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.

On the Occasion of Everyone I Know Being Knocked Up

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.

The Eighth of August

It was a warm night in Minnesota. It was late. You could smell the soybeans from the processing plant across the river. Everything was as it should be.

I was on the sidewalk with the Wily Republican and his best friend and his best friend's girlfriend. We'd been bouncing between bars for the last few hours, and now we were hungry. What we wanted more than anything in the world was fried mac-n-cheese from one of the bars across the street. So we were paused at the intersection, waiting for traffic to go by so we could cross.

"I was a cheerleader, you know," the girlfriend said.

"I would've guessed that," I said. She was a peppy sort--bright, bubbly, full of spunk. She was smart and had freckles. I liked her.

"Watch this," she said, and she flipped into a string of cartwheels she unraveled down the sidewalk.

The boys whistled. I clapped.

"Very impressive," I said.

"I know," she said. She stood back up and blew her curly hair out of her eyes.

The light changed then, and we went across the street and into the bar where we could get our food. The Wily had worked there once, his first semester at school, and back then I would sit at the bar and watch as he brought cases of beer and liquor out from the back room or stood watch at the door, sending away the undergrads who were testing out a new fake ID. Those were some of the moments I remember most about my time with him, and they were moments that happened before we kissed, before we screwed everything up just by being us. Back then there was nothing better than sitting there sipping a lime vodka tonic and smiling at him when he smiled at me.

Inside, the WR and his best friend went to order our food and talk to the guys behind the counter, who they knew a little bit, and the girlfriend grabbed my arm and dragged me into the bathroom.

We stood in front of the mirrors and fixed our hair, leaned in close to consider our makeup.

"Wily loves you," she said.

It came out of nowhere, that statement, and for a second I thought maybe I'd hallucinated the words. I stepped away from the mirror.

"What?"

"Wily," she said. "He's in love with you."

And standing right there, in the bathroom of the bar where it all really started, my heart broke open from the weight of all the blood that had flooded it, frantic and excited. I couldn't speak. I opened my mouth. I closed my mouth. I opened it again.

She was still in the mirror, looking back at me through its pane. She smiled. "It's pretty clear," she said. "I've never seen him act like this around a girl before. Never."

"Like what?" I asked. "How does he act?"

She waved her hands in the air. "Oh, you know. Like he does. The two of you are very cute together. And you should hear how he talks about you. He talks about you all the time."

"Oh my God," I said. This was better than any number of dreams I'd had about the Wily Republican--and there had been some pretty fantastic dreams along the way.

The girlfriend finally turned away from the mirror and wrapped her hand around my arm. She leaned in close and pressed her shoulder against mine. We were conspirators. We were insiders. We were drunk, and we were in love with best friends. We thought we knew things.

"Don't worry," she said, squeezing my arm. "You'll be at my wedding, and I'll be at yours. I'm sure of it."

Here's what I can tell you now: that girl did marry the Wily's best friend, but I wasn't there. And today the Wily will stand at an altar and wait for his bride to come down the aisle, and that girl won't be me. In fact, I won't even be in the audience. Instead, I'll be here, in Maine, and I'll be thinking about him.

The fact that the Wily Republican is getting married today doesn't make me sad, but it does make me reflective. It doesn't make me want to stay in bed all day with a pan of brownies on the pillow next to me, but it does make me remember things. It does make me amazed by things.

Like it or not--and I know a lot of you (and me, sometimes) won't like it at all--the Wily Republican really got inside my head and shook things up, changed me, challenged me, made me the girl I am today--the good and bad parts, both.

This summer I read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, and in it she wrote about her own maddening, toxic, unshakable relationship, and how she recognized her man was wrong for her, that he was making her crazy, that he was like a drug, but at the same time she was sure he was her soulmate. Of course, for Gilbert, the definition of soulmate isn't the one we throw around often--the one that's fizzing with hearts and exclamation points. Instead, this type of soulmate is a person who comes in and picks you up and challenges you and makes you crazy because they are the opposite of what you are--or close to it. That kind of soulmate is your balance. That kind of soulmate has the potential to teach you immeasurable lessons about yourself. With that person in your life, it is suddenly that much easier to define yourself, to say, Here I am. This is who I am. Love me even if you think it's a bad idea.

That can be a hard love, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth having. And I think at that point in his life the Wily Republican really needed me. When he's feeling kind and generous, he tells me I'm his voice of reason, that I'm the one he needs around to say, "Listen. You're unreasonable. You're wrong. Here's why." And I did that for him for years. I said, "Wily, you're an asshole. Do you want to know why?" And he always did. He always does.

And at that point in my life, I really needed him, too. An MFA program is fraught with all kinds of drama, and it's incestuous and intense, and there were days in Minnesota when the last thing I wanted to do was talk to another sulky writer, another frowning English major, but I was surrounded by them. That's when the WR came in handy. That's when I called him and said, "Please save me." The Wily Republican did not want to discuss what was literary and what was not. He did not want to tell me that all I write about is sex and that I should stop it, for Christ's sake. He did not want to get drunk and talk about killing himself. What he wanted to do was tell me I was fun, I was a hippie--a sweet one, but a hippie nonetheless--and I wrote things that made him want to read. What he wanted to do was get drunk and kiss.

It wasn't a bad life, but it's not mine anymore. It hasn't been mine for a long time, and it seems strange to me that today it becomes someone else's life. He's marrying the girl he wanted: a pretty little Republican doctor, someone who smiles at him and says, "Yes, Wily, yes. You're right about that. You're so right." She shares his ideals and has what he refers to as a "strong moral code. She won't be any trouble for him.

But he's always been trouble for me. He's always been the one whose memory I can't quite sweep from the darker corners of my heart. And today I won't even try.

Buy It. Buy It Now.

Today is a good day. Today is the day this book comes out:



And let me just say this about its author: Diana Joseph was one of the best parts of my whole grad school experience.

She will invite you over for beans and rice or creamy cauliflower casserole or chicken noodle soup. She will invite you over and tell you the one thing she believes in is this: everything is made better with a can of Ro-Tel tomatoes. She will invite you to Wal-Mart so you can help shop for things to stuff inside a pinata for Cinco de Mayo. She will invite you to TJ Maxx so you can shop for things to give out if someone gets a baby you've baked into the cupcakes for her party. She will invite you over to walk next door and say hi to her neighbor, the one wearing the bathrobe and making a turkey sandwich, the one she thinks you should have a fling with.

She will let you cry and curse and yell about the people you hate, the boys you've loved, the friends who have done you wrong. She will let you fuss yourself out on her couch, at her kitchen table, over a glass of scotch. She will say things like You're okay, baby. You're okay. in a voice that somehow makes you believe that, hey, you are okay and everything will be fine. She will swing her hair around and around and around and tell you you should swing your hair around too.

A girl like that has an awful lot to say, and don't you want to listen to her say it?

One More Story That Involves Strippers and My General Classiness

On Friday night, just as I was taping the last of my moving boxes closed, I decided to check my e-mail one last time. When I logged in, I saw that someone had sent me a message on Facebook, so I went off to check it.

The message was from one of my former MSU students. This particular former student was my student in the fall of '03--a member of my first-ever class--and then later in the fall of '05 when I was teaching creative writing.

It's been well documented how much of a soft spot I have for the members of my first class. I loved pretty much all of them--except for that one who wrote journal entries about how much he hated every black person that ever lived--and this particular student ranked high on the list of my favorites.

He was the class clown, a real cut-up, a boy who liked to tell stories about shaking loose a bag of flour on his roommate when he was in the shower. This boy liked to talk. He liked to drink. He liked to talk about drinking. He liked to bat eyes at one of the girls in class--a girl who would go on to become the first student to ever cry in my presence--and I later learned they'd totally made out on one of those crazy weekends in the fall semester. Once, when I ran into him outside a bar with another of the pretty girls from our class, he said, "Hey! We were just talking about you!" and I asked him just what they'd been talking about and he said, "How awesome you are!"

I was charmed by him. I was charmed enough to have drinks with him several times--some planned, some not--long after class was over. In fact, he was with us on the now-legendary night where some dirty townie standing in line behind me at the strip club trash-talked me up and down because I was chatting with the bouncer and she was in a goddamned hurry to get to the DJ booth because there were precious few minutes left before the club closed the entry list for the weekly wet T-shirt contest. She wanted a win, some dollar bills, some sweaty men waggling their eyes and tongues at her. And I was holding her up. And she didn't like my looks. And she wanted me to know that I was ugly, that I had a stupid voice, that I had giant horse teeth.

I came home and wrote about that night. It was not the first time I'd write about strippers on my blog, and it wouldn't be the last. But it would be one of the things that allowed this student to, years later, find me, find my blog, and then let me know he'd found my blog.

He messaged me on Facebook to tell me how funny it all was--he'd Googled "Mankato strippers" because it was rumored that one of his friends was dating a girl at the club, and he just wanted to take a peek, see what she looked like. Well, what he got when he Googled wasn't a picture of his friend's girl. What he got was me. What he got was my blog. And he did a little digging, and he found the things I'd written about his class, things about people he knew, things about the nights he'd run around with us.

When I read this in his message, I thought my head was going to split down the middle and fall off the stem of my neck. I was an odd mixture of amused and horrified. A student finding my blog has always been a nightmare scenario for me--let's face it, it was awful enough when some unkind person anonymously forwarded my blog on to the Wily Republican--and I was certain I didn't want any other surprises.

But, really, what does it hurt now? I let myself feel embarrassed and horrified for a good five minutes, and then I realized that if any former student was going to find my blog, I was glad it was this one--a boy with good humor and fond memories of the girl I used to be when I was a grad student trying to write her way across three years in the Midwest.

And this student? He'd written a message to me that showcased some lovely rhythm and grammar (save for a few missing apostrophes that he and I can discuss later...), and in that message he called me his favorite teacher. He said he'd never forget me. He said I had a pretty smile, no matter what those girls at the strip club said.

In the end, I guess, there are worse things than having a student find your blog by Googling strippers. After all, that note helped me pull myself up off the floor after seventy-five small tragedies slid over me, threatening to bury me mere hours before I had to load a twenty-seven foot van with everything I owned. And that was worth those five minutes of embarrassment where my cheeks burned, where I tried to remember everything I ever wrote, where I tried to recall just how honest I'd been about that first class and how nervous I was when I stood before them on the first day, my hands shaking so much I was sure my students could see the tremors in the syllabus I clutched to my chest.

Favorite Pictures from My Minnesota Vacation

Highlights included: babies in cupcakes, a slutty fairy princess, a passed out Midwesterner with moppy hockey hair and a quilted shirt straight out of 1973, a photoshoot in which I was conned into wearing the Hooters outfit, dressing up dogs as lobsters and monkeys and Bill Cosby, suddenly-appearing Teen Beat-ish books about N*Sync and New Kids on the Block, and Steve Almond's Good Thunder Reading.

Burp, Fart, Etc.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Katy was standing at the foot of my bed, digging through a rumpled pile of clothes we'd pulled out of my closet. She'd called an hour before and said, "Oh my God! I don't have anything to wear! Can I come over and borrow some clothes?"

This was an unusual phone call for me to field from Katy at this point in our relationship. After all, she and I barely knew each other. I'd been in Minnesota for only a few months, and I wasn't yet quite sure how I felt about this short blond who hung up motivational posters in the giant bullpen office we shared with twelve other first-year graduate students who were teaching composition.

"You're such a girl!" Katy said as she flapped out a shirt and pressed it to her torso.

Katy was calling me such a girl because I was the opposite of her. Katy was calling me such a girl because I didn't own velour jogging suits that I counted as "going out outfits." She was calling me such a girl because I took a shower every morning, because I put on makeup before coming to school, because I threw out shoes that had holes in the soles, because I didn't teach in sneakers, because I always remembered to put on deodorant, because I didn't have a legendary collection of hoodies, because I shopped at places other than the Kohl's junior section clearance rack, because I refused to buy a shirt that didn't fit me, even if it was such a bargain priced at three tiny dollars. In short, Katy was calling me such a girl because I was very different than she was, and she liked to think of herself as above all that girly stuff. She wanted to be no-fuss and what-you-see-is-what-you-get. She wanted to drink cheap beer and eat baked potatoes at a bar while wearing a pink velour jogging suit.

But still, there she was, shrieking over my clothes, my shoes, my giant bin of earrings and necklaces and bracelets. She wanted to know how I had time for all of that stuff in the morning. She wanted to know how I didn't get overwhelmed with all those choices. And she wanted to see what she'd look like in this shirt, that shirt, this necklace, that necklace. This, of course, was a dead giveaway: sure, she wanted to mock me for my "girliness," but there was also a part of her that wanted to drape herself in all that girliness, too.

At the end of her visit, Katy walked out the door with a few of my shirts to wear, and she threw a wave over her shoulder as she headed for her car. "I'm so excited!" she sang out. "I've got a GIRLY FRIEND!"

For a long time I tried to fight that label. I resented that everyone I went to grad school with--even the boys, especially the boys--thought I was some fluffy, frivolous princess. I resented the fact that because I took care to shower every morning and turn on the light when pulling an outfit out of the closet, because I ran a comb through my hair before walking out the door, because I made sure I didn't stand in front of my class smelling like whiskey and strippers, because it took me fifty minutes from the moment I woke up to the moment I left for school, that I was thought of as a big girly-girly-girly-girl.

But I (mostly) got over it. And I (somewhat) even managed to force Katy into a girly streak of her own for the three years I lived in Minnesota. There were some very important lessons I tried to teach her before I went--things like one should not wear an oversize hoodie with a skirt and chunky shoes went out with My So-Called Life--and some of it took, but some of it didn't. Or maybe it is more precise to say that it took for a little while.

This past week when I was in Minnesota, there was a moment I found myself in Katy's closet, and she just looked up at me with sad eyes and said, "I'm bad, aren't I?"

We'd ended up in the closet because when we were getting ready to go to a party where there was going to be a lot of alcohol and a visiting writer who liked to read stories about anal sex, and when Katy came upstairs in her outfit--work pants and a sweater/dress shirt onesie--I blinked. Then I asked her if she knew she was going to a reading where the word sex would be used more than any other word. I asked her if she thought it was a bit weird she was wearing something she might wear to work--and she works in close vicinity to a cluster of nuns--to this type of function.

"Dress meeeee," she said, picking at the shirt she'd just tugged on.

And that's when she took me in the closet and gestured to my options. And that's when I realized that maybe a few things had backslid the last few years I've been away from Minnesota. I'm not saying she went back to the velour jogging suit era--far from it--but you could tell that the girl hadn't spent any time or money finding clothes that she really loved in forever.

Other things had gone on the backslide, too. The old Katy--the girl I imagine thrived as an undergraduate at MSU--had reared her head over the recent months, thanks to a childhood friend coming back into her life. This childhood friend liked to swill beer and burp and fart and pick her nose and scratch her breasts in public. These are things you will never see me doing. These are things you will quite often see Katy doing. (You will also see her pick "spicy stuff" out of her Chinese food at Yu's buffet, using only her fingers.)

While we were out at the bars on Halloween, this childhood friend of Katy's was with us, and she lived it up the way I imagine Katy used to when she was younger. After this girl--who dressed up as a character from some YouTube clip--took a giant swig of cheap beer, she'd hinge her head backward and rumble out a burp that smelled like fried food and olives. And then she'd giggle. And Katy would giggle. And I would think Ick.

But as much as I was dismayed by this kind of behavior--and some of Katy's backsliding into the not-showering-not-shopping-anywhere-but-Sears behavior--there wasn't much I could do about it. And why should I? I apparently have the corner on that girly-girly-girly-girl market, and why should someone who likes to talk about poop and farts as much as Katy be forced to be anything but what she is, anything but a girl who once thought it is completely fine to have a night out on the town wearing something that is all the rage with the assisted-living set down in Coral Gables, Florida?

A girl like that is one in a million.

Topography

Yesterday Megan dropped me off at the Wily Republican's house because he was going to drive me the rest of the way up to the airport so I could get on a plane bound for Maine. This wasn't exactly how it was supposed to be. We'd planned to have more time together than the twenty minute ride from his house to the airport, but, as usual, things went awry.

The night before was Halloween, and I'd had an awful lot of vodka-tonics, and those vodka-tonics made me giggly and unreasonable, and I tried calling the WR several times, even though I knew he was working that awful overnight shift on a holiday that makes people lose all their common sense and decency. I figured he'd be putting a whole bunch of costumed people in handcuffs. I could imagine him driving back to the station with a backseat full of zombies and vampires and girls dressed as any number of slutty things.

I called anyway. I called because I needed his professional opinion on things. After all, crimes were being committed. While we were at the strip club, Matt's costume was stolen, possibly by a gangly man who insisted on standing in front of Katy when she was just trying to mind her business and watch that one stripper do back-bends off the pole. When the guy blocked her view, Katy suggested--as politely as possible--that he should sit the hell down so people behind him could enjoy the spectacle, too. The man didn't think much of Katy's suggestion, and minutes later we noticed that Matt's Nintendo costume, which he'd taken off so he wouldn't be obstructed when he tried to reach for his beer, was gone--along with the gangly man.

I got on the phone and called Wily. "Wily!" I said, talking in what I thought was a very serious, very grave tone, but would later to come to find out--when the WR replayed the message for me on the way to the airport--was a tone closer to "giggly" and "shrieky."

"Wily!" I said. "There's been a crime! A very serious crime! Crimes are being committed in Mankato! It was a theft! A THEFT OF A HALLOWEEN COSTUME! WHO STEALS SOMEONE'S HALLOWEEN COSTUME?! We need your help!"

Later, somewhere around 3:30 AM, I would place another call to the Wily Republican because Katy, Megan, Matt, and I had become concerned that we, too, were committing some crimes when, after ingesting a massive amount of cheese bread and Hawaiian pizza, Bill passed out on the couch and we decided to pose him with a number of filthy things. In my favorite pose, Bill is holding a banana and has a Playboy stretched out across his chest. There are wadded up tissues and a bottle of lotion resting around the magazine.

Again, I decided to consult the Wily Republican. "So," I said in the message, "if we were to put a passed-out boy in various filthy poses, would that be wrong? Is that considered wrong?"

"Is it libel?" Katy chirped in the background. "Ask him if it's libel."

"Is it libel, Wily?" I asked. "Is it defamation? Are we going to get sued? Call me back. I need to know."

The next day, after a familiar are-we-or-aren't-we-going-to-see-each-other dance, things aligned so that we were going to see each other, even if it was for twenty small minutes. And when I stood on his front stoop and rang his doorbell, the Wily Republican opened the door and said hey as casually as he might've had we been back in Mankato, had I just driven over to his house and knocked until he opened the door and let me inside, into his room, where the cardboard cut-out of George W. Bush gazed over his bed.

But it wasn't that. It wasn't like we were in Mankato anymore, and it wasn't like things were the same. I was looking at a boy who looked both exactly the same and completely different than the boy I used to know back in graduate school. He was bigger and softer-looking, but he was still so tall and square. He looked like someone who had found his niche in life, found exactly where he wanted to be.

"Can I see your kitten?" I asked--one of the first things I said after hello. The Wily Republican had driven to the shelter with his fiancee not long after I'd gotten Abbey. The two of them--the WR and his fiancee--picked out a tiny tiger-striped kitten with white paws. He was cute--ridiculously so--but I'd spent several months asserting that my kitten was cuter. I just needed to make sure of it in person.

The WR disappeared inside for a second and then came back to the door, a cat dangling from one of his palms. "Here you go," he said and deposited the cat in my arms. Had I tried this move with Abbey, she would've looked up at the unfamiliar person and--if this person hadn't immediately given her treats or canned food--assumed that this was some giant new toy I had gotten her, and she would've started playing with vigor. This tiger kitten, though, just looked up at me with its big eyes and then twitched its nose before reclining in my arms. It didn't even mind when I pressed a few kisses into its head because I am a sucker for that warm spot between a kitten's ears.

The kitten smelled good. The kitten smelled very good. The kitten smelled like boy, like the Wily, like whatever cologne the Wily wears. Everything about that cat was very, very sweet and very, very cute.

"Here's your cat," I said. I passed the cat back to the WR. "He smells like you."

"He was napping with me," the Wily said.

"Aha," I said. "Well, my kitten is cuter."

"Doubtful," the WR said.

And then we left. We got in his car and started back up the long road to the airport. I looked out the window and watched southern Minnesota flash by: brown field after brown field after brown field. You could look out across those fields and see forever. There was so much emptiness there, and it was only occasionally interrupted by a water tower, a gas station with old-fashioned pumps, a restaurant that advertised a T-bone dinner for $15.99. Except for those things, there was nothing except long stretches of churned-up farm land.

I've always been fascinated by the landscape of Minnesota. When I moved there for grad school I could feel a difference in me--a difference turned over by my surroundings, by the sun sinking into soybean fields, by the flatness, by the smooth patchwork that unfolded underneath me when I saw the state from the air. I was an East Coast girl who was used to hills and valleys, to views that rose and fell instead of just stretched. There was comfort in that kind of topography. There was comfort in things that changed and moved, things that had shape.

And even though I got used to the Minnesotan landscape, and even though I even grew fond of the way I could watch the sun sink and sink and sink so far away on the flatness, I was always still a little suspicious of that much wide open. It was disconcerting to be able to see what was coming at you from such a long way away.

I was thinking about all of these things as the Wily drove me farther away from the town where we met, as he drove me toward the airport where I would board a plane and fly back to the coast, to the rocky shoreline, to the rise and fall of a place whose landscape breathes, rolls, sings wild songs.

The Wily and I were doing what we do so well together--our usual snarky routine--and I realized that my feelings about Minnesota's landscape were the same as my feelings about the WR. Both were things that I'd had reservations about. Both were things that were different and new, things that set me on edge. I'd loved the Wily for the same reasons I found a certain level of love for those wide open fields: there was so much space, so much room to run and scream and act up. It seemed like that could go on like that forever, and even if you saw what was coming at you, and even if it wasn't good--even if what was headed your way was heartbreak and ruin--you still had a good long ways before it caught up with you, before you and it were anywhere near each other, so why not keep running?

But later--after the Wily Republican had dropped me at the curb and hugged me in one of those half-committal ways, a way that implied here was a boy who was engaged, a boy who had a new life, a boy who couldn't be seen hugging some strange girl with red hair as she clutched her carry-on and stood on her tip-toes to reach him--there was a strange swell of relief inside me as the plane lifted off the Minneapolis runway and turned itself East. Soon, things would start to look more familiar, more rolling, more unpredictable. Soon, I would be back in a place that smelled of sea and sun, a place where you couldn't quite see all the beautiful things that might be coming at you over the crest of the next hill--and that, that surprise, was exactly what I was craving.

Dropping My Ohhhhs As We Speak

There's an episode of The West Wing where there's some sort of prescription drug hubbub going on in the state of Minnesota, and CJ--the Bartlet administration's press secretary--gets wind of it. When she goes to tell Toby--the administration's communications director--about the trouble that's brewing--she begins this way: "Okay," she says, "say you're from Minnesota..."

Toby looks at her and says, "I'm from Minnesohhhtahhh."



That's sort of what I've been up to lately. When I first started mentioning to my students that I was getting on a plane and flying to Minnesota at the end of October, I said Minnesota like a normal person would. Over the last week, though, I've been saying Minnesohhtahhh. Today I even used the word "spendy." I'm preparing for my arrival here:

"Preparing" means dusting off the Minnesota accent I spent three years perfecting. "Preparing" means mixing a CD for Katy, who has been longing to huddle in my arms. "Preparing" means dreaming of all the ways I will cause trouble with my favorite people. "Preparing" means brainstorming what we're going to stick in cupcakes at the after-party for this. "Preparing" also means making sure to pack something that vaguely resembles a Halloween costume because Katy has already informed me that if I come sans costume, I am going to be forced to wear the Hooters waitress outfit from her dress-up bin. And if there's any specific costume I've wanted to avoid my entire life, it's a costume that would, in some way, intrigue my brother, who is a connoisseur of everything Hooters-related. I'd also like very much not to expose my orange-shorted ass in a state where it has already snowed, where it is guaranteed to be freezing.

I'll be there for the next few days. I'll be eating and drinking. I'll be busy being literary. I'll be hording cream cheese won tons and fried mac-n-cheese. I'll be dropping my ohhhs like no one's business. And it will all be beautiful. It will all be perfect.

And While We're on the Subject...

Some of my most treasured moments from my life in Minnesota revolve around the semi-annual sale at Victoria's Secret. If there's one thing Lutherans like, it's a good sale, a good bargain. And if those sales and bargains involve bins--you know, bins they have to dig through--all the better. This lets them show their chops, their skill. This lets them show just how thrifty they can be. After all, who in their right mind would pay full price for a pair of Victoria's Secret panties when they are just going to go on sale in six months? The Lutherans will tell you those things are spendy, so you might as well just wait it out.

And, boy, do they ever. Some of the most vicious semi-annual sale bin-digging I ever saw went down in Minnesota, and it went down with Katy at my side. That girl can attack a bin of lacy panties like no one's business, and she will rip a pair of panties out of someone's hands to get her semi-annual quota of cotton skivvies. She will spend an hour examining the contents of each bin, holding up the really perverted pairs--the ones missing a crotch, the ones with flimsy garters, the ones that have sayings like Knock! Knock! on the front (or back)--until she has exhausted herself.

This might explain why I go into mourning around the Victoria's Secret semi-annual sale. I've gone with my mother, with my Pink Torpedoes, with my cousin, even with the Boy From Work, but no one gets as big of a kick out of the sale as Katy. And now that I am nowhere near her, I have to dig through those bins by myself, mentally cataloguing all the funny or disturbing designs so that I can call her later and ask her if she got to see them, if she bought any for herself.

During this summer's semi-annual sale, I went a little crazy. I went at those bins like I was some sweet Lutheran girl, filled with hot dish and hope, and bought a large assortment of new panties for my collection. One of the pairs was a turquoise hipster affair with Swiss dots and ruffles and silver bows. They were the type of panties I imagined some blue-eyed milk maid slipping into before she went off to herd goats and sing songs about cheese. They were adorable.

So you can imagine my delight when I opened my birthday package from Katy--the one that contained origami, Spam singles, kitten treats, kitten toys, and Hello Kitty paraphernalia, as well as a card that included a hilarious joke about grammar--and found the same pair of panties I'd scooped up for myself a few months before.

The support for our eventual marriage continues to compound.

But seriously--just how well does the girl know me? We might as well get married--it's clear that it's already crossed her mind, so maybe we should just get it over with already. I can just picture it now: a reception with plenty of Mich Golden (kegs of it, lousy with olives), Katy in a tux, and a slow dance to some tune by Chicago. I can guarantee it would be one hell of a time.

Just a Little Gay

Tonight Katy calls me from Minnesota. She is drunk. She is in the tub. She is drinking wine and writing sestinas about me in the tub.

To be fair, I might've sent her an e-mail earlier in the day that requested she write a sestina about me tonight while I was in my creative writing class making my students puzzle out sestinas of their own.

When she calls, she reads me a few lines. "This is going to sound just a little gay," she says.

One of her end words was eggplant. Another was meat. There were lines that made us sound like lesbians of historic proportions.

"Oh!" she moans. "I'm not a poet!"

She is a little angry at herself. Before she got in the tub, she'd started brainstorming. She wanted to think of all the reasons she loved me. I love Jess, she thought, because we went to the Spam Museum together. Then, I love Jess because she and I went and looked up Jolly Green's leaf skirt together.

She is not happy with the reasons she'd come up with.

"What's wrong with those?" I ask her.

"That's not real," she says. "Those aren't reasons to love someone."

But I think those are the best reasons to love someone. You someone because she looks at you and says, "I will go wherever you go, no matter how ridiculous it is. I will follow you forever, and it will be the best thing I ever do." And then it is.

Later in the conversation, Katy sighs and tells me she won't be making it out to Maine in October like she'd planned. She won't see any foliage. She won't crack open a lobster. She won't breathe the briny air. And because of this, she is sad.

"I just want to come out there and huddle in your arms for a month," she says.

And that is probably the cutest thing she's ever said to me. And possibly the gayest.

Cheeseheads

When I lived in Minnesota, a state--and let's be frank here--that isn't known for awesome vacation potential, very few people clamored to visit me. I was lucky enough to get Amy to visit twice, but that had more to do with her eternal love for me and less to do with her thinking the state would make a swell vacation spot. So, Amy visited and so did my parents, but that was for my thesis reading and, again, not because they thought, Gee, Minnesota in spring is so lovely and not at all still bitter cold!

But now that I live in Maine--a state whose nickname is Vacationland, a state whose slogan is Maine: The Way Life Should Be--people are clamoring to come visit. They want to see the ocean, some lighthouses, some lobster boats. They want to eat seafood until they throw up. They want to find a moose. They want to stare at bakery cases filled with Whoopie Pies. And I'm more than happy to oblige.

This week I'm being visited by everyone's favorite Cheeseheads.

Rachel and Dan have arrived. This pleases me to no end. And for the next few days, we will make ourselves whirling dervishes spinning out toward the coast, toward the salty smell of the ocean, toward the lines of lobster boats slicing their way through waves.

I'll start telling stories from Mexico once they are safely on their way to Connecticut to visit another group of their East Coast friends.

Start Spreading the News

Here's where I'll be tomorrow:

I'll be returning to the mother ship.

The first time I went to the AWP conference I was a first-year in my grad program. The conference was held in Chicago that year, and a bunch of us hopped into a caravan and drove off to our hotel, loaded down with the necessities: dozens of cookies, bottles of vodka, a case of Red Bull, and high-heeled boots.

Here's what I can tell you about AWP that year: I was drunk for most of it.

I was drunk at lunch. I was drunk at dinner. I was drunk at midnight. I went to bed drunk and giggling.

I ran across the city like a girl possessed. I wanted to see everything I could in the few days I was in Chicago. I wanted to eat a deep dish pizza whose crust was made with two sticks of butter. I wanted to walk the Miracle Mile and press my nose against all the windows keeping me from all the fabulous things I couldn't afford. I wanted to stand on the edge of the lake and look East. I wanted to wander through the aquarium, wide-eyed and blinking at all the glowing tentacles. I wanted to listen to writers talk about writing--especially my ultimate author crush. I wanted to read my own writing and have people listen. I wanted to be drunk.

I did all of those things. I did the last one--the getting drunk--for a pretty good reason. There was this boy, and I'd had a momentary crush on him when I first got to Minnesota. He found out about the crush and somehow thought I would wilt, I would wither, I would become a lumpy pool of girl on the floor after I realized he didn't like me back. So what did he do? He called me up, asked me to meet him for a drink, and then he told me--out loud, to my face, sitting mere inches from me--that he was sorry but he would never like me like that. He told me he liked someone else, he was going to pursue this other thing, and he really hoped we could continue to be friends. "Listen," he said, kindly, near the end of the already horrific conversation, "I'm sorry if I maybe gave you the wrong idea about things. And I'm sorry you made the decision to come to Minnesota because you thought something was going to happen between us."

At this point in the conversation my head almost fell off my neck. This boy had been an ambassador for the college when I rolled into town after getting my acceptance. I was there to look around, see what there was to see--which turned out to be, uhm, soybeans--and to find an apartment. I'd promised myself to the school. I'd promised myself as a teaching assistant. All of this made me nervous, and this boy was around to take some of that nervousness away. He did a good job. He also did a good job of being cute and charming and sweet. His was the first set of Midwestern blue eyes I ever encountered, and looking at them made me think, Sign me up.

But to think I'd come to Minnesota because of him was ridiculous. I'd already sent in my paperwork and started planning my schedule. I'd already spent precious hours meditating on my first day's outfit--and that day wouldn't happen for months. I was settled. I was devoted to Minnesota. Say what you will about me, but I've never been the kind of girl who stays or goes depending on a boy. You can say I'm frivolous, boy-crazy, and silly, but you can't say I don't have a good head on my shoulders.

So in the moment this boy revealed he was just so concerned about me, a little girl from Buffalo who had packed up all her things and driven West because he was just so irresistible, I wanted to vomit up all the vodka-cranberries I'd mainlined in time I'd been at the bar.

I sat up straight. I tried to look strong. "I did not," I said, "come to Minnesota because of you."

And he smiled at me and patted my hand, like, Whatever you need to tell yourself to make it through the day.

I wanted to run out the front door, screaming all the way down to the river, where I would promptly throw myself in and drown out of embarrassment.

Anyway, the embarrassment didn't last for long. I got over it pretty quick, in fact. I had lots of things to occupy me from that point on, and one of those things was the Wily Republican. He and I had taken up together a few months before AWP, so I didn't really care what that first boy thought anymore. I knew what I was thinking, and I was thinking, Thank God for the military and the way it develops boys with great abs. That first semester we ran around together, the WR still had his military-built body, and when he took his shirt off it was really a thing of beauty.

But when we got to AWP, suddenly I was face to face with the embarrassment once again. After all, there was that first boy with his girl--the one he'd been referring to when he took me out for a drink--and they were sitting on each other's laps, cooing into each other's ears, gazing into each other's eyes. And they were doing it right in front of me.

I knew the boy had told his girlfriend about what happened with me, and that made me feel so foolish--mostly because this girl was achingly beautiful, more beautiful than I could ever hope to be. I felt that whenever she looked at me, she did so with pitying eyes, eyes you use when looking at a beauty pageant contestant who has everything going for her--body, poise, brains--but a jacked-up face. It's a look that says, Oh, you were so close to being pretty, and then this whole face thing happened.

The girl probably wasn't thinking that, but I felt she was. I'd already suffered through the embarrassment brought about by her boyfriend, and I didn't want to suffer through any more. And so I drank a lot. And I ate a lot of cookies. And whenever I felt like I was going to vomit from the embarrassment of everyone knowing what happened, I would think about the Wily and his big bed and his good shoulders and eyes and arms and legs and everything. And that made me feel a little bit better. A lot better. So did the drinking.

But now I don't have any of those issues hanging over my head. Now I am a different girl. I am gainfully employed, boyfriended, stable. Which makes me wonder what this little trip is going to be like. Who will I see, what will I remember, how will I feel when I get to spend time with the people who picked me out, shaped me up, and set me singing?

I'm ready, ready, ready.

My Students Would Rather Live in Arkansas

This weekend I took off and drove up the coast a bit. I was looking for a beach--a laid-back affair, something sandy (which is a rarity in this state, whose beaches lean more toward the craggy side of existence), something that would be just the right place to spend a few lazy hours with the latest copy of People and a stack of brownies.

I went to Popham. Entrance to the state park was $1.50--which the gatekeeper seemed embarrassed about taking. "But it's definitely worth it today," she said, and I told her I bet that was definitely true.

And it was.

When I climbed the hill that swelled above the East Beach, this is what rolled out in front of me:

The beach--which is pretty big and split into two distinct parts because of water flows that cut down the middle--wasn't overrun with people, but there were some brave Mainers who were bobbing in the ocean water which is in the mid-fifties. Paired with a wind, that can be cold. But those people--five, six, maybe seven--didn't seem to care. But I cared. I was wearing my bathing suit, but I kept my shorts and shirt on--and, later in the afternoon, a sweatshirt--but I did go in up to my knees. I hitched my shorts up and let the waves tug me this way, that way, whatever way they wanted.

There were people sinking their fishing lines in the churning water just off the rocks. There were kids splashing in tide pools. There were girls combing the sand where the ocean was spitting up thousands and thousands of glittering shells. There were purple shells and black shells and orange shells and, of course, sand dollars--the big prize. I didn't think I'd find any, but on my first long walk, I stumbled across four. By the time I got back to my beach blanket I'd already broken one of them, but I found four more when I went on my second walk.

There were two lighthouses in the distance, and every time I got the inclination I could look up over the cover of People and off toward them, thinking how romantic it would've been to be a lighthouse keeper. I imagine it would be a very simple, salty life--scrambled eggs and toast in the morning, a long climb up the tower, a day filled with minding waves and boats that slip so easily across the horizon, one eye on your light, one eye on you, always.

So this weekend it was pretty easy to see I was charmed by Maine. Charmed right out of my skin--not that I hadn't been already, but my trips to the coast (a thirty minute drive) have solidified the fact that this place is pretty great.

Some people have said to me, "Oh sure, it's great now, but just wait until winter."

They say this like I don't know winter. I wonder if it's possible that they've never heard of Buffalo, how it gets bitch-slapped by snow for six months of the year. I wonder if they've never heard of Minnesota, how cold it is, how your nose hairs freeze the second you step outside in the twenty below cold. I wonder if they know that for three years I walked a mile to school and a mile from school each day in that kind of weather, and if they know that for most Halloweens of my life I wore full winter gear--snow suit, parka, hat, gloves--over my costume because that's just what October 31st can be like in my hometown. Because of these things, I'm pretty sure I will still have a deep fondness for Maine even after the leaves have fallen and the beaches have crusted over with ice.

But not everyone here has the same fondness for this state, and I found that out yesterday.

I was in my first class of the day, and my students were having one of those before-class-starts chats. I was looking over the reading we'd done for that day and vaguely listening to their conversation. Suddenly it was revealed that one of their classmates had moved to the state from Arkansas.

"Wait a minute," one of the girls said. "Did you just say you moved here from Arkansas? You moved here?" Her tone was one of disgust. She sounded like she'd just been soaked by a shower of repulsiveness: news of baby frogs being stomped to death, of kittens being declawed for the fun of it, bees having their wings ripped from their bodies.

"Yeah," the guy said. He shrugged.

"Oh my God," the girl said. She looked frantically around the room. She wanted backup. "Come on," she said. "Who moves here? Why would you move here?"

At least five of her classmates nodded vigorously. "Yeah," they agreed. "Why come here? What's so great about here?"

You could've knocked me over with a feather. I almost had to reach up and shut my gaping mouth. I hadn't heard any of this before--adult Mainers seem so pro-Maine. They like the kayaking and the hiking and the giant LL Bean and the lobster and the rugged image they've spent years and years crafting. It was hard to imagine anyone getting fed up with all the beauty--the mountains, the lakes, the ocean, the trees, the coast, the winding roads into nowhere. I could imagine being a little miffed about the lack of good malls, but about everything else?

The students' disenchantment was severe. Severe. After all, they were blaming a guy for giving up his life in Arkansas and trading it in for a life in Maine. I couldn't imagine living in a world where Arkansas had a better overall image than Maine.

"Good God," the first girl continued. "That would be like me deciding to move to Minnesota."

I thought I was going to die laughing then--oh, clever comparison--but I did recover quick enough to tell her that, you know, Minnesota really isn't that bad of a state. Sure it might have a problem with soybeans and bagged milk, and maybe they don't know anything about taste and flavor there, and maybe your nose hairs do freeze and fall out of your nose in the winter, but, my God, if you understood the beauty that is walking from a hockey stadium to the bar while thinking you might very well die from exposure in the twenty feet you have to go--well, then you truly know love.

I bet you'd never feel that way in Arkansas.