Vacationland

Writing About Me

2011-05-13T16:34:00.000-04:00

My brother and his girlfriend are moving into my father's garage. My mother is moving next door to my father--with her boyfriend. My grandfather has lost control of his bowels and mows through adult diapers like there's no tomorrow. My best friend's boyfriend of five years left her suddenly. My boyfriend's birthday is tomorrow. The semester is officially done. A student recently told me I need to stop assigning readings about "cancer and dead babies and stuff."

These are some things that have been going on lately.

I know I haven't been here to tell you about them. I've been wondering why I stopped writing. I've been wondering that for a long time, actually. My reluctance to blog started shortly after I started up with The Lady-Killer. Why? Because The Lady-Killer and I spent most of the summer and fall of 2010 in bed, but we did not--contrary to Christine's opinion--develop bedsores. Also, living with someone takes up a lot of time. Seriously. There are days when I get in bed at night and think, "I wanted to do, like, eighty things all day, and yet I spent a good chunk of time lying on the couch reading a magazine and watching TLK play video games." The glorious thing about these thoughts though--and this is showing some real growth here, people--is that they generally do not bother me. The fact that I got almost no shit done would have driven me crazy, pre-TLK. But my world since TLK is like a whole new world, one where a psychiatrist prescribed me a whole mess of anti-anxiety meds. That's right. TLK is like a walking, talking anti-anxiety pill. Plus, he has a lip piercing that feels really good when you kiss him.

And here's another thing. I don't want to tell you some of these things. I mean, I do. I really do. I want to tell you about a million beautiful things about TLK--how he's so funny and charming, how he sometimes makes me giggle until I think I'm going to wet my pants, how he makes really good scrambled eggs because he puts cream cheese in them, how we sleep on the same pillow at night (a fact that, when I told my friends Emily and Christine, almost made them barf)--but I also don't want to tell you those things. I feel more private now. I want to hold some things close to the vest. (I mean, see that list of cute things about TLK up there? THAT IS NOTHING. TRUST ME.) But there's just something in me now that is saying Shhh.

I think it has something to do with me protecting TLK's privacy, and mine. I also think it has something to do with growing up. I mean, back in grad school, you could not shut me the fuck up. I wanted to talk about myself all day and night. And then after grad school, I wah-wah-wahed for months about how sad I was, about how rotten and dumb my life had become now that I had graduated and been forced out of the loving cocoon of the MFA program, where everyone is batshit crazy in really lovable (okay, mostly lovable) ways. I wah-wah-wahed over the Wily Republican, who I now, for days at a time, sometimes forget even exists (oh glorious, happy day that I never thought would come!). Then I wah-wah-wahed over having to take up waitressing when my adjunct gig was over for the summer. Oh my God, how did anyone stand me?

But now, I sort of don't want to talk about myself. And that's really startling to me, because I really love to talk, and I really love to talk about myself. (This, I think, has something to do with my family. Generally, during every phone call my mother and I have, we will spend 15 minutes detailing how stupid our relatives, our neighbors, our coworkers, or other people out in the world are. Then one of us will pause and say, "Well, you know, because we're obviously perfect." Sitting in judgment of others and thus illuminating our own awesomeness is one of our favorite pastimes, right up there with badminton and pierogi-eating.)

Anyway, sometimes I miss writing about myself, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes I think, holy crap! That thing TLK is doing right now is so funny (or weird! or crazy! or ill-advised!) I really should write about it! (I've said it before, but I'll say it again: TLK is a lot like my brother. He's lovable in the same way and for similar reasons that have made a lot of complete strangers who read this blog fall in love with my brother. Therefore, I think he makes a beautiful muse.)

Still, I have struggled to get it right when writing about TLK. It's easier to write about my brother than it is to write about TLK. A lot of what's funny between me and TLK has to do with the origin of our relationship, and that's one of those private things I'm not willing to share right now. I don't really care about exposing my brother's weird foibles. The kid is related to me, but it's like he's actually not. It's actually like he's some glorious, horrible space alien that took over the room in our house that had been previously reserved for my mother's typewriter. That kid--the one who took over the typewriter room, which I used to think was its own kind of heaven? That kid I'll expose all day long. TLK though? I'd rather not. That one's all mine.

So that's part of it. The other parts I'm really still trying to understand. But right now I have the inclination to be quiet, but who knows how that's going to go and how long that's going to stick around? After all, when I go home this summer, my mother will be convincing my grandfather that he can never again leave the nursing home and return to his house and that she, in fact, will be renovating the house and moving in. (Wait. Did I say "will be renovating?" I actually mean "totally already did it and has already had new furniture delivered. Surprise, Grandpa!)

In addition, my brother and his girlfriend are consolidating all the things they went to the trouble to dig up for their new apartment, which they've only been in for one year, and they will be moving those things into a small room off to the side of my father's garage. They'll be living there for God knows who long, which means they'll be there when I arrive at my father's house for my usual summer R&R. I think this year my stay at Dad's house will be less like a quiet spa vacation and more like a sitcom staring a boy who once frittered away his life savings at a Hooters.

So maybe I'll be back, but maybe I won't. Either way, I wanted you to know that everything is good--more than good--and that I'm just wrapped up in it, loving it, and being quiet about it for right now.

So's Your Face

2011-02-27T13:16:00.003-05:00

I'm writing something new these days. It's set in a high school in small town Maine, and while I think I can do a good job supplying the characters with dialogue that is realistic for their age group, it has been an unexpected stroke of luck to be living with The Lady-Killer, a boy who's--let's face it--closer to his old high school experiences than me, the girl who, two summers ago, had her ten year reunion.

TLK has a really robust vocabulary--I've often heard him drop words that make his friends scrunch up their noses and say, "Dude, what the fuck does that mean?"--but that robust vocabulary doesn't follow him around everywhere.

He has, after all, been known to answer the question, "What do you want to eat?" with this: "Your butt."

In fact, "your butt" or "my butt" or simply "butt" is an oft-used response in this house.

"What's shakin?"

"My butt."

"What do you want to do tonight?"

"Your butt."

"What is that?"

"Butt!"

So is it any surprise that I occasionally channel him and some of the phrases I choose for my characters? After I wrote the following exchange I took a step back, looked at it, and realized that there he was, my boy, speaking back at me through my characters:

Joe Geiger, the football team's backup quarterback, leans through the mob crowded onto the large mat to narrow his eyes at Amy. "Don't even think about it," he says. "We have a strategy here. We're, you know, trying to win."

"It's a game, Geiger," Amy says. "It's stupid."

"So's your face," Joe says, then he is swallowed up again by the group of jocks around him.

~~~

It also occurs to me that this exchange would please my brother very, very much.

A Message from The Lady-Killer, 12:30 PM

2011-02-17T17:42:00.002-05:00

We need sugar... I had to use powdered sugar in my Kool-Aid... it sucks.

Bed Sores

2011-01-23T17:51:00.004-05:00

The Lady-Killer and I have spent all day in bed. He got home early this morning--he'd gone up to the U. for a party last night--and we got in bed and decided to stay there. We got up only for practical things, like when I couldn't take it anymore, I was starving, I needed some food, I needed some eggs, Jesus God, after a night of drinking Drambuie and scotch, a girl needs a fried egg with cheese and hot sauce.

So I got up and fixed myself an egg. Then I thought better of it and plopped another one in the pan. TLK, after all, likes a fried egg--at the end of the semester, we went through a stage where we ate a whoooole bunch of fried egg sandwiches on homemade toast--and so I made some toast and jellied it and brought the spread back to the bed. TLK had told me he wasn't hungry when I went into the kitchen, but when I arrived back with cheesy, yolky eggs, he couldn't resist. So we ate the entire plate, and then TLK said, "Want another egg? I do." And so he went into the kitchen and--for the first time in his life--made some fried eggs.

Then we stayed in bed and watched a horrible movie called The Slammin' Salmon on Comedy Central (which, consequently, had a star rating of ZERO in the guide) and, on commercials, we played Plants vs. Zombies on the iPod.

Now it's six o'clock, and we're too lazy to fix more food, so we're going out for Mexican.

This has been a good day.

It's a Whole New World

2011-01-17T17:13:00.003-05:00

The other day, after Katy read that The Lady-Killer had procured a pile of chips from a dumpster outside a Frito-Lay warehouse in town, she called and said, "You're SO going to eat those chips. I know you are! Jess of five years ago would have never eaten those chips! It's a whole new world."

I told her I wasn't going to eat those chips. I told her there was no way in the world I was going to eat those chips. But guess what? I ate those chips. TLK opened the bag of cheddar-sour cream Ruffles, which are, like, one of my favorites, and he said, "Hey! Look! These ones aren't even expired. They just didn't have a lot of air in the bag! I bet that's why they got thrown out."

And I tasted them. I just wanted to see. I tasted the dumpster chips.

I TASTED DUMPSTER CHIPS. What the hell is wrong with me?

TLK + Dumpster Full of Chips = My Brother?

2011-01-15T21:09:00.004-05:00

Let me be frank: I love chips. Oh my God, I love chips. Here's how sick it is: The reason I love sandwiches so much (and I love sandwiches A LOT) is because I get to eat chips with them. If you try to give me a sandwich without chips, I am going to ask you what the hell is the point. This means that this is an apartment that is always stocked with chips. Especially now, because I live with a boy who would die for French Onion Sun Chips the same way I'd die for Doritos.

Knowing this makes you understand the crisis situation we are in right now: This apartment is chip-less. Or, to be precise, it was chip-less until late last night, when the TLK arrived home from a jaunt with one of his friends. This morning I got a look at the bounty he'd piled on the stove: bags and bags of Doritos, Ruffles, and Cheetos.

"That's a lot of chips," I said.

He looked proud. "Yup," he said.

"Where did you get them?"

"Well, I bet you don't know this," he said, "because I didn't either until last night, but there is a Frito-Lay warehouse just down the road in the industrial park."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"And so... what? They were getting rid of almost-expired chips or something?"

"Right."

"So they put them on sale and you stocked up?" I asked.

TLK smiled at me, the smile you save for a simpleton. "Something like that," he said.

I looked at him. He looked at me. I looked down at the chips.

"Did they have them in a bin out front or something?" I asked.

"Not exactly."

"Oh my God!" I said.

"They're fine!" he said.

"Oh my God!" I said. "You went dumpster diving for chips?"

"I wouldn't call it DIVING," he said. "It was just a giant dumpster full of chips. It's not like we had to pick through garbage for them or anything." He picked up one of the bags and turned it toward me. "See? It's just that today's its expiration date. No big deal." Then he realized there was a dark smudge on the bag, a crust of God-knows-what. He put it back down. "Doesn't matter," he said. "I'm still eating the chips. They're on the inside."

And that was the moment I realized TLK and my brother were the same person.

The Seniors

2011-01-11T22:01:00.007-05:00

When I was in high school, the seniors were huge. They were tall, yes, but they were also wise and larger than life. I remember them being really something remarkable. After all, when we first arrived in the high school--this being before they built the addition and gave everyone lockers that you could open without using the combination but by using, instead, a well-aimed punch--they had their own section of the school that anyone who was not a senior or a senior's significant other could not go into.

The year my class--the class of '99--arrived in our high school, the senior's lockers were solid. They were probably the same lockers they'd put in when they built the school, which means they were made of actual substantial things like metal and more metal. Whatever the new lockers were, they weren't anything special, and they certainly weren't set off by themselves in a glorious elevated alcove like the seniors' were. My freshman self sighed dreamily every time she passed that alcove and had to look up to see the seniors who seemed so tall and world-weary. They'd seen some shit, you could tell, and they had been rewarded with those lockers and late arrival privileges.

It seemed like the only way to live.

I was thinking about this tonight as I sat in the gymnasium of a rural Maine high school--the one the TLK attended--watching a basketball game The Lady-Killer's brother was playing in. It was a weird experience. I was sitting in the middle of a hundred sixteen year-olds and watching a bunch of varsity high schoolers play ball and all I could keep thinking was, Who the fuck are these people? These are the seniors? They're children! They're babies! They're skinny, sickly-looking little things!

They were nothing like my seniors. I went to a whole bunch of basketball games when I was in high school, especially as a freshman because that was the year we had an exchange student from Australia and, while he was only cute from certain angles, he had a voice like buttah and he could dunk. Back then, basketball games were a spectacle, and those boys were ten feet tall. They also could grow facial hair and had feet so big it looked like they could share shoes with Ronald McDonald. I should know. Once, in gym class one of the senior basketball players stepped on my sneaker during a game of speedball and it left a permanent black mark that could not be scrubbed away no matter what I tried.

This particular boy, whose name was Mike, was probably well over six feet tall, or at least it seemed that way at the time. He was a bit chubby and slow-moving. He was the super tall guy every basketball team employs to loaf around under the basket at all times, in the hopes that he will simply half-raise his arm and tip a basket in. One of my friends was desperately in love with him, and she spent the entirety of our ninth period gym class following him around the floor during speedball or mat ball or whatever ball we were playing that week. This was fine with me because I was in love with the Australian, who was Mike's best friend. While my friend panted after Mike and actually worked up a sweat during gym by looking like she was participating smartly, I spent the period dodging the speedballs the boys flung deliberately at the girls' heads, and I went to my safe place: an elaborately-concocted future where my friend and I married Mike and the Australian, and we lived happily ever after as next-door neighbors.

But at the high school game tonight I couldn't get over it. I really had no idea what I was watching. These boys looked like what I remembered middle school boys looking like. Even the ones who weren't playing but were clearly at the game to hang out and look cool and were thus not exposing their pale-Maine-wainter-chicken-legs to the entire gym looked like babies. And that's when I realized it: These days, the boys look younger than they did when I was in school and the girls look older.

One of the girls sitting behind me, who was draping herself around one of TLK's best friend's shoulders to piss off her ex-boyfriend who was somewhere in the crowd, had makeup that looked like it had been shellacked on by some makeup artist, pre-Golden Globes. Her eyeliner--which I still cannot manage--was impeccable. She didn't have a hair out of place. Her outfit was skin-tight and stolen from the pages of Seventeen.

I hated her. I couldn't help it. I thought nasty, shitty things about her in my head. And then I realized I was insane and made myself smile at her to make it seem that I wasn't some cranky old broad that had accidentally wandered into the student section and would leave shortly, after she'd soiled her diaper and needed to be changed.

After I smiled and turned back around I said this prayer: Dear God, thank you for letting me go to high school in the 90s. Thank you for letting me grow up in a decade where we did not look like that.

I've never been one to look back on my high school years with rage or despair; I've never walked back into the school after graduating and uttered, "Man, this place fucking sucks!" I know now and knew then how lucky I was: I went to a good school. I did not get caught up in anything bad or illicit. I had a sweet, smart group of friends. We were good girls. Yes, there were shitty times and days when I absolutely refused to get out of bed and go to school because high school was hard, but it was not bad. Not bad at all.

I grew up riding out the wave of grunge. I wore my father's jeans and old sweaters to school. We rolled the sleeves of our t-shirts up and permed our hair. We had ratty old flannel shirts ala Angela Chase. We wrote notes and then folded them elaborately. We sat in the bleachers and watched our big, tough seniors dunk basketballs and then, later, watched from the parking lot as they threw their duffle bags into the backseats of their cars and drove home. We waited for our parents to picks us up.

It was a gorgeous life, and looking back on it now, I think it was extremely romantic. It was a real Time. It was a time unlike this one, maybe, because it was the last of something, things were about to change, people were already getting a little kooked off the impending 2000s, and nothing was going to be much the same anymore after that. We felt it. The class below us always argued they were better because they were the class of 2000. They were the first of the century! But this is what we thought of that: So what? That's not something to boast. The first of something can almost always be improved upon; the last of something usually goes out with a bang.

I don't mean to generalize and use the old things were just simpler back then argument. In some ways they were, and some ways they weren't. But I am glad for a lot of the more simpler things: the notes written in study hall and passed between classes instead of the instant gossip grapevine of text messaging; the absence of social networks; the clothes that didn't cling to our body; the boys who looked grown-up and gallant; sleepovers where we had fashion shows and played Girl Talk or Mall Madness.

If anything, I think it was a quieter time, where kids were forced more to hack it out on their own. I spent a lot of alone time in my room, figuring things out about myself. Do kids do that anymore? Do they sit in their room, without looking at a computer, a television, a cell phone, an iPod? Do they have time to sit still and listen and think, This is me, right now. This is me and no one else.

I'm sure some do, but not many and not often. And when I sat amongst those high schoolers or recently-graduated high schoolers at the game, I was filled with a certain kind of panic as I imagined myself in their world, in their school at that moment. What would I love? Who would I love? Who would I be?

But I didn't want to know. I wasn't jealous of them and their slick 2011 lives. I was overwhelmed with gratitude for my life, when and where I came from. And, also, as one of the boys on the court broke away with the ball and galloped toward the basket, I was seeing the Australian exchange student, his overly-gelled red hair, his long legs scissoring toward the key. I saw him lift, hover, float in the air above that basket before descending upon it and shoving the ball through the hoop as the entire gymnasium of our high school erupted in screams and everyone--not a single person glancing at a cell phone or iPod--leapt into the air because they knew they had just been the part of something holy.

A Not Unpleasant Puke

2011-01-08T13:06:00.003-05:00

The Lady-Killer is a pro at puking. (See also: Steph's wedding.) Well, he puked again last night, and this was a fact I did not learn until this morning, when we woke at 11:53 AM, which was long after he'd slipped into bed after getting home and kissed me several thousand times.

"Gross!" I said. "You VOMITED last night and then came home and made out with me?!"

"Hey," he said, "I brushed my teeth!"

That, at least, was true. The first thing he did when he came through the door was take off his clothes. TLK prefers nudity or almost-nudity whenever he is lounging around our apartment. If it were up to him, every day would be a no-pants party.

The second thing he did was teeter into the bathroom, where he commenced brushing his teeth vigorously (TLK is very serious about dental hygiene). He even gargled with Scope. When he got back to bed, he breathed his minty breath onto me.

"So," I said as the mint washed over my body, "you spent the night drinking peppermint Schnapps and now came home to wash it away with minty toothpaste? You're minted up."

Of course what he neglected to tell me was that he'd spent part of the night vomiting up the half bottle of peppermint Schnapps he drank (straight) before being driven back to our place, where he promptly tried to smooch me up.

"You're gross," I told him this morning.

"Well, let me tell you this," he said. "That was a not-unpleasant puke experience. Seriously! Peppermint schanpps is the way to go! It came up tasting just as minty as it went down! It's nothing like what I usually puke up."

"Ew."

"Jagermeister," he said, "usually comes up really sour. And that night at Steph's wedding? That was just a mishmash of drinks, so it was really gross. But peppermint schnapps? It's the ideal puke."

This, my friends, is handy information to have.

Ass Turned Toward Fire

2011-01-05T22:28:00.004-05:00

That was hard.

That last semester and that Christmas vacation, both were excruciatingly hard. I won't bore you with the specifics because they bore even me. Let's just summarize: I worked my ass off; (most) of my students did not. It made me sad.

Then I packed my car, said goodbye to The Lady-Killer and Abbey, and I drove home for Christmas. I looked forward to the trip home. I'd been craving Buffalo for a while. I kept having dreams about pierogi.

At home, I thought, I could rest. Relax. Decompress. But what happened was this: I ran. I ran a lot. I had a billion things to do, a billion places to be. And I also had to meet and mingle with my father's new girlfriend.

And here's where I utter something that makes me extremely guilty: I spent the entire two weeks being really, really annoyed at my father.

I don't know what it was exactly, but I spent two weeks grouching my way around Western New York.

"WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?" I asked the girls, who I was not grumpy at. (It's hard to be grumpy at people who keep me well-supplied with vodka and M&Ms and chicken wing dip.) "WHY AM I SO PISSED AT MY FATHER?"

Everything he did infuriated me. If he asked me where I'd been, if I'd had fun, if I'd seen this person or that person, I wanted to punch him. I kept thinking about that scene in My So-Called Life, the one where Angela admits that lately she can't even look at her mother without wanting to stab her. I just wanted to call up fifteen-year old Angela Chase and say, I feel you, sister.

My father wanted me to do this with his girlfriend, do that with his girlfriend, attend his girlfriend's family's party, go to a movie with his girlfriend, eat breakfast with his girlfriend... and every time he requested these things, I felt my shoulders involuntarily rising until my ears were crammed down into them, making permanent shell-like indentations in the skin.

"I can't do it," I told the girls. "I just can't do it. I'm exhausted. I'm just so tired. I don't have it in me. I don't think I can go to a party filled with strangers and answer questions about myself. And I don't want to ask them questions either."

The mere thought of that made my eyelids go heavy. And then I felt guilty because I was being a brat. I was being selfish. I was being a nasty thirteen year-old version of my self, but worse because I'd never been that nasty when I was thirteen years-old. So I spent the entirety of my Christmas break breast-stroking through vast oceans of exhaustion, tantrum, and guilt.

And then came the incident with the fire.

It was a morning after my father had spent the night with his new girlfriend. I had the house to myself, and I spent the morning lounging in bed. But my lounging was interrupted when my father called at 10:15. "Hey!" he said. "Come to breakfast. We'll be there at 10:30. Join us!"

That last phrase--join us!--made my fingers clench into fists. I wanted to chuck my phone across the room. Why? WHY? I do not fucking know.

I declined breakfast; after all, a lady cannot get ready in three minutes to make it to the restaurant in time. But my father and his girlfriend made an appearance at the house after breakfast. I puttered around in the living room while my father collected things he needed for their New Year's party. I talked to the girlfriend, who is--it must be noted--very nice. And in the middle of the small talk, my father breezed in and said to me, "Okay, well, we're ready to go. I just threw some logs on the fire. Do you know how to use the stove?"

Okay. Okay. Now let's be clear: I am twenty-nine years old. I lived for more than eighteen years in that house, and for all those years that house was heated by a wood stove. When I was young, I was taught to respect the fire--to stay away, to warm myself from a distance--and I took to that warming idea with much glee: there are many pictures of a young me with my bare ass turned toward the stove, the white moon shining in the glare from the orange flame.

Later, when I was old enough, my father took me aside and taught me how to build a fire, how to teepee the kindling and feed the building flames. He taught me how to use the flue. He taught me how hot the stove needed to get before I cut off the oxygen and let it do a slow burn to last through the day.

Let's be even clearer: I have been making and tending fires for, like, fifteen years.

My father knows this. And even if my father had fallen and hit his head and that fall had erased his prior knowledge of me--his only daughter, his firstborn!--and my fire-making abilities, it wouldn't matter because two days prior to his asking me if I knew how to use the stove, he arrived home just as I, who had also just arrived home, finished building a fire to warm the icy house. He even complimented me on my fire.

So when he stood at his girlfriend's side and asked me if I knew how to tend the fire and use the stove, I almost committed a murder. I wanted to run to the family picture albums, pluck out any of the pictures of me warming my butt near the wood stove. I wanted to shove it in his face and say, "DOES THIS LOOK LIKE THE BUTT OF SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO USE A WOOD STOVE, MAN?!"

I don't know what happened to me. I don't know what split open in my brain and let all that rage leak into my bloodstream, but it was awful. And I feel guilty still--worse, actually, now that I've admitted it here, to you.

I need therapy.

Honey

2010-12-29T12:20:00.005-05:00

Yesterday was the anniversary of the seven months that the The Lady-Killer and I have been together, and to celebrate this, I am going to tell embarrassing but endlessly charming stories about him.

The day before I left for my Buffalo Christmas vacation, The Lady-Killer and I attended a family Christmas party. His father's large family had crammed into a cozy kitchen and living room to eat and engage in a large-scale Yankee Swap.

Before the swapping began, I was talking to his mother in the kitchen. We both had plates full of cookies and we were watching TLK and his brother needle each other across the room.

"You know," I said, "anytime you feel like hauling out old embarrassing pictures of TLK, I would absolutely love to look at them."

She told me that was easily done--that there was embarrassing video, too... plenty of it!--but until we could get to all that, she could tell me a few stories. Both of them had to do with TLK's father's influence on him.

"My husband," she said, "has a very dirty mouth."

We both looked across the room at TLK's dad, who was at that moment hefting a giant meatball into his mouth.

"And I kept telling him he needed to watch what he said in front of TLK because he was going to start mimicking him eventually. And then one day we were all in the car, and TLK started shouting from the backseat, 'Daddy! Fuck! Fuck, Daddy! Fuck! Fuck!' I turned to TLK's father and said, 'See? See what you've done?'"

But it turns out TLK wasn't exactly talking like a sailor for the fun of it or even because he'd heard his father say that word so many times. At that moment, a truck was passing the car, and TLK was trying to tell his parents that he was really, really excited, that he was just super psyched to see a truck--a fuck! a fuck!--cruising along next to them.

"That's adorable," I said. But it wasn't the cutest thing. The cutest thing she told me about came later that afternoon, as we were standing out in the heated garage, watching the kids try to hack apart the annual homemade Christmas pinata.

TLK had one of his little cousins in his arms, and he was holding her out at an endearingly awkward angle so she could wail on the pinata she wasn't tall enough to reach. That was cute already, but then his mother leaned over and told me a story about TLK in pre-school.

One morning, all the children were sitting around for some circle time, and the teacher was asking them questions about their lives. The first question was what are your parents' names?

One by one, each child spoke up and gave his or her parents' names. When it was TLK's turn he sat up straight and said, "My daddy's name is Tony, and my mommy's name is Honey."

His mother loved that story. "He heard his father call me that so many times he just assumed it was my name!" she laughed.

We looked at him then, and the cute little cousin he was holding out made contact with the pinata and her turn was up, so he brought her back to him, snuggled her into his chest, and I loved him so much then I thought my heart was going to burst.

Kill Me Now

2010-12-17T21:33:00.002-05:00

I'm reporting live from the umpteenth hour of grading insanity. I'm so worn out and sad and demoralized that it's difficult to move. Why? Take, for example, this little nugget of loveliness from a student in my literature class. I asked the students to underline their thesis statements--because I've been trying to get them to improve when writing thesis statements, but even so it's difficult to see sometimes what the main point is, so it's helpful to know what THEY think their main point is--and this was her "thesis":

Framed life a capture draws me in.

Ugh. I have so much more to go.

Why I Love My Mother

2010-12-15T16:23:00.002-05:00

A conversation with my mother about the girl featured here:

Mom: Well, I got that e-mail you sent with that letter from your student in it. Oh my God. Where do these people come from?

Me: I don't know, Mom. It boggles me.

Mom: Well, I took one look at that and thought, Now there's a future Dollar Store employee if I've ever seen one!

(It's Almost) The End of the Semester: Notes #1 and #2

2010-12-14T16:17:00.004-05:00

(1.)

Yesterday I was called one of the top five hardest graders on campus.

The person who called me that was one of The Lady-Killer's best friends. He's never had me for a teacher.

"Oh give me a break," I said. "I'm tough, yes, but I'm fair. I don't suffer fools!"

"No," he said. "You're just hard. You're impossible."

I asked him why. Just why was I impossible?

"Because," he said, "you make them read a lot of stuff. And you make them write a lot of stuff too."

He was basing this information off two things: (1.) He has a friend who's in my literature class this semester and (2.) He has the habit of popping into my office before I go teach that literature class, and he's always paging through the stuff I'm about to hand out for homework.

"They read two stories per class," I said. "Two SHORT STORIES. They write only three essays over the course of the semester. In what world is that a lot?"

"I don't know," he said, "but it just is."

And then I told him--and everyone--needed to suck it the hell up.

(2.)

At the end of last week, I took a student aside after class. I've had this student for three consecutive semesters, and I am very familiar, very intimate with her (very bad) writing. If I'd had her for composition, I could've whipped her into shape, but as it is, I've had her for a few creative writing and literature courses, where there's very little time to wage full-scale interventions on a person's inability to use a comma correctly. I've tried as best I can, but there's only so much I can do.

So when I opened up her latest essay, my jaw immediately hit the floor. There wasn't a single mistake in it. Not a single mistake. This, of course, meant it was plagiarized. It meant the essay was FLAGRANTLY plagiarized.

When confronted about this, she just shrugged. "It's my work," she said.

"It can't be," I said. "This paper uses rhetorical techniques and sophisticated punctuation that I have never seen from you."

"Oh," she said, "well, there's a really good reason for that. I wrote my paper and then had my friend read it over. He said it was really bad and that it needed, like, a lot of help. So I said he could help me, and he came over and read each of my sentences, rewrote them, and then told me what to write. Then I typed it. So, it's mine."

I blinked.

"It's mine," she insisted.

"No," I said, "that's not yours. Typing something that another person writes does not make it your own."

"He did it based off my original sentences, though!" she said. "He just rewrote them and told me what to write to make them sound better! I TYPED IT!"

I closed my eyes, gave myself a big, yogic breath, and then continued to discuss with her how this work was not her own. I told her there was just no getting around it: she was going to fail the assignment. She finally accepted it without much drama, and we went our separate ways.

The next morning, I arrived at school and saw three e-mails from this student. She'd fired them off in rapid succession, which I knew wasn't a good thing. I opened them up and--sure enough!--they were awful. They were littered with phrases like this is fuckin ridcluou! and im sick of collage telling me im not writting good enugh papers.

It was big of a Oh, Honey, No moment as I'd ever seen. And it kicked off my last week of the semester. There is about to be a whole bunch of liquor coming my way.

Putting It in Perspective

2010-11-09T22:41:00.003-05:00

My literature class wrote such horrifying essays duringthis past unit that I felt compelled to create a checklist that they can glance at prior to handing in their next round of essays. Let me put it in perspective for you. You know things are bad when the following items are the first items on your checklist:

Have I spelled the author's name right?
Have I spelled the characters' names right?
Have I indented my paragraphs one tabbed space?

Phony Balogna

2010-11-05T19:39:00.003-04:00

It's another marathon grading weekend here at the small apartment in the woods. This means I've got a cat nesting on the desk next to me...

... and a freshly-baked loaf of chocolate chip banana bread at my disposal for when I lose all faith in my ability to teach writing, and thus stress eat to drown my sorrows.

It also means I've got the inevitable plagiarism to deal with. I always get a little angry when I catch my students plagiarizing--I take things too, too seriously, I know--but this time made me extra angry.

So, there I was sitting in front of the computer and grading my fifteenth essay of the day. I read the title. I read the first sentence. My brain went, Wait a second. I read the second sentence. My brain went, NO, SERIOUSLY. Then I finished up the whole first paragraph and my brain said, OH NO SHE DIDN'T.

What I was reading I had read before. I was sure of it. Not only was the topic old--it was an argument essay about the No on One campaign that had been defeated last fall--but the language and voice of the essay was sassy, specific, and something not easy to forget.

I was reading a paper one of my former students had turned in last fall. I knew it. I knew it.

So I started thinking about this student who'd just turned it in as her own. I wondered who she and I had in common. Who did she know that had taken one of my composition courses? Then I remembered her talking about her best friend, how they were going on vacation soon, how they were both super excited and positively ga-ga at the idea of getting out there on their own. And her best friend? She'd been my student last fall.

I closed my eyes and took a breath. Then I went back to the archive of last fall's Blackboard course--where all my students submit electronic copies of their essays--and simply looked up the best friend's paper.

It was the same paper. Exact same paper. EXACT. SAME. PAPER.

The only thing that was changed was the secondary essay, a mini self-reflection I require all students to write about the conscious choices they made as they wrote and what effect they hoped they would have. I ask them to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the piece. I ask them to give me an honest opinion about their progress.

This student wrote her self-reflection as if she had actually written her paper. She made up all the things she hoped she'd done as she wrote the paper. She gave herself a fake little assessment.

It made me want to cry for one of two reasons. Either this student thought I was stupid enough not to catch the dishonesty or else it didn't even occur to her that I'd find them out. Whatever the reason, it was enough to make me want to give up for the night.

But then I remembered the chocolate chip banana bread and felt a little better, and then Abbey raised her head and yawned like she was bored, just oh-so-bored with all of this, and I said I felt her pain, and I gave that student a big fat F and moved on to the next essay.

There are 41 days until the semester is done.

Yowl

2010-10-30T16:10:00.003-04:00

Last week, The Lady-Killer was spending the night at his best friend's place--a sweet bachelor pad on top of the best friend's grandmother's house, which is handy because Grammy occasionally wanders upstairs to leave cookies or cinnamon rolls she's just baked--and that meant Abbey and I were on our own. When TLK isn't home, Abbey takes up her old position, something I used to refer to as Substitute Boyfriend.

When Substitute Boyfriend Abbey realizes that, hey, that boy who lets her smell his breath--which is one of her favorite pastimes--isn't going to be in the bed with me overnight, she hops up on the bed and stands on the empty pillow until I raise the blankets. Then she goes under, turns around, and situates herself so that her head rests on the pillow, so that her body is spooned against mine. And then we go to sleep.

This is how it used to be, pre-TLK. I imagine Abbey gets very nostalgic for those days, since now that TLK is in her spot she sleeps in one of the less-awesome nests she has around the house (the blanket on my desk, the giant box full of fluff, the recliner).

Usually Abbey is a very good bed-mate. She's snuggly, warm, and she smells good (cotton candy, maple syrup, or oatmeal, depending on the day). Usually we can pass the whole night snuggling like that, but last week at 4:30 AM Abbey began to wheeze, and those wheezes woke me up. She's had colds before, and she has a generally squeaky nose, but this was different than all that. This was something that sounded painful.

So I made her an appointment at the vet's. As soon as I hung up the phone with the receptionist, I began the long process of dreading this appointment. After all, Abbey is not a cat who takes kindly to others. It's no secret that I raised her in strict Single Mother with Only Child style so that Abbey loves me, only me, and generally distrusts anyone who tries to show me attention. And if they try to show her attention? Forget it.

And it wasn't only that. The logistics of getting her there also stressed me out. Abbey has done many trips back to New York with me--and that's a 9 hour car drive--but apparently she's so over those because this summer, when I was headed off to New York, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, Abbey refused to get in the carrier. TLK and I did everything we could to make this happen, but Abbey thrashed, bit, clawed, and yowled until we gave up.

I figured I'd have a repeat of that when I tried to put her in the carrier to take her to the vet's. And I wasn't wrong.

I gave myself an extra twenty minutes to get her into the carrier before we needed to leave to make our appointment. They were the most exhausting twenty minutes of my life. I tried gentle coaxing. I tried treats. I tried wet food. I tried begging. Then I tried more forceful efforts. I tried putting her in frontward, backward, sideways. I tried to hold her above the carrier and lower her in.

Nothing worked. She made the most heartbreaking sounds. She stared up at me and cried-cried-cried. Those eyes were saying, Mama! How could you?!

I was fresh out of ideas. And by that time we were going to be late, and I was crying too. (YOU try listening to that gut-wrenching, you're-killing-me sound for 20 minutes without shedding a tear!) So I did the only thing I could. I got on the phone with the vet and asked if they had any tricks of the trade that would help me get her in the carrier.

"Oh, just put a little food in the back of the carrier, and she'll go right in," the receptionist said.

But Abbey's too smart for that. Abbey just sits in front of the carrier and is all like, "Do I look like an idiot?"

Besides, I'd already tried it, even though I knew it wouldn't work when I began the process.

"Well," the receptionist said, "is there an alternate mode of transportation?"

That's when it dawned on me: The Box.

The Box is Abbey's favorite nesting area. See?

It's a giant affair, left over from my move from the Old Apartment of Death. It's filled with fluff I purchased after Abbey developed the habit of kneading the batting she'd confiscated from the underside of my recliner. The Box is where Abbey goes while we're in the office. It's where she often sleeps at night.

I hated the thought of ruining one of her sanctuaries, but I had to get her to the doctor's office. I'd spent a terrifying half hour earlier that week Googling "cat with stuffy nose" and the results had been YOUR CAT'S LUNGS MAY BE FILLING WITH LIQUID AS WE SPEAK AND SHE IS GOING TO DROWN IMMEDIATELY. I was sufficiently terrified.

So I dragged the giant box into the living room and in my most chipper voice I said, "Abbey! Look! It's your box! I am going to put this dish of food in your box! How do you feel about that?"

Abbey felt swell about that, and she hopped right into the box and started eating her food. She didn't even mind when I started closing the top, as that's part of a game we play. She also didn't mind when I picked the box up and started walking toward the door with it. Abbey is a box fan, a box expert, a box aficionado, and hardly a day goes by where she isn't sitting in a shoebox waiting patiently to be picked up and carried around. She probably just thought that's what we were doing with this much bigger box.

When we got outside, however, Abbey could sense disaster brewing, and that's when she stopped eating her food and gave one cry.

"It's okay, Abbey!" I said. "I love you!" I looked like a jackass: I was a girl speaking to a giant box labeled BEDROOM/CLOTHES.

I put her in the car, and we started toward the vet's. Abbey tried once or twice to break out of the box--she pushed her head against it, her little pink nose the only thing visible from the tiny opening in the box folds--but we managed to make it unscathed. And then I walked into the lobby, where plenty of local pet owners were waiting with their normal pets who were lolling about on a leash or in a carrier. One cat was even sleeping on a sample cat house someone was selling.

My cat was crying and poking her pink nose through the opening in the box. In a few minutes' time she would get so stressed out in the exam room that she would release her anal glands and coat the good doctor in that liquid.

Still, she wasn't as bad as I thought she'd be. There was no biting. There was no swatting. In fact, Abbey, in her addled, over-taxed state, loved up on each of the nurses and doctor. She rubbed her body all over them, let them pet her--but she growled the whole time she sought their love. Maybe it was her attempt to say, "Hey! I'm cute! Look! I'm nice! Please don't kill me!" while simultaneously letting them know she was in the mood to cut a bitch.

In the end, there wasn't anything really wrong with Abbey. The doctor thought she might have a touch of a cold, and he prescribed her a low dose of medicine before sending us on our way. And on the way out, a woman who was coming into the office held the door for me. She looked confused as to why I was bumbling a giant box through the doorframe.

"It's okay," I said to the meowing box. And then, to the lady, I said, "It's a long story." Which, I think, is an understatement.

Mid-Semester

2010-10-23T23:52:00.002-04:00

I have been staring at this screen for ten minutes, and I still don't know what to write. I feel like I have a lot to say; I feel like I have very little to say.

I could tell you that I am, right now, listening to Wilson Pickett sing "I'm Not Tired" or that this fall has been a big deal for Abbey because we've introduced her to the wonders of laser pointers. I could tell you I want a pair of red boots.

I could tell you that this is the busiest semester I've ever had, that I feel now more than ever the weight of a 5-5 load, that there have been times I've cried because I've realized just how much I have to do and think there's no way it's ever going to get done.

I could tell you The Lady-Killer and I went apple-picking and I've made apple crisp, apple muffins, apple-cheddar-squash soup, apple-caramel cake, and two batches of applesauce, and I still have an entire bag of apples to use.

I could tell you that I really, really love living with a boy. I could tell you how I used to think I'd be rotten at it, but I actually think I'm pretty okay.

I could tell you that these days I am watching an awful lot of "Four Weddings" on TLC--and that this a show where four brides attend each other's weddings and then rate them, the winner getting a luxurious honeymoon prize package--and that I violently love and hate the show at the same time. I could tell you I'm still shaking my fist at Don Draper for what he did in the Mad Men season finale.

I could tell you there's a part of me that's looking forward to snow, but it's not a very big part.

I could tell you that today I climbed into my shower and bleached the walls above the tub and scrubbed them until they were bright white. I could tell you I washed a blanket Abbey threw up on, one I avoided and let sit for a few weeks.

I could tell you one of my favorite things about The Lady-Killer is the way he says ow.

I could tell you I wish my mother would come over and make me dinner. I could tell you I wish my brother would come sit on the couch with me and watch reality television with me, make me laugh, make my mother laugh, make TLK laugh, make everyone in the world laugh.

I could tell you that today while I was cleaning my office I found a tiny yellow Post-It note that says nothing good can come from working with deli meat. I could tell you in my drawer I have a slim stack of blue Post-It notes, that these are the first notes TLK wrote me, and that one of them has his number and the words you know you want to on it.

It is mid-semester, and I am tired but I am happy.

You Know It's Fancy When It's Got Paragraphs

2010-10-13T23:17:00.002-04:00

My creative writing classes are currently engaged in nonfiction workshop. This means the students bring in essays to share for whole class discussion. They also prepare a letter they hand back to the authors, and this letter is supposed to discuss the craft of the essays and what elements of that craft they found intriguing and strong.

This is one of the letters handed in tonight:

Dear Tim,

This is a really good story. I like how you told it in paragraphs.

Sincerely,

Beth

And Then We All Stared At Her

2010-10-08T12:16:00.003-04:00

A conversation in my creative writing classroom:

Me: Okay, so we have several workshop pieces for today's class. Are we ready?

Girl: Wait. Wait a second. SEVERAL? We have SEVERAL?

Me: Yes. Several.

Girl: SEVERAL?

Me: Yesssss... why?

Girl: When did we get that many?

Me: They were on the schedule.

Boy: What's wrong with you, Girl?

Me: Wait just a second. What's your definition of several?

Girl: Several is seven.

Everyone: --Blank stares--

Girl: Several doesn't mean seven?

Boy: NO!

Me: No.

Other Girl: Several is like three or four.

Girl: Really? It's not seven?

Bread!

2010-10-04T21:14:00.003-04:00

A conversation in my short story lit class:

Me: Here's a fun fact: Ann Beattie was married to the lead singer of Bread!

Class: --Blink, blink--

Me: Do you guys know who Bread is?

The One Woman Over 25: Yes!

Everyone Else: No.

Boy in the Front Row: But with a name like Bread, I am guessing they're gonna be GREAT!

One More Bit of Happy

2010-09-24T21:03:00.000-04:00

If you live in Maine, it is inevitable that you know someone who owns waterfront property. This property could be a camp or a cabin or a cottage. The details don't really matter. What matters is this: It's on the water, and it's beautiful.

Lucky for me, three of the six people in my department own waterfront property and have said to me on numerous occasions, "Hey. Do you want to go up to the cottage for a weekend or something? Just bum around?"

And I got to take advantage of that during my extended birthday week--after all, I am a girl who knows how to seriously milk a birthday--and so Emily (whose birthday is five days after mine) and I packed an insane amount of food and invited some people up, and we spent a few days doing absolutely nothing of importance at one of the prettiest places ever.

Sure, I was a flustered mess when Emily got to my house so we could caravan together, and, sure, this meant I was still making the needs-to-chill frosting for her birthday cake when she arrived, and, sure, this meant I finished it on the fly and packed it into a tapered dish filled with ice so it could start chilling on the way to the pond. Can you sense what's going to happen next? On a particularly wicked corner, the pan the frosting was in dumped and sent a gush of warm chocolate and heavy cream across my car. Then, after I'd cleaned it up best I could, I took another wicked corner--why, why, WHY am I physically unable to not act like a race car driver when it's really important?!--and spilled even more of the frosting.

Still, even that wasn't enough to take my mind away from just how wonderful everything was going to be over our birthday weekend. I mean, look at this:

It was a whole weekend of lovely. (LOVELY!) And--you can see the proof above--there was enough frosting to coat the whole cake. It was a miracle. A birthday miracle. And so was the rest of the weekend.

And now this weekend I'm feeling pangs of jealousy because I'd like to be up there with this stack of essays I've got sitting in front of me. They're the first of the semester, and I'm thinking that maybe (just maybe!) I wouldn't take it so hard that they're rotten because all I'd have to do is walk down to the dock, slip into a kayak, and paddle hard and fast away from all that sad student prose, all the things that make me wonder if I'm good at my job, if I've ever done a single thing to help a student in my entire career.

Oh, how I wish I was in a kayak.

BRING ME A SQUIRREL!

2010-09-13T18:43:00.004-04:00

Today is my birthday.

Today I turn twenty-nine years-old. Today I get to drink champagne and eat cake for lunch and dinner. Which led to this conversation with my office-mate:

Office-Mate: So, you're going to go home and... do what?

Me: Drink champagne and eat cake.

Office-Mate: More cake? We had cake for lunch!

Me: There's no such thing as too much cake.

Office-Mate: But you're going to drink champagne and eat cake? Won't that make you hurl?

Me: (scoffing)

Office-Mate: Maybe you should make some guacamole and eat that before the cake. That way, you know, you'll get a green veggie in your system or something.

Me: Okay. All right. Fine. Maybe I'll eat a can of green beans before I eat my cake. MAYBE.

~~~

Also: Have you seen this? I wish someone would get me a purring squirrel for my birthday!

Pink Lady

2010-09-08T23:49:00.006-04:00

Last Wednesday The Lady-Killer called me up while I was at school and said, "Hey. How do you feel about going to New Hampshire?"

As a general rule, I feel pretty good about going to New Hampshire. It has no sales tax! It has liquor outlets! Its state motto is Live Free or Die! What else could possibly be needed to coax a person into a state?

So I told TLK I felt swell about going to New Hampshire. "And just what are we going to New Hampshire for?" I asked, hoping the answer was to buy liquor and shout the badass state motto at passers-by.

"To buy a car," he said.

Turns out the hours TLK spends skulking in the CARS AND TRUCKS section on Craigslist paid off. He'd found a car he was in love with. And it was a pretty serious love. When he showed me the ad, I could see hearts and rainbows and unicorns swimming in his big eyes.

"This car," he told me, "is fast."

"Yeah?"

"I mean FAST-FAST," he said.

"I don't doubt it," I said.

TLK loves fast. When his last car could no longer pass inspection because it was rotting, he and his friends tore everything "unnecessary" out, hollowing it out to be a rally car.

One day he and I went to his house, picked up his brother, and together we drove down to an old railroad bed that was now a rough gravel road that extended God knows where. TLK pointed his car toward the God knows where and asked which of us wanted the first ride.

His brother went first. And when they came back, the brother's face was flushed and excited. "I screamed!" he said. "Also, we were air-born!"

Then it was my turn. "Listen," I said as I buckled myself in, "if you kill me, my father is going to be very disappointed in you."

TLK nodded gravely and then, in the next second, he had us roaring down the road and we were transformed into nothing more than a spout of dust. And then we went air-born as TLK launched us over a bump.

I don't know what the appropriate reaction to a thing like that is, but the reaction my brain chose at that moment (and most moments since) was laughter. I squealed and I giggled and I buried my head in my heads.

When we got back to where we'd left his brother standing, TLK cracked a grin my way. "Just imagine if this was turbo," he said.

So it didn't surprise me at all last week that he decided in order to properly grieve for the loss of his beloved car (the one now turned in a hollowed-out shell of its former self), in order to properly process the loss, in order to move past the heartbreak, he needed to buy a car that would smoke his old car.

So I told him, yeah, okay, let's go to New Hampshire. Sure. Why not?

And so we did, and TLK inspected his car and then forked over the money for it and said, "I'll follow you home."

When we got home a few hours later, I parked my car and TLK pulled up behind me. I grabbed my purse and stepped out of my car. And then he gave me a gesture--a simple nod--that almost made my heart explode out of my chest. Here was a boy who was so pleased with himself, so happy, and he wanted to take me for a ride in his fast car, so he was giving me a nod, telling me, "Hey, Baby. Jump in." It was the world's most perfect nod, born of beautiful old films where the men wore leather jackets and white t-shirts and tight jeans, where they smoked cigarettes and slung a sun-tanned arm out the window of whatever smooth machine they were driving. It was American Graffiti meets a Bruce Springsteen video.

I went around, opened the passenger door. I slid into the seats--which were not normal seats but seats you'd find in a racecar--and strapped myself down.

One minute later, after TLK had driven us down the long road that circles the small airport around the corner from my apartment, we were sideways. The car was roaring, I was screaming, TLK was smiling as much as I'd ever seen him smile. We tore into a curve and the car slid through it gracefully, as if over ice.

It was then that I realized something very important about myself: I have always wanted to be this girl. I am the girl Milner gets stuck riding with in American Graffiti. I am a Pink Lady. I am, at all times, hoping to star in my own version of Grease. This would explain why I consistently disappointed my friend Greg in grad school when I chose rough-tough-working boys instead of, say, poets, which was who he thought I should be with. I said I wanted a man who could discuss literature with me, who would write poetry about the way my hair smelled or the way I looked coming out of the shower, but, really, honestly, deep down I wanted nothing to do with them and everything to do with someone who could get his hands dirty in a way most darling MFA boys will not.

If I'm completely honest with myself, I am certain this has something to do with the types of men I grew up around--my grandfather, my uncle, my brother, my father. My father, of course, isn't a rough-tough-dirty-man in the way that some of the others on that list are, but he grew up around cars. He grew up loving cars. He's the type of man who can identify the make, model, and year of any old car when it passes on the street. He's the type of man who, when I smile and ask him sweetly, will change my brakes for me.

So maybe I've always been looking for what I'm used to. And while I was in the sideways car, shrieking and giggling and saying, "Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!" I realized that, hey, look at this. I've found something I've always been secretly looking for, and in finding it, I have managed to transform myself into the girls I always wanted to be, the girls I always identified with: the ones who would run down the stairs and into the car of a boy who's wanting to take them out, show them some fun, drive them fast along the dark country roads where no one else is around and all that's there is the long squeal of a tire and a quick flash of light in the place where, just seconds ago, a car had been.

The First Week of School: A Review

2010-09-02T23:00:00.001-04:00

DAY ONE:

I stock my snack drawer with Parmesan Goldfish, Kashi crackers, chocolate, and aspirin. I dust my picture frames. I eat celebratory back-to-school pizza. I put the magnet of Bucky the Badger I got on my trip to UW Madison this summer on the fridge. I point it out to my office-mate.

"Listen," I say, "Bucky doesn't take any shit. Look at him. When one of our students acts up, we can just point to Bucky and say, 'DON'T UPSET THE BADGER."

"Because that'll work," he says.

"Right," I say.

DAY TWO:

LOVELY!!!!!

DAY THREE:

The chair of our department bursts into my office.

"Did you hear what those girls were saying out there?" she asks.

"What girls?" I ask.

"The girls in the hall," she says.

I haven't heard anything. I've been in full-on nerd mode. I've been organizing the folders and sub-folders on my class's Blackboard site. I've been admiring the neat little nested list and how easy it is to find everything. My brain, otherwise engaged in this, its own version of porn, has blocked everything else out--especially the conversations happening feet outside my door.

"Oh, it's really good!" she says. "One of the girls asked the other girl who she had for English 101, and the second girl said, 'I've got The Girl.'"

"The Girl?" I ask.

"The Girl!" she says.

"Oh! Me?" I say. "The Girl is me? I'm The Girl?"

"Yes!"

I shrug. "You know what? I'm turning twenty-nine in two weeks. I'll take it," I say.

DAY FOUR:

The chair comes into my office. "I just got a weird phone call," she says.

This is never good news.

"All right," I say. "Let me hear."

Turns out, two students in my creative writing class were so appalled, horrified, and repulsed at one of the essays I had assigned for the first night of homework they decided not to come to me and discuss their concerns--which would, you know, be a reasonable reaction--but instead went straight to their adviser and demanded to know what's what.

The students swore I was making them read porn! Smut! Revolting trash that had no business being considered literature. It was crass! It was filthy! It was disgusting! They wouldn't read it! They wouldn't! And they wanted someone to tell them they didn't have to!

The adviser asked them to furnish a copy of the essay, and when they did he read it and agreed with them. So he called up the chair. He said it was crass! It was filthy! It was disgusting! It wasn't literature! Why was this trash being taught in a creative writing classroom?

"Oh Jesus," I say.

The chair rolls her eyes. I roll my eyes.

I go into class a few minutes later and--surprise, surprise--everyone who's present loves the essay. They love it so much we get carried away discussing it and before we know it, we've got to leave for the day because there's another class coming in and they're waiting in the hall.

Two people had been suspiciously absent from class, and--sure enough--when I check my e-mail there are two e-mails from them. They tell me how appalled and disgusted they are. They tell me they can't believe I'd post such trash. They tell me they're shocked at what this college is teaching. They don't believe such work is necessary in a creative writing classroom. They tell me they are dropping my class. This isn't a slam against you as a person, one of the e-mails says. Just so you know.

I roll my eyes some more. I roll my eyes a lot. But then I decide to leave it be because I don't teach on Fridays (which means I'm free for the weekend!) and I've got four days off coming up (hello, Labor Day!) and tomorrow afternoon I am sitting on the back porch with Emily and a pitcher of these babies, and that's all that really matters right now.

Lovely. LOVELY. LOVELY! LOVELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2010-08-31T21:11:00.003-04:00

Just as the first meeting of one of my creative writing classes was breaking up today, one of my male students approached me. He clutched a notebook in his hands.

"Uhm, hey," he said.

"Hi," I said.

"You like the word lovely," he said.

I examined him. He was skinny in strange places. He looked like a bird. He looked like he was about to peck my eyes out. "It's a nice word," I said.

"You said it a lot today," he said.

It was true. I had. I really, really, really like the word lovely, and sometimes--especially on first days--you just get into this zone and words sit in your teacher voice and get real comfortable in there, and they hang around and show off a little more than they normally would. In addition to lovely, I also used the word scoot and peek more than I wanted to. I think it has something to do with not using Teacher Voice for four months, and during the first week back Teacher Voice gets coupled with the part of my brain that is completely pleased to have eighteen people who are forced to sit in a room and listen to what I have to say about things. This is intoxicating after having four months of silence where I taught nothing and no one, unless you count The Lady-Killer and how to use the Downey ball.

So I nodded at the kid. "Yes," I said. "I love that word."

"Well, I hate it," he said.

I stared at him. "All right."

"I mean, I really hate it. Every time you said it I flinched."

I looked around. I wanted to see if anyone else was listening to this. I wanted to make desperate help me! eyes at someone I trusted. I tried to will one of my students from last semester, who had made the decision to go another round with me, to turn and look at me and give me a look like, "Oh sister, that one is completely bat-shit crazy. I'm so sorry."

But no one would turn around.

"That's pretty rough," I told him.

Then he turned his notebook toward me. He jabbed at it with his too-skinny finger.

The words at the top of the page said TIMES SAID LOVELY. Beneath it, there were three little ticks of the pen.

"Oh," I said.

"I'm going to keep track of this," he said. He was very serious. He nodded. "I'm going to keep track ALL SEMESTER LONG. And then I'm going to tell you how many times you said LOVELY."

Oh, I wished someone was listening! I wanted one of my former students to follow me back to my office and giggle in the corner with me. Maybe what I was really wishing for was Christine, who, last year, always followed me back to my office, and spent the next two hours giggling in the corner with me.

But no one was listening, and Christine was all moved on and preparing to go off to her fancy $40,000 a year college, so I had to go it alone. So I tried to squelch the laugh I felt brimming at the back of my throat. I made my face very serious.

"Well," I said, "I guess I'm going to have mind my Ps and Qs with you then."

And then he nodded and disappeared out the door and into the hallway, where he was swept away by a tide of students who were rushing for the door, ready to escape the semester that was less than forty-eight hours old.

Life As I Know It Is Now Over

2010-08-29T22:42:00.004-04:00

Friends, the semester starts tomorrow morning. For the last four months, my life has consisted of the following things: sleep, kissing, food, a lot of driving, vodka, and more sleep. Starting tomorrow morning, my life will consist of the following things: department meetings, committee meetings, syllabi, dry erase markers, and papers.

That second list is a lot less cool.

But to celebrate the fact that a.) I got everything done before the start of the semester... even though I slacked off for all of May, June, July, and August; and b.) it's been a hell of a time, let's review some of my favorite pictures of the summer!

I got an iMac. iMacs come with built-in cameras, and we made use of that camera often. See also:

We're fancy.

We're cartoon-y.

We're on the moon!

Also this summer, there was a Pink Torpedo bachelorette party to deal with! And deal with it we did.

See? We dealt with it with penis. Pink penis.

And also some chocolate penis.

And then there was the Great Pink Torpedo Wedding of 2010. Remember? There was puking!

But more important (and less disgusting) than the puking, there was the bride and the groom (and that gorgeous headpiece).

There was also some magnificent ROCKING OUT.

And then there was the trip to the Midwest, which was unlike my other post-grad school trips to the Midwest in that its main purpose was not to be inebriated for five days in a row. Its purpose was to spend every available moment cuddling babies, like this one. He's a Wisconsinite. He belongs to two of my favorite people in the universe. He and I are best friends.

And here's the other baby. It might be true that she and I are not yet best friends--I brought her a tutu to, you know, selfishly buy her love--but she wasn't having it. Someday, though, she'll realize I'm uniquely handy--like when she's pining away after some blond football star who doesn't know she exists. Madelyn, your mother isn't going to want to talk about that stuff with you. But let me break out the reams of rhyming poetry I wrote about that situation in sixth grade, and if you're good I might give you half a glass of wine while we bond. Promise.

What I learned about babies: They can wear robes!

This picture was taken outside Lorrie Moore's office (!!!!) at UW Madison. It was a big moment for me. Also, just so we're clear: That sign totally says EROTIC POETRY.

My summer was filled with babies: newborns and not-yet-borns. I did hours of art therapy with the not-yet-born and his mother.

I think it's quite clear that this was an excellent summer, and I'm sad to leave it behind, but--as always--I'm happy too. There's just something about first days, about the hope that comes along with them.

I'm ready.

All right, I won't lie. I'm not ready. But bring it on anyway.

In the Closet

2010-08-23T22:45:00.004-04:00

It was all very Sex and the City in my apartment on Saturday morning. I was cleaning out my closet, shoving things this way and that, and trying to find room that really wasn't there. There was good reason for this: I was trying to find a small corner of space for The Lady-Killer's clothes, which were belching out of a series of suitcases and backpacks on my bedroom floor.

And here's the interesting part: I wasn't annoyed by the pile of clothes. I wasn't distressed or antsy or whipped into a frenzy by some Virgo desire to seize those clothes and fold them--every last one--into a tight square of fabric. His clothes have been in a corner of my room for a few months now, and I've simply cleaned and vacuumed around them. TLK has a streak of OCD--he seriously loves seeing things arranged in crisp right angles--and he is, as a general rule, tidy. His clothes are contained and never spread about. There is never a trail of his socks and underwear, his jeans, his t-shirts, strewn about the apartment. He does not shed things as he comes through the door at night. Instead, he goes into my bedroom and removes his clothes, leaves them in a neat little pile under one of the windows.

So I wasn't moved to find closet space for him because his clothes were driving me crazy or cramping my style; instead, I was trying to find him closet space because I felt sort of bad for him, the boy who's been living out of suitcases and backpacks since May.

In the beginning, TLK was careful and unobtrusive about his things. When he came over, he usually had a single small backpack, which he would take into my office and store there, between my floor lamp and the giant box of batting Abbey likes to sleep in. I don't know if he knew he had to be gentle with me, that he had to ease me into the idea of an increased intimacy or what, but TLK did it just right. Eventually, the backpack migrated from the office into my bedroom, and now, after two weeks of his housesitting, the backpack has multiplied to several and a suitcase. For three months, TLK has been a perpetual sleepover guest. And on Saturday I felt like it was time to give him a little room of his own.

After all, I'd already suffered the shock of opening my medicine cabinet on my return to Maine and seeing the empty space I'd left filled with his things: deodorant, contacts, saline solution, packets of Vitamin D for his new tattoos.

Because the cabinet was full of those things, there was no room for my makeup bag, my brush, my lotions, my perfume. And for a second I panicked. Where would my things go? I was just one girl, and I had lived in this apartment for a year and a half, and it was already pushing capacity in a way that has me storing my vacuum in my bedroom closet, and it's such a tight fit that you can hear its handle scrape the door every time you open or shut it.

But then I took a deep breath and realized I was insane, that there was plenty of room, that I just needed to get creative. And I did, and it only took all of fifteen minutes of rearranging. So I figured I could extend the creativity to the closet, which, yes, was more difficult, but we got it done. TLK managed to line up a few piles of pants, shirts, and socks on one of my shelves.

And when we were done I felt pretty good. I felt pretty accomplished. It seemed like a big deal because, as should be pretty evident by now, I am completely insane and have unreasonable expectations about pretty much everything, including how things need to go and be in my apartment.

It's a miracle anyone even wants to spend time here.

And later, when I called Amy, I told her when I stepped back and surveyed the finished work, I had a few Sex and the City flashbacks, that I was thinking of that episode where Big gives Carrie the pink brush head to his toothbrush. Carrie, of course, thought it was a big deal. That pink toothbrush must mean something! It must be a demonstration of his feelings for her (it wasn't) or a promise of things to come (negative) or a declaration of his intent to change (forget it). It was just a tooth brush head he wasn't using.

But this felt more important than all that. It seemed like something more. That I wasn't panicking, that I wasn't spiraling into a frightened corner of my mind was a testament to something--whether it was him or me or the two of us together. Something is different in me these days--there's less insanity, less struggle for control and perfection, less need to have everything in my life be perfectly planned and considered--and it's liberating.

We don't really "live together" right now, but the arrangement is pretty close. And when I used to think about how it would be to live with a boy, I thought it would be terrifying. Frightening. Horrible. Awful. I thought I'd hate it, that I wouldn't really be capable of it, that I'd fail, that I'd drive the boy crazy. But here's what I know right now: This weekend I cleared out a section of my closet for all the right reasons--not because I was getting frustrated by his things but because I wanted him to feel like he was valued, that he was someone who didn't need to constantly run a backpack of clothes between his house and mine. And I'm not terrified, frightened, or horrified. I'm just here, and he is too.

The Cat Whisperer

2010-08-21T13:01:00.003-04:00

"Watch this," The Lady Killer said to me the day I got home to Maine from The Everyone I Went to Grad School with Had a Baby Summer Tour of 2010.

He bent and scooped up Abbey. He held her close. He nuzzled her under his chin. He kissed her head once, twice, three times.

Abbey didn't make a single sound. She didn't growl, cry, or fuss. She simply submitted to his love. She even leaned into him.

"Holy shit," I said.

"I know!" he said.

Weeks before, their relationship was a bit more complicated: Abbey would give him a single minute's worth of affection, and then, just as he was getting into petting her, she would step back and snarl and hiss. She would bite him. She was saying, "Hey, Motherfucker. Back the fuck off."

This wasn't out of the ordinary, really. Abbey used to be a really sweet, really cuddly and kind cat--back when she was little. I have pictures of everyone holding her. My brother, my mother, the Possibly-Gay-Black-Belt, my mother's boyfriend, my father. She accepted love at every turn.

But then something happened.

It's impossible to know exactly when or why. This cat has never suffered any trauma. She simply was born, lived at my uncle's house with her mother until she was old enough to leave, and then she went with me to Maine, where she spent her kitten days doing everything a kitten loves: destroying things. My curtains. My bedspread. My office chair. A couple purses. A table cloth. My sleep schedule.

But even though I was frustrated by her kitten ways, and even though she was as bad as a newborn child, and even though whenever I turned my back she launched at the curtains and clawed her way up them until she was too high to get down--which meant she cried and cried and cried until I came back in the room and had to remove her claws one by one until she was no longer stuck to the curtains--I loved that cat more than anything. My love for her was obscene (I got excited on the drive home from school because I knew I was on my way home to her) and embarrassing (she has a Facebook fan page). When she had a bad reaction to her first round of shots, I cancelled a much-needed post-move massage and stayed in bed with her all day.

She has known nothing but love. But she knew it from me. We were, after all, mostly alone. For a long time, I didn't have many visitors to my apartment here in Maine. That's not true anymore--Abbey's got lots of people around her these days--but maybe she got a little strange, a little finicky, a little bitchy because of that. Maybe her aggression and bad attitude was her protecting me. Who knows? But I am certain of this: She hated everyone but me.

And Abbey did not make an exception to this rule for The Lady Killer. He could get down on his knees and stare soulfully into her eyes--he could roll out the glow he shines on for old waitresses and cute check-out girls--and he could say, "Abigail, all I want to do is love you!" and she would still hiss at him. And then he'd turn to me and say, "Dude, your cat is a BITCH."

And it was true. Until what I'll call The Miracle.

The Miracle started poorly, like so:

It was the day TLK and I were leaving for New York, to the Great Pink Torpedo Wedding of 2010, and the car was packed. All the suitcases and laptops and shoes and food was loaded up for the nine hour drive. All we had left to do was put Abbey in her carrier and take her down to the car.

Abbey has never really been a fan of her carrier, but I can always get her into it. When she was a kitten, it was simple. I just chucked an earplug into the carrier, and she skittered after it. Or, alternatively, I'd place a pile of treats in the back of the carrier and tell her to go at it. She wised up to that tactic pretty quick, though. Now when I try the food trick, she attempts to break into the carrier from the other end so she can steal the treats and go on her merry way without ever stepping foot into it. The last time I got her into the carrier--for the June trip to New York--I had to use a massive spoonful of Reddi-Whip to coax her inside, and she still put up quite the fuss.

But this time, she was having none of it. Reddi-Whip wouldn't do it. Treats or toys wouldn't do it. I even tried a bowl of heavy cream. She simply looked up at me with eyes that said, "Mama, do you think I'm an idiot?"

Thus began the struggle. I tried to place her in the carrier, but Abbey suddenly morphed into a flailing toddler and found a way to block the entrance to her carrier with a tangle of limbs. Nothing I could do could hold her down or fold her limbs under her so she slid inside. She cried.

I won't lie: I cried too. I imagine I was feeling a little something like what mothers feel when they have to send their babies off to daycare or school and the kids just don't want to go and they scream and cry until their voices are raw. I wanted to tell my cat I was just kidding, that we didn't have to go anywhere, and that we could spend the rest of the day in bed watching all the best episodes of The West Wing. But that wasn't true. We couldn't. We needed to get our asses in gear.

So then I had TLK hold the carrier and I tried to drop her down into it in one slick motion, but once again she turned into a wild, clawing thing. She sliced my pinkie open and TLK had to perform emergency first aid to stop the bleeding. And by that time it was clear: She was not getting in the carrier. She was crying. I was crying. TLK was trying to tell me it was okay, it would be fine, he could take care of her when he flew back to Maine after the wedding.

He'd be back in five days. The longest I'd ever left her with her extended feeders was four days, while I was in Washington. And when I came back from that trip, the cat vaulted at me and climbed up my leg and wouldn't let me go for two entire days. What would she be like after five days?

But there was no choice. We needed to get on the road, and we couldn't get the cat into the carrier, so I loaded up the feeders and we headed off to New York.

And while I was in Wisconsin and Minnesota, I got sporadic cat updates, but none of them were glowing. Abbey was mostly ignoring TLK. She was sleeping on top of the fridge and hissing whenever he came near her. If his friends came over, she was similarly unpleasant. But then, a few days before I came home, there was a shift. By the time I arrived back in Maine, Abbey was feeling more loving toward TLK, and she was following him around, letting him pet her, pick her up, kiss her. "Come here, kitten!" he'd call, and she'd come over and rub up on his leg. It was miraculous.

The good attitude has even applied to people beyond TLK and me. When TLK's best friend came over the other night, he called us into the living room and whispered, "I have been petting this cat for five minutes, and she hasn't hissed once!"

It was so clear: TLK cat-whispered Abbey into good behavior.

Then, this morning, the crowning glory: TLK came back home after an early meeting, and I was still in bed. Abbey had been under the covers with me, but she'd leapt out when she heard her boyfriend come through the door. She trotted out to meet him, and when he climbed under the covers with me, Abbey hopped up on the bed. It was the first time she'd even dared to step on the bed when he was in it with me.

We both held our breath. And then Abbey draped herself over his legs and snuggled in to sleep with us.

"Oh my God," I whispered. "My heart is full to bursting." And it wasn't an exaggeration.

One of These People Puked in the Bushes Outside a Wedding Reception (Hint: It Wasn't Me)

2010-08-02T10:32:00.007-04:00

Hey! I'm home for the next big Pink Torpedo weekend, which took place this weekend. I brought The Lady-Killer home with me for the event, and when he wasn't busy using my father's label maker to print off such gems as BUTT MUNCH and SHIT ASS and I HEART WIENER, he got to meet my friends and family. He also got to vomit up an open bar rainbow of wine, champagne, espresso vodka, Sex-on-the-Beach, and rum-and-coke. This was after I gave my brother, who was picking us up from the wedding, a no-puke guarantee.

I never thought I'd say this, but cleaning vomit out of a car in high heels and a strapless dress at 1:00 AM is a pretty interesting way to end an evening. Especially after peeling a boy who is murmuring, "Baby, I'm so sorry! I love you! You know I love you, right? I love you! I puked in my crotch!" out of his clothes and putting him in the shower, then to bed.

But you know what? It doesn't matter. Both of us--the late-night puke-cleaner and the passed-out vomitter--looked pretty good when the night started.

Names for Girls

2010-07-25T11:02:00.002-04:00

I've said it before: Everyone I know is having babies. Seriously. It suddenly seems like every girl I know is in some stage of motherhood, and they're either thinking about names, narrowing down names, or settling on names as we speak.

Because of this, I've gotten a little swept up. I've thought about all the lovely things you could name a girl so that she has a song--because we all know how much I crave having a good song for my name--so that, someday, somewhere, a boy (or a girl--hey, whatever) will write those lyrics in some sweet note that'll get passed to the beloved during study hall.

Here are some of the songs that are on my list, if ever I decide I want to have children (and then get a girl):

"Caroline" by Old Crow Medicine Show

"You were born in St. Clair's Hospital, but I say you were born up in the sky..." Oh, hello. Tell me you wouldn't like those lyrics in a song about you.

"Helen" by Nizlopi

I've loved this song for a long time, but I like it even more now that I'm dating The Lady-Killer. Part of the song--"You sent me singing through the woods last night. You sent me singing. I'm a happy, singing boy because of you"--reminds me of him, about the first night we kissed. I went to see him at work. I did not go thinking I would kiss him, but, well, what can I say? There was a little bit of a moment, and we kissed. He had to go back inside almost immediately--his break was up--so we said goodbye, and while I was buckling my belt, he made his way around to the front of my car, put his hands on my hood to get my attention, and then he pointed back up to his face--which was smiling--with both index fingers.

"Grin!" he said.

I think the Nizlopi song captures a moment like that pretty well. (Good for you, Helen. Good for you.)

"Jolene" by Ray Lamontagne

I couldn't love this lyric any more than I do: "A man needs something he can hold on to: A nine pound hammer or a girl like you."

"Hannah" by Ray Lamontagne

Speaking of Ray Lamontagne, here's another good, good song. "All my wounds turned to gold when I kissed your hair..." Oh yes.

"Jolene" by Cory Branan

Dude, Jolenes have all the luck! Do you know how many songs about Jolenes there are? I especially like this one--probably because I like everything Cory Branan does. Do you hear his voice? Doesn't that voice sound like it belongs to a man you'd like to drink several thousand beers with?

"Kathleen" by Josh Ritter

This isn't the first time I've mentioned this song. In fact, I talk about this song all the time. I make everyone listen to this song, and then I talk about how much I love it, and then I give lectures on my favorite lyrics (1. The first line; 2. This part: "I know you are waiting, and I know that it is not for me. But I'm here, and I'm ready, and I've saved you the passenger seat. And I won't be your last dance, just your last goodnight. Every heart is a package tangled up in knots someone else tied...").

Other people have even gotten in on the supporting of my "Kathleen" habit: This is my ringtone on Christine's phone.

This disturbs TLK a little bit, as his mother's name is Kathleen, but that didn't stop him from trying to quote this song to me one night. He looked over at me, pushed hair back from my face, and said, "You're the North Star." It was close. The lyric he was going for was this: "All the girls here are stars; you are the Northern Lights." But I didn't mind the change. I didn't mind being compared to the star that guides people home, takes people to exactly where they need to be.

"Goodnight Rose" by Ryan Adams

I could write an entire thesis on how much I love Ryan Adams, how he got me through all kinds of ugly stuff with the Wily Republican during grad school, but this song came later, after all of that, when I was already living in Maine. There's just something so hopeful about it.

~~~

I've got more, of course--tons!--but that's a start. Each of those songs makes me a little jealous but a little encouraged, too--like maybe someday one of those guys will meet and fall in love with a girl named Jessica and just like that, I'll finally have a song.

The Inspiration

2010-07-21T22:48:00.007-04:00

The Lady-Killer brought over a Netflix copy of Wayne's World tonight, and we watched it while eating far too many S'Mores brownies.

When it came time for the part in the movie where Wayne lays eyes on Cassandra for the first time--you know, when "Dream Weaver" plays--I looked over and said, "So, is that what happens whenever you look at me? Does 'Dream Weaver' start playing?"

TLK shook his head. "No," he said. "Not that song. What's in my head is--" And here he switched to singing. "--You're the meaning in my life... You're the inspiration!"

That boy was singing me this:

It was like an eighth grade dance all over again.

King of the Nuggs

2010-07-16T18:46:00.004-04:00

World, meet The Lady-Killer, who has a bad addiction to Burger King chicken nuggets, Arizona iced tea, and Monster energy drinks.

If you couldn't tell, he also likes to pose for ridiculous (read: fantastic) pictures. See?

Just the other day, on our way to the beach--you know, the time we almost died--he was craving McDonald's, so we did the drive-thru and he promptly set about eating his two McChickens and fries. TLK does not like to mix food groups. He eats all of one thing then moves on to the next thing. He started with the fries. He'd made me ask for extra ketchup--"I don't think that's enough," I had to tell the man at the drive-thru window when he dropped a few into the bag. "This guy REALLY likes his ketchup."--and he started with the fries. Instead of creating a ketchup puddle and dunking his fries into it, he opted instead to take this approach: He ripped open a tiny packet of ketchup and squeezed a gob into his mouth before jamming some fries in there.

This is also the boy who, as I was getting ready in the bathroom the other day, trudged by murmuring, "I'm fancy. I have fancy pants!"

Why? I have no idea.

So if you're wondering if I feel pretty lucky about the summer I'm having and about all the giggling I'm doing, the answer is yes.

If You're Keeping Track, This Is Near Death Experience #2

2010-07-14T16:03:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I got up and checked the weather. I'd been craving beach--ocean beach--since I got back to Maine, and I was bound and determined to go. The weather report for Phippsburg, Maine--home to Popham Beach, one of my favorite places in the world--was simple. It said the highs would be in the 80s and there might be some fog. The tide was high at 1:00, and the tide would be at its lowest around dinner time.

Perfect.

We got to the beach at 3:00, when the tide was still receding. It had shrank back enough to unearth the craggy island that it swallows at high tide, and lots of people were out exploring the tide pools that had been left behind. So we set up our blanket, stripped down, and headed off.

The water was freezing. The water is always freezing. But it didn't matter because the weather was warm, and I was happy to be at the ocean, and The Lady-Killer was happy to be exploring the caves and fissures between the rocks.

"I'm Maine's answer to Steve Irwin!" he said after he had words with a seagull, chased a crab, and dug through the tide pools to snatch up a translucent (and tiny) crab skeleton that had been molted away.

When we'd walked out to the island, when we'd started our exploring, the weather had been clear enough. There'd been fog and mist, sure, but it hadn't been anything alarming. But over that hour and a half we were on the island, the fog really rolled in. Before I knew it, I was turning to look back at the beach and it wasn't there. I couldn't see a quarter mile into the distance.

This was no big deal. I knew the situation with the tides. It wasn't like we needed to worry about getting off the island and back to shore before high tide washed in; it had just been high tide. There were plenty of people around--tourists with cameras, fishermen casting off the rocks, children splashing through the coves--and everything was normal.

But eventually I got hungry, I got thinking about the peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches I had in my backpack, I got to thinking about that bag of Doritos I had, and TLK had explored himself right out, so we climbed down off the island and started back.

We were leisurely about it. TLK did a few brave dives into the waves as they peeled off the sandbars, and he came out shivering every time. But it was getting hard to see him each time he went running out into the water. It was getting hard to see anything.

I've been to Popham Beach about a bajillion times in my life, and I'm familiar with its layout. It's an interesting beach because it's cut in two by run-off from a river that gives the water, when it comes in, some interesting tug and tow, which makes it good for surfers. This pattern makes it a little more tricky than a standard straight-shot coastal beach. It also makes for some interesting mini sand spits--tiny little islands, really--when the water is coming and going. On a sunny day, all of that is as plain as day, and you can make your way to and from the island without so much as getting wet.

But when TLK and I were heading back, I started to get nervous. I was sure we were on the stretch of sand that led back to the beach, but as we walked through the thick fog--and by this point we couldn't see ten feet in front of us--I could see the land shrinking, narrowing.

"I don't get it," I said. "The tide's not supposed to be coming in. It's supposed to be going out. This doesn't make any sense."

And then suddenly there was no more beach, and we were standing ankle-deep in the freezing water.

"Baby," I said. "Baby, seriously. What's going on?"

"I don't know," he said. "It's okay. It probably comes back up there. Let's just keep walking a little bit."

I nodded and took his hand, but already there were bad things kicking around my head. I had a really awful feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something was not right.

Soon, we were up to our knees. I could feel the hungry lick of the current under the water, and I began to panic.

"I'm scared," I said. It was the first time I'd said it aloud, but I'd been feeling that for minutes now. "I'm really, really scared."

"No," TLK said. "No, it's okay. Don't be scared. It'll be fine. I mean, there are a ton of people back behind us. We can just walk back that way."

That didn't make me feel any better. I imagined the other people back on the island still exploring, still taking their pictures as the water rolled over the sand between us. We would be stuck. We would be trapped. And there was no way anyone could see that we were trapped.

Or, if not that, then this: We would walk back to the island, yes, and we would find everyone gone--or suddenly surprised at the turn of events, at the water that was filling in and cutting us off from the mainland, which we couldn't see, couldn't even begin to imagine anymore--and we would all climb to the very top, the very tip, which was the only part of the island that didn't get swallowed by the ocean during high tide.

Or if not that, then this: We would walk back to the island and it would be just me and TLK, and we would sit there, waiting to be rescued, waiting for the Coast Guard's chopper when the lifeguards were closing up shop and found an unclaimed beach setup. There we would be--clutching each other in the dark, in the cold, in the mist from the waves that slapped around us--and our teeth would be chattering, and we would be freezing, we would be dying, and they wouldn't get to us in time, and then for years we would become the cautionary tale every Maine mother told her children when she sent them off to the beach with friends.

Or if not that, then this: We would decide that we couldn't be too far off coast and that we could swim it. I'm not a very strong swimmer--Amy once had to save me when I choked on a wave and then, predictably, started drowning on a choppy day at Long Point, and I haven't been confident in my abilities since--and so I could see TLK having to calm me down, drag me along, pull me like a lifeguard pulling a child from the deep end. I would be too scared to help, and I would panic, and I would make us drown.

I was certain of one of those outcomes. It was going to happen. We were done for. We were toast.

So we turned around, and I held the TLK's hand tighter than I've ever held it, and I thought about his mother and how much she was going to hate me for killing her son.

TLK was very quiet. I was very quiet. We walked back to where the sand started and widened, where he'd been diving into the waves. We walked and walked and walked. We couldn't see anything. We couldn't hear anything.

But then, coming through the curtain of fog, was a woman and her son.

I was near tears, and I leaned into TLK. I wondered if she and her son were doomed, just like us. "Do you think I should ask her?" I said. "Maybe there's another way back to the beach."

And then I was turning to her, excusing myself, asking her if she knew how to get back to the beach. Then, delicately--because I didn't want to alarm her, her son--I said, "We thought we were headed back there, but when we got up ahead everything's flooded in."

She smiled. Oh, that smile! It was heaven! It was salvation! She wasn't going to smile at me if she was suddenly realizing that she and her son--and the two people standing in front of her, hands linked so tight their fingers were turning white--were minutes from certain death.

"Oh yes," she said. She turned and pointed into the fog behind her. "Keep going back this way," she said. "Eventually, you'll see a ribbon of sand to your right. That'll take you back to the beach. Right now you're on a little peninsula that extends out from it."

And she was right. Maybe twenty feet away from us, there was a meandering sand path back to the beach, which we had missed when TLK was going in-out-in-out of the water and I was laughing at the way he ran into it--wide-armed, spastically. When we cleared the thick hang of fog and could finally see our stuff, we walked to it quickly, collapsed on it. I had never been happier to see my beach bag.

We stayed that way--face down, shivering--on the blanket for a long time. We didn't even move to eat our sandwiches; we simply raised our heads enough to get them into our mouths. It's just that we were so happy to feel dry earth, to know we weren't about to be swallowed up by the sea, swallowed up by the call of the lighthouse fog horn, the last lonely sound we'd hear before we let the undertow take us.

My Own Little Boom Boom Pow

2010-07-08T16:00:00.005-04:00

Last night I almost died.

At 10:05 PM I was sitting on the shore of one of Maine's many charming ponds--The Lady-Killer and I were spending time with his cousins at his family's camp--and the boys (TLK, two cousins, and his younger brother, who, for the majority of the day, spoke in the Old Gregg voice) were setting up fireworks the cousins had smuggled in from Massachusetts.

It had been a long day. I'd ridden on top of TLK's lap in a kayak made for one. I'd been chucked off a water trampoline with such vigor that my bathing suit readjusted itself inappropriately. I'd spent the rest of the time watching the water trampoline action from the safety of two noodles I propped under my head and feet so I could float in the 80 degree water without fear of exposing myself to wholesome New England boys. I'd played a rousing game of Uno that went on for over an hour, in which the boys shouted, "I fucking hate you, you motherfucker!" whenever someone used a draw four card or skip card on them. I'd been serenaded by these same boys as they, during quiet Uno moments, rapped, in unison and a capella, songs that talked about living large, spending money, loving pretty but sexually promiscuous women, and driving fast cars. I'd giggled and giggled and giggled when the four of them chanted, "I like it when you call me Big Poppa! Throw your hands in the air if you's a true player!"

But by 10:05 PM, I was ready to go home. I was feeling a little punchy, and--I won't lie--fireworks make me nervous. Once, when I was young, my father and uncle set off fireworks behind my uncle's house on the Fourth of July, and one of the fireworks had gone off wonky, had shot off into the woods, and my father and uncle took off sprinting and the women and children stood on the porch wondering if this was it, if the boys were going to burn the whole woods down with this stunt. And if there's anything I'm a pro at, it's worrying--and I had that skill down even as a child. I went to bed that night thinking there was a possibility that the firework was still sizzling underneath a pile of dry leaves, sparking and spitting and waiting to take the woods out with one hot breath.

This old fear was not helped last night by the fact that the boys handling the fireworks are not old enough to rent a car. It was not helped by the fact that boys took any chance they could find to toss firecrackers or spinning sunflowers at each other so that they exploded at their feet--or, in one case, on someone's back. It was not helped by the fact that when this happened, the boys would scream, "OUCH, YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKER!" and then they would laugh and say, "THAT WAS EPIC! THAT WAS AWESOME!"

From 9:00 to 10:30, I was ten seconds away from standing up, putting on Teacher Voice, and telling those boys to PUT THOSE FIREWORKS AWAY AND SIT DOWN AND BE STILL BEFORE SOMEONE LOSES A FINGER, FOR GOD'S SWEET SAKE.

I relaxed a little bit after the first few rounds of bigger fireworks, because those couldn't be thrown at people and because the boys had towed in a small barge that floated just off shore, and that's where they shot the impressive fireworks off from. After a few fountains, I realized the boys at least knew which way the fireworks needed to be pointed and that no one had burned an appendage off yet, so I took a few pictures. I ooohed and ahhhed.

But then one of TLK's cousins picked up a spent firework and placed it in the bonfire that was built mere feet from the bench where I was sitting. My whole body froze. I looked at the boy, looked at the other boys. I waited for someone to shout at the cousin, to tell him to stop being a fucking motherfucker, that you shouldn't put fireworks--spent or not--in a fire.

In that moment, I felt a transcendentally-projected version of my father sitting next to me on the bench. He put his arm around me, sighed, shook his head. "That," he said, "is not a smart idea."

"Oh Jesus," I murmured.

"That might not be a good idea," one of the boys finally said.

"Oh, it's FINE," another said.

And then I watched the fire get loaded with the carcasses of Roman candles and cherry bombs and cakes. At first the boys were careful about at least settling the fireworks face-down in the fire, but after a while they got a little caught up in their excitement about the next one about to go off, and they'd just toss the cases and let them fall whatever way they pleased.

Which means, of course, that it was inevitable. Of course it was.

And at 10:05 PM, just as TLK's thirteen year-old cousin settled next to me on the bench, one of the bigger fireworks erupted, and a lick of fire exploded out from the middle, headed right for the bench. All I saw was green flame, and I took off. I don't think I've ever moved so fast in my life. I had no control over my body; it simply went. I could hear the explosions crackling behind me, and then, after I turned when I thought I was a safe distance away, more came belching out from the fire, so I launched behind a beached kayak.

When TLK found me, after he and his cousins put out the towel and chair that had caught fire--"DUDE!" the thirteen year-old yelled. "THAT WAS MY FUCKING TOWEL, ASSHOLES!"--I was quivering and sitting on top of the kayak. I was holding everything I'd come with.

"You okay?" TLK asked. He petted the top of my head.

I was in the throes of a nervous breakdown because those boys were laughing and starting to set up the next round of fireworks.

"No," I said.

"Are you having an anxiety attack?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"I almost threw myself on you to save you," he said.

"ALMOST?"

"Well, you were out of there so fast I wouldn't have caught you," he said. He poked the bag I was cradling in my arms, the towel I had wrapped around my shoulders. "And look," he said. "You grabbed all your stuff when you ran."

I frowned.

"Want to go home?" he asked.

I didn't say anything. I just stared at him.

And that's when his cousin threw a firecracker at his feet, and it exploded inches from me.

Needless to say, we were hiking our way back to my car real quick after that. And later, while we were standing in the middle of a gas station mini-mart and trying to decide what to get to eat and drink, I felt very lucky, very grateful for the Mountain Dew, the Mike and Ikes, the Junior Mints we would buy and eat, and how much better they tasted than whatever they would've served up in the hospital, had I been transported there to recover from third degree burns. Right then and there, the melty taste of mint on my tongue was heaven.

Let Me Catch You Up

2010-07-06T11:50:00.004-04:00

(1.)

I'm back in Maine.

(2.)

I just realized--just this second, this very instant!--that I have two long black hairs growing out of a mole on the side of my face.

(3.)

Josh has a new website. He's going to write funny things. He's going to make important observations. He's going to grossly misunderstand the plot of The Notebook and make all womankind roll their eyes at him.

(4.)

I have recently come into the knowledge that my boyfriend--AKA: The Lady-Killer, or, if you are Diana Joseph, Mr. Deeds--loves olive loaf as much as I do. There was a long line at the deli when we were out shopping last week, and I scuffled over to get some prepackaged lunch meat so we could avoid loafing in front of the deli case for fifteen minutes.

"What do you like for sandwiches?" I asked TLK. "Bologna? Roast beef? Turkey?"

TLK's face turned dreamy, and he stared off into the distance. "You know what I love?" he asked.

"What?"

"That lunchmeat... the one that's stuffed with..."

"OLIVES?" I said.

His attention focused back on me. "YES!" he said.

And then we jogged back to the deli for our olive loaf.

Clearly, it was fated that we get together.

(5.)

Because I am dating a boy who is younger than I am and not from my discipline--a discipline where boys wander around muttering words like pedagogy, discourse, and chapbook--certain words have begun creeping their way into my vocabulary. Words like DUDE! and EPIC! and SICK!

I've also begun to yell "Ling-Ling!" at things because we've been watching an awful lot of Drawn Together.

(6.)

Lately, I don't even know who I am. Well, that's not true. I know who I am, but I wonder what person snuck into my room late at night and gave me a quickie lobotomy so that I no longer worry about having the dishes or vacuuming or dusting done every few days.

If given the choice between getting up and cleaning the living room or, say, lounging in bed until 2:00 PM ("I'm surprised you haven't developed bed sores," Christine told me this week), I choose the latter.

It's liberating. It's heaven.

This is a good summer.

I'm Betting The Family Pack of Condoms Is in This Box

2010-06-24T11:28:00.005-04:00

My brother is the only twenty-three year-old guy I know who would label his moving boxes like this:

I can only imagine the multitudes of disgusting things in that box. You can bet I won't be touching it.

Living in Sin

2010-06-18T16:18:00.005-04:00

World, my brother is moving out of my mother's house.

He is moving out of the tiny room he shares with the Possibly Gay Black Belt, who gets the top bunk while Adam gets the bottom in a room decorated with an empty tank from the Myrtle the Turtle debacle, a million sample bottles of cologne, wax imprints of his and his girlfriend's hands, and posters of porn stars.

To be leaving this pleases my brother. He and his girlfriend had spent some time investigating apartment complexes around Western New York, and finally they found one they liked, which is three minutes down the road from my mother's place. Bonus: It has a pool. Bonus: It's close to work. Super Bonus: They don't have to put up with my mother's boyfriend, who's lately been on their nerves.

A month back, my brother had come home one night with a hankering for chicken wings. So he went at in the kitchen. He fried up some wings, tossed them with some sauce, poured a giant cup of bleu cheese, and dumped those things in his mouth. He had to do this quickly because he had a party to get to. And because he had a party to get to, he didn't have time to clean up the kitchen. And the rule in the house that belongs to my mother and her boyfriend is this: If you're making your own dinner, you're cleaning up your own mess.

And for the most part, my brother abides by the rule. But he was short on time that night, so he dashed off a note. It said, GROSS CHICKEN JUICE. DO NOT TOUCH. ADAM WILL CLEAN IN MORNING. THANKS! And off he went.

When he and his girlfriend arrived home later that night--in the middle of the night--they found that my mother's boyfriend had stacked all the bowls and dishes--still slimy with gross chicken juice--onto his bed.

That was one of the last straws.

Now Adam can make chicken wings and leave the mess around until he is good and ready to clean it up. He's excited about that.

He's also excited about the following things: (1.) The fact that he and his girlfriend have made the executive decision to decorate their bathroom with an ocean/lighthouse/sea-shell theme; (2.) The fact that he and his girlfriend have made the executive decision to decorate their kitchen with a strawberry theme, complete with darling little strawberry curtains.

This is a big deal for everyone involved, considering Adam is rotten with money. He will spend it on all manners of inappropriate, ridiculous things--a fluffy woman's robe, for example--and he can't save to, well, save his life.

But the nice thing is this: He's got a stockpile coming his way. He's been paying rent at Mom's for a while now, but she's been sacking it away for him so that he will get it in a lump sum when he moves out. He doesn't know this. He's been under the assumption that my mother has been taking that money--money she just shouldn't be charging her son because it's so evil and wrong, and it's clearly indicative of her blackened soul!--and frittering it away on nonsense.

"Mom's such a bitch," he said to us this weekend as we worked our way through an enormous order of foot-longs and fresh-cut fries at The Arbor. "She's basically stealing all my money, you know. She's taking all my hard-earned cash and wasting it. As soon as she started charging me rent, she and her boyfriend started going out to the bars all the time on the weekends, and they'd get smashed. Smashed! With my money! She's using my money to get all liquored-up! Isn't that wrong?"

Boy, is he going to feel like an asshole when she hands him a few grand next weekend.

So much so that I am sad I won't be there to be able to see it. I've got my own little move happening that day. Come Saturday, me and the girls will be moving vodka and snacks, streamers and favors, and, of course, a giant penis cake into a suite downtown, where we'll begin a night of bachelorette fun.

So I'm going to be asking someone to take pictures. I just want to see my brother's face in that moment he realizes he's getting a huge wad of money that he will probably fritter away on nonsense, a huge wad of money he thought my mother was slurping up out of a beer stein at the skeezy South Buffalo bars they occasionally haunt. In that moment, he won't know what to do or say, and that, of course, is the biggest coup of all.

Soiled

2010-06-15T10:56:00.006-04:00

Sitting in the backseat of my father's car, on the way home from a day in Ontario, my brother leans to one side, lifts a cheek, and farts in the direction of his girlfriend.

She does not seem fazed.

I am in the front seat. I turn around and stare at him. "Adam!" I said. "Don't fart on your girlfriend! That's not nice!"

He farts again.

"You should be careful with that," I say. "You seem like you're pushing a little too much."

"He always does," his girlfriend says. "I'm always telling him 'Don't push! DO NOT PUSH!'"

"That's because I've pooped my pants three times in the last year," Adam says.

"What now?" my father says.

"Oh my God," I say.

"It's true," my brother says. He's delighted with the sudden turn in the conversation. Moments before he'd been sulking because he had gone off on an angry rant about some of his friends who were getting married, and the rest of us in the car had told him to shut the hell up, to stop getting so angry, to stop getting so worked up because he was going to have a heart attack. What bothered him the most was that we didn't agree with him, and he kept trying to make his point by raising his voice and repeating exactly what he'd already said.

"Okay, George Edward," my father said, invoking my grandfather's name. It's well known that my brother is my grandfather in lots of ways, both physical (looking at a picture of them at the same age is downright eerie) and emotional (neither can control their outrage, which they simmer in often).

"Yeah, George," I said. "Zip it back there. Enough out of you."

And then my brother really became our grandfather. He huffed and sighed and thrashed a little in the backseat, even when his girlfriend reached over to soothe him. He had himself a twenty second tantrum and then threw himself into the sulking. And this wasn't the first time. Half an hour earlier, he'd gone through the same cycle when he breathlessly transitioned from a lecture on how to make French onion soup into a lecture on gay men and how he's okay with gay men, how he's on their side, how he's in their corner--unless they're "gross about it"--and this, of course, prompted me and my father and Adam's girlfriend to tell him that was a bit homophobic and he better evaluate his attitude. Then he Georged us, yelled, huffed, thrashed, and sulked.

But now--now!--there is finally something on the table he's ready to talk about again, and that something is poop. He sits up a little straighter, squares his shoulders. "Want to hear how I did it?" he asks. "Want to hear how I pooped my pants three separate times this year?"

"No," I say.

"Yes," my father says.

"Okay." Adam cracks his knuckles. "So, the first time I was at work. I was closing up for the night, and I was sweeping the aisles, and I decided to let one go. I had really bad gas that day, and I needed to let some out. So I relaxed and just went for it. I blew out a really long, really loud fart. But at the end, there was a little surprise waiting for me."

"Oh my God," I say. "You pooped your pants at work!"

My father is laughing. He is bent over the steering wheel and laughing.

"One of the other times was just ridiculous," Adam's girlfriend says.

"How was it ridiculous?" Adam asks.

"You were standing three feet from the toilet when it happened!"

Adam grins. He laughs. "Oh," he says. "That time. Yeah." He pokes his girlfriend in the side. "I was in the bathroom getting ready for the day, and I was firing one off at her, but things got a little out of hand. I pooped my pants so bad there was no saving them."

"Good thing your mother doesn't do your laundry anymore," my father says.

Adam chuckles. "Oh yeah," he says. "That's true. She'd be finding little stink pickles all over the place."

"So was it anything like what you found in the bathroom today?" I ask.

It had been an eventful day in the public bathrooms in Port Dover. Early in the afternoon when my brother and father went in for a bathroom break, Adam came out real excited, real would up.

"You will NOT believe what I just saw in there!" he said.

My father started laughing. "Hush," he said. "Be quiet. Say it quietly. You don't know who it was."

"BE QUIET?!" my brother shouted. "BE QUIET?! DAD! SOME GUY SHIT HIS PANTS SO BAD HE HAD TO LEAVE THEM BEHIND IN THE STALL! THAT'S F-ING HILARIOUS!"

"What?!" I said.

"You're kidding!" Adam's girlfriend said.

"No," he said. He pointed back at the door. "Some guy shit himself so bad, it was everywhere. EVERYWHERE. And his jeans were there, wadded up on the floor of the stall. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine pooping your pants that bad and abandoning ship?"

Of course, that wasn't the end of the story. Hours later, after we'd finished our buttery perch dinners at a picnic table on the beach, my brother went back to the bathroom. When he came out again, he was shaking his head.

"Jesus," I said. "Now what?"

He made a face. "Someone put his hands in the shit," he said, "and spread it all over the walls in there."

But now, my brother is telling his own story, his own pooped-his-pants-unexpectedly story, and I want to know if it is anything the same, if it was of the magnitude of what happened in the public beach bathrooms.

"No way," he says. "It was gross, but it wasn't THAT gross."

And then he turns his head toward the window, stares out into the Canadian fields that are still dotted with long-abandoned tobacco drying houses. A dreamy expression settles on his face, and it's easy to tell that he's thinking about his lack of bowel control and how it isn't as bad as the guy who cut loose in the public bathrooms, but there's a glimmer of something else there in his look--it's a little like he's impressed, a little like he's jealous that he doesn't have that story to tell the next time we're all gathered around a dinner table.

Your Love Is My Drug

2010-06-10T15:11:00.004-04:00

A conversation with Diana, 10:30 PM:

Me: My friends Rachel and Dan had their baby.

Diana: What did they name it?

Me: Samuel Gray. His middle name is Gray for David Gray. Rachel and Dan went to a concert of his on their fist date, and when Dan proposed to Rachel, he learned their song on the piano and played and sang it for her.

Diana: And are you going to have babies with your boy?

Me: Ew! I don't know! Don't talk about it!

Diana: Because I'm wondering what your baby's middle name would be. Would it be Samuel Led Zeppelin? It would be, wouldn't it? Samuel Led Zeppelin?

Me: No, knowing my boy, it would probably be Samuel Ke$ha or Samuel Lady Gaga.

The Exes

2010-06-09T15:42:00.004-04:00

Admittedly, I have a weird perspective when it comes to ex-girlfriends. I don't mind them. I don't mind hearing about them, and I don't mind seeing pictures of them.

I got to thinking about this last night, when Amy and I were hunched over the computer, looking at pictures of The Lady-Killer's ex-girlfriends. One of the exes is a girl I kind of know in a roundabout way, and I've always liked her. I've always thought she was pretty and funny and nice. So when Amy said, "Don't you just hate her?" I said, "No! Not at all!"

Amy stared at me, disbelieving.

"I'm serious," I said. "She's a nice girl."

"You are strange," Amy said. "I'd hate her if I were you."

And I know that's the way a lot of girls would feel, but I rarely have that gut reaction. It used to be that I thought my tolerance of ex-girlfriends was a thing unique to my relationship with the Boy From Work because when he told the stories from his past, I thought, Oh my God, that's so cute. I thought, These are the girls who have, in a way, made him who he is today.

I was thankful for that, for them. I was grateful for the ways they shaped the boy I now knew. After all, I didn't have the luxury of knowing him back then, and, even if they were awful, even if they were mean, they must have had even a tiny part of making him who he was now, and--obviously--I liked who that person was.

But today I kept thinking about that, kept thinking about if this was a new thing, if I'd only recently started having benevolent feelings for the exes. But I realized it wasn't anything new, not at all. I liked one of Keith's ex-girlfriends so much that the three of us went out to lunch a few times together, and we even went to her wedding, which--bonus!--had really dynamite food.

The only person whose ex-girlfriends drove me crazy--just the thought of them, just the idea of them--and that was the Wily Republican, but maybe that's to be expected. Everything about my relationship with the WR was like sand slowly falling through my fingers. He was impossible to contain. From the first moment, from our very first kiss, he was slipping away. And anything that reminded me that he was so tenuous--and the girlfriends did exactly that--made me panicked, more panicked than I could explain.

But, beyond him and his passel of exes, I have a tremendous amount of empathy for these girls who share something in common with me. It's not that I want to have them over for a dinner party, it's not that I want to sip cocktails with them or nibble at finger foods, but I do understand a little something about them, and I understand they have played a role in bringing my boy to me, and I guess I can't find anything to hate in that.

How to Become a Girlfriend

2010-06-03T19:05:00.002-04:00

I cannot even begin to describe the differences between last summer and this summer.

Last summer I was committed to my writing. I'd set a deadline for myself. I wanted my story manuscript to be done by the end of May. So, for that first glorious month off, I wrote and wrote and wrote. I also did a lot of yoga, walking, and eating of All Bran products.

At lunch, I stopped writing and paused for egg salad (or tuna or bologna or turkey) sandwiches and to watch a little West Wing. I'd try to write again in the afternoon, and at 4:30, I was starving and spending many minutes telling myself it was insane to get hungry at 4:30 PM, that no one but 85 year-olds get hungry for dinner at 4:30 PM, that surely getting hungry at 4:30 PM meant I was a freak--a depressed little freak--and that I needed something other than food to occupy my mind.

Occasionally, I'd meet Emily in Portland for drinks or force my office-mate to fill large water bottles with white wine so we could stand in the never-ending ocean mist of Summer 2009 and watch the tide come in.

It was a quiet summer.

This summer, however, is not quiet.

This summer I'm staying up late and sleeping in late and eating at strange hours and saying yes to everything. Do I want to drink martinis and play Dance, Dance Revolution? Yes! Do I want to drive to the top of the parking ramp downtown and take pictures? Yes! Do I want to have some drinks and then go make fun of the bad screenwriting in the new Robin Hood movie? Yes! Do I want to learn how to drive a manual transmission, even though I am confident I will suck at it? Yes! Do I want to drink more Jagermeister than I've drunk in my entire life? Yes! Do I want to go sit in a tiny room and see a tattoo being etched into someone's skin? Yes!

And this--the tattoo-watching--brings me to my point: I am now someone's girlfriend.

This may not have been the point you thought you were going to get out of the tattoo story, but, well, it is.

It started like this:

On Friday night, at 10:30 PM, I was standing in my kitchen, in front of a steaming wok, and I was making stir-fry. Normally, 10:30 would be way past my dinner time, but my entire sense of time has been skewed in the last month because there's this boy here now, and we stay up late, and we sleep in even later, and we sometimes forget to eat, and when we do remember to eat, it's usually at awkward times. I'm skipping breakfast and eating lunch at 4:30 in the afternoon.

And Friday was really no different. We'd been running around all day, and finally, after we got back to my apartment, we were starving. So I was doing my thing--I was chopping onion and mushroom and peppers--when the boy came and leaned next to me.

"So," he said, "I'm trying to figure out how to introduce you tomorrow."

Saturday was going to be a big day for him. We had to wake up early in the morning so that the boy could get his second tattoo. And I would guess that normally, in a regular ol' tattoo shop, no one would bat an eye if a guy brought a girl in the door with him. They'd just assume that the girl was the guy's woman, his old lady. But we weren't going to a tattoo shop for this tattoo. We were going to the house of a guy the boy used to work with. He did tattoos in a space off his living room, and he would probably be mildly interested in the girl who was sitting in the corner with her nose buried deep into Aryn Kyle's Boys and Girls Like You and Me. I would have to be acknowledged somehow.

"I think it's really sweet that you're thinking about this," I said.

"I want to introduce you as my girlfriend," he said. He flashed a smile at me--and that's when things started going a little crooked in my head. This boy has a smile with wattage that does some serious damage when it's aimed directly at you. This, among other things, is the reason he has quite the following of girls, a verifiable harem. Wherever he goes, women of all ages fall down around him. His aura is constructed completely of charm. And when that charm is directed at me, I'm useless. Absolutely useless.

He is, if nothing else, a lady-killer.

And The Lady-Killer had recently begun trying to convince me that I should be his girlfriend. At the beginning, I wasn't too keen on the idea, but a few weeks into things I was lying in bed and listing for him all the things that could go disastrously wrong if we really got into a relationship together, which clearly meant I was considering it. Here's how we would fail, I said. Here's what you would hate about me. Here's how I'd drive you absolutely fucking crazy.

But TLK didn't care about any of that. He just kissed me and told me he knew what he wanted.

And on Friday night, he was telling me again he really wished I was his honest-to-God girlfriend, that he could introduce me that way.

"So introduce me that way," I said.

"But it's not true," he said. "I don't want to say something that's not true." And then he smiled again, opening his eyes--also beautiful, also lethal--wide.

And looking at him--that smile, those eyes--I couldn't help myself. I heard all the lists I'd been making, the ones that had been clattering around inside my skull, suddenly go quiet. Then I heard only one thing, and that thing was telling me to stop being a pussy and just do it.

"Well, maybe it should be true," I said.

He stared at me. This wasn't exactly the response he'd been expecting.

I stirred the wok and set the spoon aside. "It could be true," I said. "I mean, you wear me down about everything else. You always get what you want."

"Oh!" he said. "I see! You don't really want to! You'd just do it to get me to shut up!"

I stood on my tiptoes and matched our foreheads together. "That's not what I mean at all," I said, "and you know it. I'm saying you're very persuasive, and this is what I want, but I've been scared. It's going to happen eventually, so why not now?"

"Really?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"No, really?" he asked.

I told him yes, really, really, really. It was true. I was his girlfriend now. And why? Because he'd needed to know how exactly to introduce me to the guy who would spend a few hours inking his skin the next morning. But it was more than that, of course. It was because I was happy, that I was delirious, that I was breathless from a month of being with him. It was because I knew I was going to give in eventually, that I wanted what he wanted, that I always had.

And the next morning I spent four hours in a chair holding his legs because the room was too small and the chair was too small for him to stay on his side without help. I held his legs and flipped through my book, through his magazine, through my magazine. I made small talk with a tattoo artist with a bald head and a kilt, and I told jokes and watched as first the outline then the blue went onto his skin. And outside, just beyond the door, summertime reruns were playing on the television and just-born puppies were yowling. I sat very, very still and thought how strange everything was, but how nice, too. I couldn't stop thinking about how, just before falling asleep the night before, he'd said, "Goodnight, Girlfriend" and I'd said, "Goodnight, Boyfriend" and that was the only thing in my head--that and nothing, nothing else. I didn't hear my lists and my reasons why we shouldn't. I didn't hear panic. I didn't hear what everyone else was going to say. I heard nothing but him, nothing but me, and that was almost as good as a miracle.

What's Happenin', Cliffy?

2010-05-24T14:36:00.002-04:00

When my father arrived home after the nine hour drive between Maine and Buffalo, he gave me a call to let me know he'd made it safely. He told me he'd had a real nice time over the weekend, that it was nice to spend so much time with his kids, that it was fun to have Adam captive for eighteen hours in the car.

"Ugh," I said. "I don't know if I'd be able to handle it. That kid is annoying."

"He's not annoying," my father said.

"He's gross! He's a know-it-all!" ~~the world's biggest know-it-all said~~ I said. "Dad, I mean, seriously. There were moments over these last few days where I looked at that kid's fuzzy head and thought, I am going to strangle him."

"Well, he certainly has his Cliff Clavin moments," my father said. "That's true."

I gasped. "I never ever thought of that comparison!" I said. "But it's so perfect!"

My brother is, if nothing else, a font of inane trivia, of probably-untrue-facts, of information that makes people think, Jesus, who gives a shit?

For example, after family dinners, my brother sometimes likes to trot out his Encyclopedia of Sauces and school us on the importance of clarified butter or a nutty roux. "You know what's some good shit?" he'll say. "Bearnaise. Bearnaise is some good shit."

And then he'll hold up the book in the way that all good elementary teachers do--turned out so the kids can see the illustrations--and he'll show off the perfect Bearnaise, fully expecting the rest of us, who are full of stir-fry or meatloaf or whatever, to be filled with the sudden urge to discuss the proper method of Bearnaise making, when none of us--least of all my brother--has ever made a Bearnaise sauce.

Now don't get me wrong. Ours is a family who talks about food. A lot. All the time. I don't mind the food talk. It's just the way the talk is presented. My brother, like Cliff Clavin, has a certain amount of bluster. He has a certain amount of pomposity. He's right, goddamnit, and you better listen to him in his rightness because--seriously!--no one else has ever been right about this, not ever, and he's going to set the world straight.

Over the course of his four day stay in Maine, my brother spouted off about ice cream, cold water lobsters, warm water lobsters, the proper trapping of cold water lobsters, crab cakes, TD Bank, poop, martinis, the proper technique for pouring a martini, boats, and the Lindt factory outlet. And this is just what I can remember off the top of my head.

(Also, it should be noted that he may or may not have burglarized a Portland lobster joint. We lunched along the water, and afterward my brother went to buy a T-shirt. On his way out, he snagged a plastic lobster figurine that had been sitting in a pail on a bench. He showed it to me as we headed back toward the shops so he could return to his hunt for the perfect gift for his girlfriend.

"Adam!" I said. "Those are the lobster lights the restaurant hangs in the window!"

"Well, they were in a bucket," he said.

"So?"

"Well, they looked free to me!" he said.)

Let's just face it: The kid is strange. He's a little bit Cliff Clavin, a little bit stand-up comic, a little bit insane. There are some times I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to con him into a large glass box I could wheel around the country, charging admission as I went, luring people in to see the World's Weirdest Kid. They certainly wouldn't leave feeling like they'd been swindled. I mean, here's how he acts during dinner:

Man Pole

2010-05-19T12:33:00.007-04:00

You'd think penis would be sufficient. Or cock or dick or wang. But it's not. Not for my brother, at least. When my brother wants to gross me out--when he really wants to get me going, to get me shrieking and fake-puking and saying, Adam! Stop it! Stop it! You're disgusting! You're a freak! Ew!--he will roll out other words for penis.

I know this because he and my father were here for the last four days, and for those four days my brother taunted me incessantly. And my father wasn't exactly any great help. After all, he thinks my brother's just oh-so-funny, and whenever my brother rolled out another gross phrase, my father would double over and laugh-laugh-laugh.

I should've known things would devolve into this just as soon as my brother got in my car on the first night. He lifted one butt cheek and rattled out a fart that smelled like death.

"What the hell?!" I said. I fanned my hands in front of my nose. "Adam! JESUS!"

He laughed. "It's from what I ate last night," he said. "Fried peppers." And then he farted again.

Then, hours later, the boy got to riffing on penises. "Want to talk about man poles?" he asked me. He leaned over and punched me in the arm. "Want to talk about zipper snakes?"

I narrowed my eyes at him.

"How about purple-headed yogurt slingers? No? Don't want to talk about those? How about balls? Want to talk about nubs? Nubbers? Want to talk about hairy balls?"

This went on for days. And it didn't get any better after he'd met my friend Christine, who is tall and curly-haired and very pretty. In short, she's right up my brother's alley.

We had ice cream with Christine right before we headed down to Portland so that Adam could spend hours combing through tourist traps, looking for the perfect souvenir for his girlfriend. He'd already gotten her a shirt and a hat and a mug (he gets her a shirt, a hat, and a mug everywhere he goes, so she's positively laden with shirts and hats and mugs, and when they finally get their own place together, they're going to have to devote an entire room to the shirts and hats and mugs they've amassed over their relationship) but he wanted to get her something else too, something with pizazz. But we couldn't do that before we had a snack, and ice cream it was.

Driving away from the ice cream stand, Adam blew a gust of air between his lips. "That Christine," he said. "She sure is cute."

She'd won him over in the first five minutes, probably when she told him there was a place in state that made lobster ice cream--actual lobster ice cream, not just the kind he was eating (Lobster Tracks, which featured red-tinted chocolate swirls)--and he decided that if there was a woman who could enable his lobster fix by giving him a way to eat it in dessert too, well, she was really special.

"Yes, she's adorable," I said. "There's no doubt about it."

"Do you think she'd like to talk about man poles?" he asked. "Do you think there'd ever be a day when she'd touch my man pole?"

I plugged my ears. He started to sing a little song about man poles, about purple-headed yogurt slingers, and my dad almost drove off the road.

~~~

I figured it might be more vivid if I showed it to you in cartoon format, so here you go. And, yes, I made us British.

Driving Miss Idiot

2010-05-12T22:43:00.004-04:00

So, I'm learning to drive a standard.

This is something I've wanted to do for a long time--it's probably been in my head since I was seventeen and dating Keith, who had a truck with a manual transmission--but I've never managed to make it happen. My father said he would teach me, but we never had a vehicle. When my brother got his first truck, I begged him to teach me but he just looked at me like I was crazy. "No way," he said. "You'll probably friggin' break it." And then he went on to pet his steering wheel, which, like everything else in his truck, he'd decked out with bling and lights.

Keith did attempt to teach me, but it didn't go well. This was his method: He decided that he would drive, and when he decided he needed to shift, he'd turn and bark, "Second!" or "Third!" or whatever.

That didn't exactly work, for a number of reasons. First, it scared the crap out of me. It made the whole thing sound desperate and immediate. It made it seem like if I didn't shift that fucking second, the truck might blow up and that Keith and I might be shot into the sky as a shower of cinders.

Second, I didn't know where first, second, third, or whatever was.

"It's right there on the knob!" Keith would say, exasperated, and I would shrug my shoulders. I could see what the knob said, and I could see where things were supposed to be, but it was an entirely different thing when I tried to hunt around and get things where they were supposed to go.

Naturally, Keith gave up trying almost immediately.

But now it's ten years later, it's suddenly summer vacation, I've got lots of time on my hands, and I have a teacher who is enthusiastic about teaching me because, as he notes, it's totally hot when girls know how to do it.

Well then, if it's going to make me hotter, let's make this happen.

The other night, we went out for the first lesson.

"Just so you know," I said, "there might be a chance you are going to hate me when we're finished here."

"Doubtful," he said.

"Okay," I said (doubtfully).

We parked in the mostly-empty K-Mart parking lot, and I said, "Give me the basics."

He did. He gave me the basics. The basics took all of thirty seconds.

"That's it?" I asked. "That can't be it. I feel like I need to know a lot more."

"I think you need to try it," he said. "Let's switch."

So I walked around to the driver's side and looked down at my feet. I was wearing tall boots. I'd forgotten my sneakers.

"I can't wear these," I said.

"Want mine?" He pointed down at his sneakers.

"I'll just drive in my socks," I said. I unzipped my boots and stepped out of them, threw them in the back seat. "Okay," I said. "I'm ready."

I was very, very far from ready.

"Think of it this way," he said, as I settled behind the steering wheel. "Imagine a rope around a tree. If you give slack on one side, you get some on the other side. That's what it's like with the clutch and the gas."

"Okay."

"Okay."

"Okay," I said. I nodded. I looked at him expectantly.

"Okay, so go," he said.

"Go?"

"Drive."

"How?"

"In a straight line."

"Oh my God." I put my head on the wheel. "This is going to go badly. I just know it."

But I started. I tried. And--honestly--in those first few minutes in the K-Mart parking lot, I did reasonably okay, but, inevitably, the level of spazziness was high.

Fifteen minutes in, I paused for a check. "Okay," I said, "on a scale of 1-10, 1 being Very Un-Horrified and 10 being Drastically Horrified, how horrified are you at my general ineptitude?"

He cocked his head to the side, considering.

"Truth," I said. "Be honest."

"Six," he said.

"Fair enough," I said. "It could be worse."

And it could've been. And it was. Because just as soon as I started getting a hold of it, we decided to go to an even more empty parking lot, one where I could get up to higher speeds, and my brain went empty and nothing made sense anymore. And that's precisely when the shrieking began.

"What am I in right now?" I shrieked. "Second? Third?"

"Third," he said. "Put it into second."

I tried.

"That's fourth," he said.

And suddenly I was eighteen again, and I was sitting next to Keith, and I was trying to figure out where the gears were, even though I could clearly see where they were.

"Oh Jesus!" I shrieked.

"Jess," he said. "Jess, it's fine."

I stalled the car out. I put my head in my hands and fake-wept. "I hate this," I said. "I hate when I'm not good at things."

"It took me a while to learn," he said. "You aren't going to be good at it immediately."

"This is not a great moment for me." And that was true, although it wasn't any fault of his. He'd done well--probably better than expected, considering I'm a wretched student, considering I hate it when I feel like I look like an asshole, an idiot, a dunce. This is precisely the reason I refuse to go to a public yoga class. I don't want to be the girl in the room who's the worst at anything, the one who's behind, the one who needs more instruction than anyone else. I realize this is not an attractive quality. I realize, in fact, that it's very bad, and I try to work with it as best I can, but still, at all times my brain is whispering to me, You've got to be the best at this. You've got to be very good. Don't let people see you suck!

I wake up every morning wondering how I'm going to impress people today.

I'm a show-off.

I'm annoying.

So, forty minutes in, after things had disintegrated so badly that I could no longer shift--I couldn't even get the shifter to move right--I gave up.

"Please trade with me," I said. "I think my brain has given up on this for tonight. But... you know, good first lesson!"

"Well, it started good," he said as he eased himself out of the car and walked around the front, "but then things went downhill."

"Yeah," I said. "Figures."

And then I crawled over to the passenger seat so I didn't have to walk outside in my socks. I crammed my feet back into my boots and slumped in my seat. I closed my eyes. I tried not to be jealous as he started the car and drove us away from the mall parking lot with as much ease as anything.

On Break from My Mojito Binge

2010-05-08T20:13:00.004-04:00

Hello, world. Remember me? Well, guess what. The semester is over! Grades are in! We've brunched, we've mini-golfed, we've done commencement. Things are as over as they're going to get.

Usually at this point, at the end of spring semester, when I'm staring ahead at three months of time off, I feel pretty giddy. I get a little lightheaded at the thought of so much time to read and write, so much time to live on Popham Beach.

But this time, at the end of spring semester 2010, I'm here to report something a little different. I was sad to see the semester end. I don't think I was exactly ready for it to be over as quickly as it was. One minute it was February and the Olympics were starting, and then there were two weeks left to the semester, and the entire world cracked open and students started going crazy in the ways they usually do at the end of the semester--So, Jess, I had a little bit of a meltdown this semester because I just realized I'm bisexual--my dad made me that way, I swear--and I know I haven't done any of the work, but can I still pass? ETC.--but the craziness barely phased me because I was all like, "WAIT JUST A SECOND. WHERE DID ALL THOSE MONTHS GO?!"

I wanted to cling to the last weeks and drag my heels in the dirt to make time slow down for just a second. Just one second!

This was, after all, a serendipitous little semester. I feel like this one's going to sit with me for a long time, that it's going to be one of those semesters I look back on and realize, hey, I learned a whole bunch over those fifteen weeks.

And it was an important semester because several of my most beloved students are graduating and never coming back. Some are transferring. Some are done with English classes, and I'll never get to have them in class again. People are starting to move on--and not just here. My best boys, my class of engineers from my post-grad school year in Buffalo, graduated today. I can't tell you how nostalgic this makes me feel. I loved those boys, and I had them when they were eighteen years-old, when they were babies, when they were mouthy and funny and ready to find any possible way to introduce me to Ryan Miller. But today they graduated. They graduated. I'm still not sure how that's possible, since I'm certain it was just yesterday that I walked into that classroom and one of them handed me a peanut butter pie and said, "I thought you'd like this."

And here in Maine I feel like I could've used a few more weeks to get used to the idea of not seeing some of my students again. This was, after all, the semester where one of my composition classrooms was stocked with sweet mothers--one whose (very funny) memoir essay was about our first day of class and how when I walked into class she wanted to laugh in my face because I didn't look old enough to teach--and they were my favorite composition class, the one I always looked forward to seeing. And even though I never called in this particular favor, I knew that if ever I really, really needed mothering, I could get it from those women. I knew I could come into class, put my head down on my desk, and ask one of them to get me a ginger-ale with a bendy straw, and they would, and they'd pet my head and ask me what was wrong, was I okay, was I feeling poorly, would a bowl of pudding make me feel better? And it would've. A bowl of pudding and a ginger-ale with a bendy straw will always make me feel better.

What I'm trying to say is this: I'll miss them. And I'll miss Hockey Dad, who was always willing to talk about Ryan Miller and Ryan Miller's general brilliance. I'll also miss Boy with the Pretty Name and The Lobsterman. I'll miss my entire creative writing classes, even Boy Dripping with Sarcasm and Girl Who Routinely Left for a Cigarette in the Middle of Class and Sometimes Never Came Back.

Most of all, though, I'll miss my Monday-Wednesday Therapy Sessions, the like-clockwork-spaces of time when my office ceased being an office and, probably much to the chagrin of my office-mate, became a dorm room filled with giggling, gossiping students. And I'm really, really, really not sure what I'll do next semester when I no longer have a reason to stay at school after my last class, when there will no longer be someone sitting next to me suggesting we listen to this or that song on YouTube, suggesting we look up her classmates' birthdays so we could understand why they are they way they are based on their astrological makeup, suggesting we Facebook-stalk cute boys we'd loved before. (Oh, Christine! Who's going to listen to me talk about Teacher Jail now? Who's going to suggest we ditch the office and go for Thai food? Whose boyfriend is going to bring me coffee or iced tea?!)

I think it's clear that my fall wasn't the greatest and the start of the spring semester--in terms of relationships--wasn't much better. In all honesty, it was my students who got me through all of that. They gave me something else to care about, and that is what made this semester the best I've had in a while. And I know I haven't done an accurate job explaining the loveliness of the last fifteen weeks--I don't know if I ever could--but trust me when I tell you it was a joy to teach this semester. I've been using the word serendipity in every other sentence for the last month or so, and that just about sums it up: This semester and everything that happened in it? Serendipity, plain and simple.

A List of Items Brought to Me in the Last Few Days of the Semester

2010-05-02T15:56:00.003-04:00

1. A cinnamon roll from one of the best places in town

2. Donuts

3. An origami penguin

4. A glittery handmade card

Pretty cute, huh? It's almost enough to make me sad that I've only got one more day left with my students...

8:30 PM. Thursday Night. Rite Aid.

2010-04-24T14:18:00.003-04:00

I walked up to the counter to check out. My purchases were varied. I had a bottle of rum, a two liter of Coke, a roll of paper towels, and a box of Apple Jacks.

The check-out guy scanned and bagged. He took my money. And then he peered into the bag once more before handing it to me. He raised his eyebrows. He grinned.

"Behave tonight," he said.

"I'll try," I said, and then I hightailed it out of there with my booze, cereal, and paper towels--clearly the makings of sleazy, sleazy night.

Which Reminds Me

2010-04-15T19:31:00.001-04:00

Today in one of my classes, a student went off on a short tangent about how she acts when she gets drunk. She doesn't get goofy or giggly or loud or angry. Instead, she gets very formal. Instead of saying, "Hey! I'm drunk!" she will say, "Why, hello. It seems you've caught me in a moment of unexpected intoxication. My apologies!"

I like that she recognizes this. I like that she's conscious of her drunk self because not many people really are. (Generally, it seems, it's the angry ones who are the least aware. Once, in grad school, one of my best friends, who'd been drinking beer for hours, pointed his finger at me and shouted, "I AM SICK OF YOU FUCKING IDIOTS!" This wouldn't have been so bad--I was, after all, aware that he was sick of me taking up with idiots--but it's just that one of those idiots was standing next to me at that very moment.)

As for me, I'm not exactly sure how I am. I've heard conflicting stories. Katy tells me she can't ever tell when I'm drunk. "You act like your normal self when you're drunk," she says, "maybe just a little gigglier."

No one, of course, has trouble identifying when Katy's drunk. After a couple tall glasses of Michelob Light, which she gets with olives--"It's a free snack at the end!" she says--Katy gets loud. She likes to engage the boys by saying inappropriate things, by talking about poop or boobs. When Katy gets really drunk, she likes to bring boys over to me and say, "Hey! Look! Here's this boy! You should kiss him! If you don't kiss him, I'm not going to leave you alone! I'm going to stand here and watch you until you kiss him! Kiss him! Kiss him! KISS HIM!"

And then she likes to puke in alleys or cars.

Of course, Katy might not be the only one who acts up. I just learned recently that I'm "the loud one" in the group--information Diana floated my way as we walked to my car in a Boston parking ramp the day after her reading in town.

I was shocked. I told her I didn't think I was the loud one in any group. In my group back home, back in New York, my best friend was the loud one, and in Minnesota I'd always figured Katy was the loud one, or maybe one of the boys, who were always mixing drinks and shouting poetry--theirs or others'--at the top of their lungs while Diana and I sat on the couch and giggled.

"No, no," Diana said. "It's definitely you. You're definitely the loud one. But that's why we love you."

Probably this shouldn't surprise me. Maybe I should've always known. And today as my student was going on about her own tipsy behavior, it made me--it couldn't be helped!--think of one of my more glorious moments: The first time I met my father's fiancee.

It was the night of my childhood friend's wedding. I was a bridesmaid who was wearing a pretty black dress and high heels, and I was flirting with one of the groomsmen--tall, slim, tan.

Maybe I was a bit bolder than I'd normally be, but there's a good reason for that. As a cost saving measure, the bride and groom bought their liquor from a local bar and then positioned a few of their relatives behind a makeshift one at the reception. What this meant was I could walk up to the bar and say, "May I please have a giant vat of vodka this very instant?" and they would say, "Why, yes, Bridesmaid Girl, you may."

Add to that the fact that the groom's father had made his own wine for the occasion, and several bottles of that wine were on the wedding party's table, and I drank an awful lot from several of those bottles, which may or may not have led to the incident on the dance floor after the cute groomsman caught the garter and I caught the bouquet, which meant we had to engage in this tradition where everyone gathered around and watched as he inched the garter up my leg--each inch another year of good luck for the newlyweds--and this spiraled into a really interesting incident in the kitchen of the reception hall, which then spiraled into a really, really interesting incident in the backyard of the reception hall--and trust me when I tell you it's best that no one but God saw that.

It's important to know these facts. It's important to know that both the incident in the kitchen and the incident in the backyard took a decent amount of time--mainly because they involved a whole bunch of kissing--and that they started in the approximate middle of the wedding party. By the time the incidents were done and we wandered back inside, the only people left were the bride's parents.

Talk about embarrassing.

Worse? The cute groomsman and I were both too drunk to drive, so we had to catch a ride with the bride's parents, who had their car stuffed so full of gifts and decorations that there was barely room for us, and I had to sit on the groomsman's lap the whole ride home.

Oh, but wait. It gets worse.

And then when I arrived home, I realized my father was still up and that he had a visitor--his new girlfriend, the one I had yet to meet. So as I stepped out of the car and turned to thank the bride's parents for driving me home, and to tell the groomsman it was nice meeting him, I knew I was going to have to put on a good show in approximately thirty seconds.

I walked down the driveway and up onto the front step. I took a deep breath. I tried to make my my whole body feel less like it was spinning. I tried to quiet the side of my brain that was saying, EVERYTHING YOU SAY SHOULD BE SAID IN SHOUT-VOLUME. And because I knew my father would ask how the party was, I made a quick list of things that should not be brought up: making out with a groomsman, dancing with one of my father's friends and announcing to said friend that I thought his children were ridiculously attractive, being photographed with a boy's hands--and a garter--three quarters of the way up my thigh.

I steadied myself. I steeled my insides. I took another deep breath and prepared to pull off a serious caper, to pull the wool over my father's eyes, to convince his girlfriend I was nothing but a classy and poised twenty-something.

I pushed open the door.

"Hello!" my father said.

"Hello!" I said.

"Hello!" the girlfriend said.

"This is Kathy!" my father said.

"It's really nice to meet you!" I said. "I AM REALLY DRUNK! SORRY!"

And then, because I'd already revealed too much, and because I was afraid my first revelation would be followed with something else inappropriate--for example: "I pushed a groomsman against a fridge in the reception hall kitchen and had my way with him!"--I decided to run down the hallway to my room and go to bed before I made things worse.

I am, if nothing else, extremely, extremely smooth.

Sometimes My Love for This State Overwhelms Me

2010-04-11T17:10:00.002-04:00

This is clearly one of those times:

Is This Because I Admitted to the Internet that I Love My Brother?

2010-04-08T23:25:00.000-04:00

On Friday, I was sitting in the Top of the East admiring the view and having a meeting about a conference that's going to roll into town in a few years, and after the meeting was over I looked down at my phone and saw that I had a message. It was from an unfamiliar but local number. When I listened to the message, the person on the other end revealed himself to be from my bank.

My first thoughts were this: DOOM AND DESTRUCTION! ALL MY MONEY IS GONE! MY CREDIT IS RUINED! SOMEONE HAS STOLEN MY IDENTITY!

But then the guy on the message kept talking, and he said, "We just got a phone call from a police department up north. They found your purse and called us with the information inside."

And then my thoughts were less along the lines of doom and destruction and more along the lines of what the fuck?

My purse? The purse I lost? The purse I lost last September, back when I was going out with that really cute guy who ended up being a complete douche--bygones!--and while I was at his house one night there was a party, and one of his douche-bag friends stole my purse? THAT purse?

Turns out, yeah, it was that purse.

After the phone call from the bank, I got phone calls from lots of places--including the library and the school where I work--because the police had found my cards and IDs in my wallet and called everyone, hoping that somehow they'd find me. They did.

And so, later, I left happy hour and five dollar mojitos to drive back up to the town where that boy lived so that I could reclaim my purse. I wasn't exactly sure what was going to be in there, but the police officer I spoke to on the phone said my camera was in it. I was dying to see what else had been left and what that might tell me about who had taken it.

All I was sure of was this: Someone had found my purse in a melting snowbank. It had probably been there, buried under snow that drifted in from the ocean, all winter.

I know very little about the town where this boy lived. In fact, all I know about it is this: I know where that boy lived. I know to get to his house, and I know how to get back to the Interstate. So I had no idea where I was when my GPS directed me to the police station, but it didn't matter. I felt like there were eyes everywhere. I felt like everyone knew why I was there. I felt the ghost of that boy in every turn. I had no idea where I was, and I was afraid after the next turn, I'd suddenly be by his street--just having approached it from a new direction--and I wouldn't be ready to face it.

There's a small sliver of crazy in me, after all, and every now and again, despite the many months that have passed, whenever I see a car like his on the street, I have a small hope that it's him, and a similarly small hope that I would transform momentarily into the kind of girl who would ram her car into his.

I generally settle for glaring. And the times it was him that I passed--some pretty new girl riding next to him--I settled for weeping instead of car-ramming.

But the streets were generally empty when I came into town, nowhere near his house. The police station was locked up and empty, and I had to pick up the emergency phone outside it, and I got patched in to the central command in Augusta, and they told me they'd have one of the officers over there but quick.

So I hung up and stood there, outside the dark station. I loafed near a picnic bench and tried not to seem suspect, suspicious, vagrant. I tried not to think about that boy at all, or the fun I'd been having with him, or how pretty he was when he smiled. I tried not to think about the fact that I could, seven months later, still exactly picture the smile he smiled at me over the breakfast table the last time I saw him.

Luckily, I didn't have to think about not thinking for too long, because one of the officers was just around the corner, and he careened into the parking lot, throwing me into the glare of his lights.

"You're here for a purse?" he said as he stepped out of the car.

"Yes," I said.

"When did you lose it?" he asked.

"September," I said.

"September?!"

I nodded.

He let us into the building, and there it was--my purse--locked behind the check-in desk. Seeing it almost knocked me out. I couldn't breathe for a second. It was eerie seeing something you had said goodbye to a long time ago, something you knew you would never get back.

It was gaping open, and I could see some of the things inside: polka-dotted umbrella, wallet, glasses case. I wanted to cry.

The officer brought it out and put it in front of me. He picked up the wallet, cracked it open. "All your credit cards," he said. "You must have canceled them a long time ago."

"Yes," I said. I shook my head. I couldn't believe whoever stole my purse hadn't at least tried to take the credit cards and make a go of it.

"License," the officer said, showing me my Maine license. "School ID." He opened the purse wider. "Camera," he said, touching the case. "iPod."

"My iPod?" I said, but sure enough, there it was. There everything was.

"There's no cash," he said.

But I never carry a lot of cash. I just don't. The night I was at the party, I probably had sixteen dollars in my purse. So whoever took it got sixteen dollars in cash and left everything else. Everything else that stranded me overnight, everything that left me locked out of my car and apartment. Everything that ended up costing me $900 to replace.

"Oh my God," I said. I touched everything. "I just can't believe it."

He passed the purse's handles over to me. "Well, at least it came back," he said.

"Yes," I said, "you're right."

And that was it. He held the door open for me, and I left. I drove back home, two purses sitting on the seat next to me. I drove back down the route I used to drive on my way home from that boy's house, and I imagined one of the people from that party taking my purse, leaving, scalping the cash, and then throwing my purse out the window and into some ditch, where it would stay under drifting snow, all those parts of my life locked under ice for months.

I got angrier about everything on the drive home. It was one thing back when I thought my purse had been stolen for all the valuable things in it, but now that I knew it had been stolen for cash, for an insanely tiny amount of cash, I wanted to scream.

But other people had different feelings about it.

"It's karma!" Diana said when she called.

"I guess," I said. By then, I'd laid everything out onto a towel to dry. The officers had tried to air it out as much as they could, but the purse contents were still moist by the time I got them home. I was sitting on the floor in front of the inventory. I was touching the rusted MSU keychain, all the keys I'd had to get replaced. I was looking at my old New York license, and my stupid-big-hopeful face on it.

"This makes me want to punch someone," I said. "Punching someone would feel so good."

"KARMA!" Diana insisted. "Have you done something really good lately? Have you put good energy out into the world?"

"I don't know," I said. "I'm in love with my students this semester. Do you think it's because I have a better attitude than last fall?"

"No," she said. "Wait. I know!" she said. "Your brother! Maybe this is about your brother! You just admitted to the Internet that you actually love him!"

"Ugh."

"You DID."

"Yes," I said. "I did."

"Well, that might be it!" she said. "It might be that you finally admitted it. FINALLY."

So there you have it, Internet: I love my brother, and I have my purse back, and some asshole in central Maine has my sixteen dollars. It might be as close to a fairytale ending as I'll ever get.

Just a Small Town Girl

2010-03-28T09:30:00.000-04:00

I am from a small town. A very small town. A town that has 2,500 people in it.

The town I live in now has 23,000 people in it. That's a whole lot more people. But most days it doesn't really feel like it. I've already talked about how I am continuously stunned by how small and incestuous my college is, but it's not just that academic sub-culture that feels tiny. It's everything.

It's even my salon.

Not long after the Great Tragedy with Maine Man #1 occurred in November of 2008, I drove myself to the salon because there is nothing quite like a trip to a stylist to perk a girl up. I was going in for a cut and a touch-up on my red color and what Katy now calls and my "angry bangs," which were clipped short and straight after my breakup with the Boy From Work.

At the salon, I parked in the lot across the street, and I saw a car I thought looked an awful lot like the one that belonged to the boy who'd just visited upon me a whole bunch of trouble, and I fumed all the way inside. Jesus, I thought. He's probably down the street at the bar. He's probably having fun, and here I am all miserable.

I got inside, hung up my coat, and leaned around the corner to tell my stylist I was there. Unlike the salon I got into the habit of going to in my post-grad school year in Buffalo, there isn't an awful lot of protocol at my new place. You don't check in with a receptionist. You just sit on a half-broken couch and listen to the girls tell an awful lot of filthy stories about their boyfriends or skanks they went to high school with.

So I leaned around to tell my stylist, who has the best station--by the window--that I was there. She was still with another client, so I went back out to the broken-down couch and took up my position. I immediately nosed into a book and stayed there until my stylist brushed her client off, walked her out, and said goodbye. Then she and I went back into the other room, and she settled me into the chair, tied a smock around my neck, and said, "How are things?"

Things were really fucking rotten, but I thought it best to downplay that. "Not great," I said.

"You were so happy the last time you were here!" she said.

The last time, of course, was when I'd first taken up with the boy who'd recently gone away. And she was right: I had been happy. Stupidly happy.

"We've got a lot to talk about," I said.

"Okay," she said. "Let me just go read the notes about your color in your file, and I'll get to mixing."

She disappeared into the front room, which left me to my own devices for a bit. And because I couldn't help myself, I leaned a little closer to the window and peered out across the street, into the parking lot, trying to decide whether or not the car there was really his. I stared and stared and stared and then decided I couldn't tell. That's when I sat back and--finally--looked to the other side of the room.

A few feet away from me, at the next station over, sat the boy. He too had a smock on, and his hair--which, it must be noted, is extraordinary--was being tended to by one of the other stylists. She had taken a step back to consult her cell phone--again, there's not an awful lot of protocol at this place--and that had left him free to rotate toward me.

"Hey," he said.

"JESUS!" I said. "Holy shit! Hey! I mean, hi! What are you doing here? Why didn't you say hello to me earlier?"

"I tried to when you walked in," he said. "You didn't notice, and then you were reading."

"Oh," I said. "Okay. Well, hi."

I wanted to die. I wanted to melt. I wanted to become a cool puddle of me that disappeared under the shell of smock. But none of that was possible. I was blushing and wondering if he'd figured out that when I was leaning out the chair and examining the parking lot, it was because his car was there.

"I can't believe you're here," I said.

"Well, you suggested it, so I finally came."

And then I hated myself. Of course I'd suggested it. Back in the days when we were going out for drinks and being all cute and flirty and ridiculous, he'd talked about his hair being long and out of control and that he needed to have it cut but he didn't really have a place to go.

"You should go to my place!" I'd said. "The girls there are bawdy and loud. You'd like them!"

And now here he was, having taken my advice. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill myself.

But there was no time for that because a sudden terror was dawning on me. When girls are in the chair at the salon, they talk about things. A lot of things. And often, those things are boys. That's what my stylist and I talk about: boys, boys, boys. She knew all about my recent breakup with the BFW and she knew all about my delirious month with the boy who was now sitting next to me. Except she didn't know what had recently happened and that the boy was currently sitting next to me. But there, in the other room, I could see her finishing up on the computer, ready to turn back to me, and I could almost hear the first words that were going to come out of her mouth, and those words would be these:

SO, WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BOY YOU WERE HAVING SO MUCH FUN WITH LAST TIME I SAW YOU?

I had to stop that question. Now.

"Well," I said to the boy, "that's good. I'm glad you came. I figured you'd like it here."

And then I launched out of my chair, smock and all, and tore into the front room, where I was now out of the boy's sight, and grabbed my stylist's arm.

"YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS," I whispered, forming each word precisely so she would understand the seriousness of the situation. "THE BOY I WAS TELLING YOU ABOUT LAST TIME? HE IS SITTING NEXT TO ME, AND HE IS GETTING HIS HAIR CUT."

My stylist gasped. "Jenna's doing his hair?" she asked.

"YES," I said. "RIGHT NOW!"

"What happened between the two of you?" she asked. "Tell me quick."

I told her quick. And then I said, "WE CANNOT SAY ANOTHER WORD ABOUT IT UNTIL HE LEAVES!"

"Yes," she said. "Of course. Got it. Not a word."

And then I calmly walked back into the other room, sat down, and arranged my smock so that it didn't billow out over the chair. I exchanged a few pleasantries with the boy, even though I wanted to nab a pair of scissors and loft them at his perfect hair and head, and I waited for my stylist to mix my color.

He left shortly after, and the crisis was generally averted, but for the rest of my time there--while I was getting my cut, while angry red was being painted onto my hair--the girls of the salon congregated in the back room to talk about how cute he was, how crazy it was that he was there when I came in, how they all wanted to date him, how sad they were to hear he had a girlfriend and was generally off the market.

"He's so funny," the girl who did his hair said. She batted her eyelashes. "He's so cute. I love him."

And then I wanted to stab her with scissors.

Eventually, though, I got over wanting to stab people with scissors. I got on with my life. A new semester started, I got a new class of punk auto mechanics to deal with, and things settled into a new and familiar and boy-less pace.

Months later I would be at the salon again, and my stylist, after she'd smocked me and moved into the cutting, would say, kindly, gently, "I have some news for you."

I looked at her in the mirror. She seemed hesitant. She paused with her scissors suspended in mid-air. "What?"

"Your boy came in a while back. He was in for a cut. He brought his girlfriend. I had to do her hair."

So it wasn't enough for him to steal my salon; now he'd stolen my stylist and handed her over on a silver platter to his girlfriend.

"I want to jab something in my eye," I said.

"I understand," she said. She patted my shoulder. "She wasn't all that cute, though, just so you know. I mean, I gave her a really cute cut, but she's no way as adorable as you."

"I hate everything," I said.

And then there's this: The last time I was at the salon, just before I left for my trip down to Boston a few weeks ago, I was sitting in the chair, and my stylist and I were gossiping about her boyfriend when the phone rang. One of the other girls answered, and we heard her taking information from the person on the other end of the line. When she hung up, she peered around the corner to relay that information to everyone in our room.

"Andrew's not coming," she said. "He can't make it. He canceled."

Everyone looked sad about this news.

My stylist nudged me. "That's your Andrew," she said.

"You are kidding me," I said. "He was coming in?"

She nodded. "I don't know what it is about you two, but you're on the same schedule." She tilted my head down so she could work on the back of my hair. "I saw that on the sheet for today, and I almost called you so we could rearrange it, but I figured there was enough time between your appointment's start and his appointment's start that we could get you out of here before he got in."

Now it had gotten to the point where my stylist was considering mini Bond-like switcheroos to make it so that this boy--a boy I can't avoid at school but should be able to avoid everywhere else in a town of 23,000 people, in a town where there are plenty of salons and plenty of barbershops that I don't happen to frequent--didn't run into me on my most favorite of days: Get More Attractive at the Salon Day.

"That's sweet," I said from under my curtain of hair, "but, really, it's okay. We see each other all the time at school. We talk. We're cordial. Probably too cordial, because I'm an idiot, but whatever. It's fine. It would be okay. No need to be sneaky."

She was happy to hear that. And then she told me how everyone just adored him, gushed over him, loved when he graced them with his presence. "He's just so nice," she said. "Everyone wants to see him naked."

And that's when I realized it: There will be no escaping that. Ever. The whole salon knows the saga and the drama, and it's likely that when I go in for a touch-up, he'll be there for his. Or that the girls will be talking about his smile or his charm or his ass or whatever. It's just official: In this small corner of the world, that one will follow me around for a good long time, and it's time I got used to it.

And Now a Story that Involves Wine, Vomit, and My Brother

2010-03-23T18:56:00.005-04:00

Let me brief and honest: My last full day of spring break was not awesome.

At first it seemed promising. It went a little something like this: Broadway Market for pierogi and placek and rye bread and pounds of sponge candy, and then the whole world fell off its axis and went spinning off into space.

There was some family drama, and after that family drama unfolded my mother was left teary-eyed and demanding to know where we'd put the fucking wine. She went into the bathroom to cry for a little bit, and I stood in the kitchen with forty dollars of Chinese food still sitting untouched and pristine in its take out containers. My mother was upset and crying in her bathroom, and I was trying to yank a stuck cork from a stubborn bottle of wine.

This called for reinforcements.

HOLY SHIT, I texted my brother. YOU NEED TO COME HOME NOW. I NEED BACKUP.

It's not that I needed help with the cork--eventually I bashed that thing out of the neck of the wine and poured two glasses (a giant one for my mother, a small one for me)--but it was that I needed help with the drama. I am not very good at handling my mother's sadness. It's true. I've handled it poorly all my life--especially after my parents' divorce. Back then, I adopted the attitude that it was her own fault, she'd made her choice, now she had to live with it. Sometimes I looked at my mother and thought SUCK IT UP.

On my last full day of spring break, though, I was not thinking SUCK IT UP; I was thinking THERE IS NOTHING IN THE WORLD I CAN DO TO MAKE MY MOTHER FEEL LESS SHITTY RIGHT NOW. I knew I would eventually need help and that I wouldn't be able to be a clown for long enough to make her forget her problems.

Thus the text to my brother.

He arrived three hours into my crisis control--which, it should be noted, is not very smooth or sophisticated. If anyone is ever hurt or sad, this is what I will do to try to soothe them: I will park it on the couch, mix a drink or pour some wine, and I will pat a knee or a shoulder or a head until it seems lame to continue to do so, and then I will mix another drink or pour some more wine, and then I will say something stupid and silly and inappropriate in hopes that the person I am getting drunk will laugh and forget, for just a second, whatever is making them sad.

But the family drama on this particular Saturday had made me sad, too, and I needed someone to come refresh me, too. If we were going to make it through this, we all needed to be at our best. And that was where Adam came in.

"So," he said, after arriving and sitting himself in front of me and my mother, "how drunk are you? I saw the two wine bottles on the counter."

"I'm not drunk," my mother said.

That was a lie.

"She's pretty drunk," I said.

"How much did she drink?" Adam asked.

"Well, I only had one glass," I said.

He raised his eyebrows. "Oh."

"I'm not that drunk," my mother said.

"Are you going to puke?" my brother said. He wrinkled his nose, thinking about the possibility. "What I'm saying is I don't really want to wake up in the middle of the night to hear you barfing into the toilet. It is right next to my room, you know."

"Adam," I said, "shut up. She can puke if she wants to puke. She's a grown woman."

"I don't want to hear it!" he said. "That's gross!"

"Oh, like you've never done it," my mother said.

My brother grinned and sat back in the chair. He cracked his knuckles and surveyed the floor of the living room. "Oh, I've done it before," he said.

"I know," my mother said. "You've had parties. You've had them here!"

"It's true."

"Gross," I said.

"Whatever," he said. "Have I ever told you two the story about the rug?"

"What rug?" my mother asked.

"The rug that is missing from this room."

"There's a rug missing from this room?" my mother asked.

"Yes. For, like, years."

"Liar!" she said. "There's no rug missing."

"Mother," Adam said, "do you mean to tell me you've never noticed that one of your runners is missing from the living room?"

She took a long sip from her wine.

"I puked on it," my brother said. "I was having a party, and the boys were here, and we were drinking, and I'd had a lot, and I couldn't make it to the bathroom, so I just leaned forward, opened my mouth, and vomited out a neat little pile of puke. RIGHT. ONTO. THE. RUNNER."

"You are vile," I said.

My mother started giggling.

"We were too drunk to do much of anything about it," my brother said, "so I told the boys to just leave it, and we'd worry about it the next morning."

"OH MY GOD!" I said. "You left puke sit over night!"

"I was trashed, Jess," my brother said. "What did you think I was going to do?"

My mother giggled harder. "What did you do with it?" she asked.

"In the morning, I rolled the rug up, put it in a bag, and we put it in the car and took it to the car wash."

"Holy shit," I said. "You took a puked-on runner to the CAR WASH?"

"Listen," he said, "it was a good idea. You know how they have the clips for the car mats? Well, I took the rug out of the bag, clipped it up, and then blasted the shit out of it."

"You sprayed vomit with a pressure washer," I said. "That's smart. Vomit everywhere!"

My brother nodded. "Yes," he said. "But it got clean, okay? And I rolled it up and put it back in the bag--"

"The puke bag?!" I asked.

He glared.

"Fine," I said. "Continue."

"I put it back in the bag, and I took it home, dragged it into the garage, and then I forgot about it," he said. "A few days later I was out there, and I realized I'd forgotten the rug. And there it was, in a dark corner, and the bag was really condensated. So I knew there were really only two possibilities now: That I'd open that bag, and I would find the rug all moldy and disgusting; or, alternatively, I'd open the bag and smell the worst old vomit smell that ever existed. So I just took that bag and threw it into the garbage can and buried it."

"My rug!" my mother said.

"You're disgusting," I said. "You threw out MOM'S RUG."

But my mother was laughing and spilling her wine and mopping it up and laughing some more. She was denying that there was a rug missing. She was saying she'd never noticed its absence. She was saying it wasn't true.

And what she wasn't saying was everything else that was in her mind at that moment--all the bad stuff--and at that moment, for that reason, I loved my brother very, very much.

How I Lost the Last Seven Dollars I Had in My Pocket on St. Patrick's Day

2010-03-19T13:22:00.005-04:00

So, there was this bartender.

He was cute. He looked exactly like a more Irish version of the Wily Republican, which, I suppose, was fitting, since I saw him when we were out in Buffalo for St. Patrick's Day.

After ten minutes of watching this boy work behind the bar, I decided I was in love with him and that I wanted him to set aside the bottle of Jameson that was perpetually clutched in his hand so that we could duck out into the alley and kiss.

What I settled for was pushing my way to the bar and ordering a drink for Becky. She wanted a Bailey's and milk.

"A Bailey's and milk?" the bartender asked. He wrinkled his nose.

"Hey, it isn't for me," I said. "My friend requested it. I don't know."

"I'm not even entirely sure we have milk back here," he said. "Let me see what I can find."

He ducked down and rummaged in a cooler. And then another cooler. And then a final cooler--way back, under a row of dusty glasses. He pulled a gallon of milk from the cooler and hoisted it up so I could see. He unscrewed the top and cautiously sniffed. Then he gave me a thumbs-up.

"Great!" I shouted. "I really appreciate it!"

"Anytime, sweetie," he said, and then he got to work mixing the drink.

Later, after I had decided I was super in love with him, I went back up to the bar. There was a lull in the action, and there was some space up there because a large group of people--including a girl who spent a whole lot of time fingering a guy's ass for all to see--had left for the night. So I slid up to the bar and my bartender came right over.

"Can I tell you something?" I asked.

"Of course," he said.

"You look exactly like my ex-boyfriend."

"Really?" he said.

Do I even need to admit here that I'd had a lot to drink by this point in the night? There was, after all, a good reason the cute bartender always had the bottle of Jameson in his hand: Everyone was drinking it, and the boys who'd parked themselves at the bar early in the night--the ones who were getting their asses fingered by slutty drunk girls--bought us several shots.

"Yes," I said. "You look exactly like him. And I was thinking that maybe later I would bring my camera over here and take your picture so I can show him he has a twin in Buffalo."

The bartender tipped his head to the side. "Is that all we're going to do?" he asked. He grinned.

I had to restrain myself, lest I leap over the bar. "Honey," I said, "I'll do whatever you want, but first we need to take that picture."

And I did eventually get that picture. It was busy again, and the bartenders looked like they were seconds from losing their minds, but still the cute bartender came over to me--we were leaving then to get tacos; we wanted Crunchwrap Supremes more than anything in the world at that point in the morning--and I needed to get the picture that second.

And, luckily, he humored me. He leaned over the bar and let me snap a picture with him. And then I pulled whatever money I had left in my pocket--which amounted to seven dollars--and I shoved it at him.

"Here!" I said.

"You don't have a tab," he said, shaking his head.

"No," I said. "It's for you. For being cute!"

And ten minutes later, since I'd given the last of my money to the bartender just because he looked like the 24 year-old version of Wily, Amy's boyfriend had to buy me a taco because I was officially poor, poor, poor.

The Mourning

2010-03-17T15:24:00.004-04:00

So, back when I had moved home for that year between grad school and Maine, I had quite the impressive little string of vehicular bird homicides. Now, it's not like I wanted to kill those birds, and it's not like I tried to kill those birds--I certainly didn't swerve to ping them, to clip them out of orbit--but it happened anyway, and I always ended up shrieking as I heard the thunk and saw the feathers fly. For a while, my car even drove around with a little feather headdress sticking out of the grill on the front because I couldn't bring myself to clean up the evidence.

And I wasn't the only one on a bird-killing streak that year. My father was too. The worst--the one I'll never, ever forget--was the mourning dove.

It was early evening. My father and I were on our way to town to get some dinner, and we were sailing along the back country roads, the ones cutting through long, tilled-up corn fields, and that's when the fattest mourning dove I had ever seen flapped its way into our path. You could tell this dove was exhausted from hauling its fat bulk around. His flight path was ragged. He appeared drunk and belligerent. Maybe he was a little suicidal. His wings gave out and he sagged near the road, hitting the hood of the car.

And then he exploded.

I am not kidding. I am not exaggerating. It was the strangest thing I'd ever seen. That bird hit the car and exploded like a water balloon. A great gush of liquid--water, blood--washed over the windshield, and my father and I screamed. And then my father turned on the windshield wipers because there was just so much liquid.

And so, now, whenever I see a mourning dove, I can't help but insert sound effects when I watch it waddle around on its toothpick legs. Slosh, slosh, slosh, I think as the fat bird thumps around the deck. I picture its stomach like a mini-washing machine, just without clothes, the water swirling in a perpetually full cycle.

Now, here at home--I drove back to Buffalo a few days ago for spring break--there are mourning doves everywhere. There are a few that like to perch on the back porch, where my father, who, after he turned fifty, decided to take up one of his mother's favorite hobbies (feeding and acquiring certain level of inside information about birds, their habits, and their preferences in suet), puts out many different feeders. This hasn't always gone well for my father. He's battling certain tricky elements--two of which are Fat Squirrel and Fat Raccoon.

Fat Squirrel is fat because he simply climbs up into the bird feeder and parks it there while he fills his stomach with seed. Fat Raccoon does the same thing, just with a little more violence. He's been known to break the feeder, knock it over, kick it off the deck so that it falls and splits in two on the ground.

But sometimes actual birds dine at the feeders, and this afternoon those birds included two huge black birds and one fat mourning dove. You know who's particularly interested in this, in what's going on on the back porch? My cat. Abbey. She's obsessed with these birds. She will sit in front of the back door for hours, her eyes as big as saucers, her limbs tense with the desire to spring through the screen door.

It doesn't make it any better that the birds taunt her. The black birds tittered at her and bounced around on the floor of the deck just so she could get a better look, just so they could say, Fuck you, cat. You can't get out of there!

And then there was the mourning dove. She waited and waited and waited for the black birds to be done with their feeding so she could get in on the free food, but she got tired of waiting and she drifted down to the floor of the deck and planted it there. She folded her legs underneath her and nestled down, turning squarely so that she faced Abbey. The two of them were separated by a few feet and a screen door, and they would stay that way--just staring at each other--for hours. I'd never seen a more lazy (stubborn? cruel? taunting?) bird. She just locked eyes and gazed upon my cat until she finally tired and got up, turned a circle, squatted low, and shit out one tiny pellet onto the deck.

Abbey looked back at me and whined. She wanted me to open the door. Of course she did. I'm just not sure why. I don't know whether she wanted to be let out to make friends with the bird or to eat the bird, but either way I was half tempted to do it, to see what would happen if Abbey decided to leap into the afternoon sun and land on the bird. I wanted to see if it would explode instantly, leaving my cat standing on nothing but a pile of moist feathers. But I didn't. I figured that was probably too much trauma for any one cat to handle. After all, I know it was a little too much for me.

TMI

2010-03-11T19:01:00.005-05:00

Sometimes I get too tied up in my students' lives. I become invested. I secretly wish a select few would come over for roast chicken and conduct their strange little lives at my kitchen table so I could watch all the drama like it was my own private television show.

This wish has intensified this semester. I blame this partly on the disappointment I suffered at the hand of yet another guy and how I've sublimated a good chunk of that disappointment and decided to float something else up to the surface to cover it, and that something is an interest in things that are going on at school.

This has been easy. The student body at school is small and incestuous. My students know each other in the most surprising ways. Students who should have no business knowing each other just do. Just yesterday, in fact, I was sitting in front of the cafeteria and handing out free books to anyone who wanted them, and one of my auto boys (who was holding a Honda magazine and showing me pictures of all the things he wants to do to his car) started chatting up one of my favorite creative writing students (who had, moments before, finished writing a sestina he couldn't wait to show me).

"Wait a minute," I said. "You two know each other?"

"Yeah," my creative writing student said. "We party together."

I stared at them. I was trying to imagine what they would ever talk about while they were siphoning beer and smoking cigarettes. "How is that even remotely possible?" I asked, but they just shrugged it off like it was no big thing. It shouldn't have surprised me. That's just how this school is.

So, there's that--the incestuous nature of my surroundings--that contributes to my piqued interest, and then there's also Facebook. That, of course, is where I recently found out that one of my favorite former students just started dating another one of my former students. And while I've always been a fan of being a sort of professorial matchmaker (when I was a TA, I once noticed how much one of my students loved another one of my students, and I was fond of them both, which made me think, hey, why not try to get those two together, which led to me always sorting them into the same circles during group work), and while I have been known to just accidentally happen into intimate knowledge about some of my students, I have never actually sealed the deal. And with these two that got together, I would've never even considered sealing the deal.

I cannot count all the ways in which I adore the boy student. I do not love him in a dirty way, in a nasty way, in a way that would get me in trouble. My love for this boy is pure. What I think about him is this: If I were ever to have a son, I want my son to be exactly like this boy. He's tall and a little lumbering, sweet, charming. He's got a great laugh. You can tell this is a boy who loves his mother, who probably goes home and kisses her on the cheek and says, "Hey, Ma, whatever you've got cooking smells great." I bet he takes the garbage out before he's told to. I bet he babysat the neighborhood children. I bet he has cute T-ball pictures that show him smiling a great big missing-tooth smile. He is going to make some girl a very, very good husband someday.

But this girl? I didn't see it coming. And when I saw the news on Facebook I stared at it and--protectively, an instant reaction--thought, I could've made a better match for him. It's not that I didn't like this girl when she was in my class--she was peppy, a talker, always ready to contribute--but it is that I have developed a certain level of mania, and I feel like I am better equipped than this boy to make romantic choices for him. Which is, you know, pretty sane.

But I'm not always less-than-thrilled with my students' romantic choices. This semester I have the pleasure of having one of my favorite-students-of-all-time's girlfriend in my composition class, and she is stellar. I knew I was getting her way before the semester started because her boyfriend informed me of this, and I wasn't sure how to feel about that fact. I wondered if that would be a bad thing, if I would like her, if I would be disappointed by his choice, if I would wonder why she wasn't nearly as entertaining and darling as her boyfriend and his twin brother. But the first time she opened her mouth she said something badass and hilarious, and I thought, Holy shit. This is the world's best match. I better get invited to the wedding.

So, as you can see, this all is a slippery slope. I'm involved. I'm spending time I used to spend wondering why all men in the world besides my father are programmed with the desire to be assholes, and why I am programmed to let those men into my life in one way or the other, wondering what kinds of weird things are going on in my students' lives. And who can blame me? They let the strangest things slip out--I'm bisexual, and my father made me that way! or Do you want to see my abs because they are awesome!--and those things can stop me in my tracks, make me stare at all these bright faces that are staring back at me, and think, Dude, you guys are almost better than Dancing with the Stars. ALMOST.

The Sequel to "Help Me Rhonda" Would've Been Called "Thanks for Your Help, Rhonda, Now Get out of My Fucking House"

2010-03-05T10:51:00.007-05:00

In Diana's book, she has an essay that talks about her love for Bruce Springsteen and the girls pivotal to Bruce Springsteen's songs. She really, really wants to be one of those girls, one of those sweet-tough girls who catches the interest of a boy in dusty jeans and a white t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a boy with messy-curly hair and a gravelly voice.

And I understand that. I'd like to be those girls, too, but if I am being honest with myself, I know I'm not a girl in a Bruce Springsteen song. Of course, this doesn't mean that I'm not immortalized in song somewhere. Because I am. Oh, am I ever. Behold:

Oh, Rhonda. I feel you. I understand you. I know exactly what happened. There was this boy, right, and he was sad and broken and you saw that and you thought, Hey! I can do something about that! I can make him feel better! and you tried, didn't you? You became the coolest version of yourself: a laid-back girl who said, "I know. I understand. You poor thing. Come here." And then you kissed that boy and combed your fingers through his hair and told him everything was going to be all right. And then you spent time--weeks, months, maybe years--giving him whatever he wanted, whatever he needed, and he was thankful for you, wasn't he? Maybe he said, "You're the only thing in my life that's good." Or maybe he said, "You're my voice of reason." Or maybe it was, "You made me feel like I can breathe again."

Rhonda, baby, I've heard it all. I know.

And I also know that's not where the story ends. I know your song isn't the last word on the subject. Sure, those boys were happy and thankful you helped them get her--the last one, the bad one, the evil one, the psychotic one--out of their hearts, and maybe they were so thankful they wrote a song or a poem or a letter about it--but what they don't tell you is after they feel better, after you've restored their faith in love, they're going to escort you to the door, shake your hand, and ask you to step outside because your transaction is now complete. Those boys, they're fixed! They're saved! And you did that! You're such a swell girl, Rhonda!

I know, baby, I know. We're both idiots, you and I. We're both just such idiots that maybe now it's time someone wrote a song about that.

And Then We Went out for Burritos

2010-03-01T19:25:00.003-05:00

If you'd like to know how many text messages I got yesterday the moment after Sidney Crosby scored the overtime goal that made Canada the Olympic champions of 2010, the answer is this: a whole lot.

Most of them were supportive toward me (and my heartbreak for my rumored fiance)--my mother said, He needs you! Comfort him!--but one of them, from one of the boys I went to grad school with, said he was pleased with the outcome because he loves Sidney Crosby and Canada, and as far as he was concerned, America sucks.

It took all the strength I had to keep myself from responding this way: I'll cut you, bitch.

Because as much as I grew up loving Canada, and as much time as I have spent in Canada, and as much as I support Canada's claim on hockey, I was solidly pro-USA in the hockey tournament, for obvious reasons. And last night that reason let an overtime goal into his net, and after he did that he fell straight to the ground. He smashed his face into the ice and just stayed there for a minute. And I thought, Oh, Ryan. I know. It's okay. Really, it is.

And you could tell just how much he wanted to kill himself then and, well, for the next twenty minutes while the Canadian team celebrated and the Americans had to stay on the ice and watch as they waited for the medal ceremony to be set up. And those boys couldn't even crack the smallest of smiles as the silver medals were hung around their necks. They couldn't even try. I felt so awful for my boy, who got quite a rousing round of applause from everyone in the arena. He still looked like he was two seconds away from taking that medal and slicing it across his throat to see what would happen. See?

Oh, don't you just want to fold him into your arms? Don't you just want to push that hair back off his forehead? Don't you just want to kiss his temple and say, "Let's go key Crosby's limo, okay?" And don't you want to actually follow through with that--key Crosby's limo--and then take Ryan Miller to some dive-y Irish bar where there's a loud band playing Flogging Molly songs, and don't you want to bring a tray of Car Bombs back to the table for him, and don't you want to drink with him until you're both drunk and stupid and singing, and don't you want to get up and do a little jig just to make him smile, just to make him laugh?

Still, even though it's clear that's not exactly how he spent his time after the game yesterday, he did end the day smiling a little bit. He went to the closing ceremony, and the camera went straight to him, got right up in his face, and you know what? Ryan Miller was smiling. He was holding out his phone, recording the whole scene, and he was smiling. See?

Maybe he's smiling because he was able to put things into perspective, to know that he and the team did some pretty fantastic things over a two week period. Or maybe he's smiling because he realizes how good he looks in that hat. (But we aren't surprised by this, are we? We've discussed this before.) Either way, he no longer looked like he wanted to off himself, and that made me happy. Because he shouldn't. I can't tell you how happy that two weeks' worth of hockey made me. I don't get to watch a lot of Sabres games here in Bruins-Land, but I loved watching him play on the world stage. I loved watching all of them play. (Especially David Backes, the boy who was playing for the Mavericks while I was at MSU. If anyone is ever wondering what Midwestern boys look like, he is a PERFECT EXAMPLE. Minnesota was filled with boys who looked like that. Tall. Strong of jaw. Broad of shoulder. Can you see why I am so boy crazy?)

What they did was really something else. No one thought they were going to be that good. But they were.

So, it's no shock really that when I went to bed last night I dreamed of Ryan Miller. This is no big shake--I dream about him a lot--but last night he was sad, so sad, and it was up to us--Western New Yorkers--to cheer him up. He hosted a charity Frisbee-throwing contest when he got home from the Olympics, and I got into the game somehow.

Honest to God: In the dream I was paired with a handicapped child who couldn't throw the Frisbee at all, and I thought, Jesus! Ryan Miller is never going to notice me because this little girl and I, our combined Frisbee throwing is going to be so rotten! But that little handicapped girl and I threw our Frisbee the best we could, and when it was really, really rotten, I tried to teach her how to throw it less-rottenly, and when he saw I was doing that, Ryan Miller sent everyone home and invited me in to his house.

What happened next would displease my father.

Then, the next morning, we woke up and talked about how we needed to practice kissing some more, so we did, and then Ryan Miller said to me, "How about we go get some burritos? I know a great little place."

And then we went out for burritos.

So, as you can see, everything works out for the best in the end. Silver's okay. Actually, it's spectacular. And so is a morning of kissing and burritos.

Crooked

2010-02-26T19:45:00.007-05:00

Bad news from Buffalo.

Ryan Miller has a girlfriend, my best friend texts two days ago. And then this morning my father sent me an e-mail with a link one of the local radio stations had put up so everyone could gawk at the pictures of the new girlfriend. And they are pretty gawk-worthy. After all, she's been in Maxim. One of the pictures the radio station jocks put up features her wearing nothing but an unbuttoned dress shirt. She's turned to the side and squatting so we are all afforded what could loosely be described as "an eyeful."

I immediately forward this link on to my office-mate, who, like everyone else at school, humors me about my love for Ryan Miller ("Have you started planning the reception yet?" my office-mate will ask. "Have you chosen your appetizers?").

I can't compete with that! I write to him.

She's strictly arm-candy, he writes back. He'll get tired of her, and who'll be waiting in the wings?

I guess the answer is me. I'll always be waiting in the wings--hopefully in a way that is more charming than it is stalker-ish. Or if not me, then maybe someone like me. Sure, it's true I know nothing about this new girlfriend except that she likes to take her pants off and be photographed in her underwear--and, yeah, I can see why that would appeal to even the smartest, most enlightened of men--but it's just that I've always hoped that Ryan Miller would get a girlfriend who is the sweetest, kindest, smartest, most adorable girl-next-door. I would be totally okay with it if he started dating some elementary school teacher from the suburbs, a girl who has a closet full of smart cardigans, a girl who routinely has to scrub paste off her hands after work, a girl who has had to sprinkle sawdust over vomit when Billy McQueen had a bad reaction to the brownies the Room Moms brought in to celebrate the February birthdays. She would have glasses. She would have a collection of plaid headbands. She would be well-versed in pie-baking.

I feel like Ryan Miller needs a smarty. Someone with an advanced degree in something other than hotness. Hey! Guess what! I have an advanced degree, and it's certainly not in hotness. My degree is an MFA in creative writing, and I've got a decent set of good qualities that come along with that, like, well, I know all the words to Salt-n-Pepa's Shoop. Surely that's got to count for something. It might not be a Maxim model, and it might not be the elementary school teacher with the heart of gold, but it's somewhere in the middle, and that might not be a bad place to be for a man who's played so brilliantly during the Olympics.

And, in addition to playing brilliantly, he's been doing something else quite well these past two weeks: Getting stubbly.

This picture was taken today, after it became clear that, well, Finland wasn't going to be winning the game anytime soon--it was, after all, 6-0 in the middle of the third period--and so Ryan Miller got to go to the bench to rest up for the big gold medal game that'll take place on Sunday. And that meant the cameras kept cutting to him--sans helmet--and that made my afternoon, which I was spending baking placek (and was thus already pretty great), even better.

Earlier, during the first period, I'd called Greg, one of my friends from grad school--the boy who had the bad fortune of having to sit next to and put up with my hysterical shrieking at most of the Maverick hockey games--and said, "HOLY SHIT! ARE YOU WATCHING THIS RIGHT NOW?!"

He wasn't. He was driving back from an teaching gig in Detroit, but he wanted to know how it was going. I told him it was going pretty well, considering the US had scored six goals in, oh, the first fifteen minutes of play.

"You know," he said, "the other night, we were watching the Olympics, and we saw Ryan Miller getting interviewed after the game, and I guess I never really knew what he looked like. So when I finally saw him, I thought, Jess is madly in love with that?'"

"Well, in his defense," I said, "after the game with Canada, he looked like he'd lost fifty pounds. He looked tired. He looked like death. And, well, he's got the crooked face."

"A VERY crooked face," Greg said.

"Yeah, but it's a very appealing crooked face," I said.

And, oh, is it ever. It's enough to make a girl stand in the middle of her apartment at 4:00 in the afternoon, screaming, "YOU ARE A GOD!" at the top of her lungs, clearly giving her neighbors something to wonder about.

So, really, all that's left now is to ignore the news from Buffalo, to forget that Ryan Miller is dating some exotic-looking Maxim model, and spend some time hoping and wishing that that boy, that crooked-eyebrowed boy, helps us get gold on Sunday.

I've got my fingers crossed.

A Love Letter to Evan Lysacek and the Winter Olympics

2010-02-19T12:25:00.003-05:00

Hello, pretty boy.

We've been here before, you and I. During the last winter games, I had to work very hard to keep myself from flopping to the floor in an epileptic fit every time you showed up on the television. It's just that you have really nice hair. And dimples. And legs. And hands.

I felt you were robbed at the last Olympics, but I felt pretty certain that things would be okay in another four years, when you were older and wiser and--I hoped--hotter. My hoping was not in vain. You are hotter. Ridiculously so. Bonus: You're now an appropriate age for me, and I feel less skeevy about having a crush on you.

Last night as I watched you kick some serious ass, your legs looking a million miles long, I couldn't help myself from thinking, I'd pay some serious money to see his abs. But it's not my fault. Between skaters, they kept cutting to footage of you working out and doing crunches. And I turned to the cat and said, "Abbey, I might die if I don't get to make out with this kid."

And thank God for all of that, because I've been pretty muddy in the head lately, and if it weren't for this glorious two-week stretch of Olympics (which, I've got to say, is featuring the most attractive bunch of Olympians ever... if you discount the creepy mustachioed Polish skiers) I don't exactly know how I'd be handling things. I'm awfully sulky. But when I get home from school each day I know I have hockey games DVRed and I can watch those with dinner, and when I get done with the hockey games, it's already time to turn on the nightly coverage of whatever's going on. Luge. Speed skating. Slalom. Snowboarding. Figure skating. All of those things take up space in my head, and that's exactly what I need right now: Less available space for thinking.

And I'll even get into the sports I could care less about. Last Sunday, after I got back from a girls' night out in Boothbay, where we drank at a bar called--I swear on everything holy--McSeagulls (oh, Maine!)--I crashed onto the couch, rolled up in an afghan with the cat, and we watched the entire biathlon. I cannot accurately express how little I care about the biathlon, but last Sunday it was the best thing in the world to just stare at a television screen for sixty minutes and watch tall men skate in circles and shoot things.

But you know what's even better than that? Figure skating. Specifically, men's figure skating. Specifically, you. You look like you're seven feet tall on the ice, and that's enough to undo me, enough to turn me into a shrieking mess.

And I wasn't the only one. One of my girl neighbors had some friends over last night, and you should've heard the explosion of screaming that was going on over there, and this screaming corresponded with every time you appeared on the screen, so I think it's safe to assume you were undoing lots of women last night. You were turning us into sixteen year-old versions of ourselves, turning us into teenagers who want to tattoo your name onto our palms with red pen.

Be my belated Valentine, Evan. Come over and I'll make you a celebratory meatloaf. One fit for an Olympic champion.

Nooner

2010-02-17T21:04:00.002-05:00

A conversation with a student:

Student: Oh my God! I know I was supposed to have my assignment uploaded today, but I didn't get it done.

Me: Why not?

Student: It says "Have uploaded by noon" on the assignment sheet, but I didn't know you mean 12:00.

What I Know Best

2010-02-13T11:15:00.001-05:00

I feel like running.

When I get upset, when I get sad, when I feel like everything is fucked up and there's nothing I can do to fix it, I want to run away. I want to get in my car and go. North, South, East, West, whatever. Wherever it is, it is gone, and that is all that matters.

Of course, I never go. I never run.

What I crave is gone-gone, not just vacated. I don't want anything to do with personal days, slips of yellow paper signed by the chair of the department. I want new. I want gone. I want to feel like until I wanted them to, no one could find me.

This is my way of thinking I can outrun sadness, that I can trick it, fool it, leave a false trail and force it off into the woods when I've taken to the sea.

But I'm an idiot. You can't outrun sadness. You can't trick failed hope. It clings to you, dead weight, and makes you feel like you are filled with nothing but sand and rock and other heavy things.

Let me tell you a story: There was this boy.

This should be starting to sound familiar. We've been here before. Since I've come to Maine, I've taken on a new role: Girl Grieving Over That Which She Almost Had.

First there was the boy who woke one morning feeling suddenly truthful and told me, yes, well, this has been swell, but we should really probably stop doing this because I am getting back together with my ex-girlfriend.

Then there was the boy with the perfect name, the one who stayed up late with me to talk about God and the world and how he wanted to change things, be better, make things better. He disappeared the week of my birthday, and I had to cry with my face buried deep into two pillows so my father, who was visiting and sleeping in the next room, wouldn't hear me.

Now there's a third. And I swear to God--I mean, really, I swear on everything--I wasn't even interested in getting messed up in something new. When I went home I was a pile of busted limbs. The semester and the last boy had left me mangled. I was having trouble speaking in complete sentences. If you had asked me then what I wanted most, I would've told you silence. I wanted to remember what it felt like to think without hating myself so loudly in my head.

But then there was this phone call, and on the other end was a friend, and she said, "So, listen. I think you should have a fling when you're home for Christmas. There's this boy, and he's going home to Buffalo. You're going home to Buffalo. I can make it happen."

I said no. I did! Really! The first words out of my mouth were forget it.

"It'll make you feel better," she said. "Maybe you two could just make out or something."

You can guess what happened next.

Before I knew it, there were a few nights and then a New Year's and then a few more nights, and then there was the last day, and I had to force myself to get up out of a bed that wasn't my own because we were leaving, both of us, the next day, and we had to stop, stop, stop what we were doing and do other things, crucial things, things like packing and saying goodbye to our parents.

Before we got out of that bed, though, the boy told me I'd made it so he could breathe again. He'd had a bad semester, too, and he was sick of himself in the same ways I was sick of myself. But those two weeks over Christmas were new and better. For me, too.

"God I was a mess," I told him. "You put me back together."

And then we kissed and went back to our own corners of the world.

Here's what should have happened: It should've stopped there. There. That second.

When we said goodbye and I stepped outside into another ski country snow, that should have been it.

But it wasn't. And things went on and on. There were long phone calls. Late night phone calls. There were nights I went to bed at 6:00 AM just to get up and teach a few hours later. I was half-asleep but happy. Delirious. Suddenly there was a new something in my life, and that something was possibility. Hope. It was far away and far off, but there was something to look forward to, and after a semester like I had last fall, something to look forward to was the most foreign and beautiful idea in the world.

About the weather: Usually when I am home for Christmas break I end up getting caught in at least one awful snow storm, lake effect so bad that I have to turn off the radio and concentrate on my breathing. Usually this happens on the roads I know best, so, really, it's not so bad. I know the curves or I have memorized the bends or I know where the exits are.

But driving south to this boy's house was new for me. I had to take back roads I hadn't traveled since I was sixteen, back when my best friends and I would sneak off to Franklinville to go to the teen dance club there. But now I was driving past even that, driving into towns I knew nothing about, and then, eventually, out into the country where the snow drifted so badly I couldn't tell where road turned to ditch. I drove there in weather I should not have. I did that more than once. I did that because I really, really wanted to.

On the first night, after we came home from a bar where we had compared notes about the people we had in common, we sat in my car in the driveway and he said, "Do you want to come in?"

I looked out the windshield. The snow coming down was the best kind. It was huge and weightless, the kind that would drench you without your knowing it. Stand under it for even a few seconds and then, once you walk into heat, you'd realize how much you'd collected in your hair, your eyelashes, the folds of your jacket. If it kept up like that, the drive home would be horrible.

I should've gone home. I should've waved goodbye and wished him a good semester. But, instead, we got out of the car, and we stood in the driveway under all that snow.

"Wait," he said. He looked up into the sky and watched the snow come down. "Listen," he said.

I tipped my head up too, and closed my eyes. I was thinking Oh God oh God oh God. I didn't know what I was doing. But I let the snow cover me. And then we went inside.

Later that week, the morning after New Year's, he and I were leaving a diner after breakfast, and it was snowing again. It was the same type of snow--impossible and perfect, a postcard. I had my hand on my car door, and I closed my eyes, felt the snow brush against my cheeks.

"It always snows the most beautiful snow when we're together," I said.

Later that week we would be in bed, half-asleep, and he'd quote that line back to me, and I'd hide my face in the pillow, embarrassed. "Oh God," I said. "You remember that?"

"Yes," he said. "I liked it. No one ever notices those things. No one ever says anything like that to me."

And then I wondered if that meant something, if all that snow and beauty really meant something, but of course it didn't. It really meant nothing at all.

I wrote recently about being happy. The last paragraph I wrote was about superstition, about how I hoped I wasn't tempting fate by admitting to my happiness out loud.

Would you like to know how much time it took after I said the words out loud, after I admitted it, for everything to fall apart? Six days. I didn't even get one last full week of feeling that way.

Listen, let me be honest: I don't know if I really wanted to be with that boy--after all, what did I know about him? I knew as much as a girl can learn over two weeks of seeing someone in person and then a few more weeks of long phone conversations. But already I was addicted to certain things. I was addicted to an idea of a maybe and the way I felt when I heard his voice. I liked having someone to tell me goodnight, sleep well.

I had vague ideas about what was happening between us, and all of it seemed okay, right up until the moment he said, "I guess I should tell you about this girl I've been seeing out here."

There was a hangnail of silence between that and what I said next--which was something like, "Yes, that sounds like very important information for me to know."--and in that moment of silence everything went black. No, that's not right. Nothing went black; it was already black. I was standing in front of the desk in my office, and after he spoke I lifted my eyes, I looked out into dark of night, saw the shapes of the pine trees outside my window, and I thought of course. Two words. Of course. I thought of Keith, of the Wily Republican, of the Boys of Maine, of everyone who chose someone else over me. I thought, This is what you know best.

I walked back into the living room and sat down on the couch. Then I got up. "I think I am going to pour myself a very large glass of wine," I said, "and you can tell me whatever you need to tell me."

And so he did.

After this boy and I got off the phone the first time--we would finish discussing things later--I called the Wily Republican. I did this not because he's my closest confidant but because I wanted to yell at someone.

And so when he answered I cried and I yelled and I told him this was all his fault. He'd made me this way. He'd made me hurt and crazy and fucked up about men, and I kept wandering into crazy and fucked up things with men.

He listened to all this and then, finally, said, "Well, what does this guy want to do now?"

What the boy wanted to do was anything he wanted. That's what he told me. He said, "I just want to do whatever I want to do for the rest of the time I'm here in Minnesota, and then, later, like this summer, when we're both home, we can worry about whatever we're doing."

And I said, "So you just want to fuck around as much as possible for the next five months?"

And he said, "Yes."

When I told the Wily Republican all of this, he wanted to know how I'd handled it, what I'd said and done.

"I told him that didn't seem very fair to me. It just didn't seem fair to say, 'Hey, I think I'll want to be with you eventually, so let's keep things like they've been--let's keep talking for long hours and everything--and maybe I'll get around to wanting to be with you.'"

"Okay," the WR said. "What else?"

"I said it was simple," I told Wily. "I told him I'd done something like that all through grad school. With you. And I wasn't going to ever do that to myself again. So I said I couldn't keep letting myself get attached, so we would need to stop talking. Completely."

"He'll come back," the WR said. "He will. He'll realize."

"Don't tell me shit like that," I said. "It doesn't happen. It never does."

And then I cried because that was right: No one ever chose me, and no one ever came back. I was once again passed over, left behind, just some girl this boy used to know for a little bit.

It is what I know best.

Best Rumor EVER

2010-02-08T19:17:00.006-05:00

So I have an upper-level creative writing class this semester, and here's the thing: I am in love with that class. It's a particularly deep and soulful love, and I spend a lot of time thinking how I'd like to fly that class to Vegas, get it drunk, and then marry it.

Today I was headed to this class, and I passed the chair of the department in the hall. She'd been teaching in the room where I'd be teaching in a few minutes.

She grinned at me. "There is a pretty big rumor about you being spread around," she said.

"What?" I said. I was trying to figure out what was so rumor-worthy about me. Earlier, I'd caught a few minutes of Scrubs while I was eating my breakfast, and on that episode Carla was spreading a rumor that the hot new Latina nurse used to be a dude. I hoped no one was trying that with me.

"Just wait until you get into class!" the chair said, and then she was gone and I was left to face my students.

"WHAT?" I demanded as I crossed the threshold. "WHAT IS GOING ON?"

(I did not add, "DOES ANYONE IN THIS ROOM THINK I USED TO BE A DUDE?")

"YOU!" one of the girls shouted. She pointed accusingly at me. "YOU ARE ENGAGED!"

I almost fell over. "What?" I asked.

"People are saying you got engaged!" she said. "To some hockey player! A guy who plays for the Sabres!"

"RYAN MILLER!" I said.

"YES!" she said. "The goalie!"

And then I shrieked. And jumped up and down. A lot. "THAT IS THE BEST THING I HAVE EVER HEARD!" I said. Of course, what made it good, what made it really fucking good, was that people--multiple people--apparently believed it.

So, to celebrate my engagement, here's a picture of my fiance with some random animals dressed in hockey jerseys:

God, that boy can wear a suit. Mercy.

Perv.

2010-01-31T12:00:00.004-05:00

This week I read an article about some high school teacher/coach who called a girl into his office before laying a hundred dollar bill on the desk in front of him and saying, "I'll give you that if you take your clothes off slowly."

My first thought was ew, and then my second thought was wait a second. That sounds familiar.

Back in high school, one of our history teachers was a notorious pervert. He'd been around for a while. In fact, he'd also been my mother's history teacher back when she was in high school. In her old yearbooks, there he is, a younger version of himself with wet-looking hair and a thick mustache. The look he is giving the camera makes it seem as if he's counting the minutes until he can go home, slip into his smoking jacket, light a cigar, and put on some Burt Bacharach. In short, he looks like a big, fat pervert.

"Oh, he was a big, fat pervert," my mother told me when she found out I'd be having him for a teacher. "He wasn't even sneaky about it. He announced at the beginning of the semester that he was going to put all the most attractive girls in the front row. The so-so girls went in the middle, and then the guys got stuck in the back of the room."

"Oh my God!" I said. "That's disgusting!" Then I paused. "Okay, where were you?"

My mother? She was in the front row.

I was fairly certain Mr. Hardy wouldn't still have such a blatant ranking policy anymore--tenure or not, that was the type of thing to get a man fired from teaching honors history in the 90s--but that didn't stop me from spreading the gossip to my friends, and we all laughed when Mr. Hardy organized the seating chart so that the class outcast and one of the smartest boys got placed directly in front of him.

"Maybe Mr. Hardy's tastes have changed over the years," we joked.

But, really, they hadn't.

One afternoon I dropped by his classroom during a planning period to hand in a short essay extra credit assignment he'd circulated to the class.

"I'll read this while you're right here," he said. "We'll take care of the grade right now."

I stood behind his desk, next to him. I read my words over his shoulder. It was a dynamite little essay, and I was proud of it. I waited patiently for him to finish it and praise me.

And when he finished, he took up his pen and he hovered it right above the paper. "This was good," he said.

"Thank you," I said. I watched his pen very closely. I was waiting to see the good grade he was going to trace on the paper. But the pen just hung in the midair.

"I'll tell you what," he said. "I'll give you a choice."

I turned my eyes from the pen to his face. His hair and mustache were the same as they'd been in my mother's yearbook, but they were gray now. He still looked like he couldn't wait for a patterned silk jacket, a cigar in his fist. He looked like the type of old man who would say to a girl, "Hi there, Kitten. Why don't you come sit on my lap?"

"A choice?" I said. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I could give you a hundred points," he said, "or I could give you a hundred dollars because you're wearing that skirt."

I looked down at my outfit. I was wearing one of those numbers that was popular in the early 90s: plaid school girl skirt, navy knee-highs, chunky Mary Janes. It was my favorite outfit, and I always felt pretty good about myself when I wore it. The boys on the bus--the only boys who had crushes on me--went crazy for that outfit.

"Uhm, I'll take the points," I said.

"Okay." Mr. Hardy laughed and finally put his pen to the paper. He scratched a 100 at the top of my essay and handed it back. He made a notation in his grade book. "You're all set," he said. "I'll see you in class."

I wanted to tell him, "Listen, buddy, you're disgusting." I wanted to say, "Get a grip, pervert." But there was another part of me that wanted to thank him. I was not a pretty girl. I wasn't like the popular girls in our grade, the ones with high, perfect pony-tails and mega-watt smiles. I'd just recently stopped perming my hair, and I had a wardrobe filled with crocheted sweater vests. My nickname was "Chassie," short for "Chastity." The boy I loved most dated the skinniest cheerleaders at school, and I would eventually join the squad for two months in an effort to make him look at me. He never did. It would be years before I got my shit together.

Beyond my parents, not many people stopped me to tell me I looked nice, looked good, looked pretty. And I knew having a fifty-something history teacher tell me I was pretty wasn't going to solve any of my problems, and I knew there was something really disgusting about what he was doing, but for just a few seconds that day I let myself feel a little bit less like I was doomed to be a girl on the periphery forever. And then, minutes later, I hated myself for thinking like that because a teacher had just vaguely hit on me. I knew I should be more scandalized than I was, but at fourteen I was looking for anything to hang my hopes on, and I needed to take whatever I got. And what I got was Mr. Hardy, who never again said anything inappropriate to me. We made it through the rest of the year discussing world history, and I got my good grades, and I sat in the second row, and I tried not to think about what a horrible pervert was standing at the front of the room, smoothing his mustache and looking out at the girls in his class and thinking, Yes, yes. If only.

And Now, a Surprise

2010-01-27T22:41:00.004-05:00

Jesus, I'm happy.

This is good, of course, but it scares the shit out of me. Last night I wrote this in an e-mail to Katy: I want to talk about how happy I am, how I feel like I've been reborn, how it's so different from last semester, but there are things I can't exactly talk about, and I also don't want to tempt fate. I think I am more superstitious than I realize.

The last time I was happy was August, when I was beginning that ended-as-soon-as-it-began ridiculousness with the boy with the great name. You remember him. He was the one who sang to me, kissed me warmly, and waved as I was leaving his house, and then I never heard from him ever again. Like, ever. And then, after I realized I'd been abandoned, that I'd been found lacking, that I'd been fooled, I opened my eyes and realized something else: I was in the middle of the semester from hell. Near the end of it I couldn't quite catch my breath. I was finding it hard to make it through the day. I was waking up and thinking, I can't. I can't do it. Don't make me do it.

And then came the point in the semester where one of my students called me a fucking bitch. This was when everything unraveled for me, when I realized there was no saving the semester. It was ruined.

This was after I'd been giving some notes on apostrophes. I'd had my back to them--I was writing on the board--and one of the boys in the class screamed. I mean screamed. I whirled around, and the boy who screamed was rubbing his arm.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Glenn punched me!" the boy said. He pointed to the kid next to him.

And Glenn looked at me from under the hat he'd pulled low over his forehead. He crossed his arms over his Carhartt. He raised his eyebrows. He dared me to say something.

So I said, "Get out. I don't care why you did what you did. Just get out of my classroom."

"Are you fucking kidding me?" he asked.

"NO," I said. "GET OUT."

And so he grabbed his books, his jacket, and then he stormed toward the door. He whipped the door open. "FUCKING BITCH!" he said, and then he left the classroom. He barreled down the hallway and out into the parking lot, where we could see him get into his truck and tear away from school. He squealed his tires tore around the bend toward the road back to town.

It was the most dramatic exit I'd ever seen in my life. And it made an impact on more than just those of us in class. An hour later, when I was with my creative writing class, one of my students came up to me. She frowned at me--a gesture of pity, really--and nodded. "We heard," she said.

"You heard?"

"We heard that kid leave class. We heard him yelling all the way down the hall. He said some not great stuff about you."

And the whole building got to hear it.

It was a treat. A real treat.

So I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that I couldn't wait to get out of Maine and back to Buffalo for Christmas break. All I wanted to do was sit in a dark bar and drink a whole lot of vodka with all the people I love best, and I wanted to do it repeatedly.

A lot of good things happened over Christmas, and I woke up one morning feeling renewed. Over night, things inside me had slid back into place, and I remembered who I was. In fact, I felt a lot like I did in grad school. I felt young, I felt fun, I felt like I was someone worth spending time with. I didn't feel rotten or awful or miserable. I didn't feel like I was a bad teacher, a boring idiot, a killjoy. I stayed up really, really late and did some inappropriate things and let every nasty thing from the previous semester melt off me.

And now that I'm back in Maine, and now that the spring semester has started, things are looking good. By this time last semester I already knew my classes were going to be bad, that they were filled with some really awful, really mean students, and that it was going to be a struggle to make it through.

But here's what I know about my classes now, after two and a half weeks: They're good. In fact, they're pretty great. I am especially in love with my intermediate creative writing class; it's filled with former students of mine, sweet devoted students who have really amazing things to say, and it's blowing my mind. Things are looking up.

I can't stop dancing. I can't stop singing. (Last Friday, as I was on my way to Portland to have lunch with Emily the radio first played Rosalita and then Cecilia, and I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.)

A former student of mine--one who knew about my woes last semester--stopped me in the hall last week and said, "Holy shit. Look at you! You're so happy!"

And now that I've said it, now that I've written it out loud, now that I've confessed it, I'm terrified. I am superstitious. I don't want the universe to think I'm bragging, I'm boasting, I'm showing off. I don't want it to think, Whoa now. Let's not get carried away.

I don't want any take-backs. I just want to be quiet and happy. I'm not saying I deserve it, but I am saying I'm thankful for it. Dear God, am I ever.

On the Occasion of Everyone I Know Being Knocked Up

2010-01-15T13:52:00.006-05:00

Holy shit. Everyone I know is pregnant.

This all started in October, when Katy and Matt showed up in Maine.

"So," Katy said, "if we drive by a drug store, we should probably stop in."

"What do you need?" I asked. I am a girl with plenty of sundries, and if she needed anything--deodorant, lotion, tampons, laxatives--I would be able to accommodate those needs without having to pop over to a CVS.

But Katy just grinned. "Well," she said, "I took a pregnancy test last night, and it was positive, so I think I should take another one to get a second opinion."

And then I squealed. I squealed a lot. And then, after we ate a lobster lunch on the rocks of Cape Elizabeth, we drove straight to the drugstore and wandered up the family planning aisle.

Katy couldn't help herself. She stared at the prices--pregnancy tests aren't cheap--and then she reached for the cheapest one on the shelf.

"NO!" Matt and I said, in unison.

Her hand froze in midair. "What?" she said. "Seriously, what's wrong with a cheap pregnancy test?"

"You get what you pay for," I said. I was remembering last October, when I visited Minnesota and Diana threw a party after the Good Thunder reading, and we made Babies-in-the-Cupcakes, and whoever found a baby in his or her cupcake got a present from the grab bag. We'd combed the aisles of the local dollar store for an hour, just looking for good gifts to hand out later. We'd selected some boas, some statues, some tubes of dollar store lube, and, of course, a pregnancy test. One of the boys was lucky enough to choose the pregnancy test, and he strode upstairs with a beer in one hand and the test in another. He did his business while we all gathered outside to talk him through the process, and then he came out of the bathroom beaming. It was good news: He was with child.

So, a year later, standing in the family planning aisle of the Cape Elizabeth CVS with Katy, I felt compelled to remind her of that. "Will we really feel confident about the result from a cheap test?" I asked.

Katy frowned.

"Don't be cheap," Matt said.

Katy frowned even more, but she edged her hand higher, toward the more expensive brands. "Can I at least get this brand?" she asked, poking to a store brand box. "It's a two-pack! It's a deal!"

Matt and I sighed. She plucked the box from the shelf and went off to pay.

A few hours later, there were a tense few moments in my bathroom before Katy came out waving a stick in the air. "Look!" she said. Oh, and we sure did:

And then we celebrated:

Yes, I put the stick Katy peed on very close to my face. In my defense, the gross end was capped.

Matt and I were excited by the results. I think it will please Katy that I've put a very rare picture of me in sweat pants out here for the world to see.

I can't remember what Katy is drinking here. It might be Loganberry. I might've been so pleased that I mixed her a big glass of Loganberry because, well, she earned it.

Not long after Katy and Matt left Maine for Mankato, I got more news. This time I was in my car, and I was driving the two hours down to Boston to pick Josh up from the airport after he ditched France. I had just crossed over into New Hampshire when Rachel, another of my best grad school girls, was having a baby, too. The kicker? She was due only three weeks before Katy. The two of them were going to be having babies at pretty much the exact same time.

At first I felt a stab of jealousy because my brain went fast-forwarding through the next few months, and I could see them pushing their stomachs together and posing for pictures, shopping for cute maternity clothes, comparing aches and pains, secretly swapping name ideas. And then, as quickly as it came, the jealousy disappeared and was replaced by another feeling, and that feeling has been simmering for a while now.

It's hard being away from my old friends. They're spread out from Buffalo to California. They're everywhere in between. They're nowhere near me. And it seems so odd that I was there for their weddings, for their first big steps into adulthood, but now I won't be there for the next. It seems completely bizarre to me that they will be pregnant all that time, and I will not see them. I'll never get to put my hand on their swollen stomachs and wait patiently to feel a kick. The night I first realized that, I was overwhelmed with sadness. I wanted to pack a bag and fly to Minnesota right then, right that second, but I couldn't, and I didn't, and instead I am trying to find comfort in the fact that, yes, this summer I'm driving out, and I'm going to spend time with the new babies in the Midwest, and, yes, Katy is forcing me to change my very first diaper then, and, yes, I will do my part in spoiling the new babies, and that's all great and wonderful and lovely, but it still seems just so quick, like those girls are going to snap their fingers and then, before you know it, before you can even orient yourself, everything is different, and I wasn't even there to see the change.

I Know Better

2010-01-14T20:35:00.000-05:00

A conversation with Josh:

Josh: I want to go back to school. What should I go for?

Me: Maybe you should go to bartending school.

Josh: Maybe I should. But that doesn't seem important enough.

Me: You could be a fancy bartender. You know, the type that makes up famous drinks and gets profiled in Bon Appetit.

Josh: Hmm. Maybe.

Me: You'd get a lot of pussy.

Josh: Yes. Wait. Wait just a minute. What did you say? Did you just say pussy?

Me: Yes.

Josh: Don't ever say that again. Like, ever.

Me: Fair enough.

The King of Romance

2010-01-12T18:21:00.005-05:00

My friend Josh left over Christmas vacation to go out to Colorado. Colorado sounded good to him, and he likes to snowboard, and he thought he could probably get a job somewhere, he could probably find a place to live for a few months, and if he couldn't, well, he knew a few people out there and he could crash on couches and figure something out.

He called tonight to tell me he signed a lease today, and that means he's staying in Colorado for at least nine months. He got an apartment with some of his friends, and he got a job as a ski lift attendant, and at night he and his friends climb up the mountain they live on and they snowboard down in the pitch black.

But that's not all that is going on in Josh's life. On his way to Colorado, he stopped in to Wisconsin and had some times with some friends, and one night all of those friends--there were, like, fifteen of them--got a hotel room. And they went out and danced on bars and got drunk, and that's when Josh decided there was a pretty girl he wanted to hook up with. But fifteen is a lot of people to cram into a hotel room--so little privacy!--and he knew he needed to have an alternate plan if he wanted to get some.

So Josh turned to this girl and said, "So. On a scale of one to five, how bad do you want to fool around in a handicapped bathroom stall?"

And this girl looked up at Josh, and she smiled. "Five!" she said.

This, of course, was after Josh had strolled into the lobby of their hotel--a Holiday Inn--and asked the guy behind the counter if he could rent a room for maybe just an hour and a half.

"I've got this girl I want to hook up with," Josh explained. "Can I get a hotel room for that long?"

The guy said he'd have to ask his manager, but the news wasn't good. The Holiday Inn was not in the business of renting rooms by the hour so that a kid from New York could show off his best moves for this girl who was eager, who was ready.

So Josh had to improvise. And he remembered the handicapped bathroom on their floor. It was across from the vending machines.

So now he had the green light from his girl. She was excited. She was going to show him a good time. And she started tugging him toward the bathroom.

"Wait," Josh said. "Shouldn't we get a blanket or something?"

But the blanket was too much to maneuver, so they settled on a lone white towel that they spread out before having sex right there in the locked handicapped bathroom, while across the way the vending machine full of Twix and Lifesavers and Doritos and Wrigleys hummed and hummed and hummed.

The next morning Josh woke up nervous. Scared. He and this girl hadn't used a condom, and in the morning Josh suddenly realized that was a horrible, horrible idea. He started to feel a little like he did for the span of years he refused to have sex with girls--he was convinced he was going to knock someone up, no matter how safe he was--which is why he tried to convince every girl he got naked to do some anal. Real sex was too dangerous. And the morning after the handicapped bathroom, he remembered just how dangerous.

This is why Josh went straight to Target, walked up to the pharmacy counter, and asked for a pack of the morning after pill. Then he took that out to the parking lot, where his girl was standing with their friends, and he handed her the pack.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

She looked at the package. She looked at him.

"Will you take this pill?"

When she didn't say anything, Josh reached over and popped the pill out of its package. "Can you take it?" he asked. "And can I watch?"

And you know what? All of this happened even though there was a surplus of condoms hanging around. I know there was. In fact, the world knows there was. Why? Because they did this:

And let me put that in perspective for you. The British one? Yeah, he's the guy I got detained with at the border this summer.

Disgusting little felons.

Merry Christmas from the Stupid Girl

2009-12-30T14:45:00.004-05:00

Let me be clear: I do not know Polish. My family is Polish, yes, and my grandparents infused some Polish words into my lexicon, but those were mostly words for food (kapusta! pierogi! placek!) or body parts (butt=dupa!) and thus were not enough for me to pick up anything substantial.

Upon hearing that I was Polish and could not speak the language, two of my old (perverted) customers at the diner--the ones who, when I asked them what they'd like to eat one night, gestured to my apron, which was slung over my hips, and said, "Oh, you know.")--took it upon themselves to teach me parts of the language. But they always chose the worst possible times. They'd test me on last week's lesson on a swamped Friday night, when I was running to and from the kitchen with my arms piled high with plates of fish fry. I was a very bad student. I'd always end up muttering something that was halfway correct or in no way correct, and they'd always look disappointed and tell me to study harder. "You have to listen to us," they'd insist. "You have to listen very carefully."

But I was less interested in listening to them and more interested in making it through the summer so I could get out of that diner and to Maine, where I would start my full-time teaching job. After all, it was possible these men were not being good teachers. It was possible that while they were telling me, "This is the phrase for 'good morning to you'" they were really telling me the phrase for "Your female bits look mighty delicious this morning, and I'd wish you'd take off that apron and service me right here in the dining room."

I didn't trust them, and I didn't trust their Polish.

And so my Polish is still rusty.

As it turns out, if I were a little better at speaking the language, I wouldn't have had to rely on my brother's girlfriend on Christmas. She was the one who ended up translating for me when my grandfather started hissing Polish words at me shortly after dinner, just as the cousins and I were setting up our annual Uno Smackdown in the living room.

Here's the deal: My grandfather has many things wrong with him--legs still riddled from a childhood bout of polio, heart disease, no peripheral vision due to stroke, bad lungs, general bowel craziness, etc.--but the one thing he takes the least care of is his diabetes. He hates taking his medicine, he hates pricking his finger, he hates having to care about the number that his meter beeps back at him. So mostly he does none of those things.

I was over at his house the other day--not because I am a good granddaughter, but because I had to give him something of his my mother had accidentally left at my apartment in Maine during her Thanksgiving visit--and while I was there I felt compelled to make his lunch and do his dishes. I knew he was supposed to be taking his medicine and worrying about his blood sugar, so I made him do it while I stood there and watched (or, more specifically, pretended to dry a pan for fifteen minutes), and so he did. When the number came back as 346, I asked if that was good or bad.

"Well," he said, "it means I'm about ten seconds away from a coma."

But he just doesn't care about those things, and that became even more clear on Christmas, when the cousins and I were sitting around waiting for the Uno to begin. Grandpa was in a recliner in the corner, watching us through slitted eyes.

When my cousin Sarah got up to get herself a raspberry candy, my grandfather said, "Hey. Give me one."

I watched as Sarah took one of the candies for herself and then lifted the whole bowl and transported them over to where he was sitting. He slipped his fingers into pile and drew out several candies that he immediately shoved in his mouth.

"Grandpa..." I warned.

"Be quiet," he said.

Later on, it was sponge candy. Sarah was heading back to the kitchen for some, and my grandfather requested that she bring him one. Actually, several. Actually, bring the whole plate.

Appealing to or guilting my grandfather wasn't doing the trick, so I said, "Don't do it, Sarah."

She looked between the two of us, and then my grandfather narrowed his eyes at me. He started mumbling something under his breath. It was garbled, fast, angry. It was Polish.

"Well, I don't speak Polish," I said. My voice was light, bright, cheery. "So here's a bonus: I don't know what mean thing you're saying about me right now!"

But my brother's girlfriend, whose very Polish grandmother has taught her more of the language than I'll ever know, was there to translate.

"He's saying, 'Shut up, stupid girl!" she said.

And I nodded, said, "That seems about right," and turned back to the game at hand.

Energizer

2009-12-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

At 4:18 PM on Christmas Eve I was in my father's kitchen. I was baking cookies and listening to holiday classics. That was exactly when Josh decided to text.

What are you doing? he said.

Baking cookies, I said.

So, am I going to see you or what?

Right now? I asked. I'm baking cookies. Come over. I'll make you a drink!

I figured I'd make him a festive eggnog--made with a liberal dose of amaretto, of course--and he could sit in the kitchen and watch me pull the last few sheets of cookies out of the oven.

You should come over here, he said. No one's here.

Fine, I said. I'll be over after I get the cookies done.

When I got to Josh's forty minutes later, I found him scrubbing at his bleary eyes.

"I'm hung over pretty bad," he said. "I'm disgusting."

I'd heard from him the night before, shortly after he and his friend John had decided it was a good idea to do two things: eat all the steak they found in the freezer at Josh's apartment and then go sit in John's car and drink a whole bunch of liquor straight from the bottle. I'd gotten a picture of it.

Now, we went into the living room and sat on the couch and watched CNN and then a soccer game. After a team had finally, finally scored, Josh turned to me and said, "Want to know what I got everyone for Christmas?"

"You got everyone the same thing?" I said. Already it sounded like a pretty bad idea.

"Yes," he said. "Batteries."

"Batteries?"

"Yes. I bought a shitload of batteries. All kinds of batteries."

"You got everyone in your family batteries for Christmas?"

"Yes! Come on--that's awesome!"

"Oh my God," I said.

"Think about it," he insisted. "Everyone always needs batteries."

"So when your mother opens her present tomorrow, she's going to just have a pile of batteries sitting in her lap," I said.

"Yes," Josh said. He was so proud of himself. "Isn't it a great idea? It IS! Really!"

Honestly, it sounded like something my brother would do. He is notoriously odd about gift-giving, too, and has been known to wrap packs of gum and give them out as seriously as if they were boxes of jewelry. But if I told Josh that--if I'd compared his gift-giving technique to Adam's--I know he would've taken that as a good thing. It might have even made his day.

Marvel at the Glory

2009-12-26T14:52:00.004-05:00

Here's what I was greeted with bright and early on Christmas morning. The robe:

And if you're wondering if that's vodka-tea in that glass my brother's holding, you'd be right. He left it out overnight, and when he scuffed into the kitchen on Christmas morning he said, "I wonder how this tastes now. Want some?" And when I said I really did not want some he tried it himself. And that face he's making tells us it wasn't that great.

Because He Wanted It

2009-12-22T12:26:00.006-05:00

I'm home. I'm back in Buffalo. ("I wish you wouldn't say that," Josh said. He was on the phone with me as I was crossing over into New York from Massachusetts. "You're misrepresenting yourself, you know. You're not from Buffalo. You're from the country. You grew up in a town an hour from Buffalo. Don't be a liar."

"Don't be a pussy," I said. "I can get to Buffalo in half an hour.")

Two days after I got home, my mother and I decided to spend a day making Christmas cut-outs and our family's (hard! ridiculous! pain-in-the-ass!) fudge recipe. Here's how that went: The oven started on fire and we ruined the fudge.

Later, my brother came home from work in a pissy mood. He's mad at our mother. He's avoiding her and not speaking to her. Why? Well, recently he passed the test he'd failed twice before--the test that allowed him to enroll in an intense one year nursing program his girlfriend had already gotten into--and this made him happy, but that happiness was short lived. Back when he started trying to get into the program, our mother told him that if he did get in, he could stop paying her rent, rent that he has been required to pay for a while now, since after he flunked out of auto mechanic school it seemed possible that he might just freeload off my mother forever. Since she has been collecting rent (forty bucks a week), my mother has been socking it away for Adam so that she can give it to him when he moves out. He doesn't know this. He has no idea that he has several thousand dollars saved up in his name for when he and his girlfriend get an apartment together. Surprise!

So, because he doesn't know this, and because he is under the assumption that my mother is collecting all his hard-earned Ass. Head Cashier money and then throwing fistfuls of it over her head as she rolls around in the rest on her bed, he is pretty angry because he came home and said, "Hey! I passed! Looks like I don't need to pay rent anymore!" and my mother said, "Uh, no. I said when you started the program you won't need to pay me rent anymore. You don't go to school until October." She told him to pony up the dough. He told her she was black and evil inside.

"I mean it!" he said. "You're black and evil for doing this to me, Mother!"

And then he stomped away and hasn't really spoken to her since (unless you count our family dinner on Sunday, when, after we finished our stir-fry, he brought out his recent acquisitions, a book called 400 Sauces and a book called The Encyclopedia of Cooking Ingredients, and gave us all a lecture on the superiority of European lobsters and the importance of a good Bernaise). He's still pissed about his money. He wants that $160. He's got stuff to buy. Important stuff.

Like a robe. A really good robe. A really, really good robe. This was at this top of his to-buy list this past week, and he made a purchase--sad because he didn't have an extra $160 to do it with--that he unveiled at dinner. He was chilly, he said, so he needed to put on a robe. Now, it's important to know that the child has a perfectly fine, perfectly good, perfectly normal robe already, but it's also important to know that this robe, this new robe, spoke to him. It called his name. It whispered in his ear: Adam! Touch me!

And Adam did. And he loved the robe. And he purchased the robe.

The only problem? It's a girl's robe. It's a red, satin-trimmed, fluffy-necked girl robe.

"Nice robe," I said.

"Thanks," he said. He petted it. He rubbed the fluffy neck against his cheek. "It's the best robe ever."

"It's also a girl's robe," I said.

"I don't care," he said.

His girlfriend rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

"You're wearing a girl's robe," I said.

"IT IS COMFORTABLE," he said. "IT'S THE MOST COMFORTABLE ROBE I'VE EVER TOUCHED. OKAY? I WANTED IT!"

"Okay," I said. "Fine."

And then he reached for some more duck sauce and another egg roll.

The End of the Semester: Notes

2009-12-13T12:33:00.004-05:00

(1.)

I go to school on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then I am done, done, done.

(2.)

I call my father. I need gift ideas for his fiancee.

I say, "What does Kathy want for Christmas?"

He says, "She never tells me."

I say, "How about toilet paper? Do you think she'd like some toilet paper?"

I recently bought what I'll quantify as a WHOLE FUCKING LOT of toilet paper because, well, it was a good price. (I felt very thrifty, very Midwestern at the exact moment I was cradling the giant package of toilet paper in my arms and hiking it back to the registers. Really, I was channeling my inner Katy.)

When I arrived home with my whole fucking lot of toilet paper, I realized I didn't have enough room for it. I am in toilet paper surplus. I have more triple-roll spools than I know what to do with. Right now, they are in my closet, stuffed behind garment bags full of dresses.

"Toilet paper, huh?" my father says. "Well, sure. Now there's a gift. Who wouldn't love getting that?"

(3.)

I call my father again, later.

"What are you doing?" I ask. "Are you Christmas shopping?"

"I am doing the dishes," he says. "Hey. Guess what. We went to a wedding last night."

"Whose?"

"No one you know. A friend of Kathy's. Anyway, I skipped the wedding itself, but Kathy went. When we met up before we went to the reception, and she told me she had a surprise for me. Someone we had in common was going to be there, and we'd get to sit with them during dinner."

"Who was it?"

"Your brother."

"My brother?"

"Yeah. And you should've seen him." My father laughs. "That kid was a dancer last night. I've never seen him like that before. He was spastic. He danced with everyone... even the groom. I think he might've had one too many pops, if you know what I mean."

(4.)

So, there's this student. This student is a male, around my age, an auto guy. I think it's safe to say he has a crush on me. I make this assumption because of the following items: a.) Last weekend I received an e-mail from him that referred to me as "Doll" ; b.) he routinely asks if I'd like to hang out with him on the weekends, even after I've scolded him and told him to stop asking that because I'm his teacher, and he's my student, and NO ; c.) if I come over to help him, he likes to tell me I smell good ; d.) he's said, "So, I bet you have trouble with your guy students all the time, because, you know, you're hot and all." And then he waggled his eyebrows at me.

So, the other day in class, after one of my other students informed me she'd gotten me a Christmas present while she was down in New York visiting her boyfriend--"A boyfriend in New York," I said dreamily. "Swoon!"--the student with the crush said, "Well, I'm giving you your Christmas present next week."

"You got me a Christmas present?" I said. "There's really no need, you know."

"Oh, I didn't get it," he said. "I'm making it."

I think this is something I'm going to have to brace myself for.

(5.)

My grandmother sent a Christmas card the other day, and after I opened it and read it, I sat down to send a card in reply. When I was done, I realized what a poor job I'd done. I had written about how sad my students had made me this semester--what says Merry Christmas! more than an in-depth discussion of the decaying behavior and skill set of college-level students?!--and then I'd tried to change subjects by discussing the fun I was going to have next week when my friend Emily and I go Christmas shopping in Portland on the night they have free wine in all the stores.

When I was finished rereading it I knew I'd have to throw it out and start a new one. The end of the card--what with its shift in tone from downtrodden to upbeat, just when I'd started discussing Emily and all the good, glittering times we were going to have shopping--was just more evidence that I am a giant, hulking lesbian. And I figure grandma doesn't need to worry herself about that at Christmastime.

The Modern Man

2009-12-03T19:33:00.004-05:00

(1.)

Over crab cakes in Damariscotta, my brother let it slip that he'd lost his license. Again.

I was eating a giant haddock sandwich, and I glared at him over the roll I'd just finished slathering with tartar sauce. "YOU LOST YOUR LICENSE?" I said. "For how long this time?"

The last time this happened, he'd lost it for a month. He'd gotten too many speeding tickets in a very short period of time, and the state of New York thought he could use a little break from anything vehicular.

"Six months," my brother said. He said this casually as he stuffed another crab cake in his mouth. "These are delicious," he said.

"SIX MONTHS?" I said. This time I turned to glare at my mother. She hadn't breathed a word of this to me in any of the calls we'd placed to each other in the days prior to their trip to Maine.

"What?" she said. She had her own crab cakes to contend with, and she busied herself with her own plate so as to look simple and innocent.

("He kept that news from me for a long time, too," my father told me tonight. "But why didn't Mom tell you? She obviously knew."

"Probably because she didn't want to give me any more reasons to ask the kid if he was an idiot," I said.

"Right," my dad said. "Of course.")

I put my sandwich down. "Are you an IDIOT?" I asked.

"It's no big deal," Adam said.

"NO BIG DEAL? SIX MONTHS?"

"Whatever," he said.

"Well, what happened?"

"I got a few too many speeding tickets in an unlucky time period."

"STOP DRIVING FAST."

"It's not that I drive fast," he said. "It's just that I don't pay attention. That's all."

"How do you get around now, without a car?" I asked. My brother has inherited my father's restlessness, and he's always moving, always going somewhere, always leaving one place for someplace better. I couldn't imagine him living his life without a car.

"Well, I can drive between set hours to work and back, and only within a certain range of miles. If I'm caught out of that, I'm done," Adam said. "Plus, I've got a driver, too." He poked his girlfriend in the side. She smiled at him over her pulled pork sandwich.

"It's going to get tricky soon," she said. "My car is not a good car in the winter."

I found that almost impossible. My brother's girlfriend drives a big old car that could, in a pinch, serve as a small tank in a small nation's budding arsenal.

"Isn't that thing pretty badass?" I asked.

"Oh, hell yes," my brother said.

"That's not exactly the problem," she said. "It's that it doesn't have heat."

"No heat?"

"Nope. None."

"How do you stand to drive it in the winter then?" I asked.

"Blankets," she said. "Lots and lots of blankets."

(2.)

Thanksgiving morning, my brother woke up twitchy. He prepared a pot of coffee in the coffee maker he'd packed and brought along with his fondue pot, and then he announced he was going to the gas station.

"I am going to get the paper," he said. "I want to look at the Black Friday ads."

My mother and I said yes, yes, sure, fine, whatever. We were busy. I was making a pumpkin cake, and she was making an apple pie. We didn't need Adam puttering around my small kitchen, underfoot while trying to perfect another brew.

So Adam and his girlfriend went down the street for the paper and came back ecstatic.

"Look at this!" my brother said. He shoved the ads in my face. "So thick!" he said. "We're going out! We're going out early!"

"Have fun," I said. By this time, I'd moved on to making biscuits. "I'll be here. At home. In bed. Warm. SLEEPING."

"It's going to be great!" he said, and then he and his girlfriend sat down to sift through the ads until they came to their favorite: Wal-mart.

My brother held the paper up to his nose and took a whiff. "Ohhhh," he said reverently. "Wal-mart."

I leaned over to my mother. "I will kill him before the day is out," I whispered.

"Make your biscuits," she said.

Ten minutes later, it was settled. My brother had seen enough. He'd seen exactly what he wanted to see. There were indeed great deals to be had at Wal-mart. So good, in fact, he was nervous about them. He figured everyone in their right mind--except me, except our mother, who were so clearly addled--would be staking their claim at Wal-mart and that meant he and his girlfriend would need to head out extra early to guarantee that they got the things they wanted (a laptop for her, a video camera for him).

"We're leaving at nine," he announced.

"NINE?" my mother said.

"That seems drastic," I said.

"It's necessary," he insisted. "Trust me. I've got a feeling this is gonna be big."

And it was big. When my brother and his girlfriend, still full from dinner, still full from the two desserts we forced on them before they left, arrived at Wal-mart just after nine, they were not the first people standing in line. The store would open at midnight, but the items could not be sold until five AM. They would simply have to stand in line to prepare for the lunging after the workers unwrapped the stack of deals.

And that's exactly what they did. My brother and his girlfriend had to stand on opposite sides of the store for their items, and they had to raise their hands when they wanted to use the bathroom, and they had to get a hall pass from the person in charge of their line, and they had only twenty minutes to use the facilities, and if they weren't back in twenty minutes--and the time was clearly recorded on their pass and on a master checklist--they lost their spot in line and, thus, their deal.

But they mustered through. My brother--the boy without a license--and his girlfriend--the girl without a heated car--spent over four hundred dollars on electronics.

Later, as my mother and I combed Freeport for deals at the Banana Republic outlet, I abruptly stopped admiring the silk scoop neck I was certain would look fantastic with a pencil skirt at a holiday party.

"Mother," I said, "why the hell did they just spend all that money on electronics instead of, you know, a car with heat? Doesn't that seem like the more important item to have during a Buffalo winter?"

"Don't think about it," my mother said. "I try not to anymore. We'll just drive ourselves crazy."

(3.)

My brother and his girlfriend slept in after their escapade at Wal-mart and met up with us later that afternoon. Adam called when they rolled into town, just as my mother and I were finishing up our mid-afternoon lobster stew.

When my mother got off the phone she looked exasperated.

"What now?" I asked.

"Your brother," she said. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

"What about him?"

"He's wearing his Crocs," she said.

At that moment, we both turned and stared out the window. It was pouring so bad that the road had turned lake-ish in spots.

"His feet are sopping wet already," she said.

"Jesus!" I said.

"Now, now..." she said.

"No! I mean Jesus!" I said. "Does that kid THINK? Like, EVER?"

"Jess," she warned. "Stop. We can't change it now. Don't say anything to him about it, okay? It'll only cause a fight."

But fifteen minutes later, my brother was standing in front of me in the vestibule of LL Bean, and he was hopping from one foot to the other, trying to force water out of his shoes.

"Are you an idiot?" I asked.

"I didn't know it was raining," he said.

"I have a giant sliding glass door in my living room," I said. "How could you not notice it was raining?"

"I just didn't, okay?" He flicked his Croc at me.

"And then when you went downstairs to go to the car--you didn't notice it then?" I asked. "You didn't notice it the minute you stepped outside?"

"I did," he said. "I noticed."

"But you didn't turn around and walk the fifteen steps back upstairs to change your shoes?" I asked.

He glared at me.

"Whatever," I said. "Fine."

"I'm going upstairs," he said. "I'll be in Fishing. See you in eight hours."

But things didn't get any better for the kid. When he'd had his fill of LL Bean, we figured we'd take off for Portland, get some dinner, duck into a few of the cute shops in the Old Port. But it was raining even harder then, and my mother and I--under the cover of an umbrella, coats, and appropriate footwear--were soaked by the time we got to our car. Adam was almost drowned.

But he's nothing if not resourceful. When we got to Portland, he--suddenly inspired, suddenly giddy with invention--grabbed two bags from the earlier Wal-mart excursion, stuck his feet in them, and then tied them around his ankles. He slid the Crocs over the bags, and he traipsed around the Old Port and sat through dinner with the Wal-mart logo beaming up at anyone who passed us by. And he didn't mind in the least.

The Divide That Will Rip Our Family to Shreds

2009-11-29T15:51:00.003-05:00

When the family--my mother, my brother, and his girlfriend--arrived in Maine for a Thanksgiving vacation, the family had plans. First, they wanted some lobster. That was easy. Second, they wanted to see a lighthouse. Again, easy. Third, they wanted to see New Moon. Well, the majority of them did. My brother did not.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered when we discussed our love of the series. "Give me a break. Twilight Schmilight."

The night they arrived, the DVR was busy recording So You Think You Can Dance and the finale of Dancing with the Stars, and since we couldn't change the channel away from either of the recording shows, my brother, unhappy with his options, begged to watch a movie.

"Let's watch Twilight!" his girlfriend suggested. "Then he'll be caught up."

"I've seen it," he said. He narrowed his eyes. "You've made me watch it."

"Watch it again," she said. "Then you won't be asking us a million annoying questions during the second movie."

"Fine," he said. "Fine. WHATEVER. Anything is better than this." He pointed to the TV screen just as Legacy--shirtless again, much to my delight--lifted his partner over his head during the Viennese Waltz. "This makes me want to throw up," he said.

"It makes me want to make out," I said.

Adam pretended to retch into his hands.

So, in an effort to please him--well, sort of--I turned off SYTYCD and put in the movie. Twenty minutes into it, Adam started giggling.

"This sucks," he said. "They're really horrible actors."

None of us could disagree. In parts, the acting is really comical.

"How can you like this?" he continued. "I mean, it's so bad."

"It's hot," I said.

"Ew."

"It's hot if you've read the books," I corrected. "The books are good. Want to read them?"

He sent me a withering look. He probably hadn't picked up a book since college--and, let's face it, while he was there (flunking out of everything) he wasn't picking up many books anyway.

During the scene in the meadow--Twilight fans know what I'm talking about--my brother decided he'd had enough of the brow-furrowing and melodrama. He decided to make the movie fun for himself.

"Oooooh!" he sang out suddenly, in a voice that was not his own. This new voice was high and girlish, maybe a little old fashioned. "Oooooh! I'm Robert Pattinson, and I'm going to make a messy in my panties!"

"ADAM!" the rest of us shrieked in unison. He was ruining it.

"Oooooh!" he squealed again, flapping his hands in the air. "Messy in my panties!"

And the mocking didn't stop there. For the next few days, whenever there was a silence, a lull, a dip in conversation, he would suddenly fill it with his imitation. "I'm R. Pat!" he shrieked. "Ooooh! Aren't I pretty?!"

But then the strangest thing happened. After a full day of exploring the coast and eating crab cakes, we came back to the apartment and tried to figure out what we wanted to do. My brother wanted to make fondue. He'd gotten a fondue pot for his birthday--it was his latest obsession--and he was ready to make us a beer cheese fondue, and he was willing to do all the work.

"Should we go to the movie, though?" I asked. "Are we up to it?"

No one wanted to make a decision, so my brother suddenly stepped in. "Listen," he said. "Listen, listen, listen. I think we should go. We'll go. I'll make us some fondue, and then we can go to a late showing of the movie. How's that sound? Okay?"

We all stared at him.

"What?" he asked.

"You want to go to the movie!" I said. I gasped and pretended to slump into a faint in my chair.

"NO!" he said.

"You do!" his girlfriend said. "You just planned it for us! You so clearly want to go!"

"Oh, whatever," he said. He ducked his head. "I'll admit I'm kind of interested in what happens next."

"OH! MY! GOD!" my mother said.

"You are a GIRL!" I said. "What a girl!"

"Shut up!" he said. "SHUT UP!" And then he turned his back and started preparing the fondue--which was, in the end, downright delicious.

So, after we dipped an entire loaf of bread and an entire platter of vegetables into that beer-cheese mix, we went off to the theater. My brother, as previously mentioned, smuggled his beer in--perhaps so he could feel less like a Twilight-worshiping girl, which he so totally IS--and he mixed that beer with cookies we'd also smuggled in. He didn't make a peep during the whole movie. Not a single one. He didn't sing out in his Robert Pattinson voice, nor did he say anything about a messy in his panties. He just stared at the screen and then later, as we drove home, announced this to everyone:

"So, I'm totally Team Jacob," he said. "Whoever's Team Edward is lame and stupid."

"I'm Team Edward," I said.

"That makes sense."

"Whatever. You're a WOMAN," I said. "I can't believe you just admitted that."

"I have no shame," he said. "Go Team Jacob! Jacob all the way!" He pumped his fist near the window, so even the passing cars could see his insistence.

And even later, he made these stunning revelations:

And the last part of that video? That is why I have decided I am in love with his girlfriend. I hope they get married.

Happy Thanksgiving from My Family to Yours

2009-11-26T14:41:00.003-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us here in Maine, especially this kid, who, when we went to see New Moon last night, pulled a beer out from his coat pocket and cracked it just as the lights were about to dim.

My brother is so classy it's breathtaking, isn't it?

Edward 4-Eva

2009-11-20T16:30:00.002-05:00

Yesterday in my creative writing class we were discussing character development, so we closed class with a prompt where students selected scraps of paper from an envelope. Written on those scraps of paper were various random (sometimes odd-ball) items (a set of moldy dentures, a blow-up doll, red stilettos, a sticker that says HELLO! MY NAME IS: AWESOME!, etc.) and the students were then asked to brainstorm for several minutes about the type of person who might be likely to own each of those items before expanding those ideas into a full-on character.

"Who the hell owns a milk jug in the shape of a breast?" one of my students asked, flapping her scraps of paper in the air.

"My brother," I said.

On the other side of the room one of my other students was bent over his notebook and muttering to himself. Whatever he'd gotten on his scraps of paper was causing him a considerable amount of stress. Finally he just gave up and threw his arms in the air. "You know who would own this?" he asked. "TWILIGHT NERDS, that's who. TWILIGHT NERDS!"

Simultaneously, three girls in the room--and, yeah, I was one of them--whipped around and said, "HEY! WATCH IT!"

And then we all smiled and nodded at each other, pleased with our synchronized chorus and the fact that we were going to be having a very, very, very good weekend.

The Rot

2009-11-17T22:09:00.004-05:00

Let me tell you about maggots.

Maggots are gross. Maggots are foul. Maggots are things that crawl around my grandfather's kitchen because he has stopped cleaning. The man can get up, shuffle across the living room, put a porno in the VCR, and then shuffle back to his easy chair to do God knows what in, but he doesn't feel capable of going into the kitchen to run a rag across the counter. And so? Maggots.

And, sure, good old George Edward can summon maggots like no one's business, but his oldest granddaughter--and, yeah, that's me--also knows how to bring them about, apparently.

Remember when I told you about the fruit flies? Remember when I blamed them on that night Emily came over and we got drunk and very seriously discussed over fifty rounds of bellinis the boringness of this season's Project Runway contestants? Remember how I said I left all the food out and then the next morning--poof!--the fruit flies had arrived in my apartment, which was now their own miniature Boca Raton? Yeah, well, they were probably there for a while, just out of my view.

Tonight I bent down to grab a book out of my school bag--a multi-compartment green croc number--and I reeled backward after breathing in the air around the bag. It was rank. It was rotten. It was everything bad in the world.

"What the hell?" I said.

Abbey, who was sitting a few feet away, looked up at me and blinked. Duh, she said.

I reached into the bag--a mistake!--and rooted around in the front section I don't really use. At the bottom, my fingers sunk into sponge. Dark, fragrant sponge. I yanked the bag open and held it up to the light. And there it was: a completely rotted banana tucked deep into the folds of my bag. It was studded with maggots--mostly dead, but some not completely.

I reacted the way most people would if they'd just gone ahead and stuck their finger into a nest of maggots and moldy banana: I shrieked and tossed that bag. A cloud of fruit flies fluttered out from it.

Immediately, Abbey lost her mind. The flies had hightailed it to the nearest surface--which happened to be the mirrored doors that close my washer and dryer off from the rest of the apartment--and Abbey lunged at the doors. When the flies scattered farther up, she pinned her ears back and chattered at them before leaping up far enough to pin a few under her paw.

I was busy standing very still and hating myself. I had let a banana rot in my bag. I had been carrying maggots around with me everywhere I went for God knows how long. When I got into my car in the morning? Maggots. When I set my bag down in the corner of the office? Maggots. When I stepped into my creative writing class ready to discuss metaphor? Maggots. Maggots and rot everywhere I went.

What kind of girl was I becoming? A girl who lets rot descend on her life, that's who.

While Abbey continued her tactical assault on the fruit flies, I took everything out of the bag and sprayed it down with cleanser and scrubbed-scrubbed-scrubbed. I set out new dishes of balsamic vinegar. I got so disgusted at myself and at the bag that I opened the door to my patio and tossed it outside. The door hadn't been open more than five seconds, but in those five seconds Abbey had decided to abandon her plan to stalk and kill the flies that had been coughed out of the bag, and she shot through the open door. She wedged herself between slats on the deck and she stared out into the night, out into the dark, and she raised her nose to smell the cold in the air. I bent to get her and hugged her against my chest, and for a minute we stood out on the porch, next to a recently de-wormed bag, and we listened to absolutely nothing.

Let's not lie: Symbolically, this does not bode well.