking. Enter also a predominantly Jewish high school friend who had no known suicidal leanings. Having only the furniture that would fit into the prestigiously-located-but-overwrought-with-drama apartment, this spacious two bedroom looked, all 365 days of our tenure, like we were waiting for the Jordan’s delivery truck. Still, we settled into happy roommatedom, free from argument, suicide attempts, and borrowed-money.
At this point, I began seeing other bodies of water. I still ran along the Charles regularly, but I also took occasional jogs around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir. Populated by almost entirely Boston College runners, the track surrounding the reservoir provided constant reminder of just how unremarkable an athlete I was. Endlessly I heard footfalls approach, momentarily run alongside, and then pass me, little pairs of BC emblazoned shorts growing smaller and smaller in my line of sight.
Ending my term as a Boston renter on a good note, I ventured to the other side of the river where the People’s Republic of Cambridge, in all its Harvard-harboring glory, welcomed me into a colorful place with a balcony. After seven years of running the same direction around the Charles, I suddenly switched. For the first time, I noticed that the Citgo sign is missing chunks of its display on its backside.
The colorful apartment (accent walls in shades including but not limited to “Holly Red” and “Fire Glow Orange”) came with a roommate found on that endless flea market in cyberspace, Craigslist, where you can find anything from a date that essentially guarantees rough sex to a vintage pair of roller skates. Or you could find someone who’s inclined to combine the two. She was a woman so taut one constantly flinched in her presence, her face in my memory an exaggerated cartoonish representation of a rubber band stretched back from the thumb of a particularly mischievous ten year old boy. When I came home to her loudly engaging in premarital relations with my ex boyfriend my initial reaction was to go for humor. Probably in an emotional version of the sort of shock that allows mangled persons to leave scenes of horrific car accidents, I put track number four of my Disney Classics Volume One CD (of which I am reluctantly right here and now admitting possession) on repeat and blasted Elton John’s Can You Feel the Love Tonight sixteen times before relenting and allowing the album to continue on to Let’s Go Fly a Kite. He was out the door somewhere between the love theme from Cinderella and a Fantasia instrumental. She was out of the apartment three months later.
This marked the period where my running career was supplemented by boxing lessons. I jogged up my stairs, throwing post-run punches from a hooded sweatshirt, darting and weaving, humming a certain Bill Conti number way off-key. My teary-eyed stretching routine made regular comebacks. I posted a roommate-wanted ad on Craigslist that included the line “must not smoke, have pets, or sleep with anyone I’ve ever dated. Ever.”
Eventually I chose one of the many women who responded with vows to never sleep with anyone I even knew as long as I would let them in my heat and hot water included apartment. As far as I know, she is still there, putting things where she likes them, cleaning or not cleaning based on her own whim.
I have since left the Northeast altogether, and am taking the plunge into roommatelessness. For a person who still feels like she’s trying on someone else’s clothes when donning a suit, the prospect of living alone feels distinctly, foreignly adult. When I come home there is absolutely zero chance (well, not zero, but it would be extremely unlikely) that someone will have chained a blowup doll to my wall, or tried to off themselves on my couch, or be a person I thought I might marry, or be engaging in premarital relations with anyone I ever thought I might marry. But no one will be there to ask how many miles I did that day, either.
With my car filled to illegal levels due to the obstruction of my rear window, I postponed my drive a thousand miles from Boston by an hour to go for one more run along the Charles. It was early in the day and summer but I didn’t have to stop on the bridge and look down to know that the water looked like old coffee. I was thinking that maybe the Ohio River will look like coffee too. Or pewter, like the pre-dawn Charles. Or oil, like the clear-night-deep-into-winter Charles. Or maybe it will look, refreshingly, like water.

For the Love of Christ

All day every day I put things in alphabetical order. Go ahead test me. Kelly what’s between J and M? KL. Bam. No pausing. Right there back with it. I know the alphabet like…well like the alphabet. Which I know even better than the back of my hand. The back of my hand is something I’m not all that familiar with. How many freckles are on my left hand? No clue. How many letters in the alphabet? 26.

I’m rambling. The point is I am employed but still looking. I am casually dating this job with the option for seeing other jobs (which always means you are hoping to meet a better job I mean seriously.)

A man named Rod called me four days ago, responding to a resume I had forgotten I emailed to basically every place in Louisville whose web address ended in dot org. So Rod of an unknown dot org says he’s looking for a sort of creative director type person to help organize this uber-progressive school he runs. He wants someone to organize trips into the woods where kids learn to write poetry/gut fish/be at one with nature/etc. Rod wants to know if I am qualified to maybe do this and teach a few writing/lit classes to inner city homeless kids. He also wants me to know that my resume is pretty much his favorite resume ever and he’ll do some number crunching and figure out a way to make the salary competitive with what I put as my salary requirement on some phantom email I forgot I sent. Rod is basically sent from heaven is what Rod is.

But then it turns out Rod really IS sent from Heaven. Capitalized Heaven.

Rod says, “And Kelly before I go ahead and get really excited about this, I just want to make sure that you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your savior.”

Rod says this offhand like he’s asking if I know that service necessitates the wearing of shirts and shoes. Like embarrassed to even be asking a question whose answer is so obviously yes.

And I have this weird moment. Could I be Sister Mary Iambic Pentameter? This moment slowed down Zach Morris style, like he had just snapped his fingers and frozen time so I could discuss with the audience whether or not I wanted to tell Mr. Belding that I was an atheist/aspiring Jew/potential antichrist…

Two years ago a friend of mine embattled the both of us in an argument the crux of which was this: if we are both characters on Seinfeld, who is Elaine? This seems irrelevant and nonsequitorish but it isn’t. You see, after several arguments, it was decided that she was Elaine and I was GEORGE. And up until Rod’s phone call I had been able to tell myself that this comparison wasn’t in any way based on my deportment but rather alluded to my adorable ability to, um, “aim above morality.”

But could I, as George certainly would have, pretend to be a devout Christian in order to get a job? Could I sit there and tell Rod Mister teach poetry in the woods for money that when in doubt about a certain action I stop and wonder what course of action Jesus would take and that if I forget there’s a little plastic bracelet on my wrist to remind me? Could I deny that the only time I say the father, son, and holy ghost is when I’m singing along with Don Mclean? Could I stomach creationism in science class? I could not. Which delivered the cold hard truth about my Costanzaness lying not in my morals but my BMI. Damn.

So I said to Rod, "And the rest of the trees of his forest shall be few, that a child may write them." -Isaiah 10:18-20

Okay I didn't say that. I just kinda hung up.

Bemusing

Bemused [bi-myoozd] Adj. Bewildered, confused, lost in thought, preoccupied.

In originally choosing the blog name I was leaning more toward the “lost in thought” end of bemused’s nuanced definition spectrum. Plus there was the inexplicable (but powerful) draw toward something cutesy and alliterative. But here I am faced with my first long weekend as a nine-to-fiver and I’m feeling at best preoccupied. And am I preoccupied with some worthy task, drawn from my computer by, say, a leading role in some community theater production of Equus or polishing old people’s floors for charity? No. I’m not even up to any good mischief. I spent three hours yesterday watching a film in which the major plot points involved trying unsuccessfully to get a middle aged man laid for the first time and then an entire hour literally doing nothing. Literally. I sat in a chair. I sat in the same chair with a book by my side and a dog insisting in various ways that I pay her attention on the other and I kept my hands in my lap and looked at a not-on television and simply inhaled and exhaled as needed.

I think this might directly relate to the fact that for the past month I have shaken my pride out of a cardboard box and into a bowl every morning, poured milk on it, and eaten it for breakfast.

But Kelly, you ask, you have been a cocktail waitress for the past seven years – how could you possibly feel any worse?

I feel like Julia Roberts when she has to deal with the condescending well-married bitches at the polo game. If I had a tray in my hand and gum in my mouth and very little was left to the imagination in terms of my outfit I would have a much easier time, somehow, putting things in alphabetical order over and over and over and over again. And don’t forget affixing labels in the upper right hand corner. I am fucking awesome at affixing labels. I bend the non-adhesive backing once and that sucker is poised and ready to be removed and affixed. No fumbling. No dicking around with plucking and scratching and wishing for longer nails.

And yes, I just compared myself to a hooker protagonist. Let’s get past that and recognize that I am having a little trouble adjusting. I get up when I used to come home. I am glad that it’s a three day weekend, rather than dreading the elongation of the two-day nightmare that exhausts and depresses every food-service industry minion everywhere. I do not make any more or less money based on the following factors: how much cleavage I am showing, how many times I force myself to smile, how many different variations of an entrée order I can accurately remember… Nobody (openly) blows lines in the bathroom.

It’s weird.

But here’s the thing. In the restaurant industry pretty much everyone is a peon. We all suffer the same indignities day in and day out. We all curse the guests aware of but willing to ignore the fact that without them we don’t make any money. Nobody really wants to be there and it isn’t a secret. Everyone has something else going on.

Two offices down from mine a woman I have chosen to nickname “Babette” sits behind a desk and thinks of ways to make me want to think of ways to kill her. I’m sure of it. Granted, if I had no office nemesis my day would be entirely devoid of any and all excitement. Every Seinfeld needs his Newman. And Newman Babette is. She is the type of woman who, in her late forties, looks like she has just stopped being the hottest woman in the room a few years ago and is not dealing with it very well. She is the Dean’s secretary.

The first time I encountered Babette I was delivering several pieces of mail addressed to the dean but accidentally delivered to our office. Babette’s desk is behind a tall counter like structure so that she is set back from the entrance in a little den of bitchiness, on a lower level but since the counter is so high anyone my height is dwarfed by the thing, giving her the opportunity to arch her little head up as if she is trying to see the little insignificant person standing behind the counter. I swear she designed this set up herself.

Babette asks how she can help me in such a way that reveals a total and complete desire to help no one especially not me.

I’m in mid answer when she asks if I am new.

I say yes, I am new, I am working in the admissions office.

She inquires, tooootally innocently, as to where they have me since there aren’t any more offices open in the admissions office.

I explain that I am a floater. No office. Totally comfortable with that.

Babette one. Kelly zero.

Enter the dean. A jokester type who likes to pat people on the back, throw out a one-liner, and disappear. I have never seen him in the same spot for more than one sentence.

He says, “Hey Harvard, taking over the place yet?”

Fair to say this ties Babette and I.

She would like to know my title. I manage to tell Babette that I am a temp (the bus boy of officeland).

Babette says “oh” in such a self satisfied snitty little prissy ass bitch way that I consider vaulting the too-high counter and going cocktail waitress on her ass.

Since then Babette has visited our office three times. Each time she looks over my head and asks everyone, “Oh, do you have a new person? And what does she do?” And every time my officemates make up some new collection of words that do not include the word “temp” and every time Babette responds with, “Oh, you’re a temp? Well welcome.”

I tire of Babette’s welcomes. I really do.

Last week she brought in her mother-in-law who had one of those hats with the feathers splayed in an upward swoop like a handful of cards fanned out. The whole thing bright red. The woman was clearly batshit. She introduced her batshit mother-in-law to everyone in the office with one exception and then, after great pause, said, “Oh, I’m sorry, have we met?”

So far my only form of revenge has been to sing the chorus of a certain applicable ELO song whenever I pass her door on the way to the bathroom.

This office hierarchy bullshit is too much for me. Babette sits behind a structurally demeaning configuration of faux-mahogany and answers phones and makes coffee every morning just like I do. We should be bound by our misery, not in competition for titles and doors and windows and whatever it is she’s after. But we have no common enemy. We must keep it a secret that our jobs aren’t, at every moment, the very thing we had hoped since girlhood to be doing. As a waitress I had to kiss ass for a self-contained period. Everything was immediate. Someone I hate comes in, stays for an hour, and I can immediately start cursing him once the revolving door sends him back into the fuckhead factory from whence he came. Officeland moves much more slowly. In order to move from one office (or no office) to the next you must tolerate fuckhead after fuckhead for periods of time absolutely inconceivable to your average cocktail waitress.