Complexes One Through One Thousand Eighty-Eight

It's no secret that I love gay men. I love everything about them. The dancing, the singing, the fashion, the bitchiness, the devotion to good skin care.

It just so happens that most of the gay men I know are what you'd call easily-identifiable gay men. Stereotypical. They've been theater majors who squirmed when they got cast as Prince Charming and had to kiss Cinderella. They've been the kind to break into a full-out Michael Jackson routine on the dance floor at Homecoming. They've been the kind who, after finding out you've been wronged by yet another heterosexual man, will lay you down, stroke your hair, sing you a song, and tell you how fabulous you are.

I love that, and I love them. But sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, the men I love have a tendency to strengthen certain complexes I have. Take, for instance, yesterday and my Big Gay Afternoon with one of my old-time friends who I will, for the sake of this entry, call Pedro.

Pedro and I had a lovely afternoon. We had lunch at a fabulous yet unassuming Chinese restaurant on the Boulevard. We gorged ourselves on mango curry, on delicate spring rolls, on chicken and stir-fried rice noodles. We commented on a woman's beautiful purple suede blazer and how much we hated slouchy metallic purses. We talked about boys. We said they were stupid and that surely they should just face facts: we are fun-loving and they should love us.

After lunch, Pedro and I went to the mall, where we spent half an hour in The Body Shop, picking out a whole new skin care regimen for Pedro's sensitive pores. I got a free deoderizing/invigorating peppermint foot spray and a trial-sized body scrub just for filling out a survey. Pedro stocked up on vitamin E-based night creams.

Then we were back in the car.

"So, did you make an appointment with my hairdresser yet?" Pedro asked. He knew I was having trouble finding a hairdresser I liked as much as the Aveda stylist I had in Mankato. His hairdresser, he said, was a dream. An absolute dream. So he slipped me her card after I got my haircut at one place and disliked the new way the layers laid.

"No," I told him. "I can't afford to get my haircut every four weeks. I'm poor. Also, I'd like my next haircut to coincide with my trip to Minnesota."

Pedro looked disappointed, and then he frowned at my hair. "Hmmm," he said. "What products do you use?"

I told him I used straightening shampoo and straightening hot iron cream, since I'm still in the pin-straight and sleek mood. When he heard the word cream, Pedro frowned again.

"Oh," he said. "I see."

"What?" I asked. I reached up to touch my hair. "What's wrong with my hair?"

"Nothing," he said. But then--two seconds later--he looked at me and smiled kindly. "I think maybe you need a serum."

"A serum?" I asked. "What's the difference?"

"Well," he said, "serum would add more shine and volume."

So, basically, that was him telling me I have flat, lifeless, and dull hair.

"PEDRO!" I said. "I like my hair! I think it's very sleek when straight-ironed!"

"All I'm saying is maybe you should try some serum," he said. "That's all."

Four minutes down the road and Pedro had moved on to discussing my purse. He picked it up and marveled at its new cuteness: blue, buckled, little. "Love it," he said.

"It's new."

"It's great. Where did you get it?" he asked.

"JC Penney's," I said. I didn't add that it had been on sale for seventeen dollars.

Pedro made a face. "Ohhhh," he said. He wrinkled up his nose.

Apparently the cuteness was diminished by the fact that it came from a department store. "Snob," I said.

Four more minutes down the road and Pedro--an employee of Express--was mocking girls who shopped at department stores and, and, and at New York and Company, which, I don't need to tell you, supplies most of my teacher clothes and accessories. The earrings. Ohhh, the earrings.

"New York and Company is for giraffe-legged girls," Pedro said. "And they have no attractive tops."

I gripped the steering wheel and tried not to think about the three new tops I'd just purchased from that store. I tried not to think how cute I thought they were, and how I was wearing one of them right at that moment.

A mile down the road I was pulling back in to the school where we both teach, and I was dropping him off at his car, and I was doing a mental tally of the complexes I'd managed to wrack up in a stretch of three hours. Hair? Check. Clothes? Check. Purse? Check. Giraffe legs? Check.

And I don't even think I have to tell you I obsessed about them (might still be) for the rest of the day, even later as I was sitting across from my cousin at the very cute, very swank Chocolate Bar in downtown Buffalo. Even as I was breaking open the chocolate ganache shell that draped itself over peanut butter mousse. How's my hair? I was thinking. Does this purse look cheap? Are my legs sticking out from this table? But then there were also these thoughts: Oh. Ohhhh. Ohhhh. Holy God. Why didn't I go to school to become a pasty chef? And those thoughts were clearly the more important ones of the evening.

Wild Bill Has a Limp Dick

I know this about Wild Bill thanks to the graffiti in the women's bathroom at the Lafayette Tap Room. I feel bad for Bill, really I do. But you know who else I feel bad for? Kathy.

Kathy, apparently, gives good blowjobs. And now the whole world knows it.

Who cares?! the graffiti underneath that statement asked.

Nobody here! someone else wrote.

It was a whole conversation, a whole dialogue between a group of women, recorded there on the wall in thick black marker. Here's a question: who carries a black marker with them at all times? Are there serial bathroom graffiti-ists?

These are the things I'm thinking about these days. I should be thinking about other things--one of them being writing, and how the writing isn't going so well for me this week (or the last or the one before that). I'm more engaged in the art of nesting than I am the art of writing.

I'm squirreling things away. I'm finding little things I eventually want to use, and I'm writing them down and sticking them all over my room, but that's where their adventure ends.

For instance:

I was driving somewhere. I had Amy in the car, and she was talking about boys, and she was talking about girls doing things with boys, and she used the phrase some kind of heavy petting. As in, "Oh, you know, they were doing some kind of heavy petting."

When I heard that I said to myself, I must steal that. Tell me it wouldn't be a great title.

So I wrote that down, and it's sitting here on my computer stand, but that's as far as it's going to go for awhile. I'm backlogged. I have three open stories right now. One involves grapes, another involves racecars, and another is trying to form a plot around the terrifying question What Would Happen If I Were Forced To Move Into An Apartment With My 19 Year Old Nasty-Ass Brother? Oh, the hilarity that would ensue.

But none of that is really working for me right now. I'm spending days wondering (read: obsessing) if I'm funny (I suspect I'm not and never have been), if I'm frivolous (check, please), and if I'll ever snap out of this--the ugliest, the meanest, the most sinister slump I've ever been in. I'm sick of writing in snippets. I'm sick of hating anything I put on the screen. I'm sick of wondering if what I'm writing is any good at all. I would like to get back to my old self, my productive self, my confident self.

But I guess for now it's just me and Wild Bill and his limp dick. I guess it's just me running back to my table at the bar to write it all down so I don't forget the detail that I hope I will be able to use soon, soon, oh please God, soon.

I Wish She'd Stop Doing That

Last night I dreamed my grandmother was sniffing my panties.

I am not a well woman.

When I woke up this morning, I felt a little scandalized. A little violated. A little ashamed. Because right before I woke up my grandmother was yelling at me. Jessica! Jessica! JESSICA! she kept shrieking. She was waving a pair of black satin panties above her head.

My grandmother wasn't happy because she thought I was having sex with an unsuitable man. She decided to take things into her own hands. She went into my room, burrowed through my laundry bin, and pulled out each pair of my panties. She was searching for evidence. Incriminating evidence of a fling with an unsuitable man.

"That doesn't make sense," my mother said today when I told her. "Gross. Gross! When I'm dead, please don't dream that I'm smelling your underwear. Because I will never do that. Okay?"

I told her okay, and she gave me a scoop of the cream cheese frosting she was making.

The grandmother in question was not the grandmother that sometimes thinks I'm a lesbian. No, this was my other grandmother--my mother's mother, my favorite grandmother, the world's best fudge maker--and she has been dead for three years.

And to dream about her being that angry at me--an level of anger I never saw in her--seems strange. I'm not doing anything weird. I'm not compromising my good reputation. I'm not sleeping with unsuitable men. Not even an unsuitable (or suitable) man singular. I've got nothing.

Listen, I was a psychology minor in college. I'd like to think I can effectively analyze this dream and understand its subtext, but there's also a part of me that thinks I must've watched something about panty-sniffing on television over the last few days and that factoid has been clunking around my subconscious until, well, until it got mixed up in a dream about my grandmother. And an unsuitable man I don't even speak to anymore. An unsuitable man my grandmother never met, never heard of, and doesn't know.

In one of my psychology classes we had a whole unit on dreams. We watched a movie from the 1970s where a man dreamed of living in a world decorated with checkerboard. Two tall half human/half parrot beings kept carrying him around on his bed, like he was a king or a pharaoh. The movie told us that Freud theorized that dreams gave us clues about unconscious desires we would normally censor if awake. (Maybe I want my grandmother to be alive again so much that I wouldn't even care if she sorted through my laundry and yelled at me about my love life?) We went on to learn about synapses and nerve firings and the workings of REM sleep and how those things seemed more realistic explanations to the random workings of dreams, but that never really satisfied me. I mean, I've had some strange dreams.

I once dreamed my grandmother (yes, the same one) was standing outside of my bedroom door and watching me doing something less than pure with a certain wily someone. Two minutes later one of the then-first-year MFA girls was outside my window, singing up to me and the boy. She was drunk. She was coming home from McGoff's. She was singing Irish folk songs. I have never said more than fifteen words to that girl in my life.

I have recurring tornado dreams. Often, I'm on the top floor of an all-glass skyscraper. Clouds build, build, build. They twist and become skinny until there it is--a finger of a tornado stretching down to the ground, and I know that even if I ran down the stairs to try to get out of the building it would be no use. I would die when the tornado shattered into the glass. I dreamed that dream the night before my parents announced their divorce. I dreamed that dream the night before my boyfriend cheated on me. Sometimes I think a body knows. It just knows.

So I'm wondering what, if anything, my body knows now. What's it trying to tell me? Is that my famous guilty conscience trying to express something I don't yet understand? Or maybe it's a warning from beyond? A cautionary tale? A way of my grandmother wagging her finger at me and saying, Watch yourself, missy.

I don't think my grandmother has any cause to wag anything, because I've done pretty well for myself (discounting a certain boy who may or may not be gay). Maybe it's just that she's mildly disappointed. Maybe she's remembering that day when I announced I wanted to be a nun. Maybe she's thinking of all the Catholic they tried to pump into me: communion, confirmation, getting my picture taken with the cardinal. Maybe she's sad I won't have earned the white dress I'll be wearing on my wedding day. Whatever it is, she certainly expressed herself. Jessica! Jessica! JESSICA! WHAT IS THIS?! And there they are: black panties in a slant of afternoon light that looks, suddenly, certainly, exactly like a spotlight.

This Post Contains Almost No Metaphors About Trees

I have been away from Minnesota for fifty-six days. This is the longest I've been out of state for three years.

I was trying to write this post earlier today, and I had this metaphor all worked out. It involved the apple tree outside my window, and how one side of it's all dead and evil-looking--like it just sprang off of a set for some horror movie--and how the other side has overcompensated for the dead side, producing apples upon apples and upon apples. So many apples that one of the branches is too heavy to support its weight and is about to snap clean off.

I had this metaphor figured out, and I had some spectacular insights about the tree. For instance, this is the same tree I stood under for my prom pictures. It was in spectacular bloom during prom weekend, so ex-Keith and I posed with the white apple blossoms. He was twenty one in those pictures. I was seventeen. He had already been to college and dropped out before I met him, and he looked mildly unamused about being forced to go to a high school prom. Pictures from later on that night show a happier Keith, though. I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again: those mashed potatoes at our prom buffet were magical.

So that's what the post was going to be about. A tree metaphor. A description of prom. A discussion of my ex-boyfriend, who had to be rushed to the hospital last week on account of a crippling panic attack--his first, and let's say it's because he realized he will never love anyone like he loved me back then, when I was a wide-eyed high school student who thought there was nothing better than driving the back roads of Boston, New York with my hand on his thigh.

But I decided that wasn't really what I wanted to talk about. Who cares about a tree?

What I really care about is this: today I booked a flight to Minnesota. Today I walked around feeling a little lighter because in a little over a month I'll be back in my old home, and I'll be sitting at a bonfire, and I'll be eating S'Mores, and I'll be thinking, Here's what I've missed.

The MFA in Random

This is what happens after you graduate with a masters degree:

People from your graduating class--people you've sat through classes with, people you've sat next to at bars, people you may or may not have at one point kissed--become a strange breed of friend. The Random Friend.

Not random as in, sketchy or undependable, but random as in calls you at 2PM on a Saturday afternoon, and when you answer, plays you Asia's "Heat of the Moment" before hanging up without having said a single word.

Which is comforting, since this is the same person who used to call at 2 AM just to sing the Ghostbuster's theme song to you or ask you to come over for beer and homemade salsa.

Masters of fine arts students are gifted artists of random. They give bottles of strange specialty liquor (Hot Damn! or 99 Bananas) for birthday presents. They throw parties where there is a distinct possibility that there will be a plastic baby in the middle of a cupcake. They think nothing of spending their Friday afternoon picnicking at the feet of a giant statue of the Jolly Green Giant.

And it's because of these things that I'm glad my parents told me I could go off and do whatever I wanted to do, that I could grow up to be whatever I wanted to be, even if that meant I was going off to graduate school for this vapory thing called creative writing and not something hard-hitting and definable--something like journalism. I don't exactly know if life would be worth living if there was no chance I would get Paul Bunyan pins in the mail, or if there was no chance someone would write me a story for my birthday. But I do get those pins in the mail, and I have gotten the phone calls with Asia blaring in the background, and I have had someone write me a story for my birthday. Completely random, completely strange, but pretty much the best thing in the world.

He Is Disgusting

My brother came home this afternoon. He came through the door with a few of his friends, none of them cute. These are the gangly ones. The ones that, no matter how much older they get, still look like they're fourteen years old.

The first word out of his mouth was Hello. The next were, When was the last time you went shopping and What food is in this house? He then proceeded to go into the kitchen and fix a giant pot of spaghetti for his friends. With it, they ate a side of dill pickle chips.

My brother was very pleased with himself. He'd just come back from Walmart, where he'd purchased a mini coffee maker. After his friends left, he got on the phone with someone to tell them about his amazing purchase. "It's a Mister Coffee," he said. "It's a really good brand."

I have no idea who this person is. Just where does this nineteen year old get off thinking he knows actual facts about appliances? Has he had a household filled with different varieties of coffee makers over the years? Is he a secret member of the Good Housekeeping Institute? Doubtful. It's doubtful that my brother can have trustworthy opinions on anything. After all, this is the boy who keeps his condoms in a see-through plastic drawer in the room he shares with my mother's boyfriend's eleven year old son. He doesn't seem able to grasp things like common sense or tact.

When I walked into the kitchen, my brother stopped me so he could discuss both the deliciousness of dill pickle chips and the wild wonder that was his new coffee maker. "It's for deer season," he explained to me. "It runs on 650 volts."

There is no need for him to be worrying about how many volts a coffee maker runs on. There's a generator--giant, red, sputtery--back at the cabin, and it's been in use for many, many years. It can power up televisions, radios, lights, and normal-sized coffee makers. When I asked him why he wasn't using it, my brother looked at me like I was a moron.

"Because it scares away the deer," he says. "Why would we want to scare the deer away when we're back there to kill them?"

I have news for my brother. The population of deer in the woods doesn't generally loiter around the cabin anyway. And if he thinks the generator emits so much noise that it would startle all the deer in a fifteen mile radius, causing them to rear up and bolt for the Canadian border, then he's got another thing coming. But the I'm Very Serious look on his face made me realize he's going to have more than another thing coming.

I didn't say anything, though. I just smiled, ate a chip, and went back into my bedroom.

Later, I came out into the living room. My brother was watching a movie, so I settled into the armchair to half watch/half read a magazine. Five minutes into my sitting there I heard a moist lapping noise. I ignored it. After all, I was reading an article on people who are too guilty, and I suspect my guilty conscience is getting so bloated it's dying to be lanced, so I was fascinated. But the moist lapping continued. When I looked up there was my brother, swiping frosting from the bottom of his cake plate and licking it off his finger very, very slowly. From bottom to top. Elaborate licks. He scoured his knuckles and the divots between fingers. And then it was clear that he saw me watching, because he began flicking his tongue in an even more devoted manner.
And then I committed the ultimate faux pas. I asked him to please stop. Please stop. Here's an interesting thing about my brother: it seems he gets angrier when people ask him things politely. If I'd said to him, "Hey, stop fucking licking your fingers, you nasty thing," it's possible he might've stopped. But because I accidentally said please, he glared at me over the tips of his fingers.

"Just shut up," he said. "Read your magazine."

And then he continued to lick, lick, lick. He started licking even louder. He wiggled his tongue in every crevice on the surface of his hand. It looked almost like a scene from a Saved By The Bell-ish teen show, where the main character was worrying about his first kiss. How would it go? How would it feel? What would he do? What moves did he have available to him? And then he would try it out on his hand to see how it all looked.

Needless to say, I left the room. It was just too much. I didn't want to hear him lapping almond paste from his fingers or see what it must look like when his face is hovering millimeters from some girl's, ready to ravish her with his scratchy gross boy tongue. After all, there's only so much a girl can handle on a Saturday afternoon.

The Boys of the Moment

I want to put my tongue in Justin Timberlake's mouth.



This is a new development, and mildly shocking. I wasn't one of those girls who went frothy and wild for the 90s boy bands. This was probably because I had already used up all my froth and wild during the whole New Kids on the Block phenomenon in the 80s. I was a little girl. I didn't understand anything, but I did know that when Danny, Donny, Joey, Jordan, and Jon got on stage I wanted to scream their names and tear at my hair.

Amy and Becky, though--they were N Sync girls. They had posters, they had memorobilia, they had websites they stalked regularly for the latest gossip about the boys. They whipped themselves into frenzies when N Sync made appearances on TRL or Letterman. There was even a time when Amy flew down to New York City on a whim to go to one of the concerts with Becky.

And I used to smile and pat their heads and say, "Oh, that's cute. That's nice. I'm glad you love them so much." It wasn't that I was against N Sync or the other boy bands--ohhh no--but I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about them. I shook my ass when they came on the radio. I didn't turn the channel when they were on. I tolerated them. Gladly, but not obsessively.

And that's why I was so surprised when the new Justin Timberlake song came on the radio. All it took was just one listen and I thought, This song makes me want to take my clothes off.

And after a dozen times watching Justin perform the song or a medley of songs from the new CD I realized I was sitting through those performances without breathing. I was looking at that boy in his three-piece suit and I was imagining oh how lovely it would be to dance with him. And, of course, to make out with him.

Last night he was on Leno. Thankfully, my father was in Rochester for the night, or else he would've heard the sound of some sort of dying animal coming from his daughter's room. That sound was me. That sound was what happened after Justin Timberlake did this little dance move and I realized with complete clarity that I had lost control of my senses. I wanted to lunge at the television. Somehow, I restrained.

I'm also having trouble with James Franco. I've always been pro-Franco, but lately my approval has taken a turn. A turn that is making me feel unreasonable things.



I want to have his children. That's what I'm feeling. I want to meet, seduce, and charm James Franco into being my husband. He's been in a slew of movies lately, and the slew is about to continue. Another of his movies--this time an epic about fighter pilots--comes out on Friday, and I pretty much know how I am going to be spending my weekend, and that would be sitting in the movies and trying to keep my popcorn from falling over after I can no longer use my limbs.



My God. Lanky, lean. It's too much. Also, it's his hair. I want to do things with it. Put my hands in it, mess it up, smell it. It's bound to smell good, after all. He's rich.

I think it was actually the hair that sealed it for me. It was after I'd watched Tristan and Isolde that I realized there was no coming back now: my crush on James Franco was full-on.



I spent the whole movie feeling like I needed to go lie down on the floor and put my face in the rug because my want to tug on those curls was overwhelming.

So, I guess it's fair to say that I've been going a little boy crazy--possibly more than I usually am--lately. There's just something in the air right now. It has to do with me being miles and miles from real boys I like, real boys I want to kiss. It's about to be a beautiful fall and I am secretly wishing to have someone--a real someone--with whom I'd go and do fun fall things. We could pick apples from the tree outside my window. We could go press cider. We could drive down to Watkins Glen and marvel at the leaves and waterfalls. And that, well, it's just not going to happen. Not with a heterosexual boy, at least. I suppose I'm projecting and using up all that lust, all those loose effervescent swells that are bubbling in my stomach. And Justin Timberlake and James Franco--those unattainable wonders--are the recipients. Which is, I guess, better than nothing.

Lady of the Lake

The summer I was thirteen years old I spent an awful lot of time at Lime Lake. Lime Lake wasn't anything special. It had more seaweed than charm. It was muddy and murky and any time I got in it I had the strange feeling like I was maybe ten seconds from being sucked under by a giant turtle or some other sea monster.

But I loved it anyway. I loved it because I was there with the girl who was my best friend at the time. Let's call her Tammy.

Tammy's grandparents owned a cottage that sat right on the lake. It had a big porch, a dock, and a boathouse. They had a big boat for tubing and skiing. They had a paddle boat that Tammy and I used to navigate the shoreline of Lime Lake, trolling for boys our age. We usually found more geese than boys.



But that summer it didn't matter that we couldn't find boys our age. What mattered was that this was it: it was one of those defining summers, one of those defining times in my life, and I knew it. I could feel it. Something was changing. We were on our summer between eighth and ninth grade. Come September, we were going to be in high school.

I had a big girl-crush on Tammy. Not in a romantic way, of course, because I was too busy harboring a giant crush on racecar drivers whose names weren't names but initials instead--one in particular who, it must be noted, actually ended up marrying Tammy many years later. But I worshipped Tammy. I wanted to be her. She had the cool family: the father who was silent but fun, the mother who drank all the time, the pesky little sister I secretly coveted. They had sectional sofas and a bar in their living room. We spent an awful lot of time mixing and matching liquor with mixers behind that bar, and I drank more than my fair share of Pepsi-Vodkas.

Tammy was popular with boys. She had a new boyfriend every week. Bobby. Eric. Chris. Don. She sang songs about them. We spent long hours in her basement bedroom (with checkered flag border) trying to analyze and understand them. And that summer we spent a lot of time at the lake trying to analyze and understand them. One in particular, a boy she would end up leaving for his best friend. I was in love with the boy she was about to jilt, but I didn't know it then. Actually, no. It was more complicated than that. I looked at them together--they never stopped making out--and I felt a dark tug in my middle, like I knew that's what I wanted but was light years from getting. Maybe this made me think I loved the boy she would eventually jilt. Maybe it was more that I was in love with the way she was and I was wishing I could be like that--so pretty-haired and outward and confident and fun that everyone wanted to be with me all the time.



Whatever it was, we still analyzed, and I was blissfully unaware of how it would all fall apart in the next three months. We sat with our legs in the water and we shucked corn. We rode tubes behind her grandfather's boat. We always said yes when her grandmother dished up second helpings. We sat out on the dock until late, late, late, and we ate Rice Krispie bars and talked about how it was going to be when we got to high school. She said we had some friends that we were probably going to have to stop being friends with. She named them. She said, "They're not mature enough for us. They don't understand."

And I nodded, but really I was thinking about that list of names and how much I loved those girls and how I thought Tammy was wrong--those girls were mature enough for us. And if she didn't think so, maybe that meant I wasn't mature enough for Tammy either.

I can still remember the way that night felt. I can remember each twink of light across the lake. I can remember the leaden feeling of four Krispie bars in my stomach. I can remember how close we were sitting and how I was thinking that this was exactly what friendship and life was about--these moments, these quiet moments sitting and staring off into the dark, which was more than just blackness. It was the future. I was peering into it and watching things take shape in the ink of night. I was seeing what our high school selves and lives would be like.



And when we went to bed that night, sleeping together in the giant king bed in the lower bedroom, I could hear the lake outside. It was lapping against the dock and boathouse. It was telling me things. It was saying, Enjoy this now. Take it all in. This isn't going to last.

It didn't. When we went into high school, something snapped between us. Tammy and I were suddenly at vastly different places. She was cheating on her boyfriend--the boy I realized I "loved," the boy I had expressed interest in first, the boy she flirted with and won right before my eyes. And, at the time, I thought that because Tammy was Tammy there was nothing wrong with that. She was also breaking up with the boy. And the boy was calling me, the best friend. He begged me to talk to her. I tried. She got angry. She got new friends. She spread rumors. One of her senior friends told me she was going to kick the shit out of me.

I, however, got the boy. It's no secret that my function in the romantic world is Runner Up. I'm always second place. That girl guys would call too good a friend to date. Or one they might date if So-and-So wasn't available and far more advanced. And it's by that default that I got the boy. He was trying to get back at Tammy, and I was trying to prove that I was better than Tammy, who I'd been wanting to be for so many years. We played Boyfriend-Girlfriend for a little bit, but he'd moved to a new school district and I was thirteen years old and unkissed. When we did get to see each other, this boy expected kissing. I was terrified. I didn't know how to do it. When he tried to kiss me for the first time as I shopped for a belly chain in Claire's, I backed away. I dodged him. I hid behind a rack of earrings. I pretended to be coy.

That's how it went for a few months. He told me he loved me and I said it back, even though I felt like such a faker the first time it came out of my mouth. You can say a lot of things about the girl I was back then, but I was smart enough to know when I said I love you, too I was lying. I didn't love him. I wasn't even close. But I was going to bed every night and crying about Tammy. That was a love I was interested in.



Eventually we broke up. It was the most beautiful, amicable breakup in the history of romance. He was so sweet about it. I was indifferent. "You're such a great girl," he told me as we got ready to get off the phone. "Give me a call someday." I lied and said I would, but I knew that would be the last time I heard from him.

Tammy and I never came back around the whole way about each other. Too much time had passed, too many things had been said. We didn't speak to each other until the summer after I went off to college. It was at the racetrack. We ran into each other in the pits, where cars fresh from the track creaked back to their pit stall to get loaded into trailers. She came up to me and hugged me. She said she missed me and that we were adults now. She said we should put all that stupid high school stuff behind us. I wanted to tell her that I cried for a year straight after she and I stopped being friends, and that losing her was worse than losing any boy. But I didn't tell her those things. I couldn't find the words to accurately explain what she used to mean to me and how much that summer on the lake defined me and taught me about life. She wouldn't have understood. I'm still working on it myself.

Yesterday all this stuff came back to me, but not for any reason you'd assume. I didn't see Tammy. It was much simpler than that. It was because I was sitting on the edge of a lake at sundown. I was staring off at lights just starting to blink on against the red dusk sky. This lake wasn't even Lime Lake. It was Silver Lake, a place where my father's girlfriend and her family own a cottage and boats and a dock. But just being there took me back. And when my one of the girlfriend's family members offered to take us out on the boat for a sunset drive around the lake, I couldn't help but thinking about Tammy as I eased down onto the cracked vinyl seats. I let the motor hum and the boat cut a path against the calm water, and I closed my eyes and smelled the whole greening wetness of the lake. And there we were: me and Tammy, towels cinched around our waist, sitting on the dock and talking about the boy she loved, the boy I would pretend to love, the boy that would eventually tear us apart.

When I opened my eyes it was to the sunset on Silver, not Lime, Lake, and I was twenty-five, not thirteen. I took a deep breath and gave myself two minutes where I could wish beyond anything to be back in that summer and on that lake with my then-best friend, but when those two minutes were over I let out the breath I'd been holding and I thought about how different things were now and I wondered how I'd ever managed to get here from there.

Why I Defiled Our Sixteenth President

On the phone last night Katy asked me why I was defiling our sixteenth president. She asked me this because it's what I had spent part of my week doing. Sort of. When I arrived at Amy and Becky's apartment on Friday night, ready for all sorts of birthday celebration goodness, I saw there was a bust of Abe Lincoln stuffed into a box by the front door.

He was pale. He was hand-painted. His eyebrows were thick and lush.

I asked the girls why on earth there was a homemade bust of Abe Lincoln just hanging out in their living room. Turns out that Amy's mother had unearthed it from some stash in their attic and thought that Amy might be able to get some use out of it. After all, she's teaching social studies, and what better to teach it with than a mildly creepy bust of Honest Abe?

Now, I think it's important we point something out. I do strange things. Consistently. And what I was about to do with the bust of Abe Lincoln I had done before. Many, many times. I've done it with a poster of Britney Spears, with Kogepan, even with a MS Paint drawing of Ryan Havely.

I've taken pictures with them. Strange, quirky, sometimes naughty pictures. And when I looked down at Abe and when Abe looked up at me--well, I knew what we had to do. Plus there were tippy glasses full of Appletinis, so it just seemed right.



Look! It's a surprise visitor! It's Abe Lincoln! And, why, look at that--he's brought Becky a bouquet of flowers to congratulate her on her impending wedding! So thoughtful, Abe!



Shortly after his arrival, Abe got into the Appletinis. There's nothing our sixteenth president likes more than a fine Appletini. After he had a few, he sang the national anthem and peed off the balcony.



Amy snuggled close and sat on Abe's lap--err, the place where Abe should've had a lap if he hadn't been made into a creepy bust.



Here's a little known fact: Abe Lincoln pukes from his forehead. You heard it here first.



After he puked, Abe rallied. He said, "Bring on the tequila!"



Abe showed us his fine stalker moves. Creepy pale floating head!



As the night drew to a close, Abe got a little fresh. And when I was trying to take the pictures that proved he was being a fresh president, I couldn't stop laughing.

He showed us a fine night, that Abraham Lincoln. And to continue the fine weekend, the next day I got to go to a birthday party thrown by mother. She made one of my favorite meals: garlicky pork roast, scalloped potatoes, corn. Then she brought out the giraffe cake.



There he is with his licorice tree and the grassy hills on which he roams. I ate his head. It was delicious.



My brother got me corned beef hash for my birthday. I was super excited by this. I love corned beef hash. He knows me so well. I'm surprised he was able to get out bed after hearing the news about Hooters closing, but I was pleased he was able to get some shopping in for his dear sister's birthday.



Another exciting moment that proves how much of a nerd I am? I got a subscription to Good Housekeeping and I was ecstatic.

Happy, happy birthday to me!

The Happenings

Tuesday

Tuesday night I went over to my grandmother's house for a birthday dinner. She fixed pot roast, mashed potatoes, gravy, homemade bread. She fixed a suspicious Jell-O mold that had nuts in it. She fixed fresh peach pie.

I said probably ten whole sentences from the time I arrived to the time I left. Between those points my grandfather--who isn't really my grandfather, but a farmer my grandmother married when I was young--directed the conversation toward more important avenues than my impending twenty-fifth birthday. He wanted to discuss combining, manure, and pistons. He wanted to talk about calving, about tires, and about the Amish up the road: They're weird, you know. They don't even have buttons.

If my grandmother wanted to ask me a question, she had to lean over and whisper it close to my ear because he never stops, my quasi-grandfather. He was talking to my father about haying and my grandmother moved over to ask how my teaching was going. I said it was great, I was loving it, I was fond of my students, and I would've said more, but that's when her husband raised his already-booming voice to decibels unknown. He didn't want anyone interrupting his treatise on the rainy weather and its effect on the season's haying.

The pie, though. Well, that sure was something.

Wednesday

It was my birthday, so I didn't really feel like doing anything. My father called. "Rent movies off the dish," he said. "Just sit in front of the television all day. And when I come home, I'm making you dinner."

My mother called. "Are you pantsless?" she asked. There was a week after I moved home from Minnesota that I woke up in the morning and refused to put on pants. It just felt right to wander around the house like some sort of displaced, pantsless bum.

I told her I had already been out to the mailbox, so I'd had to put on some pants.

Later, my father came home and made me dinner. Shrimp scampi. Then he brought out a raspberry cheesecake with a single candle burning in its center. There was also a Hello Kitty balloon and a card with tickets to Mama Mia! at Shea's. I forced him to watch Two Weeks Notice, which is one of my favorite predictable romantic comedies.

A few hours later the water stopped working completely. We couldn't flush, shower, or wash our hands.

Thursday

I went to school and taught my three classes. My middle class--easily my favorite so far--was held in a room that was as roasting as one of the deeper levels of hell, so I marched over to the window to open it for some circulation. But even after I opened it, there was none. One of my students suggested I open the blinds. My try to do so resembled some sort of screwball comedy that you'd see on the Three Stooges. I tugged, I pulled, I fiddled with each of the three pulleys. Nothing. And that class laughed and heckled as I fought with them. Finally, I gave up.

"I give up," I told my students. "If one of you wants to give it a whirl, be my guest."

One of the boys wanted to try it. As soon as he started toward the window I figured I was about to be shown up and made a fool of. Surely the thing was going to work perfectly for him, establishing that I--a teacher of college-level English--was completely spastic and unable to function in everyday circumstances, like opening blinds.

I turned around and started writing the day's journal topic on the board. When I was one line in, that's when the crash happened. I turned around and saw the boy battling with the blinds. He was yanking and batting at their swinging plastic bodies. Now the class was heckling him. And then, then, then--then one of the blinds broke clear off the track and clattered to the floor. But at least the rest of them accordioned back into a neat row. Just the way we wanted them.

"Thank God," I said, but then I pointed to the fallen blind. "I think your tuition is probably going to go up now. Maybe you should sign and date it. It could be a memento."

Then I turned back to the board and the journal topic. When I was finished, I faced them again, and there it was: the blind, sitting on my desk at the front and decorated with twenty-five fresh signatures written in thick, silver ink. CLASS OF '10! one of the students had written in the middle. The boy who broke it had written his name and then a confession: I broke it!

"It's for you," my students said. "You can hang it in your office or take it with you wherever you go. So you'll never forget us."

I love them.

Much later, after I was done teaching and after he was done with his own classes, Jeff and I met up for dinner at an organic deli down the road from our school. He got me a wrap stuffed with organic turkey (FYI: organic turkey is in desperate need of salt), cream cheese, sprouts, avocado, and miso. "That's fermented soybean paste," Jeff told me.

"Oh, it's like I'm eating Minnesota," I said. It was delicious.

On our way back to school, we passed our area Hooters, the restaurant at which my brother is a faithful and steadfast patron.

"That's my brother's Hooters," I told Jeff.

Jeff made a face. He frowned. "Hmm," he said. "That's sort of gross."

When I got home an hour later my father looked me very seriously in the eye. He had some news. Very solemn news. "The Hooters is closing," he told me.

"Hooters?" I said. "I just drove by it today! How is that even possible?"

"I don't know," my father said. He shrugged. "Just imagine how your brother is going to feel."

Friday

The plumber called this morning at 7:45. He called me Mrs. Smith. He asked if my husband had any idea what might be wrong with the water.

"He's my father," I said. "And he thinks it might be the pressure valve."

The plumber asked for directions and said he'd be right over. I got out of bed and changed out of my pajama pants. I knew what company my father had hired, and it's a family operation out of our hometown. The sons work the business along with their father. The sons are really tall, really blond, and really cute. I used to stare at them in church.

I've learned my lesson from last weekend when my brother brought the cute Midwestern boy he's befriended by the house. I fed him blueberry muffins while wearing too-short pants and slipper socks. If there was a chance I was going to get one of the cute son plumbers, I wanted to look like a normal girl instead of the freakish thing I look like when I first wake up.

Thirty minutes later, I was sitting in my living room when the plumber--a 40ish man with receding hair who had been fiddling around with the pump downstairs--came up to the window and knocked. "I COULD REALLY USE YOUR HELP RIGHT NOW," he said through the pane of glass.

"Okay," I said. I went outside. Turns out, I was in charge of catching a long pipe that he was snaking up out of our well. I caught it fine. I walked it back and back and back until the whole thing was out and into the light of day. Then I had to lift it up and walk it back to him when it needed to go back in. This would've been much more thrilling and important if it had been one of the cute sons, but just as I was thinking this he told me that everything would be okay now, and that I would finally be able to shower. That's when I forgave him for not being really tall, really my age, and really blond. He gave me the ability to shower, to do the laundry that's been piling up, and those are both really good gifts since tonight we're going out to celebrate my birthday.

The Birthday Cakes of My Life

Today is my birthday.

Because it falls on a Wednesday, and Wednesdays aren't really good for anyone or anything (unless you're in Mankato and on your way to Blue Bricks for pitchers of Long Islands), this means that my birthday has been stretched into a week-long celebration. Last night I was at my grandmother's house for a birthday dinner. Tonight is my father's turn. Friday I'll be with the girls. Saturday is my mother's party. And that's when I will get my traditional birthday cake.

For the last three years I had a different kind of traditional birthday cake. Penis cakes. Each year Katy would cut a sheet cake into various phalluses and then frost them. Sometimes the frosting went awry and came out looking orange. Or green. That didn't mean it was any less delicious.

But before that tradition came along, there was a more wholesome one.

My mother and grandmother, both goddesses among bakers, own these books--soft-bound pamphlets, really--that were published in 1959 by General Foods.



The book was a promotional-type thing meant to push for the use of Baker's Coconut. When I was born, my grandmother made one of these cakes for my birthday. It was my very first birthday cake:



My grandmother wrote my name and the year (Jessica 1982) in the margin, and that's how it all started for me. From then on out, each year I would get one of those cakes. And then my brother came along. And he started getting cakes. When my cousins were born, they got them, too. My grandmother or mother would faithfully label each cake with the names and dates each time they made them. Today you can look at that book and know what cakes each of us had for our birthdays in, say, 1987 or 1995.



Of course, it wasn't just us. You can track my mother and her brother's birthdays, too. On one of the pages my grandmother let Uncle Eric write his own name, so you can see his giant RICKIE scrawled by the date 1963.



This is a serious family tradition. This is something that's been going on for years and years and years. This is something I will do for my children and maybe for my brother's children. After all, he might end up marrying a non-baking Hooters waitress, and who's going to bake the kids' cakes then? Me and my mother, that's who.



Anyway, I experience a little bit of panic each year before my birthday. This is because after all the kids were old enough to talk and make decisions, we were able to choose which cake we wanted. This was (and is) no small feat. Sometimes it takes hours to decide. I go back and forth, back and forth. Terrier or butterfly? Rocking horse or elephant?



There have been some repeats over the years, sure, but that's because there are cakes that are so cute, so adorable, so perfect that you kind of want to have them every single year. They're our favorites. My mother's favorite cake is the little girl cake. She had it when she was a little girl--I think it was for her tenth birthday--and when I was that old she wanted to make it for me, too. But when I was ten I didn't want a little girl cake. I wanted a space shuttle cake (which is from another, non-animal cut-out cake book that's part of the family tradition). And I got the space shuttle cake, but each year after, my mother would ask if I wanted the little girl cake yet and I always said no. Finally, when I was old enough to appreciate how cute the little girl cake was, I asked my mother to make it for me. It was my seventeenth birthday.



It's nice to be back in New York with my family for this birthday. It means a lot of things, including the traditional cut-out cake. Last week my mother brought the book into the living room and set it in my lap. She told me to pick. And then I spent the next half an hour debating the finer points of the lion cake, the penguin cake, and the giraffe cake. No one has ever had the giraffe cake, and that's why I chose it. I feel sorry for it. It's very cute in this charmingly awkward way, and I can't wait to see it on Saturday. It's time for Jerry Giraffe to make his debut.




For reference, you can see the whole cut-out book here.

I'm a Loveless Pea in a Manless Pod

I've been reading Melissa Bank's newest book The Wonder Spot. Melissa Bank has a certain effect on me. Mainly, I become a nodder. I can be completely alone--say sitting in my living room in the middle of the day--and what she writes makes me feel so justified, so recognized, so understood that I just sit there and nod at the book, at the imaginary characters, and at Melissa Bank, who I think must be related to me in some way. We have the exact same thoughts.

When, in the latter part of The Wonder Spot, the narrator indicates she is just a loveless pea in a manless pod, I thought, I'm going to put that on a T-shirt.

I'm as manless as ever. I've been thinking about it a lot, which isn't a change or even a shock. I'm giving it special attention today for one reason: today is the Wily Republican's birthday.

For the next twenty-four hours when people ask him how old he is he will have to say, "Twenty-six years old." And for the next twenty-four hours when people ask me how old I am I will say, "Twenty-four." And for those brief twenty-four hours the Wily Republican will be two years older than me.

I've always thought it was a little weird that his birthday is the day before mine. It's like we were this close to being the same person. You know, born under the same moon, born under the same personality guidelines. I'm not even sure I believe in any of that, but a long time ago Kristin gave me a website to map your moon sign, which predicts who you are, what matters to you, and what you will likely be when you grow up, all based on the moon's position in the sky on the minute you were born. At times it was eerie. And because I mapped almost everyone I know, I read the WR's moon sign and personality type. His was eerie too. And so much different than mine. There must be something extraordinary about the moon's pull from September 12th to September 13th because you couldn't set out to create two more different people than me and the WR.

He's a Virgo, the WR. He's a Virgo like me and several of the men I loved before him. He sometimes fits the bill: he's anal about things like homework and organization. He has a compulsion to be the best at everything that ever existed on the earth. He derives sick pleasure at the way all the As line up on his transcript. But then there are things about him that don't fit the bill. He doesn't care what other people think about him, when he's clearly supposed to be spending precious amounts of time doing things to make everyone everywhere love and respect him. The WR is fond of saying, Fuck anyone who doesn't understand me. That's just not very Virgo-ish. A true Virgo--like me--would think nothing of being sad when she found out that not everyone everywhere loved her. But when the true Virgo--me--has those moments of understanding, the quasi Virgo--the WR--is pretty good to have around. You're good, he'll say. You're amazing. You're one of the best girls I've ever known. And then it's official: everything is fine because he has just said that.

The truth is, I don't want to be thinking about these things. I don't want to spend time thinking about the Wily Republican and my old life that had him in it. I feel like I should be far past this. Psychologically, I mean. Isn't this flame, this fascination past its expiration date?

On Sunday night I was watching a late-night episode of Sex and the City. In this episode, Carrie and Mr. Big had just broken up and she was sulking. Miranda told Carrie to stop sulking, to get out of bed, to put on a coat, to go breathe fresh air. Charlotte scolded Miranda because she'd just recently read a statistic that said that you are supposed to allow yourself a grief time frame that accounted for at least half the time you had been with this person. If you dated for a year, you got six months of grief. Two years of togetherness won you one solid year of wallowing.

Fine, but here's my question: what about the not-relationship? What about the non-boyfriend? What about the not-anniversaries? I can tell you what day we first kissed, and I can tell you all the other first-days, too. But none of that matters or counts because, really, when it comes down to brass tacks, the WR and I were nothing. There was no definable start, no definable end. And just what was our end? I sometimes feel like it still hasn't happened, or that my body doesn't feel like it's happened and it's waiting for something to tie everything up in a nice, neat package. I think that's my body still holding out hope. My body is ridiculous.

My mind is, too. I'd really rather not be thinking about the Wily Republican as much as I am. I'd whittled it down to an acceptable amount when I was still living in Minnesota. For that I thank New Boy, who distracted me with his eyelashes and dark boy-smelling apartment for the last few months I was in the state.

But then there was the moving. The packing of things that were important, that were memories. I put away my picture books. I dug through drawers where random odds-n-ends unearthed themselves--things like a note the WR and I wrote to each other on the back of a waitress pad. I had to look at all these things and face up to some ugly realities: I wasn't over him, I shouldn't have ever been under him, and I could've done things differently. And now I was leaving the state where it all happened. I was putting considerable physical distance between us. And I wasn't exactly ready.

So, I guess I'm wondering what my equation is. What's my grief time frame?

This is the number I've come up with: 1.5 years.

This is the starting date for those 1.5 years: November 1, 2006.

Those things are based on crude math that might not even be right, but it's the best I can make of things.

And I sort of would like to get my thinking of him and wondering about him and talking about him done with because then I could probably get around to tackling the fact that for the last two weeks I've been going to sleep at night and thinking, Wouldn't it be nice if New Boy were asleep in this twin bed with me?

It's tiring holding on to things that were either never there or there for only a short period of time. It's tiring thinking that surely, surely, oh God, surely there must be something good and bright and golden coming for me right around that corner or the next. He will be exactly what I want. Bookish, savvy, spectacled. And when he comes around that corner I will take a deep breath and I will finally, finally know that I can stop saying things like almost or so close or maybe if things were a little bit different.

A Fine Time

I just got off the phone with PG. We talked for over two hours. We exchanged gossip and MFA news. We talked about my upcoming birthday. We talked about boys. That's when New Boy came home. PG was out on her porch and could see him walking toward his house. "Should I yell to him?" she asked.

I said sure, she should definitely yell to him. I thought it would be nice to hear him yell back, to say hey and how are you?

"New Booooy!" PG sang out. "New Boooy, do you have, like, thirty seconds?"

New Boy, it turns out, was going in to do some homework that he'd only recently remembered he had. Also, he had a friend with him. This was probably New Boy's way of saying, Nope, I definitely don't have thirty seconds.

But PG didn't take that for an answer. Instead, she sprinted over to his yard while I was saying things like, "No, PG. Please don't. This is JUST LIKE THE TIME YOU INTRODUCED US."

But then all of a sudden she was thrusting her cell phone into New Boy's hand and he was saying, "Hello?" in a tone that made it clear he wasn't quite certain who was going to be on the other line.

So New Boy and I got to talk for three minutes. He talked about school, about his senior project, about cars, about his weekend. And I was thinking there wasn't any other place I'd rather be right at that moment. I wanted to be in that backyard with them. I would've suggested drinking something. I would've suggested a fire, some S'Mores. And it would've been a fine Sunday night.

And even though I'm wishing I could've been there with them, it's all okay. I had a fine week. There was much to do.

There was, for instance, pie baking:



And celebrating:



The celebrating was for two of the girls pictured here. The first would be the tannest one of the bunch, our dear friend Missy, who just completed her first week as a teacher of ninth grade English at the same high school we all graduated from. The second would be Amy, who's on the right, and who just finished her own first week as a teacher of sixth, seventh, and eighth grade language arts and social study students.

There was much comparing to do, much gossiping about our old teachers, much gossiping about people I haven't seen or heard about in years. It just so happens that Missy works with the teacher I love and cherish above all other teachers. He is the first person I really let read my writing, and he makes an appearance in the introduction to my thesis. I can't even begin to explain how jealous I am that she gets to see him on a daily basis.

Later that night I got a little unreasonable. It's sort of not my fault. My mother may or may not had one of the worst, most evil days of her life, and I may or may not have sat down and drunk almost an entire Cosmopolitan in a Box with her until she felt human again. And this was before we went to a Chinese Auction/Benefit for an area fire hall, where my mother's boyfriend brought us beer while we stood listening to a band play covers of songs from the Eagles and CCR.

While at the benefit, I saw the following two groups:

1. Women in their 50s wearing gut-baring shirts they must've bought at Forever 21. They shimmied and rubbed up against each other. They preened for firemen with black teeth who stood around wearing matching yellow shirts.

2. Then there were the girls who clearly graduated high school in the early to mid 90s. They were still wearing the same pullover sweatshirts that were popular back then. The type with snowflake-ish designs in a strip across the chest. Their hair was slicked back and they wore tiny gold hoops. They leaned into their boyfriends' shoulders, pressed close to their boyfriends' gold chains, and laughed and laughed and laughed at the women in their 50s who were wearing the too-small shirts. They were unaware that someday that will be their fate. That they too will be dancing for firemen with black teeth because their boyfriends will have run off with girlfriends from the old neighborhood--girls that the boyfriends' mothers knew and referred to as "wild."

And after the fire hall benefit came the bar to celebrate the girls' successful first week as real, honest-to-goodness teachers. After all that extended casual drinking, I realized my voice was getting loud. Much louder than was necessary. And I was starting to bobble. And talk about strange things. And by that point I'd also developed the nagging urge to eat a taco.

So, at two o'clock in the morning, Becky took me to Mighty Taco. I love Becky.



The next morning we all went to Hot Rob's rugby game. I was particularly excited to go to Hot Rob's rugby game because it gave me a chance to actively participate in one of the things I love most, which is watching men play sport.

Rugby, I found out, is a strange game. It's part soccer, part football, and, I think, part ballet and alcoholism. I found it strangely erotic. The boys would gather in lumpy huddles, put their heads between each others butts and legs, then they would grunt and groan and growl until the ball came out one end or the other. There was kicking where the goal was to get the ball out of bounds. Once Hot Rob even managed to lodge it in a tree, and a spectator from the other side had to climb up into the tree to get it out. Sometimes the boys even lifted other boys onto their shoulders so they could try to catch the ball. Why they can't just try to catch the ball on their own terms is beyond me, but whatever. I guess rugby is part competitive cheerleading, too.



You know what those boys get an A+ for? Their striped shirts. They're almost as good as soccer socks.

So I guess what I'm trying to tell is this: it was a good week. It was also a good weekend. And I love any excuse to mix pie, Cosmopolitans in a Box, Chinese auctions, old friends, and cute boys (some who look suspiciously like New Boy himself) tossing around a ball while wearing striped outfits. A fine, fine time indeed.

Academic Claustrophobia

Today in class one of my male students stood up and demonstrated how he can crush a can between his shoulder blades.

I was impressed. I was amused. I was charmed. I was all of those things at once because we happened to be in a spacious classroom. There were many feet in between me and his freakishly flexing shoulder blades. Had one gone awry and flexed in the wrong direction--some sort of sprouting vestigial wing--it would've hit one of his classmates (probably the one with the name I like to go around saying at loud volumes at inappropriate times, like when I'm sitting in Amy and Becky's apartment). I'm okay with it hitting his classmate. I'm not so okay with it hitting me.

Which it would have had we been holding class in another of the rooms I teach in.

This is how I start my days: I walk down a flight of stairs and into a classroom that is the roughly the size of my old apartment's bedroom. Twenty-five student desks, a projector stand (SORRY, the note on it says, THIS IS BROKEN.), and a teacher's desk are crammed into the space. Last time I was in there I had to climb up over the desk to get at the board. Good thing I wasn't wearing a skirt.

And my students? They're too close to me. Too, too close. And I think it's strange that I'm saying this. I'm usually the one who likes to get in groups with students, to sit in the rows with them while others are doing presentations. I like to socialize in those minutes before class starts. I like to chat, tell jokes, let them tell me about their weekends. But in this classroom I walk in and am immediately crushed. Crushed against them, against the board, against the window. There's nowhere to go. I can't move. I can't back away from the board so they can see what I just wrote. And to top it all off, there's no garbage can.

The garbage can thing is an issue with all classrooms at this school, but today I had gum and had nowhere to put it and I felt I was too close to my students to be caught plucking a wad of spearmint gum from my mouth and wadding it into a piece of paper. If I were one of my students, I might think seeing my teacher extract gum from her gaping maw was gross.

Anyway, I think it's strange how much that classroom affects my mood and my class's mood. You can just tell there is a weird energy in that room. It riles them up. It makes them itchy, like they want to go outside and stretch their legs and run, run, run. I want to tell them to all get up and push against the wall to see if they can move it back even an inch--just give me one more stupid inch, please! This coming from a girl who loves to be close to her students (Katy, shut up). You know it's a dire situation when I'm saying this classroom needs to be aired out and widened.

The other two rooms? Well, they're just fine. My 101 students live in a bright, airy room on the first floor of my building that houses English and American studies. It's a good building. If you take the elevators to one of the higher floors you can look out and, on a clear day, see the mist and towers and general pomp of Niagara Falls, Canada. I'm in love. And the lower floor classroom, I'm in love with it too. The window is large and it has blinds, in case I need to stop the students from daydreaming or watching the crosswalk flood with students on their way to the union.

My other 102 class meets in a building that is more a lounge than anything else. There are a lot of couches and tables and open spaces. A few classrooms are sprinkled here and there. The classroom we meet in is big and high-ceilinged. There's plenty of room to maneuver and set up group work.

So my two afternoon classes are great. I can move, they can move, we all can move. I can walk and talk, they can watch me pace. But that first classroom is awful and horrible and stuffy. I don't think any teacher should have to hoist herself up on a desk and slide over it just to get at the chalkboard.

And God only knows what could happen when things let loose in a room like that. I could, for all I know, be risking getting caught in the eye by an errant elbow or Yankees hat or shoulder blade. And that's not exactly a story I want to have to file away in my First Year Teaching Outside of Graduate School Memory Box. And, no, I don't really have that box. Yet.

Pie School

When I learned I would be coming back to western New York because I was now graduated, jobless, and rejected by 70+ schools across the nation, I called my mother and told her we had some very serious work ahead of us.

Mainly this: we would be making pies. A lot of pies.

I can do a lot of things in the kitchen but pie-making is not a skill I possess. I've tried, certainly, but each time something goes awry. Well, not something. One thing. The crust.

My mother, like her mother before her, is a championship pie maker. There's nothing she can't do with a pie. I once saw a single glistening tear form in the corner of Ex-Keith's eye as he tasted her caramel apple with homemade whipped cream dolloped on top.

But my pies don't ever measure up. The crusts taste funny or the crusts break apart or the crusts are dry. The filling, well, that's good, but if it doesn't have a good, buttery, flaky container what's the point?

And it irritates me. It irritates me that I can't do something well or right. It irritates me that I'm not carrying on the fine pie-making tradition that our family's ladies have stretched across generations. Since last year I finally mastered the art of nut roll-making, I might as well get pies right too. And what with this extended break at home it just seemed like the perfect time.

Pie Boot Camp started earlier than I expected it. My mother called and left a message for me while I was teaching on Tuesday. I'm thinking about making an apple pie, she said. I'm in the mood. Want to help?

Yes, yes, yes, I did. It was, after all, my own idea for Pie Boot Camp. In fact, I'd started conditioning a few nights prior when I sat on the couch watching the National Pie Championships on the Food Network--the network that is and always has been my porn.

I'd heard the ladies on there discuss secrets for good crust, and I was itching to get my hands in my own. And so this morning I did.

I measured. I mixed. I pastry-cutted. I monitored moisture content. I bowed down to the age-old Betty Crocker recipe that my mother has--oh yes, yes, yes--memorized.

She cut apples while I said a prayer and placed one half of the crust dough between two sheets of wax paper (I hate admitting I use wax paper, my mother said. It's like cheating). I rolled. At least I can wield a rolling pin like a pro (thanks to buttermilk biscuits and 8,000 cookie recipes), and I produced two beautifully round discs of dough. One for the bottom, one for the top. And in between we sandwiched the crisp New York apples with a mix of sugars and cinnamon.

My mother kept saying, "Looks good. Looks moist. Looks perfect."

And somehow, some way, that crust turned out stupidly beautiful. In fact, when we later cut into the pie, I found it was my favorite part of the pie, only because the miracle was elevated. I--me, the worst crust maker ever!--just produced a non tragic crust!

Pie Boot Camp, Phase One: Success.

Pie Boot Camp, Phase Two: Looming. I'm thinking about lattice. After all, don't men just love a fine lattice pie?

This Family Likes to Help Me Make an Ass of Myself

Part One: My Father

Behold my father's girlfriend's son:



The boy is tall, pretty-eyed, and he can wear a hoodie like nobody's business.

I don't think it's a secret that I have a fascination with his attractiveness. You can't put a boy that tall in front of me and expect me not to think about how nice it would be to make out with him. I'd have to stand on tip-toes to get at him. If that's not the best thing in the world, I don't know what is.

Anytime my father asks me to go somewhere with him and his girlfriend the first words out of my mouth are, "Will the Hot Son be there?" If he is coming, I have to spend an extra ten minutes on my hair and makeup. If he isn't coming, I ask why my father why he hasn't forced the Hot Son to ask me on a date yet.

"Why isn't he picking me up so we can go to a movie?" I'll ask. "Dad, you're not doing your job."

I guess it was only a matter of time before my father told his girlfriend that I asked after her son anytime I could. I suppose that's only fair. They probably think it's funny and cute. They probably mock me in private.

The private mocking has recently branched out, though. Last night when my father and his girlfriend came home from a weekend at the lake, he asked me if I'd like to spend some time looking at the pictures he'd taken of the Hot Son. He asked this as the Hot Son's mother sat quietly thumbing through the Sunday edition of the Buffalo News. "I've got some niiiice ones," he sang.

He's now started a campaign of unsubtle public teasing in front of the Hot Son's own mother, who, I'm sure, has shared this information with her son. Who wouldn't? If I had an attractive son and girls fawned all over him and I was privy to their crushes, I would absolutely tell him about it. So let's just assume that the Hot Son knows I think he's cute. That sort of makes me want to crawl into a hole and hibernate until the Hot Son inevitably meets a leggy model-type and marries her. That makes all the times I giggled and bumbled words in front of him all that much worse. I am a complete moron.

Part Two: My Brother

This is what I was wearing this morning:


1. Pajama pants (cat printed and shrunken so that they crest above my ankle bones)

2. Power Puff Girl socks (with rubber-soled bottoms)

3. A t-shirt from a now defunct Mankato bar (size XL)


It's important that you know what I was wearing because that's how I looked when my brother pulled into the driveway this morning. Turns out he'd spent the night in the cabin with some of his friends, including this boy he works with, and they'd gotten real drunk. Now they were hunting for sustenance. They wanted coffee. I'd just baked blueberry muffins. They wanted those, too.

If it had been any of Adam's old-time friends--boys who are come up to my neck, or boys who are unbelievably lanky and gangly, even at twenty-two years old--it wouldn't have mattered. They've seen me worse. They'll see me worse in the future. But this boy, this new co-worker of Adam's was, well, cute. He was tallish. He was nicely built. He had big, big, big eyes. Dark eyes. And here's the kicker: he's Midwestern.

"He's from Wisconsin," Adam informed me during introductions. "You two have a lot to talk about. By the way, you look real hot right now, Jess."

And then he was off to talk to my father about car batteries and Starbucks coffee. The Wisconsinite stood in the kitchen with me as I took another pan of muffins out of the oven.

He used to go to school at a college where I'd tried to get a full-time professorship. We talked about Milwaukee and the Safe House. We talked about the Miller brew tour, baseball, and football. He made snide remarks about the Minnesota Vikings. I told him that when I moved to Minnesota I was forced to sign a piece of paper that stated I would forever hate the Packers. "It's okay," he said, "I hate the Packers, too."

"Just so you know, our hockey team totally whooped you the last time we played you. And you guys were, like, second in the nation," I told him.

"Yeah, well who's got the trophy now?" he asked. He eyed up my blueberry muffins.

"Still," I said, "that was a really great night."

He and my brother left a little while later. They were headed for Denny's because they were hung over and in need of grease, which is an impulse I completely understand. Last week after my classy romp all over the backroads of the Middle of Nowhere, New York, I woke up the next morning and ate two pieces of wedding cake, two pieces of toast, an egg and cheese sandwich, and a bacon bleu cheese burger all in the span of six hours. I didn't feel normal until I swallowed the last bite of burger.

The Wisconsinite wanted pancakes and bacon. He wanted butter. He wanted coffee. "It's just that I drank another giant beer right before I came up here," he whispered to me as my father and brother came back into the room. "I really need pancakes right now."

They left with two thermoses full of coffee and napkins full of muffins.

I turned to my father's girlfriend. "He couldn't have called?" I asked. "Really, he couldn't have given us a heads-up? How was I supposed to know he'd gotten attractive friends?"

"He's waving at you," my father's girlfriend said.

And there he was, leaning out of my brother's truck and waving as they backed out of the driveway.

"Oh God," I said. And then I ran into my room and tried to tell myself that I looked halfway decent in pastel rubber-soled socks and too-short pajama pants. I tried to convince myself it was charming and showed how laid back I am. But none of that is really true. I don't know if you can recover from cat-print pajamas. I don't know if there are enough words to apologize for my knotted hair. But I do know I am going to thump on Adam the next time I see him, then I'll just accidentally stop in to where the boys work to prove that I can, if given enough warning, look sort of decent and not like a homeless girl who just so happens to make a killer blueberry muffin.

A Blip on the Timeline of My Life

In fifth grade I was not a pretty girl. I was at the pinnacle of awkwardness. I was wearing satin coats and overalls with only one shoulder hooked. The other just dangled sadly behind me as I bounced through school and tried not to be noticed by my enemies.

My enemies were two boys who liked to steal my erasers and pull my pigtails. One of them even took to calling me "Miss 108" because he'd been standing near the girl's side of the gym at the beginning of the year when we had to weigh in. He'd heard the gym teacher tell my weight to the girl who was recording them in a gradebook. I was one of the only girls over 100 pounds that year. That boy never let me forget it.

In the middle of the year there was a day where I was standing at a big round table in the middle of the room. There were crafty things on it. Scissors and glue and construction paper. I was digging through them with elaborate slowness because I was actually standing there to hear the popular girls who sat next to the round table talk about Ryan McLean. Ryan McLean was the love of my life when I was in fifth grade (and sixth, and seventh, and eighth) and I was starved for any sort of information about him.

This popular girl who was dating him had curly chestnut hair. She had expensive clothes. Her scrunchies were always the prettiest ones in the whole room. She and her friends were sitting head-to-head and whispering about a date she'd gone on with Ryan. What kind of date I'm not exactly sure because were in fifth grade and what kind of parent lets a fifth grader go out on a date? Anyway, she was talking about how she and Ryan had been French kissing and how wonderful it all was, what a good kisser he was, how much better he was than her last boyfriend.

I wanted to stab myself in the heart with a pair of scissors.

Then someone tapped me on the shoulder. I whirled around, afraid I'd been caught eavesdropping. I had. It was one of my boy enemies. He was smirking.

"Hi, Jess," he said.

"Hey," I said. I knew better than to extend a conversation with him. He was in the highest, most golden ranks of the social hierarchy in our middle school and to try to hold a conversation with him was a serious faux pas. I gathered some construction paper into a pile and turned to go back to my desk.

"Hey, Jess?" he said. "I want to know something about you."

I kept walking, thinking he wouldn't try to follow me around the room. This boy didn't follow anyone, especially me and my dangling overalls.

"Jess," he said, "Jess, I want to know if you're a virgin."

A virgin? I didn't know what that word meant. It sure didn't sound good. The way he said it made that word hang in the air all toothy and evil-sounding. Whatever it was, I knew it couldn't be good.

I set down my construction paper and turned back around to face him. I was going to put him in his place. I was finally going to show him that I was a strong girl and he couldn't hurt me anymore.

"NO!" I said. "No way!"

Then there was a look on that boy's face. A strange, concerned, shocked look. "No?" he asked.

"No," I said again, although now the tension had started to shift again. Whatever I'd said was the wrong thing.

Then his face lit up. He flashed a smile at me--all gleaming, perfect teeth--and then cleared his throat. "JESS ISN'T A VIRGIIIIIIN!" he said. He raised his voice so the whole room could hear. The popular girls stopped talking about Ryan McLean and his amazing tongue and soft lips. Their seats creaked as they turned to look at me.

"Stop it," I hissed at the boy.

But he didn't. He kept chanting the words, even after I brushed past him and out into the hall, even after I walked to the drinking fountain and bent over it, pretending I couldn't hear him. For the rest of the day, for the rest of the week I was Jess, Not a Virgin.

Eventually he got bored with that tactic and moved on to another, then another, then another (eventually graduating to sticking pencils in the space between my teeth and calling me Beef), but soon he would move away to become a football star and I would stay on at our school to write angry stories where Ryan McLean fell in love with me and we ignored this boy until he lost all popularity and had to date the weird girls who sat around doing shots of pickle juice at lunch.

I was forced to remember all of this yesterday because my classes are doing topic-generation for their first essay, and to help the process we did some freewriting and made a quick timeline of our lives. I made them write down things they remembered from elementary, middle, and high school. I said, "Mark down things like favorite teachers, least favorite teachers, what you wanted to be when you grew up, who you were best friends with, times you got in trouble, after-school activities you were involved with, and crushes you had." Then I looked down at the example timeline I'd scribbled down in ten minutes before class. I'd marked in all my enemies. Who I'd hated and when. "And enemies," I said. "And rumors that got started. Don't forget those things--they could make for interesting personal narratives."

One of my girls sighed, tossed her hair, shook her hand out like it was about to get the workout of its life. "Oh," she said, sound weary and resigned, "This is going to take a long, long time."