The Seniors

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.

One More Bit of Happy

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.

Life As I Know It Is Now Over

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.

My Own Little Boom Boom Pow

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.

How to Become a Girlfriend

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?

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:

Sometimes My Love for This State Overwhelms Me

This is clearly one of those times:

Hiatus

I turned twenty-eight on Sunday. It happened without a lot of fanfare--mostly because my grandmother and the man she married were in town. They'd come with my father, who dropped them off with their friends from Florida, who have a spring-summer-and-fall-home in Maine, and we went back down to retrieve them on Sunday morning so they could spend my birthday with me.

My father and I had spent the day before trying to make whatever fanfare we could, which included taking a trip to the very famous Red's Eats for lobster rolls and taking a trip to Popham Beach for some beautiful Maine coast and taking a trip to Freeport to shop and fill up on truffles from the Lindt outlet, but when we picked my grandmother and grandfather up, the day, my actual birthday, became less about fanfare and more about shouting.

My grandmother's husband can't hear very well--even with his hearing aid, which he took out and polished during lunch--and most of the day was spent having conversations like this one:

Grandma: This lobster is delicious.

Grandpa: WHAT?!

Grandma: I said, THIS LOBSTER IS DELICIOUS.

Grandpa: DELICIOUS?

Grandma: YES. YES! DELICIOUS! THAT'S WHAT I SAID!

--Pause--

Grandpa: I accidentally shot a deer last weekend.


We took them to the coast for lobster, and then we drove them to my town and gave them a tour of the high points, which included the college, the hotel where they'd spend the night, and Home Depot. After that, we took them back to my apartment and my grandfather fell asleep in my recliner and my grandmother watched me and my father polish my new dresser with Old English.

When my grandfather woke up, my grandmother cut the angel food cake she'd brought for the occasion and my father put on Fox News so my grandfather could get his fix. We ate the cake and watched a doctor discuss the merits of vegetable cleansers you can now buy in the produce section of grocery stores. Then my grandmother announced she was ready to go to back to the hotel to get ready for bed. It was 6:10 PM.

It had just been one of those days. It was nice to see my grandparents, of course, and doubly nice to see my father, but the few days before their arrival had been pretty wretched and I'd spent most of my birthday trying not to cry.

After all, it's been an interesting time since I came back to Maine at the beginning of August. Some pretty decent things started happening to me--"Hey!" my office-mate said. "Maybe Saturn's cutting you some slack!"--and those things continued to go pretty well until they stopped going anywhere at all. All the lovely, all the good, all the sweet disappeared a few days before my family's arrival, before my birthday.

And it's pretty well documented that I don't do well with with change and affairs of the heart. Especially affairs of the heart. I get nervous and critical of myself. I analyze. I analyze. I analyze. But worst of all is this: I hope. I hope an awful lot. I tie myself up in that hope, bind it right up to my throat, choke myself with it. I think, Maybe! Maybe! Maybe!

It's never maybe. It's always never. And I'm left feeling wrung out.

Today the chair of my department sent around an e-mail asking everyone to get downstairs to gather for a cheesecake in honor of my birthday. It's the twenty-eighth birthday, right? the e-mail said. I wrote back to say that, yes, it was, and that I hoped twenty-eight was going to be a bit better than twenty-seven and that I had high hopes for it; after all, eight is my lucky number.

Honey, another member of the department wrote back, they're all lucky. We just have to be able to recognize the luck. And that was enough to make me put my head down on my desk and cry for a few minutes before I went off to get a slice of turtle cheesecake.

What am I trying to say? I guess just this: I am tired. I am confused. I am busy cataloguing my faults and trying to determine how I ended up here again. I am too cluttered in the head. I want quiet. I need to shut myself up, to stop listening to all that chatter kicking around my brain. I want to silence that very Catholic part of myself that's saying, You know this happened because you're a bad person, right? Because you don't care about anyone but yourself. Because you are rotten. Because you're a brat. Because you don't do anything good for anyone. You're getting what you deserve.

It's too much. And I don't want to be like that anymore, although that seems like a lofty wish. I know that no matter how much quiet introspection I muddle through, no matter how much therapy I will eventually enroll myself in, no matter how much time I sit around trying to make myself still, I will always be a version of this girl. But for now I'm going to try to force myself to be quiet. This blog is going on a small hiatus until I can come back and tell the complicated story of how I did it again, how I ended up feeling like something that has just spent the last month turning over and over and over in the surf and saltwater until it made it back to the beach, to the sun and wind that will drink from it any of the water that kept it alive and moving in the first place.

Summer Goal #3: Work on My Maine Accent

My first goal for the summer, of course, is to write. My second goal is to make it through my ten year high school reunion unscathed. My third goal is to practice and master the Maine accent.

I mean, seriously. Enough is enough already. I've been here almost two full years now, and I still cannot replicate the accent on command. And if you're wondering how many times I'm suddenly asked to do the Maine accent, you'd probably be surprised: it's a lot. A lot. And I can't.

I'd say it took me two years to get the Minnesotan accent to sit in the back of my throat, and now when I'm back in New York, I pop into that accent every now and again to get a laugh because--can we face it? Let's just face it--there is nothing sillier sounding than the Minnesota accent. Even a Cockney accent has more clout. Someone speaking in a Cockney accent sounds like he's got his mouth full of cotton balls--maybe because he was just in a bar fight and got slugged on the jaw and then slugged someone else on his jaw and then all out pandemonium ensued. That's at least a little badass. There is nothing badass about the Minnesota accent.

Of course, it's difficult to slide into that accent if you haven't been speaking it your whole life, and I've always found it helpful to start off with one word I know will strike some kind of chord in my memory, and then I can prattle off sounding like someone's sweet grandma from "up nordt." Usually those words are as follows: oh (ohhhhhhhhhh), yeah (yahhhhhhhhhh), for (fer), or Megan (Maygin). That last one is in honor of my old roommate, who can do the Minnesota accent like no one's business. If I channel her, I'm all set.

Sometimes I start off with a whole phrase--usually the one that horrified me the most after I first heard one of my office mates utter it in complete sincerity. That phrase is oh fer cute, and it means, I guess, Wow! That's super cute! (I'm not kidding you. People actually use that phrase.) It's usually a crowd pleaser. Once, one of my friends took me aside and said, "Come on. You're exaggerating. They don't really say that." And I had to tell that girl to stop living in a dream world.

Anyway, it's those things that can easily slip me back into my finely-honed accent. And that's what I need to kick start my Maine accent. I need to find a word or phrase that's going to clang in my ear and command: Start talking like this, and do it now!

For a while I thought it was going to be forty (fawty) or the classic Maine affirmation (ah-yup), but neither of those do it for me. Neither of those push me into an a-ha! moment, where suddenly I am dropping phrases and vowel sounds from my mouth in a way they'd never normally come out.

For those of you who don't know, the Maine accent is essentially Boston-ese but perhaps a bit crustier, a bit rougher, a bit more hick-ish, and then made even odder by Maine's insistence on bastardizing French words and sounds. Sometimes the things that fall out of people's mouths up here take my breath away.

But I think what I'm going to start practicing with this summer is the word "brother." The way guys from Boston say "brother" is "brutha," and that's the way some of my students--the students with thick Maine accents--say it, too. And I can do brother/brutha pretty good. I can say Whutcha doin' brutha and pull of a decent accent. So now I think I have to make careful note of more odd phrases and phrasing, more odd pronunciations to get it just right. But I'm betting that this time next year, if you asked me to spontaneously produce the Maine accent, I'll look at you, smile, and say, "Absolutely, brutha!" And then I'll be off with wicked-this and wicked-that and fawty mah days and ayup, that lobstah's got a pretty wicked pincha on him! And it will be spectacular.

I'm Moving to Owl's Head. Don't Try to Stop Me.

God, I love Maine. I mean, I really love Maine. And this past week only enhanced my love for the state. The Boy From Work was here for a spring vacation, and we used our day to go up and down the coast, seeing and eating the best things along the way. We ate lobster in Cape Elizabeth and fried clams in Freeport. We ate chowder in Rockland and Boothbay Harbor. We saw three lighthouses and explored some of the sweetest, quaintest towns in the whole state.

But none were as sweet and as quaint as Owl's Head. It's a tiny town near Rockland, and one I probably would've never realized I needed to go to if it wasn't for the Food Network's 50 States, 50 Burgers project that named the best burger in each state. Maine's burger--the 7 Napkin Burger--sounded fabulous. Juicy. Drippy. Cheesy. Everything good in the world. And the fact that you could get those burgers to go and take them down the road to tiny Owl's Head Lighthouse for a picnic sounded even better.

And the BFW, who is always ready to go on a trip just to eat something delicious, was up for it. So we headed off for a day trip to Owl's Head and Rockland. We were going to eat lunch in Owl's Head, tour the lighthouse, then head back to Rockland for a trip out to the breakwater lighthouse and shopping in the sweet galleries and stores that line Main Street.

The 7 Napkin Burger is the brainchild of the owners of the Owl's Head General store--a place where you can get homemade burgers and chowders, cookies and whoopie pies. In the warm summer months, there are ice cream novelties to be scooped up. And if you just ran out of ketchup or toilet paper and don't want to travel back to Rockland to grocery shop, you can pop into the General Store for the necessities, which are arranged in the back of the shop, right behind the small eating area.

And that eating area was the cutest thing I'd ever seen. Big and small tables were covered with patterned vinyl table cloths and stocked with plenty of napkins--which you definitely need when eating the burgers. There were a few friends gathered at two of the tables next to ours, and it was clear that this was routine. This was what they did. They came to the store every day for coffee and a snack or a full lunch. When someone came through the door, they were greeted by name. The girls behind the grill--two nineteen year-olds in gym shorts--knew what to serve up for them. They settled in at their table to talk about the weather, to local school, their neighbors. It was so friendly and charming it made me want to lock my legs around my chair and stay there forever, even through the coldest months, when the town's residents would no doubt come through the door stomping off boots and rubbing feeling back into their hands before settling into their chairs for hot chocolate and a slice of crumb cake. I wanted to be one of those regulars worse than anything. Especially after the girls delivered our burgers, which oozed with ketchup and mustard and pickles and cheese. If someone had come into the store at that moment and announced they had a charming apartment for rent--one with a seaside view--I would've been on the phone with the movers, telling them to go on over to my apartment and pack everything up and move it on up the coast.

Of course, Owl's Head wasn't the only amazing place we visited while the BFW was in state. Here are some of the highlights:

This picture was taken at Owl's Head light, which is right up the stairs behind us. As you can see, it was a windy, windy day. When you are planning on going anywhere near the ocean, you have to dress expecting it to be substantially colder than it is inland, especially in the spring. The wind comes in off the Atlantic and rips right through you. We chose a ridiculous day to tour lighthouses--especially one that is a mile into the ocean. Yeah, that's right. We traipsed along the Rockland Breakwater Light in those winds and almost had our ears torn off.

When preparing for a visit to Maine, it's best to fast for a week before your arrival. After all, you're going to eat a lot of seafood. A lot. Here's Ross with one of the chowders we ate over the week. It was good, but it wasn't nearly as good as the best chowder I ever had, which was served up at a tiny cafe in Damariscotta.

This shot was taken at Southport, which is a small island in the waters outside Boothbay Harbor. There is a tiny beach on the island, and we took off our shoes and walked across it, pausing to examine the millions of shells that were scattered across it. The BFW was very impressed with the purple mussel shells. (I'm pretty impressed with them, too. The insides are pearlescent and beautiful. I've got a bunch of them on my desk at school.) In fact, the BFW was so impressed that he took a closed one away from the beach with us. He wanted to see what it would look like it it opened. We both got a littl squirmy about that, though, when the mussel, which cracked open a bit while we were strolling through Boothbay, sucked back shut when the BFW tried to open it further to investigate. We left that thing in the parking lot. I didn't want anything oozing out of its shell on my car floor.

This right here is me in my moment of glory. On our way from Boothbay Harbor to Damariscotta, where we were going to eat dinner at the place with the best crab cakes in the world, the BFW and I made a pitstop to play mini-golf. I got a hole-in-one on a really hard hole. Because I am awesome.

If you look in the background, you can see Hendrick's Head Light, which is in Southport. The gray areas in the photo? All shells. Beautiful, tiny little spiral shells I scooped into my hand and brought back with me. (Mine didn't have anything ooze-y living in them.)

I could write poetry about The Lobster Shack in Cape Elizabeth. The poem would start by describing the beauty of the shack's location--on a granite cliff just above the waves of the Atlantic--and then move into the beauty of the shack's food, where lobster rules the menu. The Lobster Shack's lobster roll is my favorite in the state. But that's not the only thing that's good there. Clams, crab, mussels, whoopie pies--all delicious. But their strawberry-rhubarb pie? It's perfection.

Vacation!

Vacationland is going on vacation for a little bit. The Boy From Work, who is continuing his process of woo, is coming into town to spend a week running up and down the coast with me. While I'm gone, here are some slideshows to keep you busy. These are all the places we're planning on being in the next few days.

Ogunquit:




Portland, specifically the Old Port:




Cape Elizabeth, for the first lobster roll of the season:




Popham Beach:




Owl's Head:




See you soon! I'm off to eat my weight in lobster and crab!

Things on the Side of the Road

When it gets warm out, I go for an awful lot of walks. It's always been that way. When I was in Minnesota, I had a route for whatever mood I was in, but my favorite was on a road that eventually turned to dust and dirt, which cut through fields of soybeans. That was all you could see for miles: dirt road and soybeans. One day while I was walking that road and kicking up dust, a busted-up farm truck passed me and the boy sitting in the passenger seat leaned out the window. I thought he was going to whistle or swear or say something sly, but he put a duck call to his mouth and quacked at me instead.

Today I went on a walk to explore my new neighborhood. It was the middle of November when I moved to the new apartment, and I wasn't much in the mood for walking then. Snow was just around the corner, and I was in a bad mood because of a boy. I spent weeks under the covers in my bed, drinking blackberry vodka mixed with ginger ale. Anything that required I be away from that bed or the TV just beyond it was not a priority.

But now it's spring, and everything is green, and I am in a much better mood. Last night I put on my new satin high heels--the ones with the rosettes--and chose a cute outfit for underneath my gown, hood, and hat. I watched three hundred seventy-five students walk across the stage to get their diplomas and, afterward, cookies and punch.

This morning when I woke up--in a fantastic mood--I decided it was time to see what was what in the new neighborhood, and so I took off. This area of town is interesting. I live near the municipal airport, so there's always lots of coming and going. From my office window, I can see tiny planes scaling the trees, building momentum to fly up the coast. And today on my walk, I got to watch a few planes land on the long green stretch of airport lawn, which made me miss Mankato and those times Dan took me up in the plane to float over the flatness of Minnesota. But I didn't dwell on the old days for too long--mostly because there was an awful lot to see. It's junk week here, and everyone has dragged their weird what-do-I-do-with-this trash items to the curb, so there was plenty to admire. Still, some of the most interesting stuff wasn't even in the junk piles; some of the most interesting stuff had just been tossed into the ditch.

My two favorite things were these:

(1.)

A sign on someone's garage that identified it as Asshole's Garage. The beefed-up SUV that sat in front of it had a Yankee Candle car freshener--pink--hanging off its rear view mirror. It was a great image, and I figured the man and woman who lived there were inside, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbons and listening to Winger. He was probably talking about the bike he bought--without her permission--and was trying to fix up. She was probably busy adjusting the ribbed tank top she'd cut to short to expose her stomach and thinking about that guy who works the cart return at the grocery store, the one she always winks at when she was on her way inside to buy cigarettes.


(2.)

A unicycle--short, gold, glitzy, the type you'd expect to see in a circus. It was in the ditch. Seriously. It had just been abandoned in the ditch. Parts of it were rusting, and a section of it had sunken into the mud. I kept walking, hoping I'd find something that went along with it--a top hat, a sequined outfit, an organ grinder--but no such luck. Still, you can bet I'm saving that, that I'll use it someday--along with other small details I'm picking up from this side of town (the corner variety that sells pickled eggs and toilet paper and mustards and ketchups that expired in 1999; the shrine to Mary that is missing the ceramic Mary and is now a giant empty halo; the huge plane that's parked next to the airport tower--it seems too big to have ever, ever, ever made a safe landing on the short, grassy runway, which of course makes you wonder just how the hell it got there anway.)

I Might Not Have Won the Skull Trophy, But It Was Still a Good Day

I am exhausted.

I have no reason to be exhausted. I spent the day doing nothing strenuous at all, unless you count mini-golfing as a strenuous activity, and I'm betting you don't.

My whole day was low key, light, pretty not-exhaustion-inducing. It went something like this:

10:00 AM: I arrive at school. I check my e-mail.


10:15 AM: I think about dusting my desk. I decide against it.


10:17 AM: I watch as a plant with human legs walks through the door into the office. It is my office-mate and his plant. "This," he says, "is Quagmire." I'd agreed to water his plant while he is away on his post-semester vacation, and since he lives an hour and a half from where I live--yes, his is a monster commute--he brought the plant to me. "Don't kill it, okay?" he says. "We've bonded. We watch sports together."


10:25 AM: My office-mate tests the new camera he bought for his trip. He tries a video. He films me reading about Miss California's racy photos. When he downloads it to his computer, I complain. "Look at my back!" I say. "I am a hunchback! I have a hump! I look like I have scoliosis!"


10:27 AM: My office-mate tries for another video. "And there's Jess," he narrates as he tapes, "and her VERY STRAIGHT BACK."

"That's right!" I say. "This right here is a scoliosis-free zone!"


10:30 AM: It is time to do what we've all come to campus to do. We are off to the official Appreciation Brunch. The people in charge of dining had e-mailed us earlier to tell us what was on the menu for the morning. The list included things like french toast and ham and asparagus and chicken and omelets and hash browns and sausage and fruit and salad and scones and cheesecakes.

Because this food is free and because the faculty and staff is allowed to have as much of it as we want, there is a very, very long line to get to the food.


11:15 AM: We watch the president hand out the yearly awards. Someone is retiring, and that means that person is getting a lamp which is done up in the school's colors.

There is a running joke going on--the powers that be cancelled hand-shaking at graduation tomorrow because of the Swine Flu (sigh), so everyone is giving everyone else a hard time about it. The president gets fist bumps, hugs, high fives, salutes, and bows as he hands out the awards.


11:45 AM: It is determined that the weather, which looked spotty and sketchy earlier, is going to hold, thus making it possible for our department to wage the Second Annual Humanities Department Mini-Golf Smack-Down. We start gearing up for the two o'clock tee-time. This means I am off to change into my golf attire--my I Love Jordan Catalano T-shirt--and it also means I am off to buy a trophy.


12:30 PM: I am standing in the local dollar store. I am looking at ceramic cow statues, glass religious figures, packages of leis. I try to channel Diana Joseph. I think, If Diana was throwing a Baby in the Cupcake party, what would she get for prizes?

I walk out with a squishy gray skull whose eyes pulse out of its head, sloshing blood, goo, and worms when you squeeze it. I drop that into a plastic tiki stein left over from what seems to be the dollar store's Cinco de Mayo stockpile. I think DJ would be pretty proud.


2:00 PM: The Humanities Department Mini-Golf Smack-Down begins. We separate into two teams. It's the Humanities Gang vs. the Assorted Math and Science-y People Gang.


2:25 PM: On hole three, one of the members of the other group comes over and says, "Does this place serve beer?"

We say ha, fat chance, we wish.

"You mean you haven't been drinking?" she asks.

No, no, we haven't. This is just what we act like on a normal basis. Some of us are wearing sombreros. Some of us are insisting--loudly--that the ball is more likely to go into the hole if you dirty-talk it. Some of us are using our new cameras to videotape the whole thing and threatening to put it on YouTube.


3:25 PM: We are done and awaiting final scores. There is some confusion. The Math gang is saying things about averages and square roots and integers.

They win. Their average score beats our average score. In the individual scores, though, I am third. I am a mini-golf champ.


3:35 PM: We hand out the squishy skull and tiki goblet to the official winner. We are off to for martinis and food.


4:15 PM: We drink two-for-one martinis. We eat. I talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. My office-mate pours half of his second martini into my second martini glass, and I talk and talk and talk some more.

One of my former students is working at the place we love to haunt for our two-for-ones. At one point he sneaks up behind me and says, "Hey. That B- you gave me last year? It was my favorite grade of the whole semester. Everything else I didn't care about, but I worked hard for that B-."


6:30 PM: I go home. I lie down on the bed, on a pile of clothes I have been sorting out of my closet for Goodwill. I feel suddenly unable to move. I am exhausted. All I want to do is close my eyes and fall asleep while Scrubs plays in the background.

Katy calls. "Hey!" she says. "Great news! When I come to visit, you and I can now get married! Well, maybe. I know how Maine feels about gay marriage, but how does it feel about polygamy and gay marriage?"

"Oh, they don't need to know that you have a husband, too," I say. "We just won't tell them."


6:45 PM: The Wily Republican calls. "So, I've been watching Castle," he says.

"Yes?" I say. I, too, have been watching--and loving--Castle. In fact, I am the one who suggested he might like the show.

"And, okay, I'll give you this: it's kind of like our situation."

"Isn't it?!" I said. "You're the grumpy one going around telling me to stop being stupid, and I'm the one running after you and saying, 'Oooh! Ooh! Interesting! Let me see! I'm SO going to write about this!'"


7:00-rest of the night: I position myself on the couch and don't move through episodes of America's Next Top Model, Lost, and American Idol. At 10:30, I want to go to bed.

It's funny how everything suddenly just ticks to a stop after the semester ends. It's only then that the true weight of everything that happened over those fifteen weeks rolls over you. Everything you were thinking-feeling-hoping kind of just leaks out your ears, hisses out of those tight places in your shoulders and legs and toes. It's then that you realize Jesus, I am tired. And it's a serious kind of tired.

But luckily that serious kind of tired is about to remedied for three months. All that's standing between me and my summer is tomorrow's graduation, which is sure to be filled with fist-bumps aplenty. Now I'm just wondering if the post-graduation cookie and punch social is cancelled due to the Swine Flu, too...

We're Getting There

Overnight, this state turned beautiful again.

Harpswell, ME, originally uploaded by thewoodenshoes (van Kampen).

As I write this, I have every window in the apartment open, and the peepers are singing. Abbey is sitting on the ledge, tormenting herself about the various birds and squirrels that are playing at the edge of the woods.

Suddenly everything smells good, feels good, looks good. Or is getting there. This place is greening. Trees are budding. People are out in their gardens.

Here at our complex, a pack of landscapers swarmed the tiny cluster of buildings set back in the trees and cleaned everything up. They closed the parking lot for an afternoon and swept the dirt and sand off the pavement. They mulched. They planted. The trimmed and clipped and tidied.

I've started wearing sandals. Strappy, sexy sandals.

This weekend at our writers' group meeting we sat out on a patio and sipped Lemon Drops until the sun went down and the owners came around to start the miniature fireplaces next to our circle of chairs.

Right now, right this very second, our department is hatching a plan to challenge everyone else on campus to a Miniature Golf-Off, where we will prove--once again--our superiority in athleticism and cunning.

I'm trying to decide what dress I'll wear under my robe at graduation.

I want a glass of lemonade.

Everything, everything, everything is getting good. Our end-of-the-semester paper chain countdown has us in the single digits, and tomorrow morning when I go in, my creative writing class and I are going to be making chapbooks to showcase the work we did over the semester. I am going to walk into the class and heap the following things on the front table: four different colors of glitter, puff paint, ribbon, construction paper, stamps, crayons, markers, paint, and paintbrushes. I am going to let them loose and see what they create, see how they represent their creative work.

Can you think of a better way to spend an afternoon?

Celebrating That Scottish Poet Who Knocked Up a Whole Bunch of Girls

I had never heard of Burns Night before coming to Maine, but last night--on the 250th anniversary of the birth of Scotland's favorite poet son--there I was, celebrating his birthday and wearing a traditional tartan and being welcomed to supper by the call of bagpipes.

Burns Night--a big to-do in the state of Maine--celebrates the fame, exploits, and poetry of Robert Burns, the man responsible for gems like "Auld lang Syne" and "My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose."

He was a dandy, a cad, a man with VD. He slept with every barmaid he laid eyes on and fathered fourteen children--most of which were illegitimate. He loved Scotland and loved the ladies, and he wrote rhymes for both of them.

And last night we gathered to praise his poetry and insatiable appetite. And Burns Night celebrations aren't casual gatherings with some hodgepodge of food, some cluster of cheap beer and wine. No, they are carefully choreographed nights where most of the time is spent at the dinner table watching the pageant.

First, there is the presentation of the haggis. After all, what Scottish celebration would be complete without some leftover cuts of sheep that have been boiled in sheep stomach for a couple hours? Our haggis came decorated:

After the presentation of the haggis comes the toasting and the homage to scotch, which is passed around the table in giant decanters. Then, dinner. And after dinner, the traditional toast to the lassies is given by the men. Ours was read by a man with a thick Scottish accent who began like so: God bless you lassies, with your breasts and your assies. Throughout the poem, which had been worked up that day, the lassies were compared to many things--the most literary, perhaps, being big-bossomed butterflies. And after every stanza, the men, appropriately moved by the charms of the lassies, would loft their glasses and yell, God bless you lassies!

Let me tell you this: there were a whole lot of drunk people in that room.

And then, after the lassies were appropriately praised, we toasted the laddies. After the laddies were coddled, the floor opened for spontaneous Burns readings. Whoever felt like he was sober (or drunk) enough to get up and raise his glass and do a few stanzas of Burns's odes to his mistresses, his wife, or his bastard children--who, in fact, he called just that--graced us with his poetic stylings.

We left the table as the clock was nearing midnight. Desserts--oh, the shortbread--were served while we sang a couple traditional Scottish tunes and handed out a ceremonial cup to the best reader of the night.

And that--all the haggis and scotch and poetry, all the kilts and toasts and giggling--is exactly how a bunch of English nerds party. Don't let anyone ever tell you we don't know how to have a good time, how to rip-roar with the best of them.

Lesson Learned: Don't Hold Up a Sign That Says I AM DRUNK!!!!!!!!!

I am more exhausted today--my first day back in Maine after winter break--than I was when I left for Buffalo after the fall semester ended. I did a lot of running around, sure, but that was only a small part of what made me tired.

I couldn't sleep. Or, to be more precise, I could sleep, but it was an awful sleep, a sleep that was interrupted every hour by another nightmare. Each morning I would wake up feeling like I'd spent the last seven hours running instead of sleeping.

I dreamed I was fired from my job because while my students were doing oral presentations, I sat in the back of the classroom and held up a sign that said I AM DRUNK!!!!!!!!!!!

I dreamed I was waitressing, that I'd forgotten table 52's bread, that I couldn't find the kitchen to pick up my orders, that the bartender was yelling at me, that fish frys were stacking up and up and up and up and up beneath warming lamps, but I couldn't get to them.

I dreamed I was lost. I dreamed I was being chased. I dreamed there was someone in my bedroom, standing over me, watching me sleep.

I dreamed I moved into a new apartment without looking at it first, that the bathroom was green with mold, that the toilets were so backed up they spewed mountains of waste into the air, that the toilets were so backed up they'd gotten into the bathtub, that when I tried to take a shower all that came up through the drain and down from the shower head was brown, brown, brown.

I dreamed of him.

Every morning I would open my eyes and feel it immediately--the pressure, the weight of something invisible leaning down on me.

I went back to Buffalo with an awful lot of baggage from a strange semester, and I guess the nightmares, the pressure, was just my body's way of working through it, trying to make sense of the often-ugly things I slogged through for the last five months.

Even when I was awake, I was busy trying to work things out in my head. I thought I would spend a lot of time writing, but I didn't; instead, I spent a lot of time reading, and when I tired of reading I tented a book over my face so I could lie still and think while rows and rows of words pressed their tiny serifs into my skin.

I thought about what I want to accomplish in the next semester and over the summer. I thought about the girl I've become. I thought about all the heartbreak I gave and took. I thought about my students and what I could do to better teach them the things they need to know. I thought about how I want to become a better person.

And it tired me out. Still, yesterday I made the drive back to Maine--tired--but when I made it to Portsmouth, to the Piscataqua River Bridge--the midpoint of which serves as the border between New Hampshire and Maine--I suddenly felt lighter, brighter. I felt like maybe I'd made peace with some of the things that had been hanging over me as I crossed the same bridge on my way home for Christmas. And later, after I went to sleep with Abbey curled against my hip, I didn't have a single nightmare. Today I might still be tired, and I might still need a lot more sleep to catch up on all that I lost over break, but I think maybe--just maybe--I'm getting somewhere now.

Here's What I Haven't Been Telling You

There was a boy around here for a while. He was eating my cereal and sitting in my office and riding in my car. He was pouring me drinks and walking me home. He was here.

He is not here anymore. It was a quick thing, started fast and ended just as fast. It was something that happened after the Boy From Work and I broke up, after I had spent too many nights staring at ceiling tiles instead of sleeping.

All I wanted was a little something nice, a little something to make me think about things in a less tragic way. I was sick of feeling lead-heavy and dull. I was sick of being in such a beautiful state, sick of walking the streets and beaches and cobblestones by myself, sick of not having anyone to turn to when the sun disappeared over the mountains.

I was also sick of feeling quiet and simple and alone. It's been a little over a year since I moved here, and I have acquaintances and co-workers--and I genuinely like all of them--but it's not the same as having friends, people your own age to be with. It's hard being a young single girl in academia. Everyone else has their own work, their own families, their own agendas, their own patterns. I have too much free time, and they don't have enough.

There are nights when all I want to do is leave work and go to a restaurant so I can sit across a table from someone I like to talk to, someone I think is smart and funny and nice, and listen to them tell a story. There are times when I miss Minnesota and New York so badly it feels like the emotion won't even fit inside my body it is too huge, too uncontainable. And after the BFW and I were no longer together--no longer speaking--everything felt that much darker.

But then there was a boy standing in my office doorway. He was a former student, a favorite who had gone away to another school--I wrote him a letter of recommendation; for him I said some of the sweetest things I've ever said in one of those letters--but now he was back in town, and he was wondering what I'd been doing to keep myself busy since we saw each other last, since I handed him his letter and waved goodbye, wished him luck.

He sat in my office for hours that felt like minutes, and he came back a few days later, and again and again and again. He told me all his best stories, and I listened, just pleased to be in the company of someone my own age, someone who was talking to me about Maine and loving Maine, about all the things that made Maine great.

It went on easily from there. We shared drinks and watched the Red Sox. We laughed and laughed and laughed when strange men from the bar--men I'd spoken to briefly when I'd gone up for another round--bought us drinks and delivered them to the table. Later, after he walked me home along the river, after we stood in the shadows and listened to the water curve against the shore, he stood outside my bathroom and listened to me throw up into the bathtub, asked if he could do anything. It was a full moon. I was dizzy. I was certain those men had slipped something into my drink. Still, when I recovered and went back into the living room, he was sitting on the couch waiting for me, and he would stay for hours and hours and hours, until the sky was starting to pink outside my tall windows.

We shared chicken fingers and watched the Bruins play the Sabres. We sat in my office. We told stories. We laid on my bed and closed our eyes, waiting. We kissed. We drove the back roads of his hometown. We drove under the canopy of gold and red leaves, and he leaned over to point and say, "That's where I went to school" and "That's where I used to work" and "That's where my best friend lives." We stood on a hillside and felt the fall wind turn cold against our cheeks. We looked at all the red, all the orange, all the green. He said, "Isn't it beautiful?" and I said yes. Yes, it was.

We walked the uneven streets of Portland. He pointed to the water, pointed to the place you could stop to watch the boats skimming through the harbor. We bought beer at a corner variety where a woman--drunk, unsteady in her heels--made a sly comment about taking us home with her. We ran up and down the stairs of his friends' house, trying on Halloween costumes and looking at old high school yearbooks, pictures of them all in ski club. He smiled when his friend's girlfriend looked at me and said, "Oh, I like her." He said, "I think I'll keep her around."

But he didn't. And I suppose I didn't expect him to, and I suppose I didn't exactly know what things would be like for us, and I suppose I wasn't sure what was going on or where that would lead, but that was just enough for me then. I was around people my own age--people who were funny and crass and sweet all at once--and I felt, for the first time since I moved to Maine, that I belonged here, that I could be more than just a visitor, more than just an extended-stay tourist moving across the coast by herself.

But one night he admitted over drinks that he couldn't say no to his old girlfriend, and I felt panic squeeze the back of my throat shut. And I must have known. Of course I must have known. I'd been there before. I'd heard the same things from the Wily Republican. But still I let this boy reach over in the middle of the night and pull me closer, let him thread his fingers through mine, let him fall asleep there, with our heads resting on the same pillow. He would eventually go back to his girlfriend--after all, he couldn't say no--and I would sit in my new apartment and memorize the familiar weight of silence that hung there.

And what I haven't been telling you is this: it hasn't been easy. It hasn't been easy to feel like I still don't fit in, even though it seemed for a while that I might find my own small place here. He was a fix for so many things--the pain of losing my boyfriend, the pain of being lonesome so often, the pain of being far from everyone I love--and now that he's no longer around, now that we don't know what is going on in each others' strange worlds, the dark that was there before him seems even darker, even less likely to lift and lighten, less likely to disappear anytime soon.