Country Mouse

I hate to come back glum from a two-week blogging hiatus, and I promise to make it up to you tomorrow with at least one picture of a newborn baby, but the discontent that's growing inside me again needs some leg room.

I think I've said before, and I will very likely say again, that I'm glad we live in the city for now. It's brought us closer to friends and family and entertainment and great food. For me, since I tend to fear anything I haven't done before, it's also killed off a whole bundle of fears. But the last two years have also made it clear that I really belong somewhere else.

Lately, "somewhere else" is a place where my peace and conscience aren't disturbed, respectively, by footsteps above and the awareness of another life below. Where the house next door is not so close that I can hear the humming of their air conditioner and my own lights are reflected brilliantly off their white siding. Where strangers don't stand a few feet from my open windows and smoke. And we can bring home nice things and not have to even think about whether they'll be clearly visible from outside the building, and if they are, whether someone will try to steal them. Where we don't have to close the windows next to the couch when we watch TV, to mute the sound of traffic. And I don't have to think about what day of the week it is before deciding where to park the car outside my own home. Where on Tuesday mornings I can do the laundry and shake the bathroom rugs on the back step without worrying about running into a neighbor while unwashed, pajamaed, and braless.

Right now my perfect somewhere else, the somewhere else where I belong, is a place where sometimes I can feel alone.

Fine, Thank You

It was a good weekend. (Incidentally, "weekend," according to Amber and Eric's Post-Collegiate Dictionary, is defined as roughly Saturday evening through Monday.) The first half was spent with people: On Friday night Eric's youngest brother and his wife drove down from Fargo to sleep on our living room floor for a couple of nights, and Eric's oldest brother and our friend Nils joined most of the attendant festivities. I made simple but fantastic chicken on Friday (Thank you, Tyler Florence, for being both hot and genius.), and on Saturday we discovered a bar within walking distance of our apartment that has good food, good beer, good happy hour specials, a good jukebox, pool tables, and was not obnoxiously crowded or noisy. On a Saturday night. Impossible, but true. On Sunday we had the most amazing Chinese lunch ever, and then everyone left. And we proceeded to do nothing. Unless you count watching TV (Apocalypse Now, Gilmore Girls, and The Sopranos), reading, and napping as doing something. I actually don't.

So now I'm all peopled out and rested up for the hard work and diligence of the next two days, when I intend to do a lot of cleaning and writing and maybe even some writing about cleaning. And then I'll go to Barnes & Noble for a couple of days and do a little work in between social time with my coworkers and the customers.

I'm not sure this is really adulthood, but for the moment it's working for me.

Don't Read This, Mom

There was a break-in at our apartment building this morning. I don't know any of the details because when a neighbor told me about it, I didn't have the presence of mind to ask the normal questions. Such as: "Was anything stolen?" "Was anyone hurt?" and "What?!" I do know (because I just recently went up to get the mail) that the door to the apartment directly above ours is being repaired. I've never felt even vaguely unsafe here before, but I kind of do now.

***UPDATE***
The details: Would-be thieves pried open the alley door with a crowbar, then made their way to the apartment directly upstairs. Tried to pry open that door, but a neighbor heard "some goofy stuff in the hall" (probably the same noises that made me lock my door this morning) and walked out of his apartment to check it out. Found two guys standing in the front vestibule, one holding a gym bag, who claimed to be waiting for a cab. He talked to them for a while, until they left (not in a cab), then called the police. The property manager has already been here, and the doors have been fixed. The residents of the apartment building across the street seem somewhat less savory than the ones here, and the neighbor thinks some of them were able to see from there into the upstairs neighbor's apartment (her blinds are always wide open at night). They didn't get into her apartment because they were interrupted, but that was lucky, and I'm feeling pretty vulnerable.

Prose Poem for the Weather

From an apartment in the basement of a building embedded in a hill in a city, it's hard to tell if it's still snowing. Especially when the wind comes up, lifting blizzards from the ground. Swirling clouds of snow buffet each other in midair, and cars drive through them as if nature is no big deal.

Smothered

Forgive me for writing infrequently lately. And for writing graphically about food poisoning when I do. My excuse is that I do not use language well for events. I use language for description. (I'm the Virginia Woolf of bloggers.) (That creaking sound you just heard was Virginia Woolf and all the rest of Bloomsbury rolling over in their graves.) And aside from fantastically pink vomit, my life includes little these days that I feel compelled to describe. And even then, dang it, I have to hold back in deference to propriety.

Also, while I do a fair amount of self-analysis, I rarely feel comfortable putting it into writing. (If you like confessional blog posts, enjoy this one. This is about as good as it gets.) Oh, I voice my self-analysis. I talk to myself. To Eric. To the cats. To imaginary interviewers for magazines. (It's not crazy if you know it isn't real.) But it looks silly in print. I'm embarrassed to see my own stream of consciousness in black and white. (Guess I'm not Virginia Woolf after all.)

So I've felt best about this blog when I've been able to describe nature. And often those posts revealed something about me, too. I'm deeply affected by the weather and the grass and the trees and the light and the running of water. Seeing myself juxtaposed with and connected to the natural world gives me perspective. Gives me insight. Gives me inspiration. Gives me words.

I'm glad that we have lived in the city, and there are many things I enjoy here. But I've clearly lost something here. The mechanics of city life and nonfictional human interaction give me little to write about. They wear me out with their noise and their concrete and their close spaces, and narrow the space in my mind for creativity. Maybe--probably--I could find inspiration in the city with time. But I think I want my nature back. I think we may not stay here for much more of our lives.

Fair to Middling Day

There's just nothing quite like finding out that you won't be getting paid for another three weeks, and that your haircut just cost you half again more than you were expecting, on the very same day.

And it doesn't help when, while muttering to yourself in the car about the price of your haircut, you forget to stop at the library on your way home to pick up the Spenser novel you've been aching for because it's fall and time for some literary comfort food. And it makes it ever-increasingly worse when you aren't willing to get back in your car and drive the five minutes to the library because both sides of your whole street are posted with temporary no parking signs and you might lose your halfway-decent parking space on a cross street.

On the bright side, because I insist that there be a bright side to all of this, my haircut is pretty much fabulous, possibly the best I've ever had. And class was wonderful today, because before I tortured my class with their first test, I pulled out some of my best and most fun educational activities. Also, All Creatures Great and Small is pretty good cool-weather reading, even if it doesn't involve the character who inspired me, when I was 13, to learn to raise one eyebrow independently of the other.

Therapy

My biggest qualm about moving into a garden-level apartment was the prospect of bugs. Because this is basically a basement, I thought, there may be more bugs in this apartment than in one on a higher floor. But, I argued with myself, because this apartment has always been an apartment--a variety of historical features prove that this is not just a remodeled utility space--it's not a basement in the usual sense.

As it turns out, plain old basement or not, there are bugs. Not beetles, spiders, or ants, though. I think they're all being eaten by the centipedes. And centipedes are our least favorite variety of bug. Even Eric, who thinks bugs are cool and will not hesitate to pick up a beetle with his bare hand, hates them. This is because they are incredibly fast, often incredibly large, and they have too goddamn many legs. We had some in our last place, but we only started seeing them in the spring, and then we only saw one every week or two. Here, we see them once a day on average. Just now, I found a squished one on the carpet I vacuumed yesterday, which means either the cats killed it or the things are so ubiquitous we're now stepping on them by accident.

The good news is that this hasn't caused me to collapse drooling into a corner of the couch, like it might have a year ago. Instead of losing my mind every time I see a centipede, I kill it, flush its corpse down the toilet, and move on with my life. This is huge progress considering that I used to be physically unable to get within a four-foot radius of a centipede (which is not nearly close enough to kill it), and the first time we saw a large one in our old apartment, I spent most of the night awake, imagining centipedes crawling over every inch of the place in the dark.

Now I've made the sensible decision that if they're going to be a fact of life, I might as well treat them that way. As long as the centipedes understand that they are to stay off of me, and that I have the right to kill them on sight, we can live together peacefully.

Moving Rant #1

Reserving a moving truck should be easy. You should make one phone call to the company, tell them what size truck you need and the length of time you need it, and in an urban area with dozens of branches of their company, they should be able to meet those needs.

You should not have to make an abstract "reservation" for which they cannot guarantee that you will be able to pick up the truck within a certain radius of your home, and for which they cannot specify the length of time you will be allowed to keep the truck. Then, they certainly should not text-message you, when you specified that you prefer a phone call, with a more concrete reservation at a near enough location, but that requires you to return the truck at 7 A.M. on the day you have to move into your new apartment.

But they did. So you try again.

This time, you arrange a workable reservation, for a truck larger than you need, a little more expensive than the first, and farther away, but for 24 hours, which is the really important part. But you should not, then, feel the need to call the location where you will pick up the truck to confirm your reservation, and having done so, be told, "I don't have that available that day." So obviously you have to, although you shouldn't, call the original people who made the reservation--the central reservationists if you will--and ask them what gives. Then you shouldn't have to wait on hold while the central reservationists call the pick-up location and ask them, in turn, what gives. And then you shouldn't have to be told, in a way that should inspire confidence but at this point doesn't, that they "don't know what his issue is over there, but we'll work it out. You have the truck, and if that changes we'll call you."

There are just so many more important, theoretically more challenging things in life than moving trucks. So why, three hours later, do I have a headache and no energy left for anything else?

Tension

This morning, despite an aching neck and an aching back and a groggy feeling pounding against the insides of my eyelids, I stayed in bed an hour and a half longer than I intended. Not sleeping so much as hiding. Today I have plenty of the normal stuff to get done, like buying conditioner and groceries and cleaning and taking out the recycling. But today is also the day that I've set aside for driving up to the college where I'll be teaching as of Monday, so I can use the floppy drive in the "adjunct workstation" to read through the entirety of the helpful information I've been given, and so I can make copies and transparencies for the first day of class, and so I can find out where to pick up keys and how to get a copy of my class list, since I can't print one myself until Human Resources finishes processing the paperwork I gave them three weeks ago.

Add to those Unfamiliar Important Things the fact that we found and applied for a really great apartment over a week ago and still haven't heard whether we're approved for it because if we are approved, they'll simply sign and mail us the lease we've already signed. And yes, she said to assume we were "in the clear" if we didn't hear from them, and we haven't heard from them, but we are both committed realists (pessimists), and I want so badly to just know where we stand on this that I dreamed last night we got the lease in the mail, and we moved in. And today, because it wasn't real and because so many other uncertainties are, I feel as if a crowd of tiny people is bracing its feet against my brain and pushing with its hands against the inside of my forehead.

Two Big Cities, Too Many Apartments

Today, Eric and I spent about four hours driving and walking around a few areas we're interested in moving to. We came home with enough phone numbers to cover four pages of a notepad. Then I called those numbers. So now I'm exhausted and overwhelmed and frustrated. Frustrated by rude/snotty/apathetic property managers, by the dearth of apartments available when our lease is up (in just two months), by outrageous rent and pet fees, by the fact that balconies are usually only available in expensive or boring or sketchy buildings, and by our own lack of freedom and time to go and look at places we find interesting.

And I hate to have such negative feelings about this process, since it's really kind of exciting. But so far, the process is kind of letting me down. Lots of effort, and only a couple of decent leads. Blah. I'm gonna go clean something.

Philanthropy

My neighborhood has a reputation as the most politically liberal area of the city. Hippies galore. Charitable groups find this reputation useful: The Nature Conservancy has an office down the street, and while I haven't seen a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon yet, I've met more left-leaning door-knockers in the past ten months than I can count. Just today, I've declined to purchase a beautiful bracelet or a matryoshka from a young Ukrainian man (proceeds would have fought teenage drug use), and regretfully insisted that it wasn't possible for me to contribute "just" $20 to a GLBT civil rights group.

These door-knockers are trained to work the guilt angle for all it's worth, and bless them for that. I hope my neighbors give generously. But I'm really very poor. I'll listen respectfully to their mission statement, I'll express moral support for their cause, and I might even put their bumper sticker on my car. But I won't give them money. At this point, it's a matter of policy. After all, eating has to come first. Then changing the world.

Thoughts in a Very Loud, Very Dark Room With Hundreds of Strangers

That was to be the title of a stream-of-consciousness blog post that I wrote in bits and pieces in my head last night during the Modest Mouse concert. But now it's just a persuasive argument for keeping a notebook in my pocket at all times and writing things down as I think of them. Because when we got home last night, I didn't have the energy to actually write it out. So I sat down to recreate it just now, and discovered that all the magic had gone out of it. It would be hard at this point to remember everything I had wanted to say, and hard to achieve the effect I wanted, and I'm not interested enough anymore to put the effort in.

So instead I'll just say, in conventional blog fashion, that the concert--which we owe our friend Katie for, since she let us have the tickets she won--was awesome. We were in the front row in the orchestra pit, directly in front of the guitarist and his guitar-only speakers, which convinced me that it is possible to be too close to the stage during a concert. The singer's vocals were often drowned out by the guitar, and the unique vocals and lyrics are one of my favorite things about Modest Mouse. But that's just an observation. I wouldn't complain. The music was great, the venue was gorgeous, the gin and tonic was tasty, the people-watching was interesting, and the vibe was extremely positive. People love that band. It makes them smile. And for good reason.

Modest Mouse Rocks

Rock on, Modest Mouse.