Maybe if I had a boy's name . . .

I read Seventeen magazine religiously from 6th grade until I graduated and the 2nd new editor in my subscription time period turned it into something more like YM, which you would buy at Longs but never subscribe to. It was pretty fantastic in its own right, mostly for its quizzes which invariably gave you hope that you and the boy were ultimately very compatible, and the painfully edited embarrassing stories, like a boy sees a tampon in your purse, or you sneeze on his sweater when you lean in to kiss him. These stories, as I recall, were rated on the embarrassment scale, and I don't know if they even have that section anymore, but they were all about solidarity, if nothing else. Carrying around a copy of YM at Clovis West High School was a temporary key to popularity in my experience, especially in the Spring when the teachers were feeling lazy and you would do busywork or group work at your desk and you could sneak it out to read the stories and do the quizzes, hoping that people like Onna Mehas and Misty Tutt wouldn't actually write in your magazine when they took the quiz. Still, I probably didn't care that much because it meant they acknowledged you did something hip and good for them - ultimately the goal, after all.

But Seventeen I subscribed to, and kept every issue stacked on my floor, much to my mom's perpetual irritation; I think I was grounded more than once for its untidiness. When Tierra and Tawna came to visit we spent hours reading them on my bed, trying out the hairstyles, trying to figure out how people's mothers would let them wear strapless dresses to the prom, reading about the It boy of the moment. There was also a trend to get the binders for school that had the view pocket on the front so you could make collages from your mags - essentially an advertisement for competing brands you thought were cool: Esprit, Guess, Polo. We cut out only the words, and glued them along with whatever else to some cardstock, as if cutting it out of a magazine made you as cool as if you owned the clothes themselves, which, incidentally, I did not.

I'm not sure my mom ever really believed this, but my affair with the mag was 95% based on the fiction, which I'm not entirely certain is still a feature. People like Joyce Carol Oates and Lorrie Moore and Sylvia Plath had all once been published in Seventeen, and I distinctly remember searching out The Bell Jar in the Clovis West Library and being scared to death by "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" I used to flip through the whole thing - backwards, for some reason - and look at the skinny girls and their outrageous clothes, read the Sex + Your Body column, and look at the cute famous boy article first, always saving the fiction until I could hardly stand it anymore. Each year, when the fiction contest happened, I would just die with jealousy for the girl who won, and desperately want to be the person who could be published in what I saw as essentially The New Yorker for tragic teenage girls with a little talent.

I'm remembering all this because today I listened again to a story I loved from This American Life - "Like It Or Not" it's called, and the third act is a story about something called Jubilee, which takes place at indiscriminate times on Mobile Bay, Alabama and has as much to do with bizarre tidal patterns as dumb luck. (As it turns out, there is a Miss Jubilee and a Miss Teen Jubilee, I am happy to report, which makes the whole thing even more fantastic than I can handle.) Though the fabulousness of the story and the event could merit an entire article in itself, how I mean to connect it is that the woman who tells the story is named Curtis Sittenfeld, and I suddenly remembered her name from the contest; she was the envied winner in 1992. I think I vaguely remember her story, (and fortunately if I dig through all my crap I will most likely be able to find it, as I ripped out the fiction from all those piled Seventeens before I went to college and my mom insisted they be chucked) about a girl whose mother had died, or something equally confusing and difficult. Doing a Google search on Ms. Sittenfeld brings up a crop of articles - she has become, I guess, what people who have the guts to enter contests and eventually be published ought to be: a writer by profession. And just the fact that I've thought about this all day and have almost emailed her something like "Hi, I wish I were a writer and you're good and I'm so jealous and did you really go to Stanford and then The Writer's Workshop and how am I 28 and doing nothing about anything?" hopefully more eloquent than that, but still. I sort of feel like I've known her since 1992 and then suddenly we've become reacquainted, and I'm just bummed out over here because thinking about Seventeen reminds me of what I used to want to be, and I feel kind of like I sold out to my own laziness or fear or excuses or whatever else stupid thing keeps me from doing what I claim to want the most. So, Curtis, if you ever happen upon this page through some random Googling of yourself, good job on knowing how to do the next thing.

Hey Jupiter, nothing looks the same

There's an exceptionally bright star in the sky this week, and you don't know exactly what it is about stars that make you feel small and bad at things like relationships and competence, but you keep looking at this star or this planet and it's haunting you or looking down on your control freak self with at least one eyebrow raised and arms folded with some serious chagrin. If you knew which way was east or west you'd look on a constellation chart to figure out who it is, because though it's no secret that you don't much care for the country, you sure can see a lot of stars out here.

And let's be honest, you were in therapy and learning about projecting and Dr. Freeman told you about her own desperation and how she would find herself leaning towards people just to feel their humanness, it was all very intense and maybe TMI at the time, but there comes a point when that star or somebody strips you of your clipboard and your duties and you're just you, embarrassed and cringing and startled when you accidentally brush your fingers on a boy's arm. And you can talk about fast cars and indignation and how you are burdened by all your hats but really you're busy building a little fortress and you hate when it falls down, limp and messy and like a bad photograph with blotchy skin and double chins.

And really, you think, if it was anything but Dulcinea you'd have been fine, but something's always wrong, right? And you are That Girl in love with C who now has three movies and a wife and you're wearing a bad flannel nightgown and pretending to be lots of things but you have an omnipresent memory of that night in the street when you gave him a stupid fuzzy card of cue balls on a pool table and fortune cookies that you stayed up all night making and then wrapped in saran wrap with raffia. And then you were both gone and here you are, almost old, with all these knives and pans and what passes for having it together, but really you're scared of animals with long pink tails and clearing your throat too loudly and of being scared, even, which makes you love television and strawberry lip balm and fake diamonds for a joke and listen to Ryan Adams because Love is Hell, not that you'd know, and you can really only handle the idea of things and carefully chosen conversations in which you pretend to be high above it all, maybe alongside that planet, and there's this enduring sense that the rotating is making you unravel.

Ian Frazier will tell you why I hate bags

And because he said it so well in a recent New Yorker piece about things that get caught in trees and his hobby of removing them, I quote:

"Of course, the basic thing that gets in a New York City tree is the white plastic deli bag. [Here in the suburbs it's the blue plastic Wal-Mart bag, but you get the point.] It reaches the tree with the aid of the wind, or (as I sometimes think) by its own powers. With its flimsy whiteness and its two looped handles, it suggests a self-levitating undershirt; we have named it the undershirt bag. It does not have a soul, but it imitates one, rising and floating on the exhalations of a subway grate like the disembodied spirits that poets used to converse with in Hell. Its prehensile handles cling to any branch that comes within range, and then grab hold for eternity. This bag is not hard to get out of a tree when it's still fresh, but as it ages and shreds, it becomes more difficult. . .

If you spend a lot of time taking bags out of trees, you learn that they don't wish anybody well. It's no accident that a visual convention for spookiness is dangling spiderwebs, moss-draped branches, jungly, heart-of-darkness drooping vines. Though not the Dark Power itself, bags in trees nonetheless act as its minions; or, to put it another way, nothing makes a neighborhood look scarier than bare-branch trees draped with plastic-bag shreds above a razor-wire fence similarly fluttering and bestrewn. The bags and debris are an established part of the picture. They like it up there, and prefer not to be disturbed."

Available soon for purchase:

I really love Thanksgiving

Do we like the new design? I can't decide. I hate being limited by web colors only. But I wouldn't want troubles, so I bow. Of course, being that I stole the idea from gnoyle, he/she ought to be recognized, especially since he/she may or may not be Abby's friend.

ANYway, I am happy to report that I arrived home (45 minutes late, like thanks for nothing America West Airlines, also known as the worst airline ever still civilized enough to assign seats) with canned goods, as in the bottled kind that old school farmers and people with forethought used to make. Applesauce and peaches. I ate the peaches at 11:30 last night and they were quite fabulous. I even drank the juice, feeling a little guilty and a little uncivilized, but it's sort of like nectar, you know?

The best thing about this story is that my sister is the one who canned them. It makes me so proud, in a "aw, aren't you such a good homemaker" kind of way. I'm not a terrific homemaker, though both she and I might consider it a dubious honor anyway. I'm a bit of a snobbish homemaker, to be honest. When my scheduled arrival at Thanksgiving was for approximately 1.5 hours before dinner, I was both relieved and perplexed that my influence would not be felt, even knowing that last year my arguably overengineered dinner caused, among other things, barfing in my bedroom trash can, a small fire of butter and grease in the oven, and serious nervousness over cornbread stuffing. But I watch the Food Network. I wanted to mix it up; my family wanted grandma's stuffing. Of course they said it was good - and it was - but I am quite certain that this year nobody was dreaming about the beets roasted in sea salt when we sat around Grandma Muelleck's table.

It was like we always remember it: turkey that tastes of nothing but turkey, plain Idaho russet mashed potatoes, sliced sweet potatoes with apples, german red cabbage like only she can make it, and even Jell-O with fruit and Cool Whip, never a choice I'd make, but then sometimes eating it for comfort value alone is worth it. It was old school and pretty perfect, frankly, and I remembered that traditions - however simple or not-Martha or unchanged since 1982 - lend a whole lot of peace to my otherwise fairly frantic and perfectionist insides. I love Thanksgiving. Thanks for cooking, Grandma.

Trouble with opossums, part II

[It's been forever. I know. Forgive.]

The mystery of life is why the name of the blasted animal is spelled either opossum or possum. If only I were rich like the Hunters and I had the OED taking up many many shelves in my living room bookcases, I'd look it up. And did you know at one point you were supposed to pronounce the O? In honor of my confusion, I'm spelling today's story with the O.

See, every time I come home, I know when they've been there. The cat food bowl is licked clean, see, and cats don't lick. They leave all these little crumbs, like a baby. It's rather endearing. Not so endearing is the shiny opossum-slime covered clean dish, but I'm always just relieved they've gone away. And I vow -- usually out loud to the cat -- that there will be no more feeding on the porch and especially no more feeding of the opossums, and even though she's crying and whining, I get all bitter, like why didn't you eat it before they came, and why, for the love, didn't you chase them off?

Well, it turns out the reason her little skinny, scared-to-death of my foosteps self doesn't scare them off is because they are huge. Gigantic. Fatter than the fattest thyroid-troubled cat, fatter than the oldest dog who is blind and does nothing but eat all day, fatter than a fat lady's thigh. And I say them because there are two now. They were both on the porch at the same time last night, one on the railing pretending to be scared or dead or whatever nonsense they do instead of running away like respectable animals when I come driving up and flash my lights a few thousand times while hyperventilating in the car, the other one choosing the exact moment of my arrival to heave his grotesque body up the steps and sniff around. The fatter guy already ate it, though, and the cat whined and jumped on the hood of the car.

The main trouble is that there's no other way in the house without waking up Murch, which seemed rude last night, but this morning seems like a pretty good idea. So I come to the office instead, willing the fat beast to jump down and run away so I can pretend like it doesn't happen every. single. day. Matt is there, so he comes to help, not being quite so petrified as myself. His weapons: a hollow, plastic kiddie bat, a flashlight, and some pebbles. Pelting it about 30 times doesn't work. Chucking the bat at it doesn't work. So he manages to get up the stairs (fatty #2, upon finding the bowl shiny clean, has hauled himself away), into the house to find the broom and poke at it. And still, he sits on the ledge, maybe scared, maybe pissed; who knows. Matt said teeth were bared. Meanwhile, I'm in the car screaming into my jacket, waiting for him to come running down the stairs. Instead, Matt manages to push him over the ledge, where he does a painfully slow, deathgrip drama of falling incrementally, first down the railing, then to the second roof, then sliding down the tin where he lands in a heap on the sidewalk. And he isn't dead. He shakes himself out a little and waddles off. Meanwhile, I'm not sure I ever want to touch my broom again, and this night for absolutely positively sure that food is going down the stairs. Either that, or I'm moving to LA.

I have a little rant

I started this particular journal on September 30th, because it's been so long, and I was in a jovial bad mood about societal observations. I'm still in a bad mood, and this time it's about more stuff and not that jovial, so look out.

The thing is, I try to be positive in here, leaving insult to the self-deprecating variety. There was that one time I made fun of all the freaks with online diaries, but for the most part I usually just make fun of things that deserve it, like Wal-Mart and bad reality television. But I think I've been operating under the illusion lately that I'm a positive person by nature, or at least a lot of therapy helped me discover my inner positive breeding by the queen of cheer, my mom. Look here if you don't believe me. That's one cheery lady. And pops isn't much of a crank either.

Except lately, I don't think it's really true. I hear myself quite cynical most of the time, and I can't figure out just when I got such a bad attitude, but there it is. So I guess I have something to work on, just as soon as I figure out how to sleep more and it stops being so freaking hot outside in October.

And before I get happy and nice, can I just complain about the following things?

1. Apostrophes in plurals. Sometimes, inexplicably, in the same sign:

For Sale:
Shrimp
Mussel's
Oysters

I'm not kidding.

2. Signs on businesses' doors that say things like "Please leave muddy shoes outside" and are signed "The Management" or, worse, "Mgmt." So if it's not specifically requested by Boss Hogg, you're allowed to ignore it? I especially love when the sign has obviously been printed with a Sharpie by the 17-year old who works the counter for $6.50/hour and writes with bubble letters circa 1988.

3. Here's the worst public signage offense: "We're sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you." They don't take checks anymore, you can only have 3 packages of ketchup with your fries, the place has been burnt to the ground - in any case, they're sorry for our inconvenience. Aside from being one of the most poorly-constructed sentences in the language of small-business owners, it's also a big crock. They're not sorry.

I am, though. Now, onto being positive . . .

A gift

As I've mentioned before, the events of 2 years ago have been heavy in my head and my heart. I was preparing to write more sad things, to ponder again how another year's passing has changed it all. But then this happened, late September 9th:



And everything feels much more hopeful.

Welcome to the world, Elsa Louise. We're so happy to see you.

Place

When I was a sophomore in college I wanted pretty desperately to be a fiction writer. I was taking English 218R: Writing Fiction [R=repeatable, though not for credit, and I did lots of times] and decided that to be a respectable writer of short stories one either had to write from the haughty assurance of New York City or down home simple pride of the country. So I imagined myself at the end of college in either Virginia or New York, not really sure doing exactly what, but with some serious writer ambition, living alone in some sort of a great apartment being cool enough to merit publication. But I'll get back to that. So tonight I'm driving home from Asheboro and I had all kinds of revelation about just why I am not actually doing any writing, this journal excepted, and it hardly counts. Asheboro is a smallish town west of where I live, and is part of the whole Western North Carolina land of producing textiles and furniture. It is of sufficient population to have a Super Wal-Mart, heaven help us all, but my real reason for the trip was to get some rocking chairs. Chances are pretty good that when you purchase furniture it -- or the fabric that covers it -- was made right here in my lovely state. High Point, the sleepiest town ever, turns into this giant smorgasbord of buyers, producers, and industry darlings at the Furniture Market each year, and the whole sort of Western area, with the exception of Greensboro and Winston-Salem, seems to me a collection of small places where people are born and die, usually working in the mills.

I was getting rockers because what you do in the South, no matter how blasted hot and humid it is outside, is sit on the front porch at dusk and drink sweet tea and watch the lightning bugs. And you need a respectable rocker. So I went to P&P Chairs (they don't so much have a website), which is housed in the same warehouse as when it started. You go through the office -- clearly marked by one of those hanging-from-chains "OFFICE" signs perpendicular to the door -- to the outlet store, really just a mass of chairs in a large room with wood floors and pillars, and a room which, I quite vividly imagined, could have served as a social hall for some sort of hoe-down in the past.

I asked the middle-aged man helping me how long they'd been in business, and he said, proudly, "Since 1926. In this same building." And it was pretty obvious. There were a couple hundred coats of vaguely greenish paint on the walls, a million coats of gray on the outside, and some 70s-looking improvements like a couple of wall-unit air conditioners that blew freezing air to the office and a serious blast of heat into the warehouse this 95 degree day. He told me that his grandfather started the business, and his father, "the white-haired man you saw in there," runs it now. I went with him in the office to pay through a swinging half gate, around randomly placed old desks and through a door with a frosted glass pane marked "Private" in red letters. After taking my check and giving me directions to the restaurant where I was meeting a friend, he hesitated a minute, then told me that I shouldn't go to that restaurant (and having been there before, I silently agreed) but that I should go just up the road to the American Roadhouse, which boasts a seriously schizophrenic menu of fried chicken or frog legs. We took his recommendation, and I ended up with 2 gigantic chicken breasts coated in mozzarella and weird marinara, a side of garlic mashed potatoes, and Texas Toast, with a Diet Coke in a Ball jar. My meal and Tracy's came to less than $15, and we were surrounded by all these Asheboro folks, regulars, a bunch of them, familiar to the waitstaff and each other.

Then in the truck I heard on NPR some reading recommendations, and there was an excerpt from a contemporary writer named Maile Meloy whose first collection of stories has just been published in paperback. The girl who read had a perfect radio voice and I was so entranced by the prose that I nearly ran a red light. And even though it's a space hog and probably a violation of some copyright to post it, it's so fabulous that I listened to it on NPR about a thousand times so I could transcribe it, and here's how it goes:

"If you’re white, and you’re not rich or poor but somewhere in the middle, it’s hard to have worse luck than to be born a girl on a ranch. It doesn’t matter if your dad’s the foreman or the rancher, you’re still the ranch girl, and you’ve been dealt a bad hand. If you’re the formean’s daughter on Ted Haskell’s Running H Cattle Ranch, you live in the foreman’s house, on the dirt road between Haskell’s place and the barn. There are two bedrooms, with walls made of particleboard, one bathroom, no tub, muddy boots and jackets in the living room, and a kitchen that’s never used. No one from school ever visits the ranch, so you can keep your room the way you decorated it at ten, a pink comforter, horse posters on the walls, plastic horse models on the shelves. Outside there’s an old cow dog with a ruined hip, a barn cat who sleeps in the rafters, and, until he dies, a runt calf named Minute, who cries at night by the front door."

I even said WOW out loud in the truck and then I was of course, jealous and awe-struck and I thought, "See, she can write that because she's lived on a ranch and so she can get those details just right" and then I almost crashed again because it hit me: I am in precisely the spot that I once thought I needed to be, and it's like I have no idea. I live on a farm, in the country, people at my neighborhood feed & garden store know me and give me discounts on my herbs, I can chase down the FedEx man while he's getting lunch at Subway and he knows me and even stops to chat a bit, the crazy woman in the Wendy's drive-thru says "SEE YOU TOMORROW" every time I go (even though I really do NOT go every day), my neighbor Clark Poe knows everyone within a 10-mile radius and most of them go to church at the Orange Chapel A.M.E. Church just down the road, and I know from him that my mechanic tries to cover up the booze on his breath with "too much Listerine" and that Mark Crawford's truck recently blew up, "just blew up!" while it was sitting in the garage, and that there's a secret bar in downtown Chapel Hill that does all its business just after 4:30 or so, and serves 2 kinds of beer and nothing else. Truth, it turns out, is much stranger and a whole lot more interesting than fiction, and I am living smack in the middle of the things of so many whose fiction I admire: Faulkner, O'Connor, Raymond Carver.

In other words, I have no excuse, and that's kind of depressing. My dying breath is that maybe I'm meant for New York writing, which is probably why I'm all antsy to talk about Abby's possible move there: it's probably 20% jealousy and 80% sad to see her go. And I'm still not entirely comfortable with what I see as too many paradoxes in my belonging to this wonderful place: can you have subscriptions to Vogue, Allure, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Martha Stewart Living and Weddings, and Harper's and carry around all that poser angst, and yet still smile fit to make your cheeks ache when you drive over the Cape Fear River and imagine your branch, the Haw, that runs in the backyard of the place you currently call home?

Don't answer that. I'm a little obsessed with this notion of place -- in fiction and in life -- it would seem, but when we talked about literature in college and when I read it now, I dwell on place and I think kind of incessantly about how that shapes us and the characters we write. But I am dripping with beauty of place over here, so maybe my dying breath is actually that I'm scared that I'm not good at it, which everybody knows isn't a very good reason to not try, because even if you end up being pretty terrible, someone will tell you. And, as us ranch girls know, there's the whole getting back up on the horse thing.

Don't I have a bb gun around here somewhere?

Okay, seriously? No matter how hard I try to be in love with the so-called peace and quiet of living in the country, the cons so far outweigh the pros that I can't actually think of any pros at this moment.

So tonight I was already annoyed at myself because I was feeding Street's fish this weekend and of course forgot to do it while I was actually in town for church, so I said I would go back later, after my nap. Later turned out to be around midnight, which is my own stupid fault, but not the worst thing, even though I didn't get home until about 1 a.m. However, I have been watching too much Boomtown and have become a little paranoid that Chatham County is like East LA with gangs and scary people hiding behind the bushes and whatnot. Of course, I don't think people actually get murdered in Chatham County, though there are some more-than-occasional troubles at the Paradise Club down 87 - a strip club, it probably goes without saying - advertising "beautiful ladys. our prices beat the rest" on its backlit billboard on wheels.

ANYway, when I'm more rational, murder isn't actually the thing that freaks me out so much as the bugs, animals, darkness, and spiders. Until I moved to a horse ranch, I had remembered with vivid terror a chance encounter with a possum outside my bedroom window sometime in high school - I probably told that story like it was the worst thing that ever happened, since wildish animals weren't known to prowl around our neighborhood with much frequency, it being populated and not in the middle of a forest. Now I routinely almost run over possums who freeze like crazed lunatics and stare right into your approaching headlights, but I can leave them safely behind with just a little shudder.

Just fifteen minutes ago, however, owing to my stupidity of having a cat feeder on my front porch, I ran up the stairs to my house, praying that I wouldn't run headfirst into a giant spider web that the little devil keeps spinning right at head level between the posts of the porch, and there was a freaky, ratty, devily possum, chilling on the banister like he owned it. I screamed like a hysterical stupid girl in a horror movie, and it echoed all the way to the river, I swear. If I had any neighbors, they would have come running for sure.

And yet, he did not go away. I don't keep the porch light on because at least a million mosquitos and moths would come in when I opened the door, so I could have TOUCHED his horrible rat body and -- oh this is so awful I can't hardly type it -- his prehensile tail. I don't know what that means, but I know what it looks like. Ew ew ew. He's probably out there chowing down on Kit 'n Kaboodle as I write but I can't bring myself to go look again. Also, he won't be scared away, even with frantic banging on the glass and the freakishly girly screaming. The cat in this scenario sat at the bottom of the stairs and whined. Now I know why, though little did she know how not useful I'd be in saving her dinner.

I'm afraid this has officially put me over the edge. I am so thankful and indebted and thrilled with the house I live in, and the kind, benevolent people who employ me and give me more stuff than they ever should, but the country? Once I move, I'm never living here again. We are finished.

Mourning

[I love how it says 12:00 straight up on this entry. Mostly I love that the last angsty one is now archived instead of being the thing that defines me for 2 weeks.]

For no discernible reason, I've spent the past few days listening to and reading stuff written after September 11, 2001. It began with listening to a PRI program I worship and adore, This American Life, which approaches reporting with an intriguing collection of spoken essays and interviews with carefully-chosen background music and interludes. The program is done in three to four acts, each story based around a theme; on 9/21 the program was called "Before and After."

Act Two isn't about the WTC at all, but a tragedy which the fountain in its memory calls "The Worst Disaster in the history of New York." It was on June 15, 1904 that the members of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church boarded the steamship General Slocum for a picnic. It caught fire, and burned to a shell in just 15 minutes, killing 1,031 people - mostly women and children - from the all-German community of the church. "In the most painful and horrifying example of this great city's capacity to top itself and exceed all previous expectations," the reporter David Rakoff says, "the sign will now have to be changed."

I think it makes me feel sad and weary and driven to cry quietly here in my office these many years later because my disconnection to those lost both in the boat fire and the World Trade Center feels very profound. I didn't know anyone who died, I don't even know anyone well who lost someone, and yet I grieve, nearly two years later, with a sense that it will always feel this way to me, a stranger, and especially as bombs explode on unsuspecting people all over the world with alarming frequency. I don't feel exactly justified in my tears for the deaths of strangers and the terrible, intense fury and powerlessness I feel towards the people who embrace death and murder as an act of God, and yet maybe it is this disconnect which keeps the wounds of that day open.

Or maybe the reason that I've been listening and reading so many human responses is because the fury that fueled the acts never stops, just takes different structures and different people who aren't protected by the perverse and unsettling vigilance of the United States. The repetition is no less tragic.

Here's the other thing: I have, since that day, really wanted to write something. I wrote nothing when it actually happened, and I wrote some mawkish drivel last year on the date in a journal. I read it recently, and of course, it was less introspective analysis than bewilderment. I suspect it's because I don't quite know what's in my head - mostly there are disjointed and sad thoughts and this kind of void between them that says, "it didn't really happen to you." It happened to an old friend from college, it happened to my cousin, New Yorkers both at the time, but the friend of a friend of a friend doesn't seem allowable for big crying. So, in a sense, I feel dumb or false or hollow writing anything, and yet I want to own the grief for solidarity's sake. I want to hug it and comfort it. I can hear about the Germans and feel twingy because my dad is German - those people were a collection of immigrants who traveled through the same gates as my grandparents years ago, and somehow I feel a license to step into the space filled with that sadness. New York? I have never belonged.

It's not exactly like I want to relive what I felt that day, when I called my mom early in the morning on the West Coast and told her with a shaky voice to turn on the television, and then lay on the couch staring blankly at CNN for most of the evening clutching my woobie like a child. But listening and reading the story of tragedies connects me to humanity - forces me to consider how I handle diverse people and good and bad things. It reminds me of the lens through which I ought to be seeing things more clearly: the eye of faith would be a good place to start. The Master taught that I should mourn with those that mourn, and I like to to hope this is something like that.

Tellin' myself it's not as hard hard hard as it seems

Today was an ugly day. They're the worst sort of day, and are not coincidentally cyclical and associated with profound annoyance at people you work with, exhaustion, and a general feeling of wanting to watch a lot of television and drink Diet Coke. That, or listen to tragic songs. My poison today: Going to California. Sigh. California. Dear Robert Plant, singing to my hormonal soul.

One thing I do when I feel ugly is to wear bad clothes, and I get this overpowering desire to hide. One thing that seems to make sense at times like these is to hide one's head. This can be achieved by wearing a hat, maybe, or an Hermès scarf, if you're so inclined and have an extra 300 bucks lying around. I went for a lower-budget and rip-off approach, myself. Since I might be a teensy bit in love with all things Isaac Mizrahi and he often wears a white version of the classic bandana on his crazy hair, I decided one late night at Wal-Mart that I should become a bandana girl. It's so sassy, so hip. Or maybe it used to be hip - I can never be sure in North Carolina. At any rate, I debated between white and orange for a good 8 minutes, and finally settled on orange, for my own statement, presumably. It cost $1.26. I still feel ugly today, even with it thwarting the escaping ugly from the top of my head, sort of like heat when you're camping.

Also I was thinking how many people lately have been asking how my summer's been, and as all these people are in some period of college matriculation, I just have to grimly answer that it's been fine, when, in fact, once you are a grown-up and don't have kids around which to base a schedule, summer is just weather, and this cute girl tonight was telling me about her summer in Boston where she met and fell in love with a darling landscape architect named Hugh. It's just been hot here. Also, sometimes I really wish I could live in Boston.

And can I just end by saying that I love how when you make a typo in Yahoo it ever so kindly asks at the top of the page, "Did you mean [correct spelling] instead?" It's just so polite, unlike me today.

We'll see if tomorrow is better. Goodnight, Robert Plant. I'll come see you in California.

Oh, this yummy baby

Growing huge without me. Sob!

Birds are scary

I think I might be a little afraid of birds.

It's a new development, really, since I've never really thought about it before last night, when I was on a search for a little carribeener-type thing for Donnie and I really had no idea where to get it. So I went to this hobby store in our weird little Chapel Hill mall and the boy said they didn't have any but that I should go try a pet store; he uses one on the cage for his macaw, and he was pretty sure I could find it there. I was skeptical.

But it turns out that we have a pet store called Dubey's Pet World right in the mall, which perplexes me for a few reasons: old-school malls like this one don't actually have doors, just those grates like a roller shade, but of course they're only lowered at closing. Also, Dubey's has a couple of large tropical birds literally inches from the wide opening where a door should be protecting shoppers from sudden movements.

Last night, I was the kind of jerky shopper that shows up at 8:50 looking for a relatively obscure item. As I browsed the wall of bird items, I noticed a young East Indian couple looking intently at every animal in the place - first at the brightly colored parrot (I'm assuming, since I don't really know how to distinguish it from a macaw), then in the way-too-small glass room filled with tanks of reptiles and amphibians, then into the little glass cat room, where the woman let out a skinny white cat that rubbed all over her legs. Since the man seemed terribly interested in the big red bird, I thought he was the voice of the loud "goodbye" that I was hearing over and over. I thought he was trying to get the bird to repeat him, which seemed pretty irritating, not to mention embarrassing for him. But then I discovered it was, in fact, the bird, and eventually he stopped saying the word and began a slow crescendo of intense squawking, which his counterparts in the store - also just sitting on a branch out there in the open - quickly began mimicking.

Meanwhile, the nice helpful boy working there was digging through a fish bowl he had behind the counter that was filled with random things like opened cat toys and dirty leashes, most of which didn't look saleable to me, along with the occasional pen and paperclip. But at the bottom, he found 2 fasteners for me, so he started to ring me up and all of a sudden I realized I couldn't even hear what he was saying over the din of the squawking. It was ridiculously loud and of the pitch that breaks windows in movies. And I said something like, "Doesn't that make you insane?" He told me that they do this at closing every night. "How do they know what time it is?" I asked. He shrugged.

So I left, but there was a girl trying in vain to sweep off a rug that was underneath a pale yellow squawking bird, and she just stood in the way so I had to get way too close to it. I was pretty nervous, and I realized I was pretty nervous the whole time in the store.

I guess it means I'm scared. And it's not just of the big ones, either. We had this little parakeet named Jordie who would come out of his cage occasionally when some brave person would dare tempt the pecking, and I would generally want to run away from the room he was in. I nearly went crazy if he started to flap around and go up to the ceiling. Birds just seem so unpredictable, like are they going to come land on my head or try and peck my face? It's probably a pretty slim chance, but I prefer them in cages or in trees, high above my head.

Maybe it's more accurate to say that birds make me very uneasy, since I don't have the same kind of psychological and physical reaction as when a mouse or a rat even thinks about being near me. My toes curl up and I can't really breathe. That is what I call fear, and it sometimes causes me to scream loudly in small spaces when everyone else can calmly say, "Someone get a mouse trap." Give me a squawking parrot over that any day.

Thank God for your dirty dishes; at least you have food

In conversation, my friend Abby is all about transition. If someone is talking about, say, the most recent episode of Young and the Restless and how Chris blacked out the other night and may have killed Isabella, Abby might say, "Speaking of forgetting things, the other morning I woke up and realized that I forgot to shut the window of my car all the way so it filled up with water and now it smells like rotten upholstery." Not that Abby ever forgets anything like that; the point is, she can make a transition statement out of anything. (And I may be projecting a little there, since I'm bitter that my car smells like rotten upholstery at the moment.) It's a pretty endearing trait, even if sometimes the transitions are pretty convoluted. So, in honor of Abby, who wasn't at church today because she has left us for greener pastures, as it were, I will attempt to connect the random thoughts in my head in Abby-style.

Speaking of church, the title is from the backlit announcement board outside the Orange Chapel United Methodist Church up the road. Heh.

Speaking of orange and fruit-flavored things, I watched the guy named Steve sitting next to me on the plane last week consume eight pieces of Juicy Fruit in a half an hour, as he told me stories of his brief backup singing career with Stevie Wonder (cut short when Stevie caught him kissing his assistant, also Stevie's girlfriend, it turned out) and his only trip to Utah, during which the most memorable event was an extremely bloody hockey game. He folded them all into little packets before chewing, and he didn't seem to feel at all embarrassed that he was literally eating all that gum. Here's a tip, Steve: try JuJuBe's next time.

Speaking of eating bizarre things, tonight some people from church made dinner and served it to the residents at the Ronald McDonald House in Durham. The girl who orchestrated the event decided that meatloaf was a good idea, and so we all made these rather perverse-looking meatloaves (which, by the way, is a terrible word) and laid them out on this counter to be consumed by people with already too much sadness in their lives. However, one strangish girl, bless her heart, decided to contribute a tuna loaf to the party, so out of a teflon loaf pan plopped this dark brownish gray, burned-yet-soggy pile of what looked like cat food on its worst day. It was horrible. One brave guy ate a piece and came back in the kitchen and said, "Wait, wasn't that salmon? It tasted like salmon." Heaven help his intestines tonight.

Speaking of horrible things, I love the South and all, but with summer come cicadas, and their mating call back and forth is the rhythmic deafening sound of a power line being dragged across the epiglotus of a snoring man. Aside from being hideously ugly and having a revolting life cycle, the noise makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out.

Speaking of needing your eyeballs intact, I watched The Restaurant tonight. It's pretty compelling stuff. It's been a long time since my last celebrity crush (hi, Mulder), and boy howdy, they're milking this beautiful mug for all it's worth. And it's worth a lot.

Speaking of beautiful people, I am so tired. Good night.

Something is seriously wrong with me

Right now I am sitting in my office. Though it is well past 5 pm, I am sitting here still because I am afraid to go home. The reason is not anything horrifying like a mouse infestation (I'm looking at you, Sandy and Park City apartments) or because it's even that messy and I'm avoiding it (owing to approximately 7 straight hours of cleaning the other Saturday).

The real reason is that in the past month I have become something of a disaster-prone girl. It's very bizarre, and I have caused some pretty tragic and expensive destruction at my house lately. I really can't figure it out. When I was complaining about it over chicken tenderloin salad at Saladelia the other night, Heather said, "You're ovulating." Which had been true, but surely wasn't true this morning and on Friday night. There's this one episode of Felicity where Megan puts a clumsy spell on Felicity and I just watched it; maybe I've been vicariously cursed.

Story #1: Dishes broken or maimed

1. Big chip on the side 70s glass cake plate given to me by Steph, given to her by some cheapo at her wedding, as it still had a Kmart old school price tag on it in, back when the K was all slanty and big and back in the day when retailers weren't yet familiar with the bar code.

2. Fabulous square stoneware platter, large chip off side trying to shove it into the cupboard right into, it turned out, the lid to the cake plate. Chip glued on with super glue; looks very bad and is obviously poorly repaired.

3. One of set of 4 pasta bowls with gourds painted on them jumps out of my hand unloading the dishwasher onto the wood floor; shatters into a lot of pieces.

4. Ugly (but sweet) pottery mug given to me by Robbie for Christmas, full of pens, knocked off the counter to the floor while trying to turn up the stereo. Shatters, sends pens flying.

5. One of brand new antique set of 5 milk glass goblets falls out of the shopping bag onto the cement as I'm taking it out of the car; stem breaks off cleanly so I can glue it back together, but glass has a large rough chip which is unfixable.

Story #2: The 2 days of destruction

Sunday morning, 7:55 am, just out of the shower, putting on my robe, flush the toilet, feel my robe hit something on the counter on its way up the arm, wonder if I've maybe knocked something in but decide it's too preposterous. But then the toilet is acting strangely and I look all around the house, in vain, for the small squatty bottle of Sea Spray for the hair. It has been flushed. So I avoid the toilet and vow to call Chris Vickers, the plumber, and negotiate in my head how much I'm willing to pay for him to come and remove the bottle from the curvy part of the porcelain. I decide it's worth $200 at the most so I don't have to tell Murch. I am 20 minutes late for church because I get the bright idea that plunging like mad will make the thing pop out. No luck. Murch comes up later, sticks his hand up the toilet's hole for 5 minutes, and removes the bottle. I'm pretty sure I don't want it, but he doesn't throw it away, so instead it sits on the sink, and Monday morning I decide that since there is no apparent poo residue, it maybe could be used after a good sterilization. It is, after all, a brand new bottle, and it's been discontinued. So I soak it in a sink of blazing hot water and go to get dressed.

Monday, 9:15 am, look at horrible chipping toenails and dash in the bathroom for a quick coat of Vino. It's in the medicine cabinet, a brand new bottle, purchased only weeks ago to replace the one that shattered on the tile floor and dyed the grout around the toilet pink. It was $13. It's my favorite color. Open the medicine cabinet, take out the bottle, watch it jump from my hand, hit the faucet, top breaks off, bottle pours on the white counter, brush does a spinning leap and splatter paints the purple wall, my $9 Wal-Mart jeans, the white bathmat, the tile, and lands choking out 2 more splatters for the brazilian cherry. In my haste to get out the remover, the bottle dumps into the sink, filled with scalding water for the Sea Spray, and dumps in a strange and surreal pattern, like blood. Cleanup is successful on counter and sink, but not on the wall, the rug, or the jeans.

Shall I go to bed and never get out again? This place needs protecting.