So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Night

This weekend I baked somewhere around 250 cookies to celebrate the end of the semester, which was today. I made chocolate chip cookies and sandwiched them together with vanilla frosting, and I also made a double chocolate cookie recipe my college roommate somehow managed to steal from our favorite bakery in Fredonia. I turned out sheet after sheet after sheet after sheet of these cookies until they overflowed from the containers I was trying to store them in.

Today I lugged those cookies up three flights of stairs to my office, where they then sat until one of my students--one of my most-loved engineer boys--happened by my office and slumped into one of the crusty chairs the powers that be stuffed into our office in hopes that student visitors wouldn't mind sitting on something that looked like it'd been peed on by the entire population of the Whispering Pines Assisted Living Community.

This student didn't mind at all. "Hey," he said. He sounded tired, beat-down, half-dead.

"Hi there," I said.

"Can I just tell you about my weekend?" he asked, and I said of course. So he did. He told everything that happened since the time I'd seen him last. And it was a lot of stuff. The kid was having a rough week, and--more importantly--a rough semester.

When he finished listing all the things that went wrong, the student took a deep breath and slumped against the back wall. He looked like he was two seconds away from imploding. And if that happened, the only evidence that he had ever been in my office would've been a soggy Sabres hat perched above the pee stained chair.

I felt I needed to lift his spirits somehow. "Here," I said. I unwrapped the first package of cookies. "Have one. No, have two."

He took two. He stuffed them into his mouth. "I need help with my Works Cited page," he said, and he looked so sad and so tired that I nodded and peeled back the wrapping on the second package of cookies.

"Okay," I said. "And here, have another."

By the time he'd left my office, that student had eaten somewhere near six or eight cookies. I felt very proud of myself, very much like I was on the right track to becoming the type of mother and grandmother I want to be: the type who takes one look at her children and grandchildren when they step in the door and says, "You look skinny. Come into the kitchen. I'm making you a pie."

Later, this student and my other favorite engineering students sat in the hallway outside of our classroom shoving those cookies in their faces and eating half the pan before any of the other students even got there. But I didn't stop them. "Go, go," I said, because, really, I'd made those cookies for them. I'd made them so I could do one last thing for them, so I could extend one last gesture, one last Let me take care of you, okay, boys? We took good care of each other for thirty weeks. And there was nothing I loved better these last two semesters than having those boys around me all the time, having them around to say, We love you, Jess! and What are you going to do without us, Jess?

The truth is, I don't know. Mourn, probably. Mope. Kick around the campus and wonder what they're doing now, how they're doing in physics, how much they're eating, if they're getting enough sleep, if they need more cookies in their diets. But at least today I could contribute.

And at least I know I haven't seen the last of them.

"We looked up your fall schedule online," one of them admitted to me this week. "We wanted to see when and where you were going to be around. You know we're going to come by all the time."

And I thought, Thank God.

There Was Much Screaming, Much Stomping

Here's what I remember about last night: It's Game Two. I am standing on a table. Or the bench to the table. I am considering popping the guy next to me because he had, mere seconds before, turned to yell at me and Amy--"CALM DOWN!" he said as we hysterically screamed things like Oh my God, do not score on us! Do not score on us! Do not score on us in the last minute!--but I don't pop him. I know he was thinking those things, too, but he chose not to scream them in the banshee-like levels Amy and I were using.

I am stomping my kitten-heeled feet on the table-bench, and I am screaming, "SUCK IT, RANGERS!" I am pointing to one of the many TVs broadcasting the Sabres game and shrieking my love for all things hockey. At this point of the night, after too many vodkas thick with lime wedges, I am screaming how much I love my future husband, how good he is, how wonderful, how flexible, how beautiful.



I am watching Amy do victory dances to celebrate. I am watching her pump her fist. I am watching the entire bar high-five. I slap the hand of every bearded man--because almost every Buffalo boy is sporting a playoff beard right now--and I slap the hand of every person at my table. Twice.

It was a good night:

Working Girl

I need a summer job. The semester ends soon, and I'll be officially unemployed until the end of August. I've been preparing for this since last summer, since before I got my university job, back when I was convinced I was going to have to wait tables full time or work at the local credit recovery agency for the rest of my life.

Anyway, I've been preparing. It's been hard to prepare. Each day I have to wake up and say to myself, You are only two months away from waiting tables, you are only one month away from waiting tables, you are only weeks away from waiting tables. Some people--mostly my parents--think I'm being too dramatic about it. They think it's no big deal, no big shake. They don't understand why it would bother me to go back to waiting tables after receiving a terminal master's degree, after I have been hired on as an instructor of college English. My mother especially thinks I'm being a baby about it. When I ask her how she'd like it if she had to wait on one of her students she says she'd like it fine. What's the big deal? she says.

The big deal is this: it's one of the world's most uncomfortable experiences to wait on one of your students--to bring him a nice steak dinner and an extra potato when his father asks it, even after he says, No, no, it's okay, Jess, you don't have to! because he feels weird, weird, weird that the girl who just spent fifteen weeks teaching him how to string together coherent sentences is standing in front of him with a coffee pot in one hand and a bottle of ketchup in the other. I did that while working banquets in Minnesota. I don't ever want to do that again.

The chances of that happening now, though, are slim. I live very far away from my university, and the places I'd wait tables are places my students wouldn't be likely to go. This makes me feel slightly better about returning to the world of serving, to a world where men think it's okay to talk about your nipples as if you aren't standing in front of them, refilling their water glass.

It makes me feel slightly better, but not entirely better.

My father thinks I'm crazy for not driving to the restaurant where I used to work and asking for my job back. You know the place! he says. You know the menu and the people and the way things work! And it's true. I do know those things. I can still hear myself reciting the list of potato choices (We have baked, fries, curly seasoned fries, cottage fries, or potato salad!), and I can still see myself sucking up to all the cooks on the off chance that I will really screw up someday and need them to make me food that I forgot to ring in, and I can still myself sitting at the bar and counting out a filmy stack of ones onto the slate counter.

It wouldn't be horrible, but it would be strange. It would be contrary to what I was hoping and assuming on my last day of work. That night after I clocked out for the last time, after I had my last post-shift-drink, after I had appropriately nuzzled every boy I loved (the cooks, the dishwashers, the bartenders), I walked out thinking See ya! Adios! Au Revoir! I walked out thinking, I'll never have to do that again. I foolishly thought that once I got my terminal master's degree, life wouldn't be a struggle anymore. I wouldn't have to have some crappy part-time job that involved flipping salad bars, washing down a patio, zoom-brooming the carpet where some parents let their baby toss half a container of gummed-down Saltines.

While working at the restaurant, I'd secretly felt sad for the girls who came back to work after graduating college. They had full-time jobs--they worked as teachers and social workers--but they were still driving to the restaurant and slipping into long black aprons, they were still floating beer-loaded trays on the palms of their hands, they were still asking people how they wanted their fish fries done--battered, broiled, or breaded?

I knew why they were still working at the restaurant. I wasn't stupid. While these girls made decent money at their full-time jobs, it was hard to give up that extra money even two shifts of waitressing brought. They might be able to walk out with $300 in their pockets, and that money could go to all the best things in life: wedding funds, vacation funds, clothing funds.

But it didn't stop me from thinking, God, I hope I never have to do that.

Well, I've got to do that. I'm coming back, fully degreed, with a decent resume and decent accomplishments for someone my age. But I've got another of those muggy summers in front of me--a summer where I come home with aching legs and a pocket bulging with dollars, a summer where I'll have waitressing nightmares every week (I forgot to bring table 52 extra tarter sauce! I never brought table 32 their water! I can't remember where to find the computer!)

Yesterday I went around my little country town and I applied to a few places that have an atmosphere, menu, and clientele that won't throw me into a never-ending spiral of depression, a spiral of Where did I go wrong?! I haven't yet convinced myself to go back to my old restaurant, to become one of those girls I'd felt sorry for three years ago.

But yesterday I got to sit down and interview with one manager--a young girl, probably younger than me, who sported a nose ring and a earrings made out of turquoise feathers.

You could tell I made her nervous. "Do you think I'm doing an okay job with this interview?" she asked me. "Maybe I should practice on people who already work here. Maybe that'll make me feel better about it."

There was an ant or a spider crawling on the table as she was saying this. I didn't want to flick it because I thought it would embarrass her--after all, what did that say about the cleanliness of where we were sitting? What did it say about whoever wiped down that booth? I also didn't want to look closer because if it was a spider, I'd be pinned to the booth by a crushing tumble of fear and revulsion, and she might very well think I was psychotic, that I had some sort of mental disorder than kept me from functioning like a regular member of society. I just smiled and told her she was doing a fine job, that it was very standard, that she was asking pretty normal questions in a pretty normal way. I ignored the spider-ant.

When she fanned open the application I'd filled out, she looked for quite a long time at the education section. "Wow," she said. "Wow, that's a lot of stuff to list. You're really overqualified for this job."

And that's when I had to do something very, very hard. I had to plaster a smile to my face and look her in the eye--without sighing, without reaching for a knife and gouging it into my eye--and tell her that was a very nice thing to say. "Thank you," I told her. "Thanks very much."

One of the Ugliest Things I Can Tell You

I'll tell you this about yesterday: I was awake only six hours.

I'll tell you this about Monday: I spent ten hours in the hospital.

It wasn't for me. I wasn't the one wearing the flower-patterned gown. I wasn't the one gagging into a metal pan. I wasn't the one airlifted from one hospital to the next. I wasn't the one who had a stroke, the one who had blood pooling in the back of my skull, the one whose eyes clouded over, smogged, grew filmy.

That was my grandfather.

My mother called around 8PM Monday night, told me my grandfather had been taken to the hospital, that they thought he had a stroke. I told her I'd be right there. I hung up the phone, changed my clothes, shrugged into a sweatshirt, put on some shoes, walked out to my car. I waited and waited and waited. I thought it might take a few minutes, that I might feel one way or another about the news. After all, my grandfather was in the hospital. That kind of news would make a normal person feel something, react in some way. What I reacted to was my mother. I didn't think, Oh my God, my grandfather! I thought, I should go be with Mom.

I drove the empty back roads of the country town where I grew up. My highbeams bounced off the creek bed, the pine trees, the wet pavement. I kept waiting. Nothing was coming. No sadness, no fear, no regret, no nothing. I was just a girl driving a car on a dark street.

The only thing I could really think about was what I'd heard on the radio during my drive home from work. One of the local stations had a woman on--a woman who was attending the funerals of the Virginia Tech students who died last week. She wasn't a relative, a friend, or a sympathizer. She was a member of a group who was preaching what they believed to be the truth behind the Virginia Tech shootings: that those students deserved to die. She said they were wicked and evil. She said they were shot for a reason, that God had found them to be lacking and undeserving and so he devised a way to eliminate them.

The DJs yelled and fussed. They called her crazy. They called her a heartless bitch. She told them they were going straight to Hell. Then she said most of America was, too. Most of the people listening to the radio right now, listening to their silly little show and their silly little antics, all those people were on an express train to Hell. You're evil! she shouted. All of you! Just evil!

I flicked the radio off then, but I couldn't keep myself from thinking about that lady and her thoughts about those students who died, her thoughts about all of us. I wanted to find her and hold her down, tell her that's not how the world or God works, but the more I thought about it the more I thought, What if she's right? What if we are all evil?

Several hours later, I wasn't feeling all that good about myself. I was pulling into the cratered driveway of the hospital and wondering if deep, deep down I wasn't a very good person. I was wondering if I had an evil bent to me, if something inside had gone wrong, had twisted until it was skewed and defective and not good. I figured maybe this thing with my grandfather was punishment for past wrongs I'd committed against him and my family.

For a long time my grandfather and I didn't speak. We didn't speak because of what happened on Christmas Eve in 2002. My family was gathered around the table my grandmother had prepared. My uncle was there, my mother was there. My brother and my boyfriend were also there. So was a strange pale Midwesterner--someone my uncle met at his job, a boy who hailed from Minnesota, a boy who hadn't met any of us before. His family was 1,000 miles away, and my uncle didn't want him to be alone for the holiday, so he asked him to join us.

Shortly after we sat down to dinner, my grandfather started in on his normal holiday routine: he talked about how much he hated black people. In the span of two minutes, he'd used the n-word five times. On Christmas.

This wasn't new. Not at all. My usual policy during these holiday rants was to make long ruts in my mashed potatoes, to busy myself by directing rivers of gravy through these ruts, to try to keep myself from hating my grandfather. But this time I was sitting next to my boyfriend, and I was burning with shame because my my grandfather was saying these things--awful, awful things--in front of him and a complete stranger. It was one thing for him to try to weigh us down with his politics, but to do it in front of strangers was too much. And I was sick of him.

My grandmother said his name once, a reprimand--George!--but that only made him angrier. He continued. He said worse things. My boyfriend had stopped eating his turkey. He had a hand on my knee.

And I knew this was him trying to tell me it was okay, that I shouldn't make a fuss, that I should just keep on eating my potatoes. But I was filled with a sudden rage. Just who did my grandfather think he was? I didn't want to have to sit and listen to him one more second.

So I made my voice steady and calm. I said, "Grandpa? It's Christmas. Please."

The whole table stopped moving. There was silence. Nobody breathed.

My grandfather looked at me as if he'd never seen me before. He stared at me for maybe four seconds, but it felt like eternity. Then he told me he didn't give a damn if it was Christmas. This was his house, I was eating his food, and he was going to say whatever he pleased.

I looked back down at my plate, at my mountain of potatoes, and started eating again. Around the table, breaths expelled. I swallowed gravy and the urge to cry.

An hour later we were gathered in the living room for gift opening. My grandmother's tree burned brightly in the corner. Flutes of champagne glittered in the blush of the multicolored lights. I'd steadily made my way through a pile of gifts I'd gotten: waffle maker, crock pot, DVD player.

I felt a little better, but I should've known it wouldn't last for long. The gift opening continued. Each person had a turn, and we kept circling the living room that way. When the next turn fell on my uncle, he bent to select a gift from his pile. His pants rode up with the bend. His ankles were suddenly visible, and they were outfitted with a bright holiday sock--a sock that was most likely worn to please my grandmother, who hoarded and handed out holiday-themed socks with unparalleled glee.

My grandfather, upon seeing those socks, gasped. "Did you steal those socks off a dead nigger?" he asked. As he said that last word he turned to look directly at me. See? his look said. See? I can say whatever I want, and I don't care what you think about it.

I said nothing. His look was already too smug, and I didn't want to give him more occasion to look that way. I turned to say something to my boyfriend. I leaned up against his knee. I rested there and tried to ignore my grandfather.

This didn't work. The gift opening had passed to my uncle's wife, and she was ripping paper to reveal a set of ivory combs my uncle had gotten for her.

My grandfather raised his voice and stared right at me. "You know what kind of hair that comb wouldn't work with?" he asked. "Nigger hair."

What happened next was ugly. I don't know what happened inside my brain--I don't know what fired or burst into action--but I do know what I felt was something snap. Something unraveled and I lost all control. I was on my feet. "I can't believe you!" I was yelling. "How could you do this? And in front of strangers! My boyfriend! A guest in your home! I asked you nicely! Politely! I said please! It's Christmas!"

That's when my grandfather started thrashing in his armchair. Wrapping paper flew into the air. The chair rocked noisily on its hinges as he struggled to get the footrest down. I thought for a second maybe he was going to come after me. He thrust a finger at me. "You!" he howled. "You are nothing but a spoiled brat! A little know-it-all! Well, you don't know anything! You don't know shit from shit! I am seventy years old, and no little bitch is going to come into my house and tell me what I can and cannot say! Not you, not anyone! I could care less who is visiting! Do you hear me?"

I heard him. I heard him loud and clear, which is surprising because I was crying by that point. It was a hard crying--loud and jagged. He kept yelling, kept saying what an awful girl I was, so spoiled and so inconsiderate, so stupid. But I couldn't hear it all anymore. I was out of the room, running down the hall, running into a bedroom and throwing myself on a pile of coats. I cried in that nest of down and zippers for a few minutes until my boyfriend came after me, told me to put on my coat. He said he wasn't going to sit in a house where people treated people like this. He said, "Come on, we'll go home."

And I was putting on my coat and asking him why my grandfather would do something like that, say those things, treat me that way. I was ready to walk out. But my grandmother appeared in the doorway. My mother, too. They made me sit down. My grandmother told me I had to go back out there and apologize. She said, "He'll never change, Jess. He'll never change, and you have to accept that."

But even back then I knew there was a difference between asking someone to change and asking someone to respect you. If he wanted to go on thinking that way and saying awful things, he could go right ahead and do so. But to deliberately make everyone around him uncomfortable because he thought that was power--and that's what he loved more than anything--that wasn't right. And I wouldn't apologize for asking him to stop. I would never apologize for that.

But my grandmother pleaded. She said I had to, I just had to apologize. I had to be the one to make it right. She wrote me regular letters up until her death, letters that kept begging for an apology from me. He's family, she argued. I wondered what I was. What made me less worthy of receiving an apology?

I didn't apologize. I didn't the night it happened, and I haven't since. My grandfather and I didn't speak until after my grandmother died, and those first few conversations were fueled by guilt. Every conversation after that was fueled by another type of guilt--this one not by death but by my mother. I don't want her to have to deal with it anymore.

And so that is what I was thinking about when I sat in the room with my grandfather, who had started losing his eyesight at noon but hadn't thought to call anyone about it. By the time his girlfriend called for an afternoon chat, he was several hours into a stroke and the doctors couldn't do anything but wait and wait and wait.

I was thinking what a shitty person I was. Here was a man--my own grandfather--who was almost in tears because he couldn't see anything or anyone, and he was saying, "What am I going to do? Oh Jesus Christ, what a thing to have happen. What a thing. How will I live?" And I didn't feel much of anything. I did what everyone did--I put on the good front. I did schtick with my family to take his mind off of it, I told stories, I nodded and said yes, yes, yes when people would say, "It could be worse. It could be worse." I drove to the next hospital after they airlifted him to Buffalo. I stayed late into the night. I went back and forth from his curtain in the emergency room to the waiting room, where my mother and uncle were sleeping. I stayed up with his girlfriend. I waited with him until he went for his MRI. Then I went back to the waiting room and tried to fall asleep, which I couldn't. I stayed at that hospital until 6:00 AM, and then I followed everyone into the parking lot so we could go eat some food, take a shower, get some sleep.

And I did sleep. I slept a lot. I went to bed at 7:30 AM and didn't wake up again until 4:00 PM. I spent the rest of the day wandering through the house like I wasn't quite sure where I was or what had happened or how to feel. I bumped through the next few hours before falling asleep again at 11:00. Sometimes, I guess, it's just easier to sleep than it is to think about things.

He Swears It's Clean

Today I called my brother. I don't often call my brother, mainly because I don't have a reason to. After all, what would we talk about? His possibly-gay-black belt-bunk mate? Hooters waitresses? The pros and cons of a boy ordering a Fuzzy Navel?

But today I bit the bullet. I did it. I called him and said, "Adam, I need to ask you questions."

And he said, "Is this about something bad?"

I assured him it wasn't. It wasn't about anything bad at all.

"Okay then," he said. "Ask away."

"Well," I said, "what I need to ask you about is strip clubs."

"Oh," he said, very seriously, more serious than I've ever heard him. The tone of his voice changed. In one breath he went from assistant head cashier at a tool store to full professor--someone tenured, learned, wise. He could've been lecturing on mitosis or race relations or the brilliance of WB Yeats. But he wasn't. "Well, Jess, what would you like to know?" he asked.

I told him I wanted to know about Canadian strip clubs. I said I needed to know my options. There's a bachelorette party coming up, after all, and I wanted to be well-versed on the whereabouts, general cleanliness, and price ranges of all the clubs close to where we will be staying in Niagara Falls. The party is taking place on the Canadian side of the falls, the same place my nineteenth birthday took place, the same place where we lost one of our college friends for several hours because she went off with some random boy from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania and neglected to tell us she was going. (We will not repeat that same type of raw panic we knew that time, however. Steph, party planner extraordinaire, is on it. "Don't worry," she told me today, "I'm going to have everyone's license plate numbers and contact information. Just in case." This is a good thing. Last time we underestimated Canada and the falls and the strange songs they sing into some girls' heads--songs that make them slip their hand into the hand of a boy wearing a straggly wife beater and a gold chain, songs that take them away from their friends who then wander up and down Clifton Hill and Lundy's Lane for hours, calling their names, screaming You better not be dead! Your dad is going to kill us!)

It's good that the party will be in Canada. After all, in Canada, strippers can be full-on naked and liquor is still served. Served by the boatload. And cheaply, too.

"Top shelf will run you about seven bucks," my brother informed me. "Well drinks, though, you can get them for $4.25... no, excuse me... $4.75."

I asked my brother where to go specifically. He listed several places that are over the border. He told me about the one that's closest to our hotel. "It's clean," he said. "Real clean. I swear. I like it there. They have good food, too, and you get a ton of it."

"What's it like?" I asked him.

He described it: two floors, one long stage, which he referred to as "runway-like," and several smaller stages that have table clusters surrounding them.

"When are you going?" he asked, sounding suspicious. Suddenly I was afraid it was a very real possibility that I would run into my brother while I was at the strip club. I didn't want to see my brother sitting next to a stage with a pile of chicken wings in front of him and a wad of dollar bills in his fist.

"Eeeew," I said. "You're not going to be there when I'm there, are you? That's just gross and wrong."

Luckily, though, my brother is going up before then. They've planned ahead. They're going soon, actually, and he said he is looking forward to it. "You'll like this place," he said. "Seriously, it's clean."

I asked him about the clientele--skanky? businessmen? a mix?--and I asked him about the club's position on girls coming in, especially groups of girls.

"Oh, it's fine," he said. "There's always girls there. They have a lot of fun." He told me this like he needs to convince me, like I need to be convinced that strip clubs are fun. I had the momentary urge to tell him to sit back because I was going to tell him my top three best strip club stories, and one of them involved me running into a stripper in the bathroom, a stripper who had her leg hoisted up on the counter as to better facilitate her checking the status of her lady parts. I squelched the urge to tell him this, though. I think he and I operate on the same basic principal, and that principal is I Don't Want to Know, Okay?

My brother continued talking about the girl patrons. "We've been noticing something lately," he said. "Lots of guys are bringing their girlfriends. They're always there."

Then there was more squelching on my part. This time because I wanted to tell him about the time I made the Wily Republican take me to a strip club in Minneapolis--all-nude, a place that served giant cups of pop or fruit juice. I wanted to tell my brother that the whole thing was sensory overload and I felt like I should have brought a notebook or a laptop so I could accurately capture all that I was seeing: guys and girls who'd left their prom early to finish the night by fanning singles up at willowy Swedish strippers, the big screen TV set off to the side of the stage that was broadcasting the Discovery Network--a show about ants or earthquakes or maybe it was ants in earthquakes, and that stripper wearing a plaid skirt-knee-high combo I'd owned in eighth grade. But, again, I said nothing.

My brother went on for a few more minutes. He had other options for me. Go here, do this, see this. Don't go here, don't do this, don't see this. He told me to stick to his favorite place. It's close, he said. It's good. It's fun. And it's clean. He couldn't stress that enough. It made me wonder what other strip clubs he's been in, if he's seen some things I never want to see, if he's come out wanting to shower and get a tetanus shot as fast as he could drive back to the states.

I thanked my brother. He'd been helpful. And, really, I had never heard him that eager to talk to me. He'd never sounded more pleased to have been consulted on something. I might have made his night.

"This is good," I said. "I'll start researching this. I'll let you know what we decide."

We said goodbye then, and I knew he would hang up the phone and crack his knuckles or stretch his arms up over his head--some gesture of self-satisfaction, something that said, "My God, I am so freaking smart. I am an expert."

And he sort of is.

Go, Abe, Go.

This was our Friday night:

Happy hour two-for-ones:



Happy hour buffet:



A special appearance of Sporty Amy:



Game Five, which caused me to announce to the whole bar that the man who just made that save, that man right there, he is my love, my future husband, and I love his hair:



Getting Abe dressed for the next round of the playoffs:

Further Proof That He's Literary

When I got the news yesterday that my latest story was going to be published I couldn't help but thinking, Huh. That's interesting.

I thought it was interesting because it's one of those stories that was fueled by the Wily Republican--things he did, things he said, things he was. I wrote the story the week after I moved away from Minnesota and back to New York. It wasn't the greatest week I ever had, and it's important to remember that I spent most of that week pantsless and wandering around my childhood home thinking Oh my God oh my God oh my God. My mood was foul. My hygiene was questionable. My head was a mess. And when I sat down in front of the computer all I could think about was what I'd left behind, and the Wily Republican was one of those things.

While he was in college, the Wily worked at the nearby psychiatric treatment center, where the state threw the most despicable people it could dig up. He told me so many stories. There was a man who committed a string of rapes by first hitting women joggers with his car, knocking them down, taking away their only means of escape--their fast legs--and then he would get out, drag them off the beaten path and finish what he'd come to do. Another man was locked away because he'd kept his wife locked in a closet for days without food and water. Shortly after his arrival at the treatment center, he was beaten within an inch of his life by someone who had fashioned a heavy whip out of an old sock stuffed with batteries.

The Wily often looked tired when he told me these stories, and I wasn't sure how he--or anyone--did it, how they kept going back to a place like that without snapping, without taking these people up in their own hands and taking them apart little by little. Snapping bones, tearing out hair, snipping off fingertips.

So I wrote that. I wrote all of that. And I made the main character fall in love, a hard love that, when held up next to his life and work, made the people he watched over seem even more repulsive than they already were.

I like the story quite a bit, so I was happy to see it get picked up--especially because it got picked up by the first place I sent it to, and that's something that hasn't happened to me before. But what was more interesting to me was this: that's the second Wily Republican piece to go. Sometimes I think he and I lived our strange intersecting lives for three years just so he could feed me inspiration, just so we could run around town and do strange things that would eventually turn up in my writing. Sometimes I think the WR is a lucky charm. Sometimes I think that's worth all the times he made me cry, all the ways he made me crazy.

In the story that just got taken, there's a line the main character thinks the first time he sees his to-be-wife. He's looking and looking and looking at her. He can't stop. He doesn't know what it is exactly, but there's just something about her that takes away his ability to talk, breathe, move. He keeps on staring and thinks, Now that's someone worth knowing. That's one of my favorite lines of the story, mostly because I like to think that's what the Wily thought when he was first getting to know me. That he was watching me be quirky-strange-bumbling me and thinking, This is someone I'd like to know for a long time. I like to think this because I know that during those first few months we knew each other I kept looking at him and listening to him tell his stories, and I couldn't help thinking with almost complete certainty that this was going to be trouble, trouble, trouble, but I was going to go along with it anyway because it felt like it was going to be really good, really worth it, one of those things that would change the way I looked at the world.

Best. Day. Ever.

I'll tell you this: it hasn't been easy lately. I'm starting to come to grips with the fact that I am not going to land any of the fifty full-time teaching gigs I applied for this year. I'm starting to realize that, for better or worse, I am probably going to be in Buffalo for another year. Still, I remain thankful for what I've been given: more time with my family and oldest friends.

But it's been hard. It's been hard to go to the mailbox every single day and see more rejection letters from colleges that stretch from New Hampshire to Oregon. We don't want you, they say. Are you kidding, they say. Better luck next year, they say.

It's been a similarly taxing battle for publication lately. My stories--even the one I love and believe in more than anything--have bounced back to me. Rejections have sprinkled in from all my favorite literary magazines. Not right, they say. We loved almost all of it, they say. Try us again, they say.

My mailbox has been stuffed full of no, no, no, no, no. It's been like this for months. And it was starting to grate on my insides, scrub me raw.

But then this morning I woke up in a beautiful mood. There was some song on the radio--some song I'd never heard before--and it was just the right song to wake up to. I wanted to sing in the shower. I wanted to pull out some of my best dance moves as I was pouring cereal. I wanted to splash through leftover puddles on my walk into school this morning. Everything felt good.

It was just one of those days, filled with these and other beautiful things:

1. I got a standing ovation in my last class of the afternoon.

2. My boy Blake--my favorite American Idol contestant, the boy who, yesterday, inspired me to shriek (in front of my father nonetheless) I want to bite his stomach!--was sent safely back to the couch and Sanjaya was kicked off the show. Later, Katy would call me to declare victory and say, "The world is now right!" and yes, yes, I had to agree. It was. Now I will no longer have to worry about writing her a five paragraph rant on Wednesday mornings that discusses how much I am bothered by Sangina, which is what I took to calling him weeks ago. (When I said Sangina in front of my mother, she turned to me and said, very seriously, "Jess, that's not his name." And I had to say, "I know, mother. I'm combining words here." And there was a pause and a smile as it slowly dawned on her. "Oh," she said. "Ohhhhh. I like it!")

3. The Sabres won Game Four. Let's take a moment to meditate on the beauty of this statement.

4. And here's the crowning moment of it all: all the ugly no-no-no was finally replaced by one yes--a yes that made me drive to the liquor store in search of a bottle of champagne because why shouldn't one celebrate success on a Wednesday night? One of my stories was just picked up by the Berkeley Fiction Review. The edition should be out in a few weeks.

Anticipating the Separation Anxiety

There are two weeks left. Two tiny, eensy, infinitesimal weeks left before the spring semester is over. There is a part of me that is saying yesss and halleluiah and bring me a mojito! but that part is seriously being dwarfed by the fact that in two weeks I will no longer take the elevator up to the top floor of the English building and walk into the room that's made of windows-windows-windows to see the beaming faces of all my best and favorite boys.

There are ten best and favorite boys (and, actually, one girl). They are engineering students. They are going to grow up to build important things. They are going to keep our world turning. But before they do that, they are going to make it through two sections of English Composition (regular and advanced) and they are going to do it with me. They enjoyed my class so much last semester that they swarmed my open sections for this semester and, even though they hate writing and English, and even though they think it's terribly pointless for boys like themselves, they have spent the last thirteen weeks of class (and the fifteen weeks of fall semester, too) listening to me, getting better, trying to impress me, tossing papers at me with confidence. "That's the best paper I've ever written," they'll say, or, "You're going to love this." And they're right. It is and I do. They are trying so hard, and I love them for it.

These best boys have done a lot of things for me. They've brought me peanut butter pie, Oreos, and ice cream. They've written me notes of love. They've even gone so far as to orchestrate it so their laptops blast bass-thumping arena rock-type songs when I enter the classroom, which makes me feel like I'm some sort of badass superhero teacher.

It's things like this that make me adore them, and I adore them in a way that is unyielding, hard, unshakable. Part of me wants to scoop them all up and move them into my basement so that they are available whenever I get the itch to be amused. Part of me wants to tell them that when they've all successfully turned twenty-one, I am going to take them to the bar and buy them rounds and rounds of shots. Part of me just wants to stop time so I can go on with them in my class forever.

After this semester, they are done with English. They will have successfully killed their general education requirements, and they will be off to save the world with their chemical-mechanical-aerospace engineering skills. I will miss them terribly. So, so terribly.

I'm dreading the last day. I'm dreading the handing out of cookies (they asked, they begged, they looked at me with big big big eyes and said, Can't you make us cookies again? Like last semester? They were soooo good.) and the inevitable goodbye, which is going to be as difficult as saying goodbye to my first-ever class. It will be so much the same. It will be me looking at these boys--my best, best boys--and thinking, You have changed me, you have made me a better teacher, you have taught me about myself. I will never be the same again.

And it will be completely true.

Playoffs: Game One

We won, we won, we won.



And you, tall-skinny-great-haired-man, know how I feel.

Do You Like Me? Check Yes or No.

His name was Matt. He was tall, gangly, tan, all hard angles--knees, elbows, chin. He had silky brown hair, and he wore it in the way that a lot of the boys were wearing their hair in the early 90's: parted in the middle, flopping down over the ears.

This was eighth grade, and Matt and I shared a homeroom in the warm English room that overlooked the soccer fields. The room was plastered with Mark Twain posters and quotes. The man in charge of that room became my Ultimate Crush, the man I wanted to love me, the type of man I wanted to be with when I grew up, my English teacher for both eighth and twelfth grade, the best English teacher in the entire world.

But my English teacher wasn't my only crush that year. There was Ryan McLean, of course, and this new one: Matt. But I liked Matt in a way that was different than the way I liked Ryan. For most of our lives, Ryan had been beautiful and popular and stunning. He was unreachable and untouchable. He was the boy the popular girls would sigh about, sing about, gossip about. He kissed all the popular girls. He never kissed me.

But Matt seemed more attainable, more realistic. For one thing, he had glasses. None of the really popular guys had glasses. They weren't marred by imperfections. Instead, they were smooth canvases of perfectness. They were golden and sparkling. They were frat boys in training. Matt, though, had flaws that took him out of that category. He was loud and goofy. He was just the right amount of awkward. And--best of all--he liked me.

I thought it might be in that way. I thought it might be more than just a friend. He was sure giving me the indication that it might be so. He pinched me, he grabbed me, he pushed me, he caught me under his arm, he kept putting his hands on me. He called me Jessie, sweetly, like I was his best pet. He and I had inside jokes, tender moments, good times. He liked to pose for my camera. He'd flex his muscles, show off his teeth, stand his hair on end, twist his body into unfathomable poses. I pressed the shutter a thousand times for his poses. I was bringing my camera to school a lot back then. It was like I knew this life wasn't going to last, that these friendships weren't long for the world, that everything was about to change.

But for awhile I was very bold. And I let myself think Hey, maybe, maybe. I let myself think about that for a good long time, and then, when I was certain I'd examined his actions from every angle, when I was certain that his actions were saying I like you, Jessie! I want you to be my girlfriend but I'm just too good and shy to ask you myself!--when I was certain of all that, that's when I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I wrote Matt a note. The note explained that I was glad he and I had become friends, that he was making eighth grade extra memorable for me, that I thought he and I could be good together. Maybe, I said, just maybe we should be boyfriend and girlfriend.

And like the squirrely eighth grade girl I was, I handed that note to one of my best friends and made her deliver it to him before lunch. In lunch, I knew, I'd have to have my answer. It would be impossible to ignore me. His table of boys sat next to my table of girls, and he would have to face me at some point, whether it was to barter for a piece of my friend's Fruit by the Foot or to shoot milk at us with a straw.

I almost vomited in the lunch line. I knew in a few short minutes I would come out into the lunch room and see him. I was almost certain my life would be over at that very moment. After all, I'd never admitted my feelings to a boy before. I'd never felt capable. I'd never felt like I had a legitimate chance of having those feelings returned to me.

Luckily for me, I didn't have to wait very long to have my answer. I came out of the lunch line clutching my tray and barreling down the aisle toward my table. I ignored Matt's table because I was afraid of seeing the looks he and his friends were sharing. Surely I would be able to tell what my answer was by those looks, and I didn't want to know anymore. No, no. I decided I should tell him I was kidding, I didn't mean it, it was an early April Fool's joke. Ha! Gotcha!

But he was merciful. Merciful Matt. He took me aside during lunch and told me he didn't mean to have made it seem one way when it was actually the other. He didn't think of me that way, he said. In fact, he liked one of my best friends. He was sorry, so sorry. He said, "You're one of my best friends, Jessie. We shouldn't ruin that, right?"

Right, I said. Sure, absolutely, great, glad you think so, I think so too, I need to go eat the rest of my sandwich now and maybe puke in the trash can but that's besides the point oh my God I am never doing this again.

I sat back down and shoved the remains of my sandwich in my mouth and chewed and chewed and chewed until that bread was a masticated piece of cud in my big fat mouth. Why? Why? Why? I couldn't stop asking myself why I'd done it, why I'd even been possessed, why I'd been crazy enough to think there could be a happy ending at the end of that road. I sat in that lunch room and listened to the buzz of everyone around me and to my friends whispering it's okay, it's okay, you can cry later and I said to myself I am never ever ever doing that again.

But I did. To varying degrees of success, of course. But those are stories for another time.

Seventy-Eight Words

Tonight I accidentally lit my hair on fire with a candle.

Tonight I ate the following: a pound of rice crackers, three milk chocolate eggs, three Brach's Fiesta Malted Eggs, two mini Snickers, a slice of sour cream coffee cake. (All of this after my dinner.)

Tonight I played two hours of The Sims 2.

Tonight I learned that The Black Donnelly's has been canceled, which means my love affair with Jonathan Tucker and the way he hardly moves his mouth when he talks will have to end. Now Mondays will cease being The Day I Spend Considerable Time Wishing I Could Put My Hands in His Hair.

Tonight I spent my time consumed with all of these things for one specific reason: I couldn't write. And I tried every trick in the book to break out of the block. I played some Martin Sexton, ate some chocolate, lit some candles. That got me seventy-eight words. Seventy-eight words that aren't good, that sound crappy, that led nowhere, that made me pace, that made me put my head down, that made me eat too much and think too much and obsess too much.

I need to snap out of it.

Heard Around the Easter Table

My Mother's Boyfriend's Possibly Gay Black-belt Son

Me: This ham is delicious.

My Cousin: Yup, great ham.

Mother's Boyfriend's Possibly Gay Black-belt Son: So, this year I got drunk on New Year's.

Me, My Cousin, My Aunt: Whaaat?

MBPGBS: Yeah, I did. We were so crazy. We were down in the basement and the parents were upstairs. We kept running around and giggling and screaming.

My Aunt: Did you find a liquor cabinet or something?

Me: Or some beer?

MBPGBS: No.

Me: What did you have then? Where did you get it?

MBPGBS: Oh, the adults gave it to us.

Everyone: Whaaat?

MBPGBS: Yeah, they gave us sparkling grape juice. Man, we were so drunk. I had a hangover later. Hey, you wanna know what else is cool? Freezing BBs and then shooting them at people.



My Grandfather

Grandpa: You want to know what Easter reminds me of?

Us: What?

Grandpa: Killing baby chickens on the farm.

Us: Oh.



My Brother

Adam: Do you want to hear the real story of that time I got lit on fire and burned my leg?

Me: Yes.

Adam's Friends: Yes.

Adam: Well, we were back at the cabin. Just me and the cousins. We had a bonfire going, but there was this stump that was bothering us. We wanted that stump out of there. So we devised a plan. A good plan. We had it all worked out.

Me: And you were unsupervised.

Adam: Oh yeah. Totally unsupervised. We had a Snapple bottle full of gasoline, so we decided we were going to douse this stump in gasoline because we'd already tried to chop it apart and that didn't work. So we started a fire on the stump but it wasn't going as good as we wanted it to, so the cousins started tossing more gasoline on it. Well, the fire started going everywhere. It was spreading into the woods.

Me: You were starting forest fires.

Adam: Well, it wasn't our intention. We just didn't like that stump. So we all started stomping it out, but that wasn't working. And the bottle had fallen on the ground by that point, and it was setting everything on fire, so I tried to kick it out of the way. But when I kicked it, it spun around and spewed gas on me. And I didn't really know what was happening. I tried to stop, drop, and roll... what a bunch of bullshit that is. You know how they always teach that? Well, it didn't work. I was still on fire. And that's when David came running out of the cabin and launched himself at me. He smothered my leg with his body and a towel. He saved my life. And that was the end of my leg hair.

Happy Birthday, Amy!

Today is my best friend's birthday.

Amy and I became best-best friends in sixth grade, when the stars aligned and all the following things happened:

1. We had the exact same schedule.
2. We were taking science from an ancient-looking man who had been my mother's science teacher. He required us to do group presentations on one of the body's main systems. Unluckily, we drew systems like reproductive and excretory, which meant we had to say words like testicle and rectum in front of the whole class. Without giggling.
3. During a game of Mum Ball, Ryan McLean threw the ball to me, and Amy and I were able to analyze that (and his love for me, as clearly indicated by said throw) for the next six months until he threw the ball to Amy and the cycle repeated itself.
4. We were taking social studies from grumbly Miss Poweski, who was always threatening to beat the class with wet noodles.
5. We shared the same arch enemies.
6. We spent countless study hall hours creating a set of code we could use in our notes to each other. We gave everyone nicknames. We gave ourselves nicknames, too. Amy was Sparkle and I was Miss Basketball. Our notes looked like this: Sparkle loves Baby Got Back! Sparkle HATES SALAD! Miss Kitty is on the prowl.
7. We couldn't go two minutes without talking to each other.

Not much has changed since then, and that's probably one of the best things about my life, one of my most prized accomplishments. I don't ever want to live in a world where I can't call this girl at 4 AM in the morning to tell her about the eighty-five small dramas that happened to me since I saw her last.

And so, in honor of Amy's twenty-sixth birthday, here is a collage of photos from her birthday celebration last night--a celebration that ended with us cutting thick wedges of chocolate Oreo cake and stuffing our faces with it in the wee hours of the morning:

One More Thing About the Students

I need to face facts: I have strange dreams. I've had dreams about celebrities (Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson eating giant bricks of Swiss cheese), dreams about non-celebrity celebrities (Kevin Federline whittling me a chair from a large hunk of wood and presenting it to me as a gift, after which I exclaim, "NO, KEVIN FEDERLINE! YOU CANNOT BUY MY LOVE WITH A CHAIR!"), dreams where I'm a lesbian (with girls from grade school, with my best friend, with complete strangers), dreams where I'm pregnant (and my dad corners the father in the produce section of a local grocery store and lectures him until I run to the freezer section to cry), dreams where I'm naked with a boy (my grandparents are watching and waving), and dreams about Minnesota people (Diana saying, "Sure, I'll go to the bar with you. Come over and get me. Give me five minutes. Oh, and don't mind the giant box of sex toys that's on my couch!").

That's why it shouldn't seem strange to me when I have more of these strange dreams. Even when it's the subset of dreams that involves students, past and present. That's not new. When I was in Minnesota, I was dreaming about students all the time. But this past weekend I woke up one morning and blinked hard at the things that were still hanging in that misty just-out-of-reach dream space in my brain. I could still see things from the dream, but I didn't understand them, and I didn't understand how I transitioned into that part of the dream.

What I saw was this: one of my students from this semester, a student I don't find all that good-looking (although I did admit to myself during conferences this past week that he's got good hair, nice jeans, and an artsy air that some girls would love). My student was wearing an outfit I saw on a student in an undergraduate poetry workshop I got to sit in on when I was down in Fredonia this week for a poetry reading by Lucille Clifton.

This is what the student did: he collapsed onto a bed, and I hesitantly came down next to him. "I'm not allowed to do things like this," he told me. In my dream, this student was super religious.

"You're just on a bed," I said.

"I'm on a bed with a girl," he corrected.

"And you're probably not supposed to do this either, huh?" I asked, and proceeded to raise one of his knees so I could sneak one of my knees between his, so I could make a knee sandwich.

"No," he said. "I'm definitely not supposed to touch knees with a girl."

And then I woke up.

I blame this on student conferences. I totally do.

Student Gems, Continued.

(1.)

Male Student #1: So, what you're telling me is... I need to un-vague this?

Me: Yes, un-vague it. Un-vague it a lot.


(2.)

Male Student #2: Can I ask you a question?

Me: Yes.

Male Student #2: Did you make up the word rebuttal?

Me: Uhm, no.

Male Student #2: Really? Huh.

He's Glad He Inherited That Gene

Tonight after his twenty-five minute shower (during which he did God knows what with that detachable shower head he likes to rave about), my brother pranced into the living room wearing only a pair of plaid pajama pants. He was shirtless and slick from his shower. His skinny chest was puffed out. He stopped in front of us and started to massage his nipples.

"Gross," my mother said.

"Disgusting," I said.

"Look at this," he said. He plucked at some straggly hairs around his nipples. "Look!" He tugged and tugged and the nipple elongated, warped, shrunk back down to size. "I can make it dance." He started humming a little tune, and his nipple jigged to the tune.

"I'm going to vomit," I said.

"You know," my brother said, finally abandoning his nipple dance and collapsing next to me on the couch, "I got that from Dad. The hairy nipple gene. Hairy tits. I'm pretty happy I inherited that."

Right at that moment my mother's boyfriend's possibly-gay-black-belt-son, the eleven year old who shares a room and a bunk bed with my brother, arrived on the scene. He, too, skittered into the living room in his sleepwear--a shortie robe that revealed his knobby knees. He wanted to say goodnight to me. He did. Then he turned to my brother and said, "Good night, Adam. See you in bed."

Oh, I couldn't help it. I couldn't help laughing at the ridiculousness of it all--the shortie robe, the vaguely sexual goodnight, my brother scantily clad and picking at his nipple hair.

"Oooooh," I hissed as the possibly-gay-black-belt-son retreated to the bedroom. "It's going to be a special night."

"Oh come on now," my brother said, feigning innocence. "It's only our first date. What do I look like?"

"Hmmm," my mother said.

"A kiss," my brother said. "Maybe a kiss. It's a first date. That's all I'm giving up."

Later, I would find my brother in the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror and preening. He was picking at his hair, smoothing a hand over his stubble.

"Have fuuun," I sang. I backed out of the bathroom before he could retaliate in some awful way--by rubbing his naked chest and errant hairs on me, by flicking my arm fat, by calling me Square Head (this because my brother swears that my head is a scientific anomaly--a perfectly square head--and he has done numerous tests to prove this point to me, my parents, and my friends). I backed away, thinking I'd escaped.

I hadn't. My brother called my name, and I, like a fool, turned around, turned to see what he wanted.

"Look at this," he said.

That's when he stepped out into a swatch of light falling from the bathroom lamps and raised his arm in one smooth, elegant motion. And there it was: a quasi-pelt of man hair. And as if that wasn't bad enough, my brother reached over and dragged his comb--the same comb he'd been running through his shower-damp hair moments before--through his awkward tangle of underarm hair. I made a face, but it was too late. My brother was already lowering his arm, happy with his grooming, and stepping back into the bathroom and shutting the door behind him.

In the Meantime

You can always tell when I've gotten a new batch of essays from my students. Things around the blog get real quiet. It's just that when I have one hundred papers sitting on my kitchen table, there are very few things that can make me want to write, to turn a phrase, to be coy and witty and charming. Student prose is lethal. It grabs at your throat, it seeps into your brain, it sucks at your very will to live. The way some students treat the English language--so carelessly! so recklessly!--can depress a person like nothing else.

So if I'm quiet right now, know that's the reason why. I'm whittling down the pile, and I have about twenty more essays to read before putting this group of papers to rest.

In the meantime, this is for Diana, who, when she heard that my father had unearthed some early photos of me, wanted to see what I looked like when I was a little girl: