A Cry For Help, Right Next To the Ice Cream

I'm kind of worried about Seth, you guys.

He keeps putting stuff in the freezer.

I mean, it was fine at first, when it was just the tofu, alcohol, and coffee. Then a few weeks ago, I discovered his suit coat chilling with them during a routine snack check. He'd worn it out the night before, so I suspiciously dismissed it on grounds of drunken absentmindedness. I can't even count the amount of times I've woken up the next morning with star-shaped stickers on my face, bags of chips I didn't remember buying, only wearing one shoe, with vomit maybe not all in the toilet. Pretty tame, I know, but comparable to a frozen suit coat. He told me later that the night before, someone got gum on the sleeve and he knew that sticking it in the freezer would make the gum easier to remove. It was gone after a few days, and I forgot about the whole incident.

Until this morning, that is, when I found a stack of records snuggling next to each other by the icy wall. They were a bunch of old vinyl in their old original sleeves: Best of Sondheim, Xanadu, Sinatra in Pal Joey, Edwin Drood. He'd hung them up in his room two different ways in the two months we've lived here, and now they've been degraded to this. And the level in that Ketel One bottle hasn't gone down a millimeter.

Please, Seth. You know that you can always come to me, especially if you have a problem. I'm here for you, whatever it is. We'll figure out what to do. I just don't want to be the first to get there if we ever get a cat.

That's what she said

Almost two weeks ago, Seth and I moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn. The bathroom doesn't have a sink and we don't have internet, but we have our own rooms, so we're pretty satisfied.

I went away to Kirksville for a week, which I plan to give its due attention later. When I got back, I found to my dismay that the gentleman who was supposed to have hooked up our internet was in fact not a gentleman at all, but a douche, who was surly to my roommate and gruffly remarked that there were X amount of things that he needed before he could connect us to the system of tubes that supplements our post-collegiate procrastination. He told Seth to make a date for the next week.

There is a smattering of wireless connections floating around our space. They are all password-protected and typically-labeled, save one: a saucy unsecured network dubbed Tompkins Is Pussy. It might as well be named Carmen Sandiego, for it is as elusive as it is alluring. In our desperation for convenient Facebook, Seth and I asked our English-speaking neighbors what internet services they used and how good the connection was.

A friend of ours knew someone on the first floor, and he said, "Yeah, Steve's been on Tompkins Is Pussy, but it doesn't last very long, and it's really hard to connect to."

Without even thinking.

No sleep 'till Brooklyn

So I guess the reason I haven't written this week is because when I haven't been working, I've been travelling 140 blocks uptown to visit apartments that until yesterday I thought were in our price range. Since then we've had to lower the bar about $100. When I haven't been on the subway, I've been napping, since I usually average about 4-5 hours a night. When I haven't been napping, I've been either at the cold reading sessions for Ten Grand Productions (the reason why I am not reduced to a trembling mass at the bottom of the loony bin) or at the gym, burning off the copious amounts of reduced-fare Easter candy that I've felt compelled--nay, forced--to consume as a stress-management tactic.

And the reason that I'm sitting here clicking away in between rows of pink half-dollar Peeps and guilty snatches of Seth's Hershey Minis (except the Special Darks, lest I want my throat slit), is because I need five damn minutes to unwind after the news that Seth and I definitely need to be out by the 31st (which means in three days settle on an affordable apartment in God knows where, apply, get accepted, and move our stuff), because someone definitely dropped the ball when it came to communication, and this time you can't say we weren't doing our part.

Small (Town) World

The stage manager led me into the room where I was supposed to read for Katharina in Taming of the Shrew with two other people. There was a blond lady, a man in his late twenties, and a dark-haired lady whose name I knew was Sabrina. I got ready to begin the scene.

"Let's see, first of all, Meredith...." They pointed at me like I was the perpetrator in a police lineup. I gulped. "You went to Truman!" The man and Sabrina threw their arms up in celebration.

"Yeah, yeah! Who went to Truman?" I asked.

"We did!" they both responded. Joy surged through my every capillary.

"What year?"

"Two thousand one," the man replied. "It'd be right before you came, so I think Alan Altmansberger would be still around that you know."

"I totally know Alan! Do you know Randy Bame?" I exclaimed.

"Hell yeah I know Randy Bame!" he laughed.

"What's your name?" I asked him.

"Brian Waters," he said.

"Oh! I've heard of you!" It rang a heavenly choir of bells; this guy played a key role in many of Randy's tales of the olden days when he first started working in the auditorium.

Suddenly, I didn't feel quite so nervous anymore.

I say the darndest things

(after Seth revealed to me that his favorite pair of jeans had torn in frightening vicinity to the crotch)

"I think that's a Freudian rip."

There Will Be Strawberry Jelly

There was an Oscar party yesterday at Seth's friend's house. I think between he, I, her, and her roommate, we had seen about half the films that were up for consideration overall, but we'd each seen Juno at least once.

In the station on the way there, a saxophonist played "And I Love Her" for spare change. If he hadn't been on the opposite side of the tracks, I would have given him spare dollars. Among other things, this prompted Seth and I to spend most of the ride there singing "Bohemian Rhapsody."

This is the same friend that we spent both Christmas and the Superbowl holidays with, and so we inadvertently established a tradition of toting copious amounts of food on the train and stuffing ourselves silly upon arrival. We'd agreed that our dishes had to correspond to a nominated film. Her roommate got mini pecan pies and jelly to stand for the meat pies and blood in Sweeney Todd. Seth got french bread and baby brie for Michael Clayton, and pickles and peanut butter for Juno. I brought milkshake supplies for There Will Be Blood.

I watched a Barbara Walters interview with Harrison Ford in a segment before the ceremony. His first agent had told him that he'd never go anywhere in the business. She asked him if it bothered him that he never won an Oscar. He said no. I think I'd rather have his career than an Oscar, anyway. She asked what he would most like to be remembered for in his lifetime, and he said, "As a good collaborator."

The red carpet pre-show only made me feel contrary. The other three spent that half hour criticizing the hell out of the outfits and actors, and I spent it contradicting them out of spite, regardless of whether or not I agreed. Which usually I didn't.

I was already ripe with a food baby before Jon Stewart got warmed up, and my best friend didn't win his category, but mostly I didn't have any major beef with the decisions. I especially enjoyed the Tribute to Binoculars Montage, when the voice-over announcer stumbled over an actress's name, and when one of the winners for Best Original Song got to come back on and make her acceptance speech when she was cut off by the musicians.

Perambulance

I was walking with Seth in the park this past unseasonably-sunny-yet-seasonably-chilly Thursday, when our ramble was interrupted first by the crescendoing squalls of an approaching baby and second by a man hurriedly pushing this angsty child in a stroller past us.

My initial annoyance was superseded by my impressed realization at how sly that trick was. I imagined him having a twenty-minute distance to cover in ten or less before the old lady came home and bitched at him for leaving his dirty socks on the floor again, or for potentially making them late for the six-month-old's play date. Instead of sighing in resignation, it would strike him to gently nudge the child awake or take away its Dora the Explorer until you could hear its wails in the East Village. All he'd need is a blue and red flashing light. Sidewalk traffic would clear to his advantage, and he would make it back to the apartment with minutes to spare. Crying baby! Very urgent! Stand back!

Or he could have been a pushy asshole. Whatever. Since I plan to keep this tactic in mind for future use, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

"Too much Mrs. Dash! Add Nutmeg!"

Enter Roommate #4,583,917.

Rachel sat me down and told me that she and Matt decided to also adopt Nutmeg, another cat from the same household. Apparently their owner was having a baby and didn't want to neglect the cats after she popped it out. Which was thoughtful, I suppose, but also probably hard on the cats, especially since Dazz had barely emerged from underneath Rachel's bed since she arrived. Maybe they wanted a more social cat, maybe they wanted to do the woman a favor, maybe they thought getting Dazz a sister would bring her closer to civilization, but she asked me if when Seth and I moved, if we were interested in taking Dazz "if she didn't work out."

I don't know what "not working out" means, but I told her I would if Seth agreed and our landlord would let us--or at least, if there were a place we could hide it.

I went to Rachel's room today and managed to tempt Dazz from Under the Bed, but when I tried to pick her up and carry her to my room for some love, the claws came out her paws and into my chest, and once more she disappeared.

I've not yet seen Nutmeg. I think they made her up.

Cat Power = Modest Mouse

Today I gained yet another roommate in order to rid ourselves of a few others. Rachel came home with a lady cat named Dazz, who, according to Ben, dashed into her room and underneath her bed the second she got home. She pulled Dazz out in order to show her where the litterbox was, and I got to meet her briefly before she retreated to underneath the couch. It will not be long before she and I will be the best of friends.

So it goes

When I was a junior in high school, I met a guy named Evan. I knew him through Speech and Debate and theatre activities, which by their time-consuming nature allowed us to become close enough to begin dating. He was my first serious-ish boyfriend, so naturally I'd spend a lot of time at his house, especially since he lived so near the school and we'd hang out there after the aforementioned extracurriculars. We were both smart kids and enjoyed reading (especially Kurt Vonnegut) and writing (mostly existential essays for class that attempted to imitate prestigous literature that I was too young and too academically overcommitted to understand).

I didn't meet his mother right away. She was always gone, or sleeping or something, when I happened to be over initially. He always seemed a little anxious whenever she came up in conversation. His dad was cordial and awkwardly polite, allowing Evan a surprising amount of freedom and space. They had five dogs and a number of cats that I was never allowed to reveal. At one point I was able to name them all. His dad couldn't stand them, and Evan tolerated them good-naturedly.

I'm not sure how I first met her, but from all the time I spent over there, it was inevitable. She was slight and kind, with eyes like Evan's: green and feline-sleek. Their noses were similar as well, and both their smiles were thin-lipped and came up higher on one side than the other. Hers was a quick surprise when it appeared. His was more ready and often; he shared a cautious, haunted expression with his dad.

She used to be a teacher, and liked to talk to us, even though she also was quick to give us our space when she felt that it was time for us to be alone. She'd taught both special-needs kids and gifted kids before she retired, and she told me stories of when Evan was small and she recognized his potential from his problem-solving skills, such as when he wanted to play at the sink with the water faucet ("I didn't get it, either," she'd giggled) and what he chose to stand on and how he got it to the sink without her help. She wanted to see how he did it on his own.

He was applying to colleges when we dated, and she would read his essays and critique them. Again, I'm not sure how she got on to reading the stories and essays I'd write for my AP Language class; maybe I asked for her opinion, I don't know. She always liked reading what I wrote, encouraged me earnestly, and once asked me to write a story for her. "OK, what about?" I asked.

She needed a day to think. I came by after school another day and she told me, "I want you to write me a story about God, the universe, and cats." So I did. I spent weeks on it, used profanity in a manuscript for the first time, and it may have stretched over twenty pages. When I finished, I came over not to see Evan but to see her (he was actually out of town at the time). She loved it, and after she read it we ended up talking for over four hours. We came close to ordering pizza for dinner except my mom called me home.

There was a reason for his reluctance to talk about her, perhaps even for the haunted look. Early in our relationship, we walked into his house, only to find it in shambles. There were few family photos because she destroyed them in a fire one day. All the pets were hers. Twice she had to go to treatment facilities for manic depression.

She also sent me funny emails during the school day, made sure we had plenty of snacks, gave us movie recommendations, and took roll after roll of pictures when Evan and I went to Prom. I'd just learned how to make gum-wrapper chains, so out of the blue one day she gave me a basket full of three diffrerent kinds of Wrigley's. Evan told me she'd been excited about that all day. Once I called, asking for him, and when he wasn't there we started talking about books, and she read to me a chapter from Me Talk Pretty One Day. When I found it just as comical, she ended up getting it for me for my birthday along with two cards. Hers were the best cards. I still have them all. She was always kind to me, and I never saw her in her bad moments.

Evan went away to school, and soon she ended up divorcing his dad and moving to California. I never really talked to her or heard from her after that, but when I'd meet up with Evan and ask about her, he told me that she would ask about me and that she still had a few of my old high school photos.

I heard from him today for the first time in about a year. He told me that she'd died in August. Right about the time I was bitching about moving and routinely drenching my liver in Captain Morgan. I remembered her from time to time, wondering how she was. If I knew how to get in touch with her, I doubt it would have been any bit awkward.

She still had a few old pictures of me among her things.

Not a creature was stirring. Or so we thought.

My other two housemates went home to California for the wintertime holidays, which left Seth and myself with a little over a week of having the place entirely to ourselves. After sharing a room for the past two months, we literally (but not really literally) exploded across the apartment, though reluctantly we had to pack it all back in when it came time for their return. Rachel moved back in on January first, and Matt on the third.

And in the meantime, so did Minnie and Fievel.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting on the ol' sleeping futon, yacking with Seth and getting ready for bed, when a small furry thing darts from the closet out the door and into the bathroom. I've stared down bulbous cockroaches and lurking subway creepsters without blanching, but at that moment I let out a shriek that would put Fay Wray to shame and leaped--nay, launched--backwards in your classic jumping-on-the-chair moment.

My mom trained me good and early to not be afriad of squishing bugs, as our ground-level apartment would attract the occasional creepy-crawly; though in my college years, I grew guilty when it came to spiders and let them free, and my dog would usually eat most of the insects before they came to my attention. This was the first time I've had to deal with vermin that are actually cute.

"What is it?" Rachel called from the other room.

"Ummmm...I think there might be a mouse."

"Aww, it's okay. Here, let me try to find him. Where did he go?" She got a strainer off of the dish shelf. "Here, Mickey....Come on out..." She peered into the bathroom and behind the suitcases in the hall, but found nothing. "Here, Fievel....Shit. I'll get the poison."

"Christ."

I felt awful. When I was a kid, I wanted a mouse for a pet. They were soft, kind of tame, didn't eat much, and the one in The Witches could do tricks. I'd even given myself the nickname "Mouse" for a grade or two in elementary school. Now, not only did I have to be responsible for their extermination, but there was also the liklihood that I'd witness one writhing to its poor little death after devouring seemingly innocent peanut butter-coated blue pellets.

During a Futurama marathon a day or two after Christmas, while we made as much noise as we wanted and took liberal cigarette breaks out on the fire escape which our roommates forbade us to go, Seth heard a rustling in the garbage bag by the door. He poked it, listened, and after a moment there was more rustling. "I think the mouse is in the trash bag," he said.

"I think we need to take out the trash," I replied.

We thought the coast was clear, especially since the poisoned peanut butter clumps were disappearing from the mouse dish outside the cracks in the wall borders. All was well until the day after Rachel returned. I walked into our room and Seth said, "I have bad news. The mouse is back."

"Oh no."

"And it's a baby."

"Oh shit."

I wanted to be the all-American kid from New York City

Seth and I went up Broadway this morning to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. It's true that television adds ten pounds, or in this case, about an hour and a half, because it was shorter and smaller than I had anticipated. It also made me hate large crowds of people a little more, especially if those people were pushing baby carriages, and especially especially if those baby-pushers had a knack for running over my toes. It also didn't help that every third balloon had "MACY'S" stamped all over it, as if we could forget that This Parade Was Sponsored By Macy's; Shop Macy's, For All Your Christmas Needs. But it was worth a visit if you want to see a Pikachu the size of your house chasing a Poké Ball the size of your car, which I most certainly did.

My favorite float was filled with Muppets. Actual-size.

We ate lunch-dinner at Marissa and Jesse's in Brooklyn, where they are renting a room on the top floor of a townhouse owned by Bela Fleck's brother. We ended up splitting four bottles of wine between the five of us there and feeding turkey bits to Louie's twenty-one year-old cat Iddy. We'd all made the food ourselves, most of it for the first time. Marissa remarked as she was spooning out the mashed potatoes that it made her feel like such a grown-up. Then she proceeded to knock the spoon out of the bowl and get potatoes all over the table and floor.

I'm sure Iddy got most of them for us.

I Could Have Maybe Possibly Seen Paul McCartney Yesterday, In Theory, Like Hypothetically

I was having dinner with Lindsay at a Mexican restaurant, and she started telling me about the show that her roommate was in, which we were going to see afterwards.

"It's a performance piece--it's called 18/6, like eighteen-slash-six. There are projections, and people painting circles onto a canvas, and other stuff. It was done in 1959, and they're doing it again because of some anniversary thing with it. The playwright was really, really specific on how he wanted everything to be done, like he wrote out the exact movements, and dimensions of the set, and timing and audience instructions, and how many years after his death it would have to be before he would authorize it being re-released. It was this really underground thing back then, and for some reason it got really popular. They were hoping it would stay more underground, but the mainstream got word of it, and all the nights are sold out. It's kind of a really big deal." She looked a little sheepish. "Oh, yeah, and also, the guy who's painting circles on the canvas, it's going to be Paul McCartney--"

I choked on my tamale.

"--but not tonight, it's just a dress rehearsal, he'll be there another night. I guess that's how important an event this is supposed to be."

We took the subway to Queens and walked about six blocks, when we came upon a gaggle of warehouse spaces at a dead end overlooking the East River. Lindsay said to "look for one with the garage door half open," which made the event sound more eerily "underground." We entered and saw what looked like the skeleton of a really small house, with transparent plastic stapled to the frame to make walls, red and white and sometimes blue light bulbs lining the top beams, and divided with the transparent plastic into three rooms. They gave us brightly colored cards with handwritten instructions on which rooms to go for parts 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and 6. I was in room 2 for the first two parts.

Imagine your typical performance piece. Stereotypical, even. This was it. The actors entered, walking slowly to a beat. There was atonal music. They moved linearly and robotically, turning at right angles. They did some poses. One guy said monosyllabic words at irregular intervals. They left as they entered. Two minutes later, two actors re-entered, stood on opposite ends, and read two different speeches--on "art" and "time/perspective" that occasionally overlapped.

I switched rooms. The actors entered again. One girl stopped in front of me, grinned grotesquely, and began mechanically, rhythmically bouncing a small rubber ball. At one point she fumbled and it rolled by my feet. She held out her hand simply, her eyes imploring. I gave it back, and she resumed the bouncing. I wondered if it was part of the show. The actors came back, lined up, and screeched a few notes on some instruments--a small banjo, a kazoo, a recorder, and a violin. I switched rooms.

They re-entered. Some posed again, one stood by a projector while slides shuffled, one marched back and forth in front of a mirror, stopping every so often to brush his teeth or straighten his tie, and one squeezed oranges into juice and drank it. They exited. They re-entered. They pulled down scrolls of paper from a bar, read the different monosyllabic words on them all at once, and then marched off. It was over.

Lindsay and I left. She looked at me quizzically. "There were so many metaphors," I said wearily. We laughed. One of the girls afterwards made a remark about how it was "obviously" social commentary. I didn't get the obvious part, but I can go back in places and see where it could have been.

What I got from it was that performance art is not really my cup of tea. But I understand where it fits in the spectrum of theatre. I once visited a boyfriend when he was working at a theater in rural Indiana, where they essentially did choreographed musical revues for old people. The one I saw had a circus theme, and took 90 minutes worth of songs out of context in order to loosely wrangle them around elephants and trapeze artists. Thay even threw in "Send in the Clowns" because it had "clown" in the title. My boyfriend at the time complained about working there, saying that it wasn't what he wanted to be doing, that this wasn't art, he wasn't "creating" anything or making people think. Which was true; it was theatrical Cheez Whiz, icing, full-fat mayonnaise, purely for pleasure and stress-free entertainment, requiring no mental commitment.

Last night was the exact opposite. It forced you to not only forge connections for yourself, but decide where they would be forged, and when, and what the metaphors stood for, and if there was even any meaning at all. It was like they gave you a glass, a cow, some spices, pasturizing instructions, and then a hollow book of Les Miserables with a soggy Fig Newton inside. What I saw could have been very, very deep and over my head, or it could have been some playwright laughing his ass off at the thought of five actors walking around like robots and bleating nonsense. It reminded me of a story Rachel once told me, of a guy who one a poetry contest with a poem that consisted of one word: apple. The sponsors justified this because they said his poem made you question what a poem was, and what it meant that this was being classified as "good" or "winning" poetry, etc, etc. Or it could have been some frat guy who did it on a drunken whim.
Regardless, it suceeded in facilitating discussion and brainstorming between the two of us, even if it was only on the nature of what constitutes art and legitmacy and how we both preferred the middle ground, like Shakespeare, which I guess would be like fine Cheddar. Or Moliere, which could be Brie. Neil Simon would be American. Andrew Lloyd Webber--maybe Kraft singles.

The show is sold out for its entire run. Tickets ran around $250. I can't exactly call them suckers, though, because some of those lucky shits will actually get to see Paul McCartney.

This Is Shorter, I Promise: Reflections Upon Leaving St. Louis

The first night I went to dinner with my brother, my mom, her douchebag boyfriend, and Joey and Rosie Pini. Almost all of us had margaritas. It was the first time my mom had consciously drank in front of me. I was both surprised and not surprised that I could recognize the behavior.

I got to see everyone I wanted except two: my aunt and Kellie. I haven't seen my aunt for over a year and a half, and I didn't get to give Kellie the picture I drew of her. Such is life.

I tried to visit Chekhov at Rachel's parents' house. They weren't home, so I didn't really get to. He had on a chain collar and growled at Christian and me when we approached the door.

I spent the most time with Christian, which I think was appropriate.

I haven't considered St. Louis "home" in quite some time.

Dry Land and Dry Wit: Reflections Upon Leaving Kirksville

The summer before I was a sophomore was when I really started living in Kirksville, beginning the Truman Week that two freshman dropped out due to heat-related dissatisfaction. That summer I spent a week in Scotland, three months at Taco Bell flirting with a manager two years older than I was, and one humbling night drunk off my ass for the first time. I moved in my off-campus apartment on one of the more sweltering days, watching the highway evolve into town as I drove in along 63, the convenience stores and billboards springing from the cement like ruins from the desert. I referred to that stretch of road as the Path of Despair because I'd frequently returned home to St. Louis every few weeks and every Sunday I would inevitably take my place in a long line of cars savoring every last second that they were not in Kirksville. I had less than twenty dollars in my bank account and spent most of it that afternoon on a fan and Pop-Ice from Wal-Mart.

Come December, I was typing my papers in gloves, a sweatshirt, my robe, socks and slippers, with a blanket around my shoulders because the cold was so fierce and I had no thermostat, only a musty heating grate that ran for five minutes and shut off for thirty. I left my window open over winter break to air out my apartment and made $400 working at Taco Bell that month. At the end of the break, my landlady informed me in broken English that my pipes had frozen and created $400 worth of damage.

The memory of Kirksville is shaped by two forces: the weather and the dust. They are the constants, and everyone and everything I have experienced since that first sweaty day have been variables victim to their command. The dust on the side of the road, the dust that makes up the unpaved roads, the dust unearthed by ceaseless construction and costly attempts at improvement, the dust that forms a fine film on the windowsill and bookshelf, the dust that forms soft gray balls; so soft it made me gag to have to touch them and throw them away. The dust that clung to my sweat when I walked along the uneven and potholed sidewalks in July and formed a different fine film on my flesh: a glutinous one I tried to wipe away but only suceeded in redistributing, one that traps in the heat and reappeared an hour after showering. One I shared with others, through contact of arms, legs, hands, and lips. It's salty. It makes you thirsty. It makes you weary. It makes you lonely and lascivious; and come the cooler blue-gray twilight, this intoxicating sultry dust-paste is a double-edged aprodisiac, gluing you drunkenly to another as stickily passionate.

The population of Kirksville, a town touched by farms on all four sides, is less than the sudent body of Mizzou, a college campus in Columbia, the nearest legitimate metropolis. It's a town that consists of Townies, who have been and will be in Kirksville forever, and Students, whose two largest fears are running out of money and getting stuck in Kirksville, the first of which inevitably exacerbate the chances of the second. Its motto is "Where the People Make the Difference," and the unintentional truth of that is in order to achieve anything, whether it be goals, creature comforts, basic human need, or even fun, you had to be intelligent and ingenious enough to make it happen yourself. You got by with a little help from your friends. I've met and spent time with some of the greatest people in the world in Kirksville, MO, whether they were born there or just passing through for four-plus years. I've learned as much from them as I have from my college education and loved them as only a twentysomething girl with few responsibilities can love. Every once in awhile a townie would give you a huge break or help you out. I got a job at JavaCo and hundreds of dollars worth of painting sold when Jan Collins found out I was a nice girl with an artsy streak. The lady at For the Fun of It conducted last-minute business with me for green hair dye without even meeting me face-to-face, leaving the products I needed by the back door when we discovered our schedules didn't match up for me to peruse the store. The lady at Hidden Treasures offered me her house to stay at when she learned that I'd be staying at friends' houses a month before leaving town. And then there were the rat bastards who made your life miserable. My first boss at Travelers Inn was a drunk who regularly passed out in various places around the building and who was recently indicted on multiple drug felony charges. The schizophrenic lady on the first floor of my apartment tried to beg change off me when she was sober, and when she was drunk she would gibber at the walls, blast her music, and call me a whore. The human experience was what made your life unique, because you sure as hell weren't going to get your kicks from clubs or museums. There weren't any.

Such a microcosm doesn't teem with activity or have regular bursts of energy. Rather, it breathes. It sighs with the seasons shifting, pants during party weekends, gasps during finals week, and occasionally holds its breath and lets it out in a whoosh like a mischievous child who is learning the meaning of tension and release. The dust shifts with the flow to other places and other forms. It stays in the air with the October gusts just enough to keep it warm and remind you of summer's irresponsible rascalous freedom. Kirksville exhales, the weather changes; it inhales, the weather changes back. It's the most dynamic time of the year. Ambition is still fresh, I could comfortably walk everywhere I needed, I could wear a jacket if I wanted but could get away without it, and I had all the time in the world. My birthday was in September. October was the most fun. I started dating almost all of my boyfriends in early November. My best semesters were the firsts.

With time, the dying summer breezes rest, the dust settles. The dust on the windowsill grows thicker before the dropping temperature forces you to close the window for the next several months, and the dust outside freezes with the ground or mixes with the snow when it falls, forming an insufferable sludge. With the arrival of January came also the realization that Hell was not fire and brimstone; Hell was a Kirksville winter. When we got hit with snow it was more like an artillery assault, and when there was no precipitation the north windchill made it unbearable to leave my apartment for any reason. It made any sort of movement desperate, and only as much as necessary. Winter is isolating. It is claustrophobic. Instead of bringing people together to salvage warmth, it drove us apart; almost any interaction chipped away at sacred personal space of which they had already been so robbed. My seasonal depression reached its zenith around mid-February. Most of my romances deteriorated around March.

I've often wondered if it is beacuse of, or in spite of the size of the town that its residents have the relationship with it that they do. The citizens are obsessed with themselves as a part of the town; there are endless Kirksville-pride events, homages to a near-nonexistant history, and activities designed for the betterment and enjoyment of "the community." It's also a town with an income gap larger than I think anyone could fathom. In the span of a few miles, I've walked from the two-story houses along Halliburton that most likely belong to the professors, dentists, doctors, and small business owners, to the housing projects by PC Mills park in the southwest corner of town where every child has a parent either in jail, dead, on welfare, or on drugs. There are self-supporting farmers who sell their apples and brownies on the square on Saturday mornings, Amish famillies with cell phones at Wal-Mart, and supposed meth labs in the woods. I think they all talk about "community" without really knowing or considering at the time what all that community consists of.

The townies love it, and the students hate it; they hate it for its lack of entertainment when the unforgiving winter locks them quickly inside; they hate it when the dependence on human interaction affects them negatively; they hate the noisy frat across the street and how the community theatre only does cheap-laugh comedies, and fucking Wal-Mart; and they hate the fear of being stuck there. And yet sometimes they grow to love the town too, when the warm breeze makes the rainbowed leaves tornado in the fall, or when the silly child finally lets his breath out and spring blows in with tepid, overdue gusts and warm spittle drizzling the yellowed grass to life.

Kirksville casts a strange spell over some. Once I lived there year-round, I realized the small things I found lacking in St. Louis, such as walking to work, or biking on dirt roads with Randy, or old bridges and railroad tracks and how fun it was to climb up to them and have a cigarette with Rachel, Christian, and Eric, or how the sky was so thick with stars on clear nights that I could finally understand why and how the Greeks invented constellations, and how beautiful those constellations looked when walking in the dark with Jared. I began to breathe with the town, inhaling the same dust as the grizzled barbers and groomed businessmen. The same dust that Kirksvillians have been breathing for decades, the dust that settled in the lungs of the Beards and Floyds and McClains and Goulds, rooting them inexorably to the ground that they were eventually buried beneath, and the dust they became part of themselves. The dust grounded me as well, weighing me down as I consumed and washed off years of deteriorated particles of iron ore, failed crops, and generations of corpses, and I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay in Kirksville because I lived there year-round; I'd known it in all its capricious seasons; I'd tasted its bitter monotonous savor mixed with my own sweat; I had a steady job and a role in the community theatre and all my friends still went to school there. Highway 63 had long since ceased being "the Path of Despair" because I rarely left town and I couldn't wait to get back when I did. I was happy, and my greatest fears were running out of money and not being happy.

I think the fact that my plans to leave superseded that contentment was due to understanding that the greatest portion of my happiness was tied to a facet of the town that did not wish to be a permanent part of it. My friends would eventually leave, and with every passing year I would be more entrenched within the town, both hating and adoring my cramped, repetitive universe in 365-day cycles until I was no more than another common name on another headstone.

So I left, right before the leaves started turning, before the temperatures plunged into oblivion, but after I had one more summer of sweat and dust and heady squalor. I miss my friends, and what they're doing that I'm not able to be a part of. I dream about them, and the stupid, fucking, self-obsessed town that I learned to love. I'm still coughing up dust from all the bike rides and bridge climbs, brushing it off myself after being yanked up from the ground but unable to find another place to set root. Though I know that years out of the Midwest, in sundry times and diverse places, I will still be shaking it out of my hair and clothes, and I'll remember those breathless October days in Northeast Missouri.

Goodbye, Dukum Tuesday

Last night was my last Tuesday Night Karaoke With Wendy.

It passed quickly, which is either indicative of how much fun I had (the amount of which surpassed the weight of a herd of T-Rexes on Jupiter) or Wendy's reluctance to start karaoke without Ron and Randy being there right at the beginning. Both are probably true.

Clint came with two CDs full of downloaded karaoke songs, most of which I would have loved to sing. I chose "Octopus's Garden" by the Beatles because it made me the happiest. I made requests for Clint to sing "Born to Run," Jared to sing "The Lady is a Tramp," and Aaron to sing "Come to Papa." Due to the enormous volume of patrons, however, the only one that happened was the first.

I sipped two Bloody Marys full of vegetables while Randy sang "The One," Jason sang "New York State of Mind," and Max sang "Your Song."

I bought Justin a drink in exchange for him singing "Other Side," convinced Liz put in a song, and hated myself for perpetuating all that "You just have to sing!" crap which I despise.

I never had time to step outside. I never got to talk to Gina, Ron's wife, and tell her I was leaving in a week.

Jared, Aaron, and Clint collaborated on "Hey Jude." It's one of my favorite memories.

I put down "New York, New York" to be my second song despite the potential cheese factor, but due to a special request from Dereck, Wendy changed it to "Don't Stop Believing."

Karaoke in Kirksville is strange. It becomes a cultish habit. I feel particularly queasy at the moment for even devoting a post to a topic so shallow as this, even more so for actually listing the songs. I don't know why it's such a big deal other than that it's an excuse to socialize on a weekday and this condition is recognized among my immediate aquaintances; I don't know why I've gone almost every week for the past two and a half years and it's become a ritual steadfast enough to make plans around, other than that for every night that is gratingly lame, there is one that becomes a warm beery haze or laughing stumbles to my apartment afterwards. But like everything else, for better or worse, I'll miss it when it's gone.

Confusion and Contradiction in the Rec Center

I had to get a special guest card at the gym because they won't let you use the facilities after you graduate, and even with it, I can't work out there after 2 PM without paying two dollars. However, the girl swiping my card either didn't notice or ignored that fact, so I got in for free.

The second thing I noticed when walking towards the locker room were the three huge sheet cakes sitting on a table, "provided by the Student Senate" for the tenth anniversary of the Rec Center or something. I was pleasedly puzzled, because considering it's kind of supposed to be an establishment promoting healthy lifestyles, I'd think they'd at least have fruit plates or something, but the counterproductivity of the fact was far outweighed by my desire to have cake. I sat down to eat a slice after running, saw Jared's brother, and talked to him for a few minutes about how he should write his German essay on him not paying attention in class because he was distracted by the frisbee players outside.

Finally, when walking out, I noticed a list of activities scheduled in weekly segments for the first semester. One of the first was "Fantasy Football."

The BBC Would Like to Issue a Clarification to the Previous Post

When I wrote the line "...Neither one of us went to the extreme of dying our hair pink, slathering on eyeliner, wearing spikes, or filling in the bubbles on Scan-Trons in class to make pictures of Nixon with a knife through his eye," my immediate thought was "Holy cats! Nixon?! What fucking generation did we belong to, anyhow?" Because, of course, if anyone it would most likely be Bush. Rachel and I were also two of the five-odd Libertarians in our high school, but while outspoken on social and economic issues, neither one of us were rampantly into Bush-bashing.

Then the literal truth of the line sidled up to the anachronistic humor, since we did not, in fact, make Scan-Tron pointilist masterpieces at all, with any political figure, past or present.

Then I realized how cool and hip and so punk it would have been if we really had turned our backs on criticism of the current administration and retrograded to picking apart the Nixon era. And then I figured, why stop there? What history teacher wouldn't kill to see a well-rendered grayscale of Benedict Arnold hanging from a mighty oak, or perhaps Rasputin's icy corpse by the frozen Neva riverbed? I'd give them an A just for that, regardless of what the test results were.


Another clarification: Unfortunately, regardless of how delightful a phrase it is, I did not actually think "Holy cats!" before pondering why on earth Nixon would be our rendering of choice.

Superbfairywren.blogspot.com regrets these errors in communication.

"Be excellent. Don't be average." *

"But you see, it's not REALLY a Snickers, because it has no nougat! It's an imposter. ImpostiSnickers."

Rachel punctuated her disdain by smacking her fist on the lunch table in our high school cafeteria. She purchased an Ice Cream Snickers, not for the first time, but had only then discovered why they'd not achieved post-lunch taste bud satisfaction. The so-called Snickers bars had the requisite chocolate, caramel, and peanuts, true, but made a costly error in the decision to substitute the ice cream for nougat.

"So?" another friend of ours asked.

"It's not a Snickers without the nougat! To be a Snickers, the nougat is inherent! Just like the chocolate, peanuts, and caramel! To exclude one of those makes the claim of being a Snickers null and void!" She defiantly tossed her hair over her shoulder.

"Wait, but if the components of "Ice Cream Snickers" in and of itself are ice cream, chocolate, peanuts, caramel, and no nougat, that makes it its own separate entity!" our other friend countered.

The table was silent for a minute. "No!" Rachel laughed.

"It doesn't matter," I added. "For all the big deal they make out of copyrights and trademarks, the Snickers name brings a certain expectation to the product. The Snickers label should bring, at the very least, the chocolate, caramel, peanuts, AND the nougat. Ice cream is the modifier, and should be added on top of everything else. Or, I guess, inside."

Rachel nodded approvingly, flattened out the wrapper of the misnomed frozen bar, and wrote IMPOSTER! on it in menacing black Sharpie. I bought one too, ate it, wrote the same, and we stapled them to our backpacks in solidarity against The Man. When they frayed and fell off, we bought new Ice Cream "Snickers" and again with the ebony letters sharply branded them IMPOSTER!, hanging them by staples to the gallows on our backs. We realized later that we'd only fed The Man by buying more, but we wrote it off as a necessary expense as a means for providing greater damage.

Sticking it to The Man was kind of our thing back in high school, when we became friends during her senior and my junior years. It manifested into a mutual decision to "become" punk on the way back from the first speech tournament of the year, chalupas in hand and Green Day on the tape player. She threw away her Blink-182 cds ("They say they're real punk, but they're pop, and it's because they cater to the mainstream instead of defy it. When they traded their drummers for someone who was more appealing, that was the end of their real punk days") and we made rainbow bead rave bracelets that read "Fuck Authority," without having been to an actual rave.

Neither one of us went to the extreme of dying our hair pink, slathering on eyeliner, wearing spikes, or filling in the bubbles on Scan-Trons in class to make pictures of Nixon with a knife through his eye. But we listened to plenty of NoFX and Green Day and Janis Joplin, used obscenities freely, shopped at thrift stores, and small-scale rallied against the district's ban on teaching the Communist Manifesto in class.

Yes, we knew that clothes didn't make the punk, and sometimes it was hard to say exactly what we were rebelling against, but going to school in the middle of Chesterfield while growing up on the outskirts, it was hard not to say "everything" and be pretty much on the mark. The Facebook group isn't so far off the mark when they say West St. Louis County is like the Orange County of Missouri. So even the acts of reading literature, not dropping triple digits at Abercrombie and Hollister, not attending Mizzou, and having parents that worked at jobs instead of the school store was in opposition to a large chunk of what the rest of the school stood for. We were against assimiliation, against the desperate clinging addictive desire to conform that reeked from so many of our peers like too much Hugo for Men cologne. We wanted to be original, and if we could achieve that, maybe we'd finally make some sort of impact. Damn it, The Man would not get away with denying us our nougat.



*-Mr. Bekemeyer, who taught AP Euro, and with it, the Communist Manifesto.

Nomadism is the New Pink

"Rachel and I discussed it, and you're the best roommate ever. We see you for five or ten minutes at a time, then you disappear for a few days, and it's anyone's guess as to when we'll see you again." -Nick

At least fifteen people have asked me when I'm leaving. The answer is shrug, with doubts about having the will or the way to go at all. About the same number, give or take a few, have generously offered me their couches to sleep on while I'm still here. I'd be like a portable slumber party, but gone for work before everyone wakes up, with none of the awkward bleary-eyed good-byes. If I brought the Strip Twister board and had kitchen and bath privileges, I would be called something else.

Randy: Why don't you want to go anymore?
ME: I don't think I can afford it.
Randy: I don't really think you can, either. What's another reason?
ME: I'll miss my friends.
Randy: That's not a good reason.

Saturday is my last day at the coffeeshop. They hired someone new to replace me, so the only hours I would get would be last-minute desperation replacement shifts.

"There's nothing like being alone in a city when you're young and shit-broke." --Katie

Truer words.